Building an Effective Team

Aaron Clancy from Property Management Profits continues his three part series on growing your rent roll, discussing the importance of building an effective team, and how to get more from them each day. Last issue, we discussed the importance of understanding the client. Property management is a competitive niche, and therefore it is important that you understand what your client’s wants and needs are before launching into the services that your company offers. By understanding their needs, we increase our chances of converting our prospective clients. Please remember to track all business (unconverted and converted) so that you can improve your systems if your conversions are not as high as they should be! This time, we are going to talk about building an effective team. We will cover the various ways to get more from your team each and every day. Property management can be an extremely challenging job, and therefore you need to ensure the work environment is set up in such a way that your staff want to come in every day and work for the best property management company in the area. Building morale Morale is a topic that comes up often in all industries, and the reason it is so important is that employees feed off each other. A low morale can really destroy the dynamics of the company. If workers are happy, and they talk like they are happy, morale will generally be higher; if workers don’t feel appreciated, or don’t feel valued for the services they provide, then morale in the organisation will be lower. As a business owner, it’s important that you work on the morale in the company and implement strategies to build an effective team. Here are five ways to build an effective winning team: 1. Social Club Whenever I look back on my own working career, the best memories are from our social gatherings organised via the social club. Now, before we think a social club sounds difficult, it really isn’t. Most accounting software packages for managing your expenses and so on have the ability to track social club payments. If your company is currently not implementing any sort of monthly or quarterly social entertainment, then you should consider why. I know of property management companies that do different things each month to keep their staff morale high. For example, one company manager I know has no formal social club for the staff, but every couple of weeks he will go out and buy a few beers, a couple of bottles of wine, some cheeses, crackers and grapes for the team. Come Friday, everyone sits down after work for an hour and has a drink to unwind and relax. This has been extremely effective for him and he has a great winning team. Now, obviously the success of his team does not come down purely to providing wine and cheese, but these small added gestures help build the team he needs to make them the best property management company in their area. The contributions for a social club can be deducted directly from the staff’s pay (this is easier because that way you don’t need to chase them up). Once the funds build up, you can then go out somewhere and use the funds in the social club for everyone to enjoy. Having a good social club that does fun entertainment is extremely effective! 2. Bonuses/Incentives Now let’s not get crazy. We are not talking about quarterly banking bonuses here, or big Christmas holiday paydays. What we are talking about is providing incentives to your employees for referring business to your company or hitting specific milestones. In our own property management company, I know from working the numbers that we make around $300 profit per year per client (using basic management fee calculations). We also know that each client will stay on average for five years. Therefore, if I’m wise and have a marketing budget set up (which we do), then I’m willing to spend around $250-$300 per client to get them in the door. This will enable us to cover our costs in year one (so essentially break even, paying all costs associated in securing this client and looking after this property) and make profits in years two to five. Why not create an effective sales team in your company and reward staff for referring business? Now what you reward them with doesn’t need to be expensive. It could be a nice bottle of wine, a voucher for dinner, or tickets to the local sports game – whatever you like. The point is in setting it up so that you always do it and provide that extra incentive for staff to bring new business in the door. This could be simply hearing someone at a weekend barbeque has property management issues and talking to them about the ways your company could help solve their problems. Why does this work? Well, think about it. Have you ever been at home and a ‘thank you’ card turns up, or a small gift from a client or tradesman? Even though often the gift itself is not expensive, the gesture goes a long way, and you do feel appreciated when this happens. The same applies to staff. Acknowledging them for their hard work goes a long way and, naturally, implementing small gestures like this will also go a long way to improving morale. 3. Training and Procedures Adequate training needs to be given to staff when they come on board or when their role changes. Too many businesses employ new staff, or give promotions internally and just let them wing it for the next three to six months until they get accustomed to their position. The issue with this is that a lot of damage can be done during this period, and if their position is to communicate to clients, then you can really affect your client lifetime value! Essentially, every company should have a standard set of operating procedures. The company owner or senior property manager should be in charge of keeping them up to date (so when processes change, these changes are reflected in the operating procedures). The point in having standard operating procedures is that when new staff come on board they can read what is required of them and how certain job functions are carried out. It also means you will get a more reliable output from your staff as they will carry out jobs more consistently, rather than just ‘doing it their own way.’ I recommend that if you do a job more than two or three times, then write up a simple checklist or procedure so that it can always be followed. A good example of checklists working well is when a property falls vacant. There are a lot of stages to go through when a property is going vacant: advertising, liaising final payments with current tenants, showing prospective tenants through, signing up new tenants, collecting the bond, letting fee and rent, and so on. Checklists and procedures need to be simple, kept updated, and must be accessible to all staff. If you do have standard operating procedures, then look to get a couple of manuals made up so you have hard copies available in the office. 4. Team meetings and training days It’s hard to improve work processes and get the most out of your team if you don’t have team meetings or training days. Invest in making your team the best they can be. Team meetings can be a great way for talking about what is working and what’s not. Usually it isn’t the management that comes up with the best ideas, but those who are doing the job every day: your staff! So get into a habit of holding regular meetings each week where issues can be dealt with and ideas can be shared. Regular team meetings can be very powerful if held regularly and consistently; however, don’t make them too long or staff will lose interest and dread coming to them! As you know, property management is an industry that is getting extremely competitive and is forever changing, and therefore you need to ensure that you do invest in your staff to enable them to be the best at what they do. For example, make sure that you do send them to a conference each year where they can network, meet other property managers and glean information from those in the industry who are speaking at the event. Training like this can be invaluable for the right staff members. You can look at holding internal training days as well. Having training with the team on a monthly basis can help increase their skillset significantly. One example could be to provide further training for the property management software that you use. To enhance their knowledge, carry out training where someone (who knows the most in the company) can share small tips and tricks for using the software to make the property managers more efficient. Come up with a new training session each month. The benefits will well outweigh the cost of having your team off work for a couple of hours. 5. Tweaking the winning formula Continuously adapt and change. Welcome suggestions from your team for improving the working environment. They are what enable you to get the job done, so create that atmosphere where they can feel appreciated when they suggest new ideas or create new processes. Your team will either make you or break you, and generally it is those company owners who have it ‘my way or the highway’ who struggle the most with creating a winning team. A winning team takes time to build. Put in the effort and the necessary steps so that you can start to create a culture in your work place where staff want to turn up. Nothing will kill your company faster than an environment where the staff do not want to be there, so look after them, work with them, praise them, and do everything you can as a business owner to get the best out of them. Next Issue: Aaron will cover various marketing strategies for growing your property management company.

Aaron Clancy

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