Optimize Your Company – Do More With Less

What are your company’s goals for 2022? 

Are you ready for those goals? Do you think problems may occur internally that could prevent you from achieving those goals? Do you know what those are?

We all know that in order to grow, a business must scale. Inefficiencies and bottlenecks often go unnoticed while the company remains small. However, these systems and practices that get by at a small scale often break down as a business grows.

These bottlenecks:

• Limit the output of employees and the company as a whole
• Lower the customer experience and increase churn
• Put the brakes on growth
• Lower the employee experience and morale, making it harder to keep effective teammates

What is a bottleneck, you ask? Anything that prevents or limits a system from achieving its goal. 

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Here's a graphic to illustrate this. While the input into the bottleneck is high, the bottleneck slows it down drastically. This causes buildup before the bottleneck and produces a lower output.

Think of a manufacturing company - anytime work piles up at a certain point in the process (say a machine breaks down or a task is very time-consuming), you have to slow down the process to make sure it all gets through that bottleneck. This slows down the entire process rather than allowing for increased input.

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It is in the company’s best interest to optimize and eliminate those bottlenecks so more can be done with less.

The same thing applies to the real estate and property management industry, though at first it might not seem as obvious as in the manufacturing industry. If you are already overwhelmed by the tasks and properties you already have, you aren't in a position to grow. Those bottlenecks will force you to slow down growth or stop growing altogether.

However, these bottlenecks are not as easy to see in property management. The challenge often is in identifying them and then creating a strategy for optimizing them, increasing efficiency and output.

So, what is the solution if you find yourself in a bottleneck jam? 

Don’t worry! There is a proven process to help you identify and optimize bottlenecks or eliminate them altogether.

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Identifying Bottlenecks in Property Management

The first thing to do is look for the places in your company where work is piling up, not being completed, or due dates are regularly missed. These are your current bottlenecks. (Even if you feel like there is nothing you could do to eliminate the bottleneck, you should still identify it as a bottleneck and keep an open mind about solutions. You might be surprised at what's possible!)

You'll find that sometimes the bottleneck is a person. With too much on their plate, they aren’t able to produce the necessary output. (Be honest here - are you, as the business owner, a bottleneck in your company? This is very common for entrepreneurs!)

Sometimes the bottleneck is a process - the process takes too much time or effort, or handoffs between teams aren’t smooth. Maybe certain tasks take too much effort to complete and could be streamlined or automated through a CRM and workflow automation software to increase efficiency.
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Okay, now that you've identified multiple bottlenecks, take a moment to prioritize them. If you could eliminate one tomorrow, which would you choose first?

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Optimizing People

Let's start with optimizing people. If the bottleneck is a person (and it very well may be you!), it’s time to delegate some of this stuff off your plate.

Delegation - How to avoid becoming a micromanager

Let’s take a quick side track here and talk about delegation. 

Delegation is an essential part of this process of eliminating bottlenecks and building a scalable company. Remember, if you as the owner are a bottleneck in your real estate company, you have to step out of the day-to-day to free up your capacity to work on the business (and maybe go on vacation every once in a while 😉).

However, effective delegation can be challenging for an entrepreneur.

How can you trust an employee to do the job the way you would do it? Here are the proven steps we've discovered in working with hundreds of property management companies to do just that:

1. Take an honest look at the work on your plate and identify the highest value things. These should be the things you, and only you as the owner, can do. Identify the items that you can hand off to your team and eliminate tasks that are high effort and low impact.
2. Next, you absolutely must get your processes, your way of doing things, out of your head and documented. Define for yourself exactly what you want to see happen and exactly how you want it to happen. 
3. Communicate that effectively to your employees. They need the knowledge, tools, skills, and information to do excellent work without your input all the time. They need it at their fingertips and easily actionable, and also need to be able to influence how the process is done for the better.
4. Then you need accountability - a way for you to know what is being done, how it is being done, and when it is complete, without micromanaging your team or interrupting their day.
   

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The same thing goes for any other team member who has too much on their plate.

The most effective way to accomplish all of this is with a process management tool, as we will discuss below.

Optimizing Processes

Processes and systems are the next place to look for bottlenecks.

If you don’t have standardized systems, you have as many versions of each process as you have people on your team. Each person has their own way of doing things, and there may not be much consistency between them. There is a huge amount of opportunity here to optimize processes and increase your company’s capacity!

Take a look at this flowchart to help identify the process that is currently the biggest bottleneck for your property management company:

Next, follow these proven steps to optimize your process:

1. Start by nailing down exactly what currently happens in the process. Simply by doing this you will immediately find ways to simplify and standardize it by eliminating unnecessary tasks and identifying inconsistencies.

2. Look for gaps where the ball is dropped most often. Identify ways to be proactive to avoid these mistakes rather than only reacting after they have happened.

3. Identify the most time-consuming parts and automate them. Your team will know what these are! Here are the most common ones and their solutions:

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Data entry - eliminate double data entry as much as possible through integrations

Communication - utilize email templates to avoid writing the same email over and over and include those in the process‍

Handoffs between team members - eliminate interruptions and ensure information and tasks are handed off efficiently‍

Decision making - utilize conditional logic and build systems for standard decisions like application approval

4. Look to make timelines more predictable and standardized. Eliminate unnecessary delays and ensure that the process has plenty of time to be completed before the deadline incase unexpected delays come up.
   

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Okay, so now that you’ve done the work to document the process, the next step is to make the process actionable and ensure it is being followed consistently. (Quick tip: a paper manual isn’t going to cut it! 😉)

You need a tool that will help you eliminate unnecessary data entry, include all communication and templates right in the process, include all documentation about the process and individual tasks, automatically assign tasks, and provide accountability and clarity into every process. This is where LeadSimple’s world-class software for process management, specific to the property management industry, comes into play. 

But we aren’t just a software company! We also offer in-depth consulting services with dedicated experts to help you identify and eliminate bottlenecks, build and optimize processes, and disseminate systems-thinking to your team.

So if you have identified bottlenecks in your company but aren’t sure where to start (or how to find the time!), that’s exactly what we’re here for! Schedule a call; we’d love to chat and see how we can help you achieve and exceed the results you’ve been hoping for.

Let’s get your company streamlined and ready to scale so it can grow by leaps and bounds in 2022!