Having just had some Dinner with a very good friend who is a
letting agent, he told me that he was going home to work until midnight to
check all the files from the day’s work. My friend is a perfectionist and a
great letting agent. He even told me he was getting 5 or 6 properties a week over
the last month or so, and he put it down to be a perfectionist.
I couldn’t disagree with him more. I told him the reason he
was getting that new business, was because he went the extra mile,... its because
he and his team cared, not because 100% of the boxes were ticked correctly on
WinMan (or Jupix or whatever software system he used). It was because he sat
down with landlords, talked to them, listened to them and they thought it such
a revelation, they had started to tell their landlord mates
If you want to grow your lettings agency, there will come a
point where you need to take on people aka colleagues/staff. Now, as the phrase
goes, you wouldn’t have a dog and bark yourself, would you? So why do you do
that with staff?
You see, there is a crossroads
every letting agent must come to in order to grow a business beyond a certain
point, a point where they must change from ‘doing’ to ‘leading’.. It means
stepping back from the day to day operations of deposit disputes and viewings and
slipping into the role of the head honcho/leader/chief.
It’s all about delegating more significant and important responsibilities
from you to your colleagues . Yet for many letting agents, who view their lettings
agencies as their baby, this is more easily said than done. When you have taken
staff on, once they have proved themselves to you, you start giving them larger
projects and eventually turning over actual responsibilities. Learning to
delegate is an ongoing process. Half the trouble, no most of the trouble is
hiring people who you feel comfortable delegating to. The other half (or
whatever is left) is creating dependable work processes.(which to be honest is
pretty easy with all the software packages out there)
Once you put the right people, systems, and processes into
place in your lettings agency, your lettings business should practically run
itself. It is at that point that you can safely disengage long enough to
provide the vision essential to your letting’s agency long-term growth, and
begin with writing your blogs, writing the articles which we have proved time
and time again, work
So, Mr(s) Letting agent, I know alot of people say this, but
as is often in life, it’s the simple things that are the most effective .... it's
all about learning to work on the business instead of in the business. Get out
of the of your own way staff (because they probably do a better job without you
breathing down their neck and I know they will never do 100% perfect, 96% is
pretty darn good in anyone’s books) anyway, then you will have time to blog and
write these stories.
PS Yes, it has to right, especially when it comes to Gas
Safety’s, Deposits and repairs .... but correct me if I am wrong, but I never
seen an award category at the Sunday Times or ARLA or ESTAA’s for an award to UK’s
best letting agent who has the most perfect up to date property management
systems with all the boxes ticked? You don’t need to be 100% perfect .. no one
can 100% perfect, in fact perfectionists can sometimes be seen aloof.
In my opinion ‘really, really good’ is ‘good enough’. I
am not saying your efforts just need to be ‘good enough’. No, I say they need to
be ‘really really good’. It doesn’t need to be perfect; it just needs to be
shared, just like landlords sharing their experiences with other landlords in
his town. Because, when I say shared, I mean landlords are talking about you to
others, or passing on copies of the local newsletter.
Trust me, a note to the perfectionists out there, I don’t want
you to drop from 100% to 75%. 75% is ‘good enough’ to most agents, but you aren’t
most agents. However, I want you to believe that 95% is ‘really really good’
... especially as the competition are miles behind at 30% to 40% and ‘really
really good’ (95%) will get you just as
much new business than 100% will (and you won’t have to spend every night upto
12 midnight) getting that extra 5% from 95 to 100%