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.
