How To Systemise Your Property Business?
Do you know how to systemise your Rent-to-Rent business?
In today's episode, I will cover the seven key ways to systemise your property business, why you should start straight away and how to remain consistent…
In this episode, I will break down how to systemise your business, with a focus on the Rent-to-Rent business model. However, if you have a property business that focuses on other strategies, I think there will be some great takeaways.
The reason systemising your business is so important is because most people embark on their property journey to become financially free, independent and create more freedom in their life. It's important not to make the mistake of swapping one job for another, that's the key! By systemising your business, that is how you achieve your goals. I've learnt from experience, I have over 100 tenants now, and it can be really hard work if you've not put the systems in place that I will discuss in this episode.
If you are at the beginning of your journey, you are going to have to invest some hard work. You may need to be the painter, plumber, administrator, accountant and negotiator. The list goes on, but this can be the most valuable and the best part of your first year in business. However, you will want to change that as soon as possible, and it will save you countless headaches and situations that could have been avoided.
The main thing I want to achieve in this episode is to share my experience, so hopefully, you can avoid some of the mistakes I made.
In this episode, you will discover
Why it's essential to systemise your property business
Seven key ways to systemise and outsource
Why you need to think of opportunity cost
How to remain consistent
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Podcast Transcript↓
[00:00:56] Simon here and welcome to another episode of the podcast where we talk all things property, Creative Cashflow and of course, how to be financially independent today. Not in 25 years. And on this show, I'm going to be breaking down how to systemize your property business, OK? Now it's going to really, really apply to rent-to-rent, as you guys know.
[00:01:25] But any property business or, you know, for that matter, any business at all, I think a lot of these will apply regardless. And I've tried to make it quite open so that you can get value from this no matter what your business is. Now, the reason this is so important is because most of you are probably wanting to get into property to become more financially free and independent, to have more freedom, not less. So what you don't want to do is swap one job for another, OK? That's key. Systemization will be the main thing that's going to help you do this. If you don't, you will end up with another job and take it from me, having 100 tenants can be really, really, really hard work if you've not done these things. So it doesn't matter if you've got one deal, five deals, 10 deals, 20 deals, make sure you've done all these things.
[00:02:25] And of course, if you're at the beginning of your journey, at the beginning, you're going to have to do some sweat equity, which means you might end up being the painter, the plumber, the admin, the accountant, the bookkeeper, the negotiator, the viewer, the valuer and everything else as I was for the first...best part of the first year of my business.
[00:02:49] But you'll definitely want to change that as soon as possible.
[00:02:53] And I think in hindsight, if I knew what I know now, back then, I probably would have put a lot of these in place earlier, which would have saved me countless headaches and situations whereby I could have just avoided the the stress. And as you guys know, if you're regular listeners, one of the main things I try and achieve with this podcast is to share my experience and help you so that you don't have to make the same mistakes I did.
[00:03:21] So seven things to systemize, to outsource, to get sorted as quickly as possible, OK? Number one, refurb and maintenance. Now, guys, if you want to be a property investor, yeah, then your main value-adding, income-generating tasks should be getting the deals, finding the deals, securing the deals, finding the tenants, securing the tenants and then moving on.
[00:03:55] You don't want to be spending too much time with paint brushes and screwdrivers and and messing about with the nitty gritty parts of the game. Now, there's a few caveats. Number one is, at the beginning if you want to save money, you might want to chip in, get mum, dad, brother, sister, partner, everybody around the property to help. And there's nothing wrong with that because we've all been there.
[00:04:23] But you need to kind of manage that and you need to make sure that when you come to the eighth deal, you're still not leveraging too much of your own time poorly and your family's time poorly and your friends' time poorly, because it will get old, it will put a strain on your relationships. So, you know, look, if you're just starting, you might want to do that. And that's fine. I get it.
[00:04:48] But if you're five, 10, 15 properties in and you're still doing the maintenance, you're still painting, you're still pulling up carpets, doing skip runs all these bits and bobs, right? It's going to take you away from growing your business. Really expensive in terms of opportunity cost. So what's funny, though, is that if you love and you enjoy it, then, hell, be my guest. Go ahead. Yeah?
[00:05:23] But if you're good at it, but you don't enjoy it or sometimes when you're doing it, you're thinking, why am I doing this? Then what you need to do is you need to be really careful, because I know a lot of people that are really, really handy and therefore it's so tempting for them just to do it themselves because they're good at it. A lot of the time they might know more than the trades, OK? So for you guys, I know that's tough, but even if you can just do 10, 20, 30 percent less, it will free up your time to focus on income generating tasks. You outsource that. And even though it feels like it's costing you more money short-term, long-term it could be creating you a lot more, trust me. And if you're not particularly good at DIY, but you want to save money that bad, you're willing to watch every YouTube video and figure it out in weeks. Please, tools down. Stop it. It's going to take you too long and you're probably not going to do a good enough job and then you're still going to have to pay somebody to do it. So you're wasting your time and your money.
[00:06:25] Number two, bookkeeping and admin. So at the beginning, I was doing all my bookkeeping and then, as a limited company, you're going to want an accountant, you're probably going to need an accountant to submit your accounts, really. So what happened is I do all my receipts, put them in dates, put them in a spreadsheet and then send them to the accountant to finalize. But I did a lot of the sort of heavy labour, which is fine, but you want to outsource that as quickly as possible.
[00:06:58] I was getting up at four, five am riddled with receipts, you know, banging my head against a wall, trying to do spreadsheets.
[00:07:07] And by the time I got onto the business, I was knackered, to be honest with you. Like mentally, I was getting really, really tired and I still had my other, you know, I was still doing a lot in the music industry three, four times a week in London. So I was having to get up at stupid times. I was exhausted, burning the candle at both ends, so to speak.
[00:07:33] So when you can outsource the admin and the bookkeeping...admin might be tenancy agreements, emails, basic spreadsheets, you know, inboxing certain people with generic things, you know, write up example templates, get somebody to do them for you.
[00:07:53] One tip here is, your accountancy firm is going to charge you quite a lot for bookkeeping, so you might want to just get a virtual assistant or an admin person to do that and then still send it. But you're not doing it.
[00:08:05] Point number three, and it's a big one. Diary systemization. You're going to want to systemize your diary as quickly as possible, so when you're self-employed or you've got your own business, it's tempting just to wing it. It's like, oh, I might, you know, do this and I'm going to do that and I'm going to do this a bit more. You find yourself working at seven, eight p.m. You might find yourself working on a Saturday. And before you know it, it grows legs, it snowballs. And as you grow, you end up putting too much strain on yourself and your relationships. You know, I speak to a lot of people and their partners are getting sick of how much they're working, you know, they're not seeing their family or their friends. They're not looking after themselves because they've not systemized their diary, like I know a big thing for me when I was scaling was I stopped going to the gym, stopped working out. And usually I would try and do that as often as I can just to stay sharp. You know, health is wealth, right? But what happens is you end up sort of losing track. And the business gets too much and you stop doing the little things, so systemize your diary, put time in for certain things you want to do, put time into the business, put time in for your wife or husband, your family, your hobbies, your friends, the gym. Put time in and then also put time in for the business and then try to stick to it, be as disciplined as possible, wherever possible. Ok, big one, that one.
[00:09:47] Number four, get yourself a management software. Otherwise you're going to have folders and folders and papers and nonsense and you're going to lose track. I've got a system in place that automatically tells me when rent's are due, automatically tells me when tenancies need renewing or expiring. It also allows all my tenants to have an app and communicate with me and my team through that, because my mobile phone at one point was ringing...you can hear it in the background. I think that's a notification. But at one point my mobile phone was like a tenant hotline.
[00:10:26] Absolute nightmare, not because I don't love you guys, not because I don't love you tenants.
[00:10:32] But look, it gets to a point where you've just got to take yourself out of it. So get yourself management software to do the heavy lifting. It will store everything in one place so you and your team can access it. And it's automated. It means you can run your business from anywhere in the world. And I tried that out earlier on this year when I went to Thailand, Australia for three weeks and the business ran fine.
[00:11:02] Okay. So management software brings me on to the next point. I just touched on communication.
[00:11:09] You need to find a way to systemize your communication so that your maintenance team, your refurb team, your tenants, your serviced accommodation clients, your business links, everybody knows how to communicate with you and stick to that.
[00:11:28] Because I know one thing that happened to me was that, you know, I'd get maybe tenants numbers at the beginning while I was, you know, sort of closing a tenancy and then I try and implement them over to the management system, but because they've already got my number, they still call me. And you've got to be really strict with that. Otherwise you'll be out for dinner with the other half and the phone will call and you'll get landed with some bad news, really, really bad news. And once you've seen it, you can't unsee it ever in your night. So you don't want that. So you need to make sure you systemize all communication. A massive, massive tip is you can get yourself a virtual office service so that any time somebody calls your business number, a receptionist takes the call. You can have call-diverting, so they forward you. They'll say, it's so-and-so from so-and-so. Are you available? You can say, no, please take a message. If you don't answer it, they'll just send you an email, which you'll keep on an email that's not directed to your personal phone. So once again, it won't ruin your dinner.
[00:12:35] Sounds simple, but it's really, really serious stuff.
[00:12:39] No.6 cleaning and gardening. This is one of the hidden pain points of any property investor rent-to-renter, especially if you're in HMO and SA. Cleaning and gardening is key and you're going to need to maintain this. And you don't want to be speaking to cleaners all day, every day talking about they can't get in the property, this has happened, that's happened. So find a system. Originally, I would outsource to a big company that would deal with it and not just check in. As I've hired staff, I now have a staff member that then gets the company.
[00:13:21] This is what happens as you systemize.
[00:13:23] There'll be more and more and more degrees of separation from you to the root of it. And it's amazing to speak to your team member and then them organize the cleaners or gardeners because you've got a great relationship with your team member. They know what you're up to. They know what your diary is like. You know, they might know when you're not in the best mood or whatever, but the cleaners, they just want to know why they can't get in or why there's no towels or why, you know, this, that and the other.
[00:13:57] And it's really, really quite time consuming. So systemize your cleaners and gardening.
[00:14:02] Point number seven. Last but not least, and it's a massive one customer service. You've got to understand that you've got a business, a property business, and you want to add an element of sort of standardization, you know, McDonalds-ization.
[00:14:24] Where basically every single tenant, every single client has a similar experience.
[00:14:32] Ok, so you don't want one tenant to have an amazing experience and then the next one have a terrible one, or worse still, somebody bookign one of your service accommodation units and having a great experience. There was chocolates. They had all the check in information the morning somebody checked in with them, you know, there was chocolates on their pillow, beautiful towels, spare ones in the cabinet, you know, and then they booked four weeks later and they've got none of that. And they're like, hang on a minute. This is not the same. It's like going to McDonald's, getting a chicken sandwich. And then the next day they've got no mayo and lettuce in it. You're like, what? Actually happened to me not long ago. I ordered a... What was it? We ordered a wrap, you know, wrap of the day. Do like those. We ordered a wrap of the day...two wrap of the days. One, it was sweet chili day one of us. One day we had sweet chili. Next day it was like a naked wrap. It had nothing in it. It was just literally chicken and wrap. Furious. I was home by that time, so that was the end of it.
[00:15:35] But yeah, you want to create consistency with your service. OK, so that's it guys, these are the seven things I would be systemizing quickly if I were you. And look, Rome wasn't built in a day, so, you know, you're not going to be able to achieve this overnight. But make a note, have it in the back of your mind. Try and do it as soon as you possibly can, even if it's just little bits and bobs. Write down how you do every task in the business, record a video, do a voice note that you can share with somebody and break it down into simple steps. I highly recommend a book called The E-Myth for systemization, an amazing book. I'll put the link in the description of this episode, check it out. Any questions as normal. Hit me up on social media. And of course. Of course, of course. Of course. Don't wait twenty five years. Get creative.
[00:16:31] Thanks for listening. For more information, check out Simon Smith online dotcom. See you next time.