PM Collective - The ART of property management
The ART of property management with Ashleigh Goodchild is a leading platform supporting collaboration not competition through an online community and events throughout the year with one purpose: to create happier property managers. She creates connections for property managers looking to create momentum in their careers and personal life. Join Ashleigh and her guests as they discuss challenges, struggles, mental health, mindset and give advice to property managers and anyone in the industry. To get the support in your property management career, join our PM Collective Facebook and Instagram community.
PM Collective - The ART of property management
Its not a people problem, it’s a leader problem
Discover what it truly means to succeed in the world of real estate as we chat with the vibrant and insightful Andy Reid. From his roots in hospitality management in the UK to becoming a standout figure in real estate, Andy's journey is nothing short of inspiring. Join us as Andy shares his passion for auctioneering, his deep connection with property management influenced by his family business, and his unexpected but impactful role as a mental health advocate during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
We'll explore the true definition of success within property management and BDM spaces, tackling the often-overlooked value of roles like leasing consultants. Andy opens up about the importance of balancing hard work with the integration of technology, underscoring that human effort and connection are irreplaceable. Hear his thoughts on leadership accountability, team engagement, and how innovative work schedules like the four-day workweek can boost productivity and employee well-being.
Lastly, Andy gives us a sneak peek into his upcoming book, "Success Curious," and his podcast, "High Performance Humans," which features incredible stories of resilience from diverse individuals. Learn about the art of influence in leadership and how achieving high performance can transform both personal and professional lives. This episode is a treasure trove of insights and practical advice for anyone aiming to redefine success in the real estate industry.
Listen to Andy Reid’s Podcast – High Performance Humans Podcast - Andy Reid
Pre-order his new book “Success Curious” Success Curious by Andy Reid | How to define and achieve high performance | 9781923186132 | Booktopia
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today we have a guest who is not a property manager well, I don't think he was a property manager. Um, we'll find out in a minute and this is andy reed, who I'm going to describe you as a high performance coach, but I don't know if I've actually got that right, so I'm going to sort of let you do a little bit of an intro about yourself and, if that's all right, who you are, what you do and, um, and the good stuff you do in the real estate industry.
Speaker 2:I'm basically a guy with a big mouth and an accent right If we're to boil it down to brass tacks. But I started in the real estate space, having been in hospitality management back in the UK and transferred pretty much all my skills from hospitality through to the real estate space, got into sales, tried to run by the textbook of sales and failed miserably and nearly put myself in a loony bin. So then I went back to my sort of natural skill set from a hospitality point of view and it all sort of kicked off from there and found a real passion for auctioneering in 2012, like proper geek stuff, like passion, and just fell in love with it. It became a drug, and not for the attention, in fact the opposite for the attention, it's the fact that it put me in a state of flow, and I found my flow state when I was calling an auction. At first I I called it escapism, which is a very negative connotation. It's the negative way of viewing flow state. But yeah, I eventually managed to find my way through to a flow state, which makes us really, really happy. And now I was in sales doing 60 to 90 transactions a year.
Speaker 2:But I was working in a family business. So my then father-in-law, um, brother-in-law, uh, then wife and sister-in-law all worked in the same business with a whole bunch of other people as well, and they and so my uh ex-wife was a property manager and they had about 600 managements. And my father-in-law, for all all his sins, was incredible at retaining talent. He had four or five well over 10 years in service in his PM department, so the longevity of his staff in there was just tremendous. And then my former partner I encouraged her to start her own rent role, so I helped to start, I helped her kick into gear with all of that and now she's running really well with all that sort of stuff. She's brilliant at what she does. Bless her. And and I've been helping property managers, bdms, um, collaborating with the likes of you know, your sarah chin cotters, your hermione grain gardeners and those sorts of people, and mainly a lot of.
Speaker 2:It is because in 2020, when COVID went bananas and obviously in Melbourne we got hit harder than everyone from a lockdown point of view, I found myself falling into like an industry mental health and well-being advocate by accident. So because my auction business. I come out of sales and I was just running an auction business from 2018. And so, obviously, when we all got locked down and didn't have many options to do, right, so I started this show called the Silver Lining, out of nowhere.
Speaker 2:I actually woke up at like 2.30 in the morning and said, right, I've got to start doing a chat show and the whole purpose of it was to help maintain a sense of connection during a very disconnected time For people in our industry the vast majority of the humans in our industry. They thrive on connection. They need connection. It's like a necessity for people in our game. So, yeah, yeah, started that chat and it really kicked things off and and was working and helping Leah Calman a lot, um, when she was president of the RAIV, just with regards to getting messages out and supporting and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2:And then from there, I just seemed to grow this bit of a um support base in the property management space and I think it helps that because I was so close to PM myself and essentially helped in PM business and whatnot. It's not like I'm completely naive to the the cut and thrust of property management and and what have you right? So, yeah, and I think me sharing all my mental health stuff. That's the other thing that I've been really quite prominent with is is I've been very open with my own mental health trip. I'm started officially officially when I got the red, when I got the rubber stamp on the forehead in 2015. And and that's been a really interesting, real interesting trip of of self study, and and off the back of that, I've been asked to talk to a few, a whole bunch of people about a whole bunch of different things, and property managers, bdms, and and then I've now I've got a book coming out next year, so, which is really cool. So, yeah, man, I've done a few.
Speaker 1:I've had a few things in a few pies yeah, and so would you call yourself a high performance coach, or what would you call yourself now if someone said what sort of coach are you?
Speaker 2:I'm a success coach, so what I mean by that is success obviously comes in a million different ways. It comes in a million different flavors and it is very much dependent and subjective on the individual right. The whole point of the book and the whole point of me doing a lot of the stuff in the coaching space because I didn't want to be a coach Like I've really resisted it for a long time, because partly because this can sound really crude I didn't want to help arseholes make money.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I just didn't and I didn't want to be at the mercy of that for income. But in 2020, it's like all of the arseholes went really quiet and all of the really good humans stepped up, and and that's when I I was like geez, hold on. There's so many more incredible humans in this game than what I gave credit for. And so that's when I became a lot more open in terms of helping and supporting and collaborating and interdependence and all that sort of jazz. So so, yeah, and the whole point of the book it's sort of been a bit of an accumulation of all this stuff. Um, the purpose of it is to try and help success feel more accessible, because we all hear so many of the same words and so much of the same vernacular around what success looks like and feels like, and and all this sort of stuff. But if, with all of us knowing it, so we get, we get it shoved down our throats on a regular basis and yet why aren't people doing it? There's an obvious disconnect. So that's kind of what the purpose of the book is is to try and help make it feel like it is doable for more people, and then, in a property management space, in the BDM space in particular and just understanding what success even represents for them is a really interesting conversation.
Speaker 2:Because property managers, they see themselves in many respects as it's their job, stamp their time card in, they do loads of work and get beaten from pillar to post by everyone on the planet. It's always their fault, whoever is looking at them, and then they go away, they clock out and then they go home and then they're like what did I achieve for me really? So hopefully that's what I can help out with a little bit. Um, I mean, as you can tell, I'm a bit of an open book, so it's not like I'm, it's not like I'm infallible, it's not like I'm some god's gift to anything. Um, but you know what I mean. If I can help a few more normal people like me feel a sense of success in their lives, then happy days yeah, no, that's great.
Speaker 1:the um it's interesting because you probably the sales side of things are so driven by money, so very much their success is always linked to you know how many sales they do. And what was actually interesting was I went to the real estate um, the reword ball, um for like I think they call it the rewordcom ball a couple of weeks ago and I'm not a huge fan of that awards because it's all driven by money. It's like who's in the $10 million club, who's in the $20 million club, who's done this many sales? And I I've just I'm not loving that, but I guess that's for the sales people and that's what they love. Where you've got the reword excellence awards, which are more on marketing and um, you've got rookies and you've got communication and sustainability and so many other things that um. You know that that's great in the space, but we just naturally have your um sales reps where they probably only see success as that one goal. But then property managers it's interesting because I feel like where we've got it wrong in the past is by putting people on that vertical hierarchy where you start as reception and then you go to leasing and then, when you've done leasing, you can go into property management and when you've done property management you go to BDM. And then when you've done BDM, you go to head of department.
Speaker 1:But since doing these podcasts, I remember recording a session with a. He must have been about late 50s and male, and he was a leasing consultant. And I was really fascinated why a late 50 male would be a leasing consultant. And it completely changed my my thoughts, because I thought do you know that the leasing role is actually the most important role out of everything, because if you can get the right tenant in place, the rest of the whole tenancy is absolutely perfect and hardly anywhere to the property manager.
Speaker 1:Yet we're putting 18-year olds, who don't have that life experience, don't have that natural gut instinct, into one of the most important roles. And so I feel like we've got it all around, and I also don't like seeing people thinking success is going from reception to leasing, leasing to property management. You know, going from reception to leasing, leasing to property management, property management to BDM, because some people are genuinely just happy in their role and I've got a great team of property managers that just love being a property manager. But we naturally have language around the whole. You know, yeah, bdm headed department, which I find just fascinating the whole.
Speaker 2:You know, yeah, bdm hit a department which I find just fascinating. You could call it. You could almost um sort of link it to the sort of capital capitalist society that we live in, right, like we always. And it's the materialistic viewpoint that western cultures in particular really hold on to and cling on to as status symbols. Right, and we can't deny that for many of us, or if not all of us, because we do work so much a lot of our identity is connected to our work and so for a lot of people they will, because of stereotypes or perceptions. From a macro point of view, within the industry, there'll be a lot of people that will see leasing, consultant and hear all the vernacular around it, being at the bottom end of the totem pole, right, and therefore feel a little bit inadequate in their role. And it's really interesting you mentioned about, you know, you've got a lot of PMs that are just happy being PMs. Part of the book is so I break it down into four sections, right, and it's success, connection, influence and happiness.
Speaker 2:And there's a real interesting study that I did a load of homework on. I've mentioned before that I was a geek in auction. I'm just a geek, I am, and there's a study that was done on a million military personnel in the US Army in 2021. And the whole study was around the success lead to happiness or does happiness lead to success? And a lot of the time it's a little bit chicken and egg sort of conversation for a lot of people. But they did this study and it was really really comprehensive study and it was shown pretty much unequivocally that the happier the soldier was, the more accolades they got and the higher their test scores were, and and, and the ones that felt obliged to be there, or the ones that felt conscripted to be there, or what have you, across the board, had lower test scores, aptitude scores, and, um, they, they received less medals on scale than any of the ones that were happy in their role. And so it's. It's a really underrated superpower.
Speaker 2:I think it really is, because if you, if you're happy, everything's easy. Everything's easy like it doesn't matter what you're doing, even if you, you know, nearly swore that I didn't ask if I could swear even if you stuff up right, um, if you're happy and you stuff up, the way that you analyze that mistake is a million times different to if you're not happy and you make a mistake, right. So it's really interesting. You say again, people are happy in what they do because their version of success is a content life. For example, you know they want the money because they want to get their paycheck so that they can go home and look after their family and comfort and happiness and all the rest of it, and they have that defining line between work and play. Who's to complain about that, man?
Speaker 2:Like seriously, and I think you know, like I said, a lot of the industry does get driven towards materialism, right, a lot of the industry does get driven towards materialism, right, a lot of it does. And when it comes to sales and we can't get it twisted, ultimately every business has a P&L to answer to, right? We can't get away from the material facts that without making money, your business ain't going to exist and no one's going to have a job, right? So we do need to make sure that there's a degree of practicality to this conversation. But I completely agree, there is absolutely more to success than the dollar. It does make the world go round and it helps to give you choices. But if you're making enough money to give you enough choices, then what's the problem?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly Now on your Instagram, um said something that I absolutely loved, and I want to hear you talk about it a little bit more and are you nervous?
Speaker 1:maybe a little bit um, and it was the theory behind the working smarter, not harder um words that goes around and I loved it because you said on, you said on your post and I believe this to an absolute core everyone that knows me can hear, you know hears me half on about this and your words were you have not earned the right to work smarter when you haven't worked harder in the first place. I always talk about this and 100% agree with it. Tell me a bit more about your. You know the thoughts around that and, yeah, your opinion.
Speaker 2:Right. So we. And especially if you look at each generation, right, let's go macro and then bring it in. If you look at each generation, right, let's go macro and then bring it in. If you look at each generation, every generation has a sense of responsibility. They feel that they have to improve on the previous generation's work right.
Speaker 2:And when you look at a lot of people that are coming into not just real estate space but any space and before anybody starts getting a bit concerned, I'm going to start shitting on Generation Zs or Alphas Don't worry, I'm going to back you up in a minute they come into this space with an inherent belief that they need to come in and reinvent the wheel. It happens a hell of a lot with sales, but it happens across the board, right. And then we have this technology generation. That is, you know, the technology side of things. It's exponentially going ballistic, right, obviously. And as a result of that and as a result of the rate of evolution in technology, the residual effect that it has on society is that they feel that everything else has to advance and change and all that sort of stuff, just because technology is right.
Speaker 2:Now the challenge that we have with that and when we bring it into real estate is the fact that, um, technology is seen by a heck of a lot of people and and this might step on a couple of toes it's it's seen by a heck of a lot of people is as a way of not having to do so much work, right, and it's a complete misconception. You talk to the sarah bell's, the kylie davis's of the world. You know, peter schraber made around prop tech, right, and they get really shitty about this because technology was never designed to take over human beings. It was designed to assist human beings in their growth, right, and the problem is we've got it twisted in terms of the role of technology. Everyone's harping and whinging or I'll say everyone. Lots of people are whinging about AI taking over the world and all that sort of jazz.
Speaker 2:And yet we are doing anything and everything to make sure that AI does as much for us as is humanly possible. Now, that's not going to mean that you don't have to do as much work. It means that it gives you less excuse to be more of a human being for more people. It's supposed to give you the time back in order for you to scale your humanity right Now. When it comes to the whole topic of reinventing the wheel, nothing will ever replace hard work, nothing. There is no substitute for it. People have tried all sorts of illegal substances and everything, and there's nothing that stops it from being a real cornerstone piece of anything that's worth having, right, whether it's hard work in business, in your job, in your career, in your relationships, in your partnerships, you know, with your loved one. Love is hard work, man, right? When was love ever easy, right? So the problem that a lot of younger people coming through have, or with people that have this mindset that they're so entrenched in advancement, is that the fundamental cornerstone pieces of humanity will forever be there in hard work. Connection, like I said, influence, happiness. Find me a bit of kit that's going to replace any of that shit. Find me a bit. Find me anything I dare you. And so, as a result of that, there's been, unfortunately, there's a generation that are getting led down a garden path, and it's not their fault. It's not their fault because you've got the tim ferriss's and I'm not knocking him, um, because he never wrote that book to tell people that they don't. They only have to work a four-hour week or whatever, right, he didn't write that book for that. He wrote that book having done the hard yards and then getting himself into a position where he can work a four-hour work week. Right, it only took him 15, 20 odd years to get there. You know of hard work, right? So it ain't just some magical formula. Now he cleverly turned it into a book that made it perceived. Perceived it to be a magic formula, but it's simply not the case. So nothing's ever going to substitute hard work.
Speaker 2:And with us being in a human focused industry, the technology, it's supposed to be there so that it helps you to free up your time, to be more human to more people more often. It's not there to give you more time sitting in your chair, drinking your coffee, picking your navel. That's when you will become obsolete quite quickly. You take the sales side, if I can dip into the sales side just for a second Right now, because the supply is catching up or caught up with the demand. Right, and this is pretty much almost in every state. Supply is catching up or it has caught up and, as a result, the industry is getting found out for the whole thing of being an order taker as opposed to being a professional in the game. And that has been brought about through a degree of laziness, because technology has led us down the garden path of feeling that we don't have to do as much work to get the same amount of work done. It's kind of exposing the fact that we're just not talking to enough people and being human enough at the time. And so what can you expect? You know you talk about, you talked about there before we cracked on about um. You know you can give everyone the formula, but you know the recipe, but the sauce is always going to taste different.
Speaker 2:Well, why the hell do you think that we have an industry problem when it comes to fees and things like that and commissions and whatnot? It's because the consumer cannot see any discernible value from one person to another. That's got nothing to do with your efficiency. It's got nothing to do with your technology, because seven out of ten are going to have the same bits to kit, right? It's got nothing to do with your professional photos. Our professional photos are really good. Come on, batman. I had one, I saw right. This made me giggle. I didn't get really angry.
Speaker 2:At the same time, I was marking some awards for something and I won't name which awards because you might give it away and one of the things that someone hung their hat on as to why they are such good salespeople is that they transferred their video quality to 4K. I'm like on what planet is a consumer going to give two stuffs about having a 4K video? Seriously, like how? So it's? The same applies to property management and I. When it comes to the value in their service, people aren't paying for the transaction, they're paying for all the other shit they're paying for. They're paying for the, the lack of a need to be dacking their pants every time it's rent, the rent's due, right, the, the, and this is where it's all coming back. So we're getting shone right back on human behaviors and human beings. Maslow's hierarchy needs safety, certainty and whatnot. All that hierarchy needs. That's the stuff that people are paying for, because otherwise they just do it themselves. You could?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's totally relevant for property management at the moment, because I talk a lot about transactional property management versus you know what sort of going over and above. And we have found that the not necessarily AI, but maybe VAs and offshores they've replaced our transactional stuff. And so now that they've replaced our transactional stuff, and so now that they've replaced our transactional stuff, which is potentially coordinating some maintenance, sending breach notice, checking rents, you know, sending out lease renewal letters, just the basic stuff and then that's really freed us up to be doing those extra things, like I sort of do annual investor audits or I do property profiling and things like that. And that's where the property, the landlords, are needing help. At the moment they actually don't really care too much about the other stuff.
Speaker 1:It's all that value add that we need to get better at doing. And there's still people that are still stuck in their ways and saying things like, well, I shouldn't have to. But if you are going to replace part of your job role with AI and offshore, then you need to upskill yourself in the extra service, because property management's changed from 20 years ago to now. It's a completely different role that we are doing and we have the ability to mould it into a way that works for us as well.
Speaker 2:So I think we're in a really good spot to be able to revolutionize it a bit. Example has on your business is if you were to assess transparently how much time has been saved per task, right, for example. And then say, right, having this VA or these VAs or whatever we are saving in our operation, we are saving 15 hours a week, for example. Okay, what are we doing with those 15 hours? Like, how can we be strategic with these 15 hours? And I think a lot of people, because time isn't on the P&L, it's really difficult to be efficient with it. It is really difficult. We're crap at being efficient as humans, right, um, so, and so if we, if we can actually put it into sort of a tangible dollars and cents esque sort of mindset, we're right, okay, we've got 15 hours of productivity, we're getting back here, providing everything works well. So you can perhaps put a couple of hours off for wanting to get a bit of our lives back, fair play. And we can put another hour, probably waste another hour on fixing VA issues, fair enough. So there's 12 hours there, right, 12 hours like two and a bit hours per day. If you're working five-day week, what can we do? What can we strategically do with those two and a bit hours per day? If you're working five day week, what can we do? What can we strategically do with those two and a half hours? That will give us that sense of growth, but also that sense of fulfillment one of the great things that a lot of this time gives us an opportunity to do. In. For me, if you're looking at it from a revolutionizing point of view, we have a real opportunity to get a much greater sense of fulfillment in our roles, especially in property management. More so in property management, I'd argue, because you guys, you don't half get shit on from every angle, right? And the vast majority of phone calls that are getting made are crap ones. They are not nice ones, right. How good would it be for the morale, for the culture of your organization to spend even 20 minutes of that two and a half, two and a bit hours that you're saving a day on making goodwill calls, for example, right, or just doing feel good calls. And there's no harm in saying right. We're doing this for a couple of reasons. One, we're doing it because we want to make sure that our customers are getting looked after. But two, we want to feel good about what we do. There's no harm in that. And I'll tell you something now I bet you, a lot of your staff, are going to be way more encouraged to want to give that a go because you're saying right, we want you to do this because we want you to feel good about your job and what you are doing. I want you to call these 10 vendors, these 10 landlords, and just check in with them, see how they're getting on and you tell me the response. You get off the back of making random phone calls. You could even go one step further, right, and say right to each of your senior property managers, for example, or each of your staff.
Speaker 2:You say right, you've dealt with however many clients per. You've dealt with how many? However many clients so far this month? Is there one that stood out as being really, really cool? Anyone, whether it's a tenant, whether it's a tradie, whether it's a landlord, whoever who's been really cool.
Speaker 2:I say, oh, you know, janet from bloody accounts. And blah, blah, blah. All right, it is $20. Go and buy him a bunch of flowers or something. Go send him a bunch of flowers as a thank you. And you do that because you've created greater efficiency by doing a VA thing, right. So there's going to be some financial recoup from that.
Speaker 2:If not, why the hell are you doing it? So doing and having? I used to joke about it, but I probably should make a bit more of a dance song and announce about a rack rate, a random acts of kindness rate. So how's your rack rate going? Because I used to work in hotels, right, and they used to talk about rack rate being the standard fare for a hotel room, right, and I've sort of nicked that off hospitality and turned it into something completely different and like if, if we were to have a bit, a bit more of a rack rate in our property management organizations and giving each team member a time and or financial budget. So even if it's to go spend half an hour having a coffee with old Joan who comes in and pays the rent every month on the dot and he's just a lovely old lady and the receptionist is the one that speaks to her all the time how good would the receptionist feel by saying hey, joan, let's go have a coffee dog. How good would that be?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I was just thinking, like it doesn't take a lot to give your team, you know, a $500 Visa card for you know six months of the year. It is just to do those things. Or if you're off to go do a routine inspection, calling the tenant saying, hey, I'm just on my way. Did you want me to grab you a coffee? That type of thing is really, really lovely.
Speaker 2:That doesn't get done no, it doesn't, it does, and but the way that we need to. And this is this is where leadership, this is where leaders need to become accountable, because we are forever linking actions to the benefit of our consumers. We need to make a much greater effort to help show our team members and our people in our game as to the benefit for them for doing certain things. We need to make a much bigger effort on that. This is where I don't blame the new generation coming in. I blame leaders.
Speaker 2:I blame leaders massively, because one of the critical things there's been loads of studies done on this One of the most critical things that Gen Zs need to feel is growth. They need to feel personal growth and they also, coupled with that, they need to feel that the and they also, coupled with that, they need to feel that the actions that they are making and taking are contributing towards a greater purpose, which is one of the reasons why you're seeing so many of them jump on various bloody protests and all this sort of shit. Right, I mean, I bet you, if you could ask any of them to point out where half these wars are going on on a map, they wouldn't be able to. Of shit, right, I mean, tell me, I bet you, if you can ask any of them to point out where half these wars are going on on a map, they wouldn't be able to tell you. Right, but they feel that they're contributing towards a greater purpose, so that's why they're doing it. So we as leaders, need to tune into that and we need to show them right.
Speaker 2:I want you to spend half an hour with a customer or someone that you've worked with or that's outside of the organization but has worked with the business, whether it's a tenant, landlord, trader, whoever I want you to spend half an hour just going and thanking them now. That's going to help with the business in terms of you're going to actually help the business in its relationship outside of the four walls and it's going to enhance our reputation. It's also going to make you feel really, really good because you fit you. You're going to feel like you are actually giving back to the people that are providing for your life and that means that they'll get that sense of growth and fulfillment and giving back, but then they're also contributing to the greater reputation of the organization, whilst also contributing towards the happiness factor of the community right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I can tell you when that property manager gets a call from the tenant about maintenance or something like that, I can tell you right now that that tenant's going to be a lot kinder and a lot more patient with sending out that plumber or that electrician, or that maybe that phone call that you know took you three hours to respond to. It all comes around, doesn't it, Honestly?
Speaker 2:man, the bank of goodwill is worth putting some savings into 110%. Yeah, the practical benefits are tenfold, absolutely. 110%. Yeah, the practical benefits are tenfold, absolutely. Whether it is the energy that you get back, if it's a complaint, whether it's the sparky who you've, or you could call it karma, or whatever sort of, whatever sort of floats your boat, um, it's all gonna help from a practical point of view, massively, massively yeah, but I just feel that we need to.
Speaker 1:If we can help our people feel like it's benefiting them as well as then everyone's gonna win yeah, yeah, without a doubt, the um we we spoke about um before I press record the servant leadership style, which is very much that you know, helping the team look good, which is really what we should all be aiming for, um. But one thing that I think people are getting wrong, uh and I try to harp on about this a lot is I've been known to say that a property manager will bitch and moan about being too busy, whether they've got a portfolio of 80 properties or a portfolio of 250 properties. It's just in their nature. And so one thing I hate seeing is when good business owners are trying to help. They're trying to bring in, you know, maybe it's an offshore team, maybe it's a great program like TAPI or something like that, and then what happens is they do it as a bandaid fix to try and help alleviate. But I really need to stress the importance of actually knowing what hours that's going to take. So if you're bringing in an offshore team that will be saving like exactly what you said so many hours, if you bring in something like tapping, then hopefully that will give you capacity to free up your week by 10 hours. And then, when you free up your week by 10 hours.
Speaker 1:There's also a ratio for calculating how many property managers a property manager can manage per hour, and I worked out this formula a long time ago when I had lots of part-timers at the time working for me, and I worked out that a property manager, depending on their experience and how long they've been with a company, should be able to manage between three to five properties per hour that they work.
Speaker 1:So therefore, if I'm saving you, you know I'm not going to be able to do my sums right now, but you know I mean, if I'm going to save you 10 hours per week, then you should be able to handle another 30 properties, for example, or another 50 properties, and really getting clear with what your ratio is in your office. That's just my ratio Getting really clear with that and making sure that if you are bringing in technology or something into the office, that it's very, very clear with what the goal is, and that goal is to save us this many hours. Therefore, I can increase your portfolio by this many properties and I feel like that's not happening very well at the moment.
Speaker 2:No, I agree, I agree completely and it's. You can argue that with a lot of this technology, a lot of the leaders don't really know why they're bringing it in. They're doing it because everybody says it's dead. Good right.
Speaker 1:And they're just trying to keep the property manager quiet because they're saying they're busy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or they're doing it because their PMs are whinging and saying, oh, we need this, we need this, we need this, we need this, and they bring it in. And you can apply this to any technology for anything, right? Um, we like, we, as humans, we are such a pac-man sort of style consumer ship generation. Right, we're just, we're just shit, we. We just gobble up. We just gobble up technology like there's no tomorrow. Right, we really do. And yet, like I'm looking at my I'm, I'm sat here looking at my iphone and I know for a fact that that iphone could create so much more efficiency for me if I could be asked learning how to use it a bit better than what I'm using it now. But I never won't, because I'm a human being and I like, and I like looking at sport on it and whatnot, right?
Speaker 2:and all this sort of stuff, yeah, so um, and when it comes to business owners and I, I wrote an article on this um a little while ago for for reb and and it was around if you're going to take on a bit of technology, you've got to have a bit of an assessment guide as to what you know as to how it's going to help the business. Is it financially viable? What sort of time efficiency is it going to increase and can you use that time to a greater effect to improve the business in other areas? And make sure that you're not just looking at the one part of the business that it's helping. You need to look at what the flow-on effects are, what the butterfly effects are of bringing this bit of kit in in the sense of right. If I bring this bit of kit in to an accounts department, it's going to help to do X, y and Z, which will increase the efficiency by, say, 20% or 30% or 40%. Right, with that extra 40% efficiency, what can our accounts department do to assist the operation moving forward? Right, well, maybe our accounts department one of them oh geez, one of them's qualified for capital depreciation to do capital depreciation. What if one of our accountants. We hit up one of our accountants to call up some landlords and offer some free capital depreciation schedules, for example. Right, and what value adds can you bring into the business that maximizes that efficiency?
Speaker 2:Because it's not just making everyone's job easier. It's not a case of like this is, and this is what I reckon some of the technology companies need to be accountable for this, because a lot of the time they sell it by saying this is going to make your life easier, great, great. But then they wonder why their stickiness in terms of clientele isn't as great, isn't as good as what it should be. Because these tech firms, they sell themselves so much shorter sometimes because they don't talk beyond the primary functionality and benefit of their bit of kit. If they would talk about the secondary and tertiary benefits, potentially for an operation, then they would become a mainstay of that organization, wouldn't they? Because you're not just affecting the primary, you're affecting three tiers yeah of of an organization, right.
Speaker 2:So, like I said, man, a lot of the time the people in the coalface or the new generations coming through, or our pms on the front line and whatever a lot of the time it's not their, it's not whatever. A lot of the time it's not their fault. A lot of the time it's the way that anything is broadcast to them that creates a disconnect, which then creates things like inefficiencies and disgruntlement and all that sort of stuff. And I think that when you talk about happiness, happiness comes via things like certainty and safety and security and Maslow and all that sort of stuff. And that's the first thing that we need to really, without ignoring the P&L right.
Speaker 2:At the end of the day, there's a fine line between a work stress and a severe case of depression. So you know we've got to make sure we get that line right. Um, so you know we've got to make sure we get that line right. But if we can create that superpower of happiness in the right way, then not only are the people that we serve going to be better off, and then they're going to be better off coming towards, because their attitude will reflect our attitude towards them but internally, that superpower leads to a much greater level of resilience. It leads to a much greater level of um stress management. It leads to. It leads to a much greater level of resilience. It leads to a much greater level of um stress management. It leads to. It leads to a much greater level of collaboration and a willingness to want to be yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Um, I've got a question for you. Um, going back with this, working smarter, not harder, we don't like that. What's your take on businesses that are reducing down to four-day work weeks? Do you think that that's enabling that? Do you think that that's an okay balance? But, like when I hear of officers doing that, I have a healthy debate with one of the ladies in WA and I say to her what's next? Three days, two days days, one day? You know how much we're going to keep on pushing the limit. Um, what are your thoughts on that? Do you think that that's, you know, like a fair, reasonable option, or um, so, uh, one of the business.
Speaker 2:So, the business that my um former wife um was in before she took over her own rental. That's exactly what they did. They operated a four-day work week Because we were together at the time. At that time, it was actually tremendously beneficial for the functioning of our family, right? And as a result of that, the loyalty that she had towards the organization drifted up almost every single week. It was going up and up and up and up, and her ability to handle stress as a result of that went up and up and up and up and up. Result of that went up and up and up and up and up.
Speaker 2:Um, now, the thing it sort of relates to, the whole work from home debate. That's going bananas, right, because we've got to be conscious of the fact that culture contributes towards success, and it's almost impossible to create and maintain a culture if people aren't seeing each other. Human beings don't connect via screens, we don't, we just don't. So, and but this is the thing, right, put the responsibility on us because we don't articulate effectively in the language of our people the benefits of working five days, right, or the benefits of working from an office as opposed to at home. Okay now, I agree that technology and all this you know, all the stuff that we can do nowadays makes it a lot easier to provide a greater degree of flexibility and what have you, and I agree with that. But ultimately we need people that actually they do want to be there. We do need them to want to be there. They don't need to be madly in love with their job and like get eye heart P M tattooed on their arm or whatever. Right, we don't need that. But at the same time, they're not going to be half as effective as an individual if they don't want to be there and like the end.
Speaker 2:Now, I agree with the four-day workweek in certain instances whereby the person that agrees to work the four-day workweek because a lot of the time four-day workweek means that you operate 10 hours a day for the four days, right, I would be making sure that there is an agreement on the efficiency of those 10-hour days, because I bet in a lot of instances they will have the same amount of work getting done in the eight hours or the 10 hours, irrespective.
Speaker 2:The same amount of work will be getting done. So there would need to be an agreement whereby the same amount of work, of functionality is getting done across those four days, as opposed to the same amount that would get done over a five-day period, and there needs to be a much greater level of measuring for that functionality. As long as you've got real good KPI measurements and whatnot and everything's in place in terms of transparency with regards to functionality and operation and performance, then I don't see the problem with it, because four days it still means that you're in there for more of the week than you're out of it. Therefore, you can still operate a culture to a great degree.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wouldn't want to see it go less than that. But yeah, I agree, I think four days is okay. I actually agree with sort of what you're saying was that I feel like we probably waste a lot of hours. I know that I waste a lot of hours because I've got five days to do it in, so it just means that you don't take as long for coffee or you don't take as long for lunch and you don't sit and chat as much because you've got more stuff you've got to get done before you know the week finishes. We I think we naturally probably waste six or eight hours a day anyway why do you think, right, why do you think we all do this shit?
Speaker 2:why do you think we become like these, working like gods and goddesses, in the week or two leading up to we going on holiday? Yeah, why do we all of a sudden get so much busier? We don't. It's just that we've all of a sudden faced up to the amount of work that we've got to do because we've got a hard deadline, right, correct, correct, you know. And if you could bottle that shit up, then my word would be tremendously, tremendously powerful and efficient and all the rest of it. No, tremendously, tremendously powerful and efficient and all the rest of it.
Speaker 2:And you know, you're right, we do all waste time, but, like for business owners, because there are ever increasing pressures around operational costs and whatnot, and and that pit that that net profit margin is getting narrower and narrower and narrower, with cost of essentials, cost of utilities, cost of employment is rising. So we're going to need to make sure that if that profit margin is going to be sort of thin, that we've got to have as much efficiency as we possibly can. Now, there's no such thing as 100 possibly can. Now, you never. There's. No, there's no such thing as 100 efficient human being? No, no such thing. But I think that it is fair to ask for at least an 80 efficiency from our people. I think that's fair. So we're saying that if you're going to work a 10 hour day, you're still okay to have two hours of going to the bathroom and having your lunch and having a break and all the rest of it. But I think that eight hours of productivity is absolutely fair. And this is where the way in which we have the conversation with our players, with our team members, needs to become a lot more collaborative, because that's another one of the big, big things that is so important, especially for gen z's that sense of collaboration.
Speaker 2:They hate being told what to do. They hate it, which is because, because of the fact that if you keep telling them what to do, they'll just piss off and start doing their own thing on their phone, right, because they can apparently, and they can in theory, but the practicality of it is very different, as we all know. But, um, if you can talk to them in a collaborative way, in a much more right, how can we, how can we get this absolutely nailed, because I've got to tell you, I've got to tell you straight the net margin of the operation right now is making it increasingly difficult to be able to keep hold of these five bits of kit. The monthly subscriptions that we're paying alone comes to $6,000 a month, or whatever it is right. So what can we do to make sure that we can maintain those costs? What can we do to improve the amount of stuff that we're doing so that we can keep these tools?
Speaker 1:you know what I mean it has to be.
Speaker 2:We have to become in our leadership. You talk about servant leadership. Yeah, you know what I don't know? I agree with the promise, with the premise. What I don't know I agree with the promise, with the premise. I don't know if I agree with the name of it the name of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because, yes, we, you know, we as leaders, we do inherently live to serve. But I think servant leadership for a lot of people gets translated as slave leadership, um, where you are at the mercy of your staff and that's a horrible, toxic environment to because it grows resentment real fast. Um, and the amount of leaders that are just getting burnt out so badly because they are just running around like blue ass flies for their team, for their staff members, because that's what they feel they have to do. There's a difference between being a slave and a servant, and I talk about this with regards to the industry anyway is that we all have a choice of either being a servant of the game or a slave to the game. And it's more around time management, whereby if we take, if we are in control of our time, then we are a servant in the game, and part of being in the servant of the game is being able to say no If you're a slave to the game. It's kind of like being a nice person versus a good human. A nice person lives to appease. A good human isn't afraid of the hard conversation if it's for the benefit of everyone long term, and that's the difference. That's the difference, and that's where we need to make sure that we we get that right, because I agree with your, with your concept of leadership. I do agree. I think that that make you know. You know, and I say that, I say this to agents when I'm an auctioneer, my job, I say to my jobs to make you look good, irrespective of the outcome. I say that so many times. Um so, but when it comes to our team members, we need to make sure that it is servant leadership, not slave leadership, because man, that just does so many leaders in, and you see it, and it's horrible to see, because they become shells of the humans that they once were like. The ambition has turned to this grey face, no colour, you know, like just completely drawn out human being that once was an ambitious person with loads of dreams, you know. So it needs to, and the way that you would. Very, very quickly.
Speaker 2:If you are a good, if you're a nice person, you're worried about upsetting any of your staff. The best way of looking at that is of reasoning with that is if I don't have this conversation, am I going to be able to keep the doors open? If I don't have this conversation, how is it going to affect the bottom line and you need to bring it back to a practicality. If you're struggling to justify it from a human, from a humane point of view, you have to bring it back to practicality. So, like I said, you can. You can be as kumbaya as you want, but if the bills aren't getting paid, no one's going to be in a job, and how much worse off is everybody going to be? Then, for the sake of having one conversation, yeah, yeah, absolutely so anyway so managing high performance teams?
Speaker 1:this is my last question for you today, um, because I actually have about 20 questions I haven't asked you, so we might save them for later and I'm sorry, no, no no, no, absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Um, you've actually answered them all in sort of a different way, but one of the ones that I it's a bit of a personal question, but I know that there's a lot of business owners that I deal with that have this question and I'd love to sort of see how you answer it and that is that high performance obviously is very different for everyone, and I see business owners and leaders get frustrated that their team is not high performing. My mum keeps me humble because I feel like I'm quite high performing.
Speaker 1:I consider myself high performing and I get quite frustrated at people that are not high performing, but it's because I'm frustrated they're not as high performing to my standard. So my mum used to say to me well, ash, maybe you're the unusual one and maybe they are the ones that are completely normal, and therefore I guess she's saying that not necessarily believing it, but just trying to get me to be a bit more patient with others. So I guess my question is how do you coach business owners and leaders that are high performing that are frustrated at their team when they are wanting them to be at their level and maybe the team is high performing for their level, but it's still frustrating? Does that sort of make sense?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, 100%. Ultimately, they're not going to care about your business as much as you. That's, that's the first thing we've got to let go of right. They're not going to care as much as you, nor should they, because, at the end of the day, it's your business, it's not theirs, right? Why should they care as much? I think it's fair that they don't have to care as much, because that's why they're not business owners.
Speaker 2:So, that we have in terms of high performance and what that looks like and how that and what that, how that is represented in the organization. We are doing absolutely everything in our power to ensure that that is being truly understood by our people. One of the one of the bigger mistakes that I see plenty of business owners make with this is that they try their hardest to convey the message of what high performance is and the standards right, and they might have service standard manuals or culture manuals or whatever it is, but ultimately the vast majority of their language and the vast majority of their communication is coming from them to the people. Right, I think a conversation that a lot of people, that a lot of business owners, don't have with their people, is actually asking their people what their definition of high performance is, and you'd be surprised by what some of the answers would be, because I dare say that for a number of people that are in your organization, their definition of high performance it might not be to the letter of yours, but it might be a variation of a theme, and what that indicates is that they have got a degree of ambition that would make you happy as a business owner, but we've not tapped into it well enough as leaders. Generally speaking, it's not a people problem, it's a leader problem and if we are truly high performing, if we are as high performing as what we say we are right as leaders then it should be unequivocal in our people's understanding of what our expectations are. It should be unequivocal Because if it's not, we're not as high performing as what we think we are, or we're good within ourselves, the within, uh, within ourselves, with the functions of what we do, but it's kind of like. It's kind of like the best thought leaders in the world are not the ones with the best ideas, they're the ones that can connect with those ideas, the best right, I dare say.
Speaker 2:You know there's, there's countless people that would have come up with uber, for example, or come up with um, netflix or whatever right, but ultimately 99.999 recurring percent of them didn't make it happen because of the fact that they didn't have the ability to influence hence part of the book. They didn't have the ability to be able to influence people, to understand, to understand, to engage and to do so. We, as leaders, need to look at how we are influencing people. Influence influencing it gets it gets. It gets crapped on from a great height these days because it's been commoditized, right, um. You know, it's the flashy tans and the shiny bits and the bling bling and all that sort of and the bedazzled whatever, um, um, but realistically, nothing ever advanced in humanity without influence. The greatest things to have ever happened in the human race happened because of influence.
Speaker 1:True.
Speaker 2:It's not because of the idea. It's because of how it was portrayed and connected and conveyed. So that's what I think a lot of leaders need to work on is how are they influencing their people?
Speaker 1:It's not a case of communication.
Speaker 2:Communication is an idea plus communication, by itself it's still not going to work. It's only with that third element, which is influence, that's going to create any action or any evolution. And if you want to have your staff, if you want to have your staff evolve into that level of high performance that you envisage for yourself, your organisation and everyone around you, you'll have to have a look at the way you're influencing them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like that. That might be the podcast title Bang.
Speaker 2:Saves me using chat GPpt later, for it doesn't it? Well, you know, chat gpt is good to a point no, I think I've got enough, though.
Speaker 1:That's great, um, amazing. It's been an absolute pleasure chatting to you today, so thank you for um for coming on as one of our guests. Can you, um, just give us the details of your podcast as well, so that anyone that's listening can head over and subscribe and make sure they've got yours on their list as well, because I think it'll be very, very valuable for them to have some different content to absorb.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you can find my podcast on my website. It's probably easier. So you can find it on andyreidcomau and there's a podcast tab there and it actually you can watch on youtube, you can download via spotify apple. It's called high performance humans and the high performance human podcast, and I've I've purposefully gone outside of the industry, so there are some industry specific people, but there's a lot of people that aren't and and and, and I've done that on purpose, because high performance comes in all shapes and sizes. One of my best conversations with a um a, a lady called francesca who has got cerebral palsy and she's a a, a cp warrior, she calls herself and, and high performance for her obviously comes in a very different form. Having said that, though, she abseils down buildings and she's in a football team and she's just got a modelling contract.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean. So high performance comes in all shapes and sizes and that's one of the real key things I wanted to highlight with a lot of it, like the podcast that's coming out. Coming out, um, this week actually is with a guy who's a he's a british, uh mixed martial arts champion, been over to thailand and beat the crap out of all the thai kickboxers and he's been deaf from birth, wow. And so we did the whole conversation with it, with sean the interpreter.
Speaker 2:So it was a three-way with his in, with his, with his um sign language interpreter wow and it was the one of the coolest conversations because at one stage his old man jumped on his old family's there and his old man jumped on as well and he goes what are you doing? I said I'm a podcaster. And he goes what's a podcast? I said, the thing you're on right now, my friend, uh, it was so, it was so cool, such a natural podcast.
Speaker 2:But that guy there, thomas, when you think of MMA fighters, you think of Big Burley and Alpha and all this sort of shit. And don't get me wrong, he's a hard nut, right, but the way that he sees life, based on the natural adversity that he's had to grow up with, and he's just some, he's some man, he's some human man, seriously some human being, and I've got loads of people like that. They're really cool on there. So go on to my website and you'll find it on there. Um, but yes, and then, uh, yeah, hopefully this, uh, this book that I've got coming out soon will help a few more people as well yeah, do you have a name for the book yet, or yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, it's available on amazon to pre-order.
Speaker 2:Already I didn't. Yeah, I didn't realize it was going to be, but then I found out last monday that it was um, so it's due out um, it's due out on shelves and everything on january 28th. It's called success. Curious, yeah, um, how to define and achieve high performance and a lot of the stuff in there. Like a lot of the stuff in there is stuff that people have already heard, but I'm putting it into terminology and explaining it in a way that hopefully helps people to properly connect. I want it to influence people, to feel like they can, as opposed to just hearing the white noise that they hear ad nauseum at conferences, like what you said, and it goes in one ear in 48 hours. It's out the other ear, right, so hopefully it helps. Hopefully it helps a few people to to kick on and and feel a little bit more enriched fantastic, so thank you so much.
Speaker 1:So, andy Reid, you can jump onto Amazon and pre-order his book Success Curious. So that's 28th of Jan, and also that High Performance Humans podcast, I think will be a fabulous one. I am a huge fan of listening and watching content that is outside the industry, so for me, that's right up my alley, as I know it will be for many of those listening today. So, andy, thank you. So good to see you and I'll see you soon.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me, Ashley. It's been an absolute privilege.