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Coach
Coaching Transcript:
00:00 Introduction by Samantha McLean
I love breaking stuff, love it. I think some people have probably felt a bit broken. It’s kind of funny though, because when we do coach and mentor people and we go pretty hard with it, because we want to see rapid change. I can tell you, 9/10 people will cry around the table with me. They will, because it’s breaking. It’s breaking thought, it’s breaking feeling, it’s breaking everything that you’ve ever known to be your truth. What you’ve brought to the table five weeks ago was, what was your truth? Perhaps to you, some of the things that were your truth, they were actually hidden by your guys, if you like.
As to what you thought you needed to be, what you thought you needed to expel into the world. What you thought was the ‘done’ thing in the industry. I don’t like the ‘done’ thing. The ‘done’ thing to me is boring, it’s not sustainable, and it’s not practical. Especially in a marketplace and in a time in the world where we have to be, not disrupting, throw that sentence out. We need to be evolving, we really haven’t forced ourselves to evolve as an industry.
I thought the best way to demonstrate to you how passionate I am about the fact that we haven’t evolved, is to take you back to the very first moment in time where I started on this pathway in business consulting, training and coaching. Unbeknownst even to myself at the time. That was at a time in 2003. August 2003, I’m doing my very first property management training session at the ARPM Conference at that point. It’s 7:30 in the morning, the Monday morning after the cocktail party. This is like prime speaker gig time. Everybody wants to be there.
I took to the stage, and I did a session which was called ‘The Call Face Property Manager’. I thought I was unbelievable because I was smart. This thing was going to be about time management. I thought I was so funny that my walk-on music, they called ‘the sting’, Dolly Parton, 9 to 5. I’m like, I got this thing covered. Here’s what my presentation was about. This is literally the presentation, you can see the quality of the graphics there. The session was a success. This is kind of PowerPoint 101 back in the day, this was kind of cool, would you believe?
I was here talking to people about tasks management, what influences your day, ideal week, ideal month, ideal days. Getting that into your diary, monthly task planners, all this stuff. My job today isn’t to hand it to all of you, but this is all time management-esque stuff that still gets trained today. It still gets trained today by people just like you all over the country. Our trainers do it all the time. Some of those guys have been in the industry for 10, 15, 20, 30 years. We’re still going back over this same kind of stuff, and it’s evolution. The question sits around, how are we evolving?
If you look at this, we provide this training because it’s in demand. We as a commercial organisation and meeting the demand for time management training. Can you come and develop and train our people on how to manage an ideal week? We’re a supply and demand concept. How have we broken the way that we do things if we’re providing the same structural time management format training that I provided in 2003, and it’s now 2016? Can you see the comic value in that? Don’t get me wrong, we have to have organisation and methodology in which to program our days, and to be organised, etc. But it’s then the evolution of what’s contained in here.
Even if you went through those lists, guys, of what tasks I perform as a property manager, you’ll be blown away to see that you can probably take that preferred week, what we now call it because we’ve evolved the name. How cool, right? You can probably take that same ideal week that we did in 2003, give it to somebody in your office, and you’ll find it would’ve been all that different. What’s evolved around this is the tech. We used to use this thing called a follow-up folder. This was amazing. It was a 1 to 31 follow up fold out. Some of you have probably still got them, right? Yeah, I’m getting winks around the table. “Yeah Blayney, we love that thing,” right? My point is not to embarrass anyone or to suggest that what you’re doing, this is rubbish, and you shouldn’t do it. It’s just to demonstrate that the processes, the concepts, the structure even of how you do things. How your business, how your roles, and how your days are formatted are still heavily similar, if not the same, as how we did things in 2003.
We had a very cutting-edge here – what technology can improve time management? Direct debit, like this is like “whoa”. You were super cool if you had this form that someone filled out. This is my favourite, SMS and email. You got the Rockend features there. My next favourite one, palm pilots and pocket PCs. What are they, right? We used to have inspection apps back in 2003. This wasn’t a phone, this was like this mini-looking piece of tech that was for diary management, for email management. You couldn’t phone anybody on it. You would come in, you would sync it onto your computer, and your computer would then sync the information you would put in your calendar, or put into your computer system. You could do your routine inspections on it. This stuff was cutting-edge in 2003.
If cutting-edge in 2003 was an inspection software, what has happened in that time? This software has evolved, the technology has evolved. All of these businesses around us have evolved. The tech providers, the service providers, the industry providers, we should be sending them flowers because they’ve helped us make our life easier. My question for you today is, what have we done as an industry to break how we fundamentally do things in an operational, organisational, self-driven method, in order to make our own lives easier?
Rather than sitting back and saying, “Rockend, this reporting, we need new reporting, it’s got to be better.” Then they release realbenchmark, you know? Or, “REA we need to get through to people quicker. We want to make it easier for people to rent property.” Then they release different information and profiles and things for agents. Like, what have we done as a business to create a sustainable model for ourselves? I personally don’t think we’ve done much. For those who have been in the industry, I’ve been in it since 1992, fundamentally what we do has not changed. Realistically, I can count on maybe one hand max the things that have actually changed for us. Really, we don’t put people in our cars anymore to take them to inspections. What else don’t we do? We don’t hand out keys. What else? We do open for inspections instead of just private appointments.
Is that because of us, or is that because of tech now? This is the question I want you to constantly be asking. Is it a structural system change that we’ve made, that we’ve controlled, that we’ve strategically thought has been the best thing for ourselves and our business? Or is it a service, a system, a process, a tech, an industry provider that has stapled something onto the top of us? They’re three things, and you could probably apply the same three things to sales. We have a mobile phone so we can call people while we’re out on the road. We didn’t make the mobile phone, we didn’t even know we needed one until they came along. I fundamentally today want to break your thinking around what have you done as a professional, as a business owner, as a business development manager, as a PM, whatever it is your function is in the business.
What have you fundamentally done to break how you do things to make life easier, better, faster, more engaging. The biggest part about that is more sustainable, more enjoyable, and more profitable. All of those obviously factoring into the consumer sentiment around what we do. That’s really the whole crux in the breakage of property management. If we look at these from the business owner’s perspective, and we’ve talked about this now in our last session, many of you have spoken about it in terms in your goals and your own personal sessions. What is it that the professional wants? That’s you guys.
Every single office in the country that we go into, every training session that we do, can be mapped back to these four things. Some people want all four, some people want one, two, three or four. They’ll say, “Fi, I want more time”. For many of the property managers that are doing work with your coach, you’ll say, “Time management, organisation, prioritisation, I need more time in our day. I want less stress. I don’t want to be getting as worked up, I want to be able to take my stuff home with me, I want to be able to remove myself from the process.” The business owners say, “I need improved results. I need growth. I need profit.”
The challenge is, to some extent, the consumer sentiment nowadays, which I talked about at ARPM in my presentation. The consumer sentiment is actually the other way. Sure, they understand that you’re a commercial business and they know that you need to make profit, and they understand that you want to grow. They understand that everyone’s got time constraints in their life, because they too have the same challenges. They too want more time, they too want less stress, they too want to make more money. That’s why they’ve got a property in the first place. But equally, they’re putting downward pressure on you guys.
I’m going to give everybody a quick exercise to do. I’m going to give you some rules. I need you to follow the rules. The rules are, you are to draw a car park. When you draw this car park, it is to be a single level car park. Draw it.
At least 75% of what I draw is relative to what you’ve drawn, okay. Having had a look at everybody, you’re all pretty similar. Adriana, what I want you to do, is I want you to do double the number of car spaces. You are not allowed to go up, and you are not allowed to go outside of the existing boundaries.
The point being here, is that you all drew this. Everyone. Everyone’s pages looked 75%, am I right? You all looked 75% the same car park. Why? Because that’s the car park … Did you draw it like that? Let me see. You’ve got a driveway, wasted space. Because you’ve all drawn the same car park the same way since the very first time you drew a car park when you were five years old. If you went home and asked your children to draw a car park, do you think that they’d draw it pretty much like this? This red, they’d draw the red right? They wouldn’t necessarily draw the green or the black, which means, your thoughts about parking cars has not evolved past five years old. You’re programmed to draw the car park the way you’ve always known.
To draw it like that, many of you looked at it originally and went, “You’re off your head, Blayney. I can’t double cars in that!” Then someone said, “Hey, maybe you can do tandem.” Right? Pretty much 90% of you said, “We cannot get any more cars in there.” Then 10% of you said, “Yes you can, you can just park some down here.”
It’s breaking thinking. This now must be the metaphor for your rent roll.
Continue to Part 2 of Fiona’s Coaching Session by clicking here.