EPMEPM: Productivity

Are You On Track For 2016?

TAKE A MOMENT to step back and review where you are spending your time, ensuring that it’s on the areas that produce the real results.

It seems like only yesterday when I put pen to paper and wrote my goals for the year ahead. Like many of us, I’m now taking the time to review my current achievements. I find this can be a very confronting and rewarding experience – depending, of course, on my performance over the last six months.

This time is a great opportunity to gain feedback from another team member, a personal mentor or an individual who leads by example. For business development managers, I highly recommend reviewing these points and discussing them in your next team meeting.

  1. TIME MANAGEMENT
    Where you spend your time between 9.00am and 5.00pm is critical for anyone focused on rent roll growth. This is your key time to prospect and secure new opportunities for the agency. Make sure you spend 80 per cent of your time on the phone and in face to face meetings and 20 per cent on administration duties.
  2. ACCOUNTABILITY
    Whether you have a personal mentor or are accountable to a team leader, no one likes to be micromanaged. If you want to be better than the person you were yesterday, you need to be prepared to take a risk and share your goals out loud. By sharing this information you will find yourself feeling guilty when targets are not achieved and question where you are spending your time, as you don’t want to disappoint the person who is aware of your vision.
  3. EXTRAORDINARY CLIENT SERVICE
    Know your ‘why’ and the service you can provide to support your clients’ needs. Understand that customer service is a culture, not a checklist, and can change rapidly as your team grows – especially if not properly monitored. Don’t let negative behaviour get swept under the rug or tolerated just because you are in fear of having to replace a team member. If someone in your team is unhappy and displaying signs of negativity, pull them aside and ask open questions with compassion. One bad egg in a team can destroy many years of high quality customer service within seconds.
  4. DELEGATING AND SUPERVISING
    As you grow the property management department you will find your systems and procedures will adjust with each team member who comes on board. We are very lucky to be in an industry that is developing at a rapid pace and has many fantastic tools to help speed up the process across all aspects of property management. This allows us to have full-time business development managers sign 10, 20, 30, even 40-plus managements per month. It is important that you continue to review each individual’s job description, ensuring every team member is aware of the role they play and the impact they have on your agency’s rent roll growth path.
  5. WEBSITE
    This is now your ‘Director of First Impressions’ and if not reviewed, can be damaging to your brand and lead generation pipeline. In fact, at least 90 per cent of people will scroll past within seconds if your website is hard to find or unappealing. Why is it that so many businesses build a fantastic website, which in the first few months draws a lot of business, then forget to update the information?

If you are building and forgetting, you are just wasting your time. If you don’t have the time to ensure your website is managed and updated with new information, delegate the task to one of your property management department members. Hand the responsibility to them and set yourself a task to follow them up. Make sure they update staff changes, office structure updates, add testimonials and, if you move your office, update the address details. They should add any new information about your products or services and the BDMs should write a few blogs that will provide value-added information to investors.

Now is the time to prepare for a strong finish to your year by reflecting back on the first six months. Make the appropriate adjustments to ensure 2016 finishes with a bang!

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Tara Bradbury

Tara Bradbury is the Director of the BDM Academy sharing her business development ideas and strategies with property management BDM’s and Principals. For more information visit bdmacademy.com.au.