Welcome to the Micro Niche Mastery Podcast, where we help you establish yourself in the perfect micro-niche. So you will get noticed and grow your business faster. And now your host, his last episode of every season of every podcast, he produced always includes something personal and vulnerable about him, Ziv Raviv.

Ziv:

Hello, and welcome to the Micro Niche Mastery Podcast, where we, we talk every week with someone that was able to identify a specific need, going to a micro-niche and actually get results. And today I have the pleasure of talking with Tina Larsson from New York. Tina is the co-founder of the Folson group in the folsongroup.com and they chose to solve a very, very specific album and kind of take the idea of like the McKinsey company, where they go into a business and help them save money, usually huge businesses. And they said, “No, we will help people save money. But specifically in New York for co-ops and condo boards.” This is like a very unique, different approach. Hello, Tina?

Tina:

Hello, Ziv thank you so much for having me. This is great.

Ziv:

It’s really fun to talk with people that help other people save money. Like this is such a, a great idea from the get go to create value for people. But it’s so easy to be paid after you saved people, you created the check engine their lives, but tell me a little bit about what does it actually mean? What is a co-op? What is a condo board in case someone doesn’t really know?

Tina:

Okay. So a co-op condo board, it can also, sometimes it’s also called an homeowners association. So it depends on where it’s located. It’s basically an organization where you don’t rent an apartment. You own the apartment in different forms. So you own an apartment. And then what you do just like a government, you elect a few individuals who live there and own there, and they represent the rest of the owners. So those little group of the people they’re called boards, Coop, condo, or homeowners association boards. And they’re the ones who are basically running the show.

Ziv:

So they get paid from the, the people that live in that location

Tina:

No they are not paid. They are unpaid volunteers. So they’re spending, I mean, they’re volunteering, so it’s their time, but I have not seen that anyone has been paid. It’s possible that in other places, in other parts of the world, that they are being paid, but in New York city, they’re not being paid. They’re actually not allowed to be paid.

Ziv:
Oh, nice. Nice. So basically they, they choose to because they live there and they want their place to be clean and well maintained and maybe even awesome for their families. Then they volunteer to help. And they basically are running like an entire operation of a budget sometimes. Like, how big is the budget? What type of budgets are we talking about?

Tina:

Yeah. So it depends on the size of the building, of course, but, and the, how the quality of building also, but typically it’s two to 5 dollars million a year.

Ziv:

That’s a lot. So it’s a, like how much of a saving can you bring to the table to an average client, if you can share?

Tina:

Yes, we can. So typically we work, work primarily with old buildings who have normally old systems. So they have an old elevator that was installed when they built it in 1900 or elevators from when they built it, 1957, something like that. So they have very, very old system and that’s where there’s most needs for upgrades. And that’s where we save the most. And when in those cases we typically save them five to 10% of their annual budget.

Ziv:

Nice. So how do you actually chose to go into this specific niche?

Tina:

That’s a fun one. So both my partner and I, we come from a wall street background at wall street. I was a business or we were both, but I was a business analyst and I analyzed income statements and balance sheets for the sole purpose of investing my client’s money in the best in stock, in the best stocks, in the best companies. So when my partner get elected to his co-op board, he basically said, you’re a good analyst. Why don’t you look at these numbers and see if we can save any money. So I looked at that financial and I went, well, how, how do I do this? I mean, I, the only way to do it is the way that I I’m used to from wall street, which is I need other comparisons. So I went out pretending to be a buyer, and I got a bunch of financial statements for other buildings. And then I put together a benchmark and that benchmark is what we have, have used and expanded upon ever since.

Ziv:

Yeah. So you found out basically for a need for helping your partner, that you can save money for the, for that specific co-op

Tina:

That for that building, we saved 340,000 in the first three years. That’s dollars.

Ziv:

So you’ve decided to try and help with those skills or those analytic skills and help other co-ops other condo boards, other boards, but how hard was it to get your next deal after proving there’s a concept here.

Tina:

Okay. So it was, it took a while. It was hard only because we thought that property managers, so there’s a third party property manager who is typically representing the bill who’s hired by the board and who represents and work with the building on keeping it updated. But their motive is very different from ours. So their motive is to spend, have as many buildings as possible to manage as many buildings as possible. That’s how they increase their profit margins. And that is maybe not in alignment with the, the goal of a board. So the first one, we had so much resistance from property managers, but once we started getting, going and understood that we really need to target co-op and condo boards, they are the ones who are hiring us, then it started picking up. And then of course, like with any new business, it takes a while, but here we are.

Ziv:

So you actually started with a bigger niche, right? Because in the beginning you could have helped you know, program project managers and like people that actually are running, they have an interest to use their money within their own complex of services. And they didn’t have the, they didn’t cooperate with you. Then you went like more to the, I guess, smaller groups, smaller boards, more independent boards. And how long did it take you once you figured out that you need to go narrow, how long did it take you to secure your first client?

Tina:

Two years?

Ziv:

Wow. What are you doing in two years’ time?

Tina:

Well, we, so in the beginning, when we started our business, we were still working on wall street. So we had, that was our primary. Yes. So that was our primary business at the time. And it was not until little later that it switched. So now this is our primary business and has been for a few years. Yeah.

Ziv:

So if I may ask, so like these days in like in a good year, how many projects can you actually do?

Tina:

So right now we are doing about six clients per year, six projects per year. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> nice, but we still have enough resources to take on a few more per year at this level. I mean, we can always hire people and take on more, but at this level, we’re at a good level. We can take on a few more.

Ziv:

Awesome. So I wanna ask you what type of marketing does a business like yours need to do to actually get new clients?

Tina:

So we have actually, and a lot of referrals lately from LinkedIn. Nice. Yes. So during the pandemic, when they shut our economy down in March or whatever it was of 2020, the first thing that I did was that I hired an executive or a marketing coach, a coach that helps you grow your business. And the first thing that she said to me, she said, “You need to be more active on LinkedIn.” And I said, how do I do that? She said, you have hire a LinkedIn coach <laugh>. So I hired a, and we’ve rolled up that program in September last year. And now majority of our business comes from LinkedIn.

Ziv:

That is so cool. You found your tunnel, like the, your marketing tunnel for growing, and this is really nice. You save people money, but how do you get paid? Is it a percentage? Is it like a fixed fee?

Tina:

It is a percentage. So for majority of our clients, it’s a percentage. We share the savings with them, but we also have an arm and that was developed coz of pay popular demand. So we have some clients who did not have anything to compare to, and they didn’t feel that their property manager had enough bandwidth to actually go out and get bids. So if they have nothing, there’s no savings. Right? So then in those cases we also have a percent. So it’s a certain percent based on the, the cost of the project.

Ziv:

I see. So it’s a case by case according to the client’s needs for, and like once they start working with you, how long do they stay with you?

Tina:

Forever or as long as they want to, because there’s always upgrades that are needed for buildings. I was just contacted by one condo board today, this morning, who we haven’t worked with them actively because we worked for them for two years. We implemented all the savings that we could find at the time for ongoing operating costs. Right now they have a leak and they need urgent help. So they reached out to us again. So we’re kind of just in the background whenever they need us, after we’ve done the initial assessment. And can’t find we basically, when they hire us first, we start going through line by line and we try to find as many savings as we possibly can find. But at some point we’ll run out because there’s only 150 line items on the operating side. But when it comes to the project side, there are always projects that come up.

Ziv:

Does this mean you actually do hiring for them so that you could find alternative flyers of services of sorts?

Tina:

Absolutely. In some cases it’s alternative. Just like you said, alternative services, in some cases it’s just switching from one phone company to the next, in some cases it’s renegotiating. What is already there? Oh, let me tell you, do you wanna hear a good story?  So we had a large co-op who was replacing three elevators. They already had something called an elevator consultant, which is very common because they are very specialized in understanding what’s they know the entire elevator industry. They had gone out and had three different bits. The lowest bidder came in at $750,000. My partner, I can’t take credit in this case, he’s the negotiator. He negotiated renegotiated with the same, for the same scope. He renegotiated down to 500, $4,000. But listen to this one with the same vendor. And when he said, how come you didn’t give us this price to begin with? And they said, well, you didn’t ask, or nobody asked. He said, nobody asked.

Ziv:

Yeah. While you were talking. I was thinking like, oh man, these people, they know how to negotiate. and that’s the micro skill that you like, you have to Excel in to choose to help in something like that, as well as an realizing and realizing what might be the direction. Of course, this is all really interesting. And I want to like say that it’s really fun to see someone that is flourishing by like being really good at what I do. And being very specific in, in what I do. And even being innovative because solving people’s problems and, and like actually saving them a load of money that is noble. And I really like what you’re doing with your partner with that. It’s really cool. Is there anything people can go to or do in order to learn more about what you do?

Tina:

So we have a website, of course it’s the Folson group and that’s F O L S O N. A lot of people mistake it for Folsom, you know, like Johnny Cash. So it’s the Folson group. We also have free tools on our website. We have a free tools with best, best practices that you can get straight to your inbox. Just put in your name and, and your email address and we’ll provide, send it to you. And there’s one for policies and procedures. There’s one for facade repairs, which is a something that’s very reoccurring in New York. And it’s a very big cost for buildings. And it’s also energy efficiency upgrades. So I would love to, for you, anyone to contact me through there, and I’m very active on LinkedIn, follow me on LinkedIn.

Ziv:

So we will actually put in the show notes, both the website link for the tools and your LinkedIn profile, because I think that guys, even if you are just not in New York, but just interested to see like what the Folson Group are all about and how they manage to get what they to do, what they, I think that will be good for you to check it out. Personally. I am really impressed by the operations. It is. It’s just impressive. I wanna thank you, Tina Larsson for taking the time and sharing with us your success story. And I wanna thank you guys for listening for another episode of the Micro Niche Mastery Podcast.

Tina:

Thank you so much, Ziv.

Voice Over:

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