I’ve worked with countless property management companies, big and small, new and old. But one of the most common themes that I see throughout is redundancy within the business. When I say redundancy, what I’m talking about is a lack of clarity in people’s roles. It happens when people’s roles aren’t well defined, and when there’s no clear owner for a given task.
This kind of redundancy creates huge inefficiencies in your business, slows down processes, and burns out your employees.
Redundancy in roles is a huge disadvantage to your business. As the saying goes, when everyone’s responsible for something, no one is. When everyone feels partially—but not fully—responsible for getting something done, it dramatically increases the chances that it doesn’t get done at all. That’s a huge roadblock to effective business growth.
In property management, the most common growth lever is increasing your door count. The more units you manage, the more you can make. But as you scale, you may find that you need to increase headcount alongside door count, which can eat into profitability. And then, even when you have a large staff that should be able to handle the work on paper, everyone is burned out all the time.
That’s because everyone feels like they’re responsible for everything, and no one has clear boundaries and guidelines. They don’t know where their job starts and ends. Reducing duplicated work across team members is the best way to increase capacity for each team member and increase long-term growth without needing to double your staff in order to double your doors.
One of the best opportunities to reduce redundancy is in the hiring process. In fact, I believe that you should be evaluating redundancy in your teams every time you’re considering hiring for a new role.
Before you put together a job description or post a position, you need to define the scope of what you’re hiring for. If you’re still an owner/operator who’s wearing a lot of different hats, you should start by naming those hats. From there you need to decide which you want to take off. Be honest with yourself about which responsibilities are your least favorite or what you’re not the strongest at, and consider hiring specifically for that role.
If you’re already a larger company with a thousand doors or more under management, you can often copy and paste the same role multiple times. If responsibilities are delineated clearly, you can duplicate them and their supporting processes while keeping the scope of the role narrow. You can have multiple property managers or multiple leasing agents whose roles and responsibilities are the same. You just need to assign them specific parts of your portfolio.
One of the biggest mistakes I see smaller business owners make is starting with a person, not a role. They want to hire someone who they feel is “the right fit,” and then build a role around them. There are a few problems with this, but the biggest one is that you’re now structuring a role for someone else, not for the needs of your business. Beyond that, if that person chooses to leave, you’ll have to restructure the whole role for the next person that you higher. It creates an incredibly inefficient hiring and onboarding process.
You need to define the responsibilities of the role, then find someone who excels in those areas, and then hold them accountable. One of the reasons this is so hard for a lot of smaller operators is because it requires giving yourself a boundary, too. You’re basically saying, “If they’re responsible for this outcome, it means that I’m not.” It can be hard to let go of that sense of control, but it’s essential to growing your company. Owners might feel like they have to have insight into every aspect of the business, but it’s actually okay that you can’t answer every single question, because you know who to go to to find out.
Dan Martell put it well in his book, Buy Back Your Time. If someone takes over a responsibility from you and they do it 80% as well as you were, that’s still a win, because they’re taking 80% of the work off your plate. It takes a mindset shift and some getting used to, but it’s a necessary step.
Part of hiring is also establishing clear metrics for each role. KPIs should exclusively be built to drive the business where it needs to go. They’re about measuring progress, not making people look good or feel accomplished. That’s why I always caution our clients at PM PathBuilders not to get lured in by performative KPIs or vanity metrics. These are usually the kinds of stats that you’ll see companies bragging about on their Facebook pages, like percentage of rent paid on time or average days on market. They’re good and fun, but they aren’t actually driving momentum for the business, and they’re typically very market-specific and dependent on economic conditions.
Instead, you should be setting KPIs and performance-based incentives within the scope of each role. This helps keep people focused and driving toward the right outcomes—the ones that are actually going to make an impact.
KPIs should be based on the pain points you’re seeing in your business and want to solve, or on the core values that you want to amplify in your team. They should be clearly listed in the job description and offer letter so that there’s no ambiguity about what the person is responsible for, and they should be part of regular training. If you don’t put the right emphasis on them, neither will your team.
There are a few ways to approach selecting what KPIs you’re going to assign to a role. One option is to look at KPIs that you’re not currently hitting. Maybe the team member responsible for them just has too much on their plate to adequately hit all their goals. In that case, identify a few where you’re underperforming and hire someone to focus specifically on those.
Another way of approaching it is to look for gaps in your process that you know are hurting your business. Maybe they’re causing burnout, damaging the resident experience, or causing friction with owners. Once you’ve identified the gaps, decide what KPIs will help objectively measure improvement, and then hire someone to focus on them.
In a lot of cases, you already know where there are opportunities in your business, but you just don’t have the time to address them. If you’re hiring, make sure you’re assigning KPIs to measure those opportunities and assigning them to the new hire.
Plenty of companies aren’t in the hiring phase, but they may have redundancy in their existing teams because they didn’t clearly define roles when they were hiring. In fact, I’d say about half the clients I work with are in a situation like this. They know the boat is slowing, but they don’t know why and they don’t know how to fix it.
The first step to addressing the problem is naming each role on the team and writing down their core job responsibility. Usually you’ll find that trying to define someone’s job takes paragraphs upon paragraphs. That’s a sign that there’s some redundancy there. Look at where there’s overlap in roles and start there. For example, you may find that the maintenance coordinator is responsible for communicating with residents about work orders, but you also have a property manager who’s supposed to be responsible for all resident communications. That’s a redundancy, and that’s what leads to a lack of clarity in responsibilities.
You’ll need to rewrite each person’s job description to stamp out these redundancies. Each role should have a list of tasks and items they’re responsible for. The goal is to make sure that each task has one person who’s ultimately responsible for it, with no overlap. Then, bake them into your task management software so that they’re organized, automated, and transparent.
Jason Sheffield, a property management coach that I work with frequently, once gave me a piece of advice that I try to apply in all areas of my life: for every task that you have, you have to define 51% ownership. In other words, there has to be one person who is ultimately responsible for executing on something, even if they’re not the complete, total, 100% owner of every step. Other people can have some responsibility. If the task owner needs help, they can tap in another person for input or assistance, but at the end of the day, the buck stops with them. This is designed to make sure things get completed, but also to reduce finger-pointing within your business.
Besides, people just work better when they have clear accountability and know what they’re ultimately responsible for—that’s just human nature. It’s good for your team, it’s good for you, and it’s good for your business. And, really, what more could you ask for?
Looking to maximize NOI without adding headcount? Talk to one of our experts about adding a Resident Benefits Package.