Somewhere around 2015, Fiona Blayney banned a word.
Not in a keynote flourish – in her own business, permanently. “Hi, my name is Fiona Blayney and I am not busy,” she wrote in Elite Agent Magazine at the time, and she meant it: the word was gone from her vocabulary and her team’s.
“I canned the word busy from my vocabulary many, many years ago… For me, I’m not busy, it’s just being productive.”
A decade on, she has never taken it back.
That’s the thing about Fiona. The ideas stick because she actually runs them – on herself first, then her team, then an industry.
If you work in property management, you already know her. Founder of Real+, the consultancy, and training business she started from her spare room “with my UGG boots on” around 2003. Architect of ARPM and now PM/ONE, the conference she built because property management sits at the heart of real estate and almost never gets its own stage. One of Elite Agent’s top 50 influencers six years running – the only person who has done that. And before all of it: a checkout operator, a pizza delivery driver, a bra fitter at Grace Bros, and from 1992 a real estate agent – “we were charging 7 per cent then, and this was before it was deregulated.”
She has been in the Elite Agent archive longer than almost anyone – and she’s never afraid to say what she is thinking. “Look, I’m always a little bit controversial with my statement, so let’s not stop today.”
Every word below is hers, exactly as she said it – or wrote it. Here are 30 of the best.
On yourself
1. Ban the word busy. Her signature experiment, running for a decade with receipts. The logic, from the WIN 2018 stage: “Busy. That word is banned in my business. I don’t allow my team to use it… because it’s a bullshit term” – by definition it means doing more today than yesterday, more tomorrow than today, and “at some point you will actually explode.” What she noticed when she stopped: “every time I told myself I was busy a message was sent to my brain and with it the associated stress.” The replacement word is productive. “It’s amazing what impact one little word can have.”
2. Control the tech, don’t just master it. “We’ve mastered it, but we’re yet to control it.” When she counted, she was picking up her phone 101 times a day. Her three moves: distance (“The easiest way to not touch your phone is to keep it out of reach… anywhere but my bedside table”), segmenting email into set windows, and killing notifications. “It’s oh so liberating.”
3. Chase your own goals, not the ones from the stage. “The amount of time I spend unpacking people’s goals because they are not their goals. They were somebody else’s goals on the stage, and they walked out of there thinking that that’s what they needed to do to be successful.” It’s why she loathes the industry’s favourite number: “I hate it. I loathe the term GCI as it is currently used… what people should be saying is, what do you want to do for your life? What amount of remuneration do you need in order to provide yourself that life?” Her definition: “Success is the achievement of something that you set for yourself.” And if you really must use the acronym, she’d have it stand for “Goal Commission Income” instead.
4. There are no quick fixes. She tested a fad on herself – a fasting protocol, adopted with no research – and wrote up the failure as a business lesson: “I wanted a quick fix, and there are no quick fixes.” The alternative isn’t glamorous: “clarity of outcome and purpose, research, reflection, planning and accountable execution.”
5. Skip the 5am club. “I don’t prescribe to the 5AM club… the first hour of my day, atypically, looks like being present with my kids. I’m a mum, and I love being a mum in that first hour.” And if she is up at five: “I’ve gotta tell you, it’s because I’m changing a wet sheet, and it ain’t my sheet.” The routine that matters to her isn’t the one on the productivity poster – it’s the one you can actually keep.
On the numbers
6. Your numbers do not lie. The first thing she looks at in any business she coaches. “I am completely numbers mad… your numbers do not lie.” And the rule that’s survived from 2017 to 2023 word for word: if you don’t love numbers, “get somebody who will work with you that does. Because if you do not look after the numbers, the numbers will not look after you.” From her column: “‘Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know’ is one dangerous statement.”
7. Your bank account is not a budget. “Making spending decisions based on what’s in your budget, not what’s in your bank account. Your bank account is not a budget.” Her ritual: budget and actuals printed out, highlighter in hand, mid-month, end of month and quarterly – because “middle of the month, I can affect change. End of the month, it’s too late.”
8. Profit dollars, not ego metrics. “Would you like to make 20 per cent profit and it to be $500?… don’t buy in to the ego associated with some of the discussions around how big is my percentage profit.” Same for the boardroom favourite: “You can sit around the boardroom table and play how big is my rent roll.” Know why you own the thing – asset, cash flow, channel or ego – “whatever it is, just own it.”
9. Would you pay someone your rate to do that? Her dollar-productive test: “Would I be paying somebody to do that task what I should be getting paid per hour?… if I could get somebody to do that task for $35 an hour, then straight away, that’s a non dollar productive activity for me to be doing.” The companion question she asks every principal: “What is your highest and best use? What are you best at?”
10. Run the ‘Bill’ test before you cull. Everyone wants to fire the bottom 20 per cent of clients. Her brake: “Bill might ring me every other day, but am I making a profit off Bill? And if I get rid of Bill, am I just getting rid of Bill, or is there a ripple effect?” And the line that reframes the whole complaint: “Isn’t that what we’re there to do – solve their problems?”
11. Never cut income-producing costs. One of my favourites, from a 2023 interview: “They’ll go, oh, we need to cut back on training. I’m like, okay. So you’ve got people in your team that feel completely unsupported… but you’re going to cut the training line. That’s a great idea… then recruitment goes up. Then you’ve got six months with no people in your business. Rant over.”
12. Buy without an organic strategy and you’re buying attrition. “You are not acquiring unless you have an organic strategy to run alongside it. Acquisition on its own is very dangerous.” Every rent roll loses 10 to 15 per cent a year to natural attrition – “in seven years’ time, the rent roll that you’ve just bought… do you still have those 100 properties? No.” And keep it clean regardless: “A ready to sell business is a very clean business… you don’t know what’s going to happen today, tomorrow, next week. It gives you options.”
On growth
13. Everyone you meet is financing this industry. Her founding observation: “Every single person that you meet every day is either financing the real estate industry through property management… or they’re financing the industry through sales.” Every human is a landlord, tenant, vendor or buyer – and each one has a number attached: “What is the value of that human walking down the street to our industry?… I don’t know about you, but if I walked past $80,000 in the street, I’d probably pick it up.”
14. Run a club, not a database. Her flagship reframe: “Property management for you guys now is no longer allowed to be called property management. I want you to call it the club… when I’m in the Virgin Club, I don’t fly Qantas.” The rent roll is “the waiting room for investors to sell”. And the word database is part of the problem: “People are not data. People are people… That doesn’t make them your client. That just means you’ve got their name and number.”
15. Do the five per cent maths. About 5 per cent of any rent roll sells each year, and “80 per cent of those investors will sell with the agent that they’re already with” – which means “for every 100 properties you put into your rent roll, there should be a $100,000 available to you in terms of commission.” Her challenge to principals obsessed with the wrong scoreboard: “I know you all talk about how big’s my market share. I want to know how big’s your club.”
16. Stop waving the sign and look inside the shop. “We spend so much of our time, like the Domino’s pizza guy standing on the local freeway, waving a sign… But yet once those people actually start walking into our shop fronts… we do nothing.” Growth starts with the people already connecting with you – “They are screaming at you saying, we want to learn about property.”
17. Your most important hire is the data manager. “The number one business role that I would have… is the person who’s managing your data. Because it’s not your salespeople… You’ve given me a lineup of 10 salespeople, and 9.5 of them are going to be really bad at admin.” She’s watched BDMs out-call star salespeople for one reason: “because they’re running their club.”
18. Stop sending the wrong type of newsletter. The same market wrap from five agencies lands in one letterbox. “You’re typically telling me what you want me to know rather than what I’m needing to know.” Her own inbox experience says it all – an agency once congratulated her on seven years in her home: “I was like, are you for real?… I’m not interested because you and I don’t have a relationship.”
19. The market is not an excuse. From her pen, three weeks ago: businesses are growing right now on “opportunities already sitting inside and around your business… Which means ‘the market’ stopped being a valid excuse some time ago.” And her favourite reminder of where the contest actually happens: “growth ultimately gets won one lounge room at a time.”
On the team
20. Whatever you ignore, you validate. Her performance-management doctrine in one line. “When you ignore it, you validate it. And validation from ignored performance just goes across the office then like wildfire. And you don’t have one poor performer. You have two… and we end up with a poorly performing business rather than a poorly performing individual.” The other half of the deal: KPIs “have got to have been agreed to”, and then it’s “repercussions, not rescuing”.
21. Recruitment starts at the business plan. “People ring up and they give you a job. Hi, I want a property manager. Great. Do you have a job description? Do you have a personal profile? Do you have a cultural outline? No, no, no. I just need a property manager. Okay. Therein lies part of the issue.” Her definition of the whole discipline: “It’s identifying what you want. It’s finding them. It’s onboarding them, and then it’s keeping them. That’s recruitment.”
22. Stop searching for Wally. Written in 2016, truer now: “There are just not enough Wallys out there for everyone. It’s time to start looking for Wendy, Woof the dog and the Wizard.” Her answer is the Senior Junior – “someone with life experience… up and running in 60 to 90 days” – and hiring for functions, not titles. The 2023 version has more bite: re-advertising the same role for six months “is the definition of insanity… hoping that somebody appears from the glory clouds with the tooth fairy.”
23. Hire strengths for your weaknesses. One of the clearest leadership lessons is to stop trying to become everything you are not. Build a team around the strengths that complement your own gaps, then stay in the lane where you do your best work. As she puts it: “I don’t attempt to become anything that I’m not… and that then allows me to get totally into flow.” A related reminder from the Wally column: “Not everyone is as ambitious as you, and that’s a great thing.”
24. Become a chameleon of communication. “As leaders, we have to become chameleons. Chameleons of communication… my job is to be able to communicate with you how you need me to communicate in order for you to get the message… people say, well, that’s not my problem if she takes it that way. As a leader, that is our problem.” House rule underneath it: “Everybody gets to have a say. Not everybody gets their way.”
25. Give them space. Her most public piece of self-coaching, sparked by leadership author Liz Wiseman: “Here I was, I realised all of a sudden I was accidentally diminishing my entire team… I was a rescuer, I was on 24/7, an ideas person… I thought I was being motivating and uplifting but actually I was making half my workforce tired and exhausted just looking at me – not creating the space to actually let them do their best by being them.” The coach’s fix for herself: fewer ideas out loud, more space.
26. Trust your gut and leave the room. Barely into her twenties, showing a man through properties alone, she watched a hand move toward her in her own car and thought, “What the hell is going on here?” Nothing happened – but the doctrine it produced protects teams to this day: “Do not be afraid of removing yourself from a situation that you don’t feel comfortable in… No boss in the country would want you to leave yourself in a situation where you don’t feel comfortable. And if they do, then you shouldn’t be working for that leader.” Keep a swag of exit excuses ready, and always be marked out in the diary – “otherwise, I don’t know where you are. And we can’t get help to you.”
On leading
27. Turn the org chart upside down. “I actually saw the org chart turned around on its head… the CEO was at the base supporting everybody else to be the best version of themselves rather than the Pied Piper.” The 2019 version: “You are underneath your team holding them up. And being a great leader is not about you.” She knows the cost of the seat, too: “Every decision that I make is going to affect 13 other people… and what’s going to take twelve months takes twenty-four months. And what’s going to take $200 takes $400” – the business plan is “the curviest straight line you’ve ever seen in your life.”
28. Don’t hide the hard bits. Teams do not need leaders who pretend difficult decisions are effortless. They need to see the thinking, the honesty and the discomfort behind the call. In one column, she described vulnerability as letting the team see your “VPL” — the visible discomfort that comes with making tough calls in public.
29. Play as a team – and pass the barbecue test. The golden answer to more results, more profit, more time, less stress: “You’re going to do that by playing as a team. Point blank.” Not your client or my client – “it’s our client.” Her test: “You’re standing around that barbecue and you hear somebody talking about selling their property – you’re in property management. Could you walk up to that person and do a sales pitch? Do you know their stats?” Her standard is the one she applies to her barrister husband’s trade: “I don’t expect to be able to communicate as if I am a barrister, but I need to know enough to know why somebody would go and use my husband.”
30. Run a business, not a real estate agency. The through-line of twenty years of coaching: “Businesses have got to become businesses, not real estate agencies.” Protect the backbone, then experiment like she does at the races: “Everybody goes there typically with an amount that they’re prepared to lose for the day… I’ve got this backbone here. I’m not going to touch that. And if it doesn’t work, hey, I’ve learned something new. And if it does work, well, it’s been a great day out.”
Her closing charge says the rest: “Know your why. Understand all the numbers and the metrics of your business or get somebody to help you with them, and then bring everybody around you to grow with them and you.”
There’s plenty more where these came from – including the blind date with a mentor who turned up looking like “something in Byron Bay whimsical” while Fiona sat there suited and booted, and what that stranger taught her about being exactly who you are.
But I’m saving those ones for the book. To see Fiona in action, get your tickets to PM/One at pm1.com.au.