Here are the metrics and strategies to boost your revenue in your business.

How much revenue should a commercial real estate agency be producing per employee?

The answer depends on the age, size, location and composition (that is, the revenue split between property management and sales & leasing) of the business…

But a good yardstick for small to medium sized commercial real estate agencies doing property management and sales & leasing in metropolitan Australia is to aim for at least $250,000.

And, speaking of composition, what do you think is the ideal split between property management and sales & leasing revenue?

While every agency is different, I believe that having half the revenue coming from recurring sources like property management is the sign of a balanced business.

For the nuance behind this metric, and for more strategies that will boost your revenue, join fellow CRE Success client Will Tong and I for episode 185 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership.

P.S. If you’re a commercial real estate principal, and you’d like to conduct a free analysis of your firm’s performance against these and other relevant performance metrics, send an email with the word ‘GROW’ in the subject line to [email protected] and we can run the ruler over your business.

Episode transcript:

If you're a commercial real estate principal, you may have pondered the performance of your business.

You may be wondering how much revenue should we be having split between property management and sales and leasing?

What's a good amount of revenue to be generating per employee?

How does the performance of my business stack up against my peers?

We're going to give you some numbers that you can use to analyze how your business is going in today's episode.

Hello. Welcome to episode 185 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm your host, Darren Krakowiak.

Really appreciate you joining me today, especially while the Olympics are on. We're here to help you grow your commercial real estate business.

And another thing that we're here to do, as you'll learn in today's episode, in terms of what the purpose of CRE success is, is to make this industry a better place to work by making the industry have better leaders.

And that was a question that Will Tong asked me.

We've got the second half of the interview from the WTF Podcast to share with you today.

We're also going to be talking about the future of commercial real estate and the impact of technology.

By the way, if you haven't grabbed our free GPT, which is kind of like an app that sits inside ChatGPT, the really good news is that these apps, this GPT's are now available to all users of ChatGPT.

You don't have to be a premium paid subscriber to access GPTs created by people like myself.

So go to cresuccess.co/GPT

I've got the commercial real estate listings copywriter available for you.

And you can start using that completely for free to start turning your property listings into, I guess, far more vibrant and exciting and at least refreshed property listings that you can use to market on behalf of your clients.

Let me now hand over the reins to Will Tong for the second half of my interview with him.

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Will Tong

I also want to touch on, what would be some good key performance metrics to measure someone's success from an individual agent level? And also, for business?

Darren Krakowiak

Okay. For an individual, I like to just, like, look at a pipeline and just sort of say, right, if I pour a hundred leads in the pipeline, how many deals pop out the end, right? So, it can be around how many leads we're able to generate to pour into that pipeline. Or, it can be around, okay, we're constrained. We can only pour a hundred leads into that pipeline. How many deals can we get out the other side? So, then we've got to look at our ability to turn a lead into an actual prospect and turn a prospect into a meeting and turn a meeting into a proposal and turn a proposal into a, you know, in your world, a mandate or in an agent's world, a listing. And then to turn that into a transaction.

Will Tong

So, conversion rate is one.

Darren Krakowiak

Conversion rates and leads. I think they're the two things that we want to be measuring. And then you can start to look at like deal size as well. So, you might look at then the quality of the lead, the type of the lead, and that would be another way to I guess, accelerate that production. If you are an agent, the third sort of level apart from lead generation and conversions is around leverage. So, you know, if you want to double your income next year, you don't want to make that about working twice as many hours, right? We've got to try and be more productive. And that become through, you know, whether it's the use of a VA, whether it's the processes that we have in place to create a more systemized way of doing things. And also, it's about the platform that we're using. So, using technology, AI, different software to just create more efficiencies in the way we're doing things.

Will Tong

Yeah, I want to come back to the technology side of things. So, what about for a business owner? So, what would your clients come to you? And what a question you would ask them to measure their performance?

Darren Krakowiak

Lots of things. So, I want to know about their revenue. I want to know about how it's growing year by year. I want to know the revenue per employee. And then I want to look inside the different departments and look at the productivity of the individuals in that department.

Will Tong

How do you measure productivity?

Darren Krakowiak

Revenue divided by number of employees. So, you know, like how productive are the people? How's that growing over a period of time? You know, it might look like the revenue is growing, but if we added two more people, then actually we're not becoming more productive. We're becoming less productive. Within property management, it's around, you know, how big are the portfolios that our property managers are managing? It's around the average property management fee that we are charging or generating per property that we have under management. Same with sales and leasing as well, like what's our average deal size? Like, can we increase the average deal size beyond what's going on in the market, which actually shows that we are either reversing fee compression, or that we're starting to move up the value chain in terms of the types of properties that we're working on. So, they're probably the main ones that I'm trying to get a handle on. There are other things like, so, looking at the yeah, actually churn's an important one. So particularly in property management, right? So, we can bring in, you know, two new clients a month, for example. But if we're burning through one a month, then that puts a ceiling on the rate at which we can grow. And I guess the other one from a people perspective, most of my clients aren't huge companies, so therefore they're not doing like, you know, 360 surveys and engagement surveys. So just looking at retention staff turnover, I think it's important as well.

Will Tong

Yeah. So, are you able to share specifics in terms of the revenue versus team member? So what number is average? What number is poor? What number is good?

Darren Krakowiak

Okay. Yeah. I get asked that question a bit. And I want to preface my answer in saying that all businesses are different. So, some businesses that have a higher proportion of property management, for example. Then agency sales and leasing, they might have a slightly lower revenue per person. But they're also a lot more, I guess sustainable because there's this huge recurring revenue and it exists, right? Other businesses can be propped up by one or two really high performers often, or sometimes that can be the owner of the business, right? So, the whole business is just based on the owner's production. So, with those caveats in place I would say, you know, it's sort of around that 250,000 to 350,000 dollars per employee in terms of revenue.

Will Tong

So, that's the, that's the average?

Darren Krakowiak

Yeah. That is, or I would say that's a good sort of level to target for. So, if you're below 250,000 dollars, then you're sort of I think it's hard to make money. If you're generating less than 250,000 dollars per employee. And if you're above 350,000 dollars, then I would be looking and saying, "You must have you know, a couple of really high performing agents in here because you're doing much better than most of the businesses I see."

Will Tong

Okay. Got it.

Darren Krakowiak

Is that helpful?

Will Tong

Yeah, very helpful. I'll do my numbers and figure it out.

Darren Krakowiak

It's different at different points of scale as well, right? So bigger businesses actually, it probably starts to come down again because they've just got a lot more platform. And you know, they can continue to add people, but they know through the system that they'll continue to make more money. And you know, it probably really goes up and then it comes down a bit over a business sort of looking at different business sizes. Depends on the market as well. So just one other caveat I'll say, our clients I've got in regional areas, it's a little bit less because it is a regional area, but then you know, they pay less for rent. They pay less for wages and stuff like that as well.

Will Tong

Yeah. Makes sense. So, as an agency business, not a buyer's agency business, but it's an agency business, ideally, what percentage of revenue should come from property management?

Darren Krakowiak

Look, all businesses are different. But I think it's great if you can get 40 to 50 percent of your revenue coming from property management. That's great. Now I would caveat that by saying that if that's the case, but it could be because your agents are underperforming, right? So, if you've got a really solid agency team, and you could also have a property management business, which is doing about 40 percent of your total revenue, then you've probably got a pretty sound business. But again, all businesses are different. You know, I've got some clients that have properties, like a thousand properties within their property management portfolio. And look, that's a great business and it's probably a little bit higher in terms of the amount of revenue it represents and that's okay. I've got others that have got a much lower, property management represents, a lower share of their total revenue. But you know, it's a kick ass, sales and leasing business. So, I'm not going to say they've got a bad business.

Will Tong

Yeah. No fair enough. I mean, it sounds like you know, 40 percent is sort of the cost of running a business. Really, so pays all your overheads and maybe just a little bit more.

Darren Krakowiak

I guess the one thing I would say is that sometimes I come across and I can think of a couple of businesses I've worked with that have this where property management almost seems too high as a proportion. And that, to me, feels like we're not farming the rent roll and we're not actually growing the transactions business to the extent that it could grow based on our ability to have grown the property management business which property manager. I think it's harder to grow a property management business organically than it is to grow a sales and leasing business. So, if you've actually managed to grow a property management business organically and you've gotten it to a point where it's actually 70 percent of your total revenue, then let's start doing some transactions as well. And because that's the cream on top, right? You've already got a business that has recurring revenue that will keep the lights on. You know, there's other things to look at, Will. Like ancillary revenue. So, making sure that we're charging for things that sometimes clients expect for free. And there are a lot of ways to, I guess, improve that number as well. So, but again, like I said, every business is different.

Will Tong

Yeah. Fascinating! I'm curious about technology. I want to talk about technology. So, you know, you've been in real estate for quite some time. And I remember when I first started in real estate, we were still using fax machines. Email communication actually wasn't the norm. There was only a selective number of people who are actually communicating regularly via email. I remember having my Hotmail account. You know, the granddaddy of emails. And now we're, you know, fast forward now with social media, we've got AI, we've got all these different softwares and then all those types of things. We've seen the changes in the past, but I'm more interested in hearing your thoughts on what can we expect in the future? Maybe the next five, sort of 10 years.

Darren Krakowiak

I reckon that commercial real estate is a bit of an older fashioned industry. It's a little bit more traditional. So, one thing to look at is, well, what are the guys in residential doing? And you probably then see what we'll be doing in two or three years, right? So, you look at something like residential guys on Instagram, right? They've been doing that for a few years. And it's still like a bit of a novelty when you see a commercial guy on it, but probably more of them will be doing it. So, I think there's going to be more of that. There's going to be, I think, also as some of the more mature commercial real estate professionals leave the industry or retire. Then that's also going to provide the need for us to become a little bit more savvy with technology because I think there is still this model around the old way of doing things because there are still people in the industry who are doing things the old way. In Korea, actually, I used to talk about some of our high performer agents. And the other tools they had was a packet of cigarettes and a phone. Because, you know, that's all they needed to sell a building. But you know, times are changing and, you know, some of the younger guys that are coming in that they're finding ways like to use data, to generate leads at scale to prospect in a more efficient way. So, like, I'm not sure if in JLL they used to call it disintermediation, if I remember right? And that was this idea that, I can remember when people thought, what happened to the taxi industry is what could happen to the real estate industry. And that it will just be apps connecting people. And it hasn't happened, right? Because real estate agents and agencies have an important role to play. And I don't think that's going to change, but I think you know, the agents who will do better in the future are going to be the ones that know how to use that technology. And you know, the ones maybe who have been relying solely on their relationships, maybe will be left behind or not. They'll be challenged by people who are using data, who are using all of these ways to collect information and to interpret things to provide, I guess, more value to the client. Specifically, like I think about analyzing leases, analyzing deals. I think we're probably not using the full power of artificial intelligence. Or maybe artificial intelligence isn't quite there yet where it can actually just analyze the stuff and like do evaluation, for example. You know, like when you look up on domain.com.au or realestate.com.au and it tells you this is what your house is worth. Like, I don't think commercial is there yet in terms of like just, but all the data is there. So, it's just a matter of like someone creating the app and then doing that. And then that create valuation models and all this sort of stuff. So, I think that's coming or will happen. But I don't think that there's anything at this time for commercial real estate agents to really worry about. It's more opportunity. And particularly if you're a younger agent coming through, there's so many different ways that you can compete now. As opposed to you know, if you didn't work in an office where there was a high performer that you could learn from and you didn't have the right brand behind you then it was very difficult to be successful, right? Whereas now I think you can use technology and data and you can create leverage through social media to sort of make things happen that weren't able to be done before.

Will Tong

Yeah. So, on social media like you said, there are very few commercial real estate agents on social media.

Darren Krakowiak

Influencers

Will Tong

Yeah. I mean. Yeah. You see, you see a bunch.

Darren Krakowiak

When's the Gavin Rubenstein of commercial going to emerge?

Will Tong

That's my question for you. Like, why do you think that's the case? Why are we dinosaurs?

Darren Krakowiak

Beliefs, I guess. It comes back to what you believe, right? That's the reason why people are the way they are. You know, I used to believe this as well, but I think now I've got maybe a little bit of a broader perspective, but I think in commercial, maybe we think we're a bit above that, right? Like, I'm not going to dance like a pony in front of the video. Like, you know, do you know who I am? But I think already there are people in the industry who are showing that, that is not only an effective way to do things, it's actually a smart way to do things. And so, I think that change is coming, but I think it's because there's a bit of conservatism and a bit of sort of staidness in the industry where people haven't been willing to do those things just because they may be turned their nose up at it a bit. Or they, you know, they think, well and sometimes I come across these people who they say, I had an email from somebody recently where, you know, I send out marketing for my agent courses and he said, "Oh look, that is not of interest for me because I don't need to prospect. But you know, I'd be interested in any referrals that you have." I said, "You don't prospect, but you just prospect it'd be for referrals." Right? So, look, I think when other people get good at doing things the new way and the clients of existing and old-fashioned providers start talking to this new type of real estate agent and start taking and getting their attention and maybe taking some of their business, then other people start to take attention about, "Okay, well, we need to start changing things. We need to you know, create more leverage ways of finding clients, delivering value and using that technology that exists."

Will Tong

Yeah. Certainly. I think, you know, change is the only constant. And as a business owner or just being in any industry, if you're not willing to change with the times, you're going to left behind. And that's interesting. I mean on that note I don't name any specific names, but you and I both know a few people in the commercial property space. That's a pretty active on a social media front. And I think they are getting a lot of net positives from it. So, I think, social media is a very, powerful tool to use if you know how to use it correctly.

Darren Krakowiak

And you've just maybe think of something for the audience like look at some of the guys in the united states There's some great commercial real estate agents in the united states who have been doing this for maybe two or three years. And they do a fantastic job. So if you want a model of how to be a great commercial real estate influencer, still with credibility and not, you know, dancing in TikTok videos, then..

Will Tong

There is not a problem with that.

Darren Krakowiak

Well, you know, there is nothing, but I guess there's nothing wrong with that, you're right. If you want to do it in a credible, professional way that is consistent with your values, let's say there is certainly a model that is out there in the States and there's different, you know people who are already doing that with great success. So, there's a model there for you to follow.

Will Tong 

I want to ask about, specifically I know you're a great user of AI and I'm very slow to adopt AI. What are one or two AI applications or tools or tactics that someone can pick up today and dramatically transform their performance?

Darren Krakowiak

Well, I think it's ChatGPT, right? So, I know that might be the obvious answer, but often the obvious answer is the answer because it's the answer. So, like, think about it as the blank page problem, right? So if you were maybe going to pitch to somebody who had a scenario that you didn't have any idea about, let's say you were going to pitch to a 45 year old woman who was recently widowed and had, you know, two primary school aged children and you're thinking, “Well, how am I going to speak to this person in a way that resonates and understands them because I don't have that lived experience and I don't know anything about what she's experiencing now.” ChatGPT. Hi, I'm going to meet with this person and we're going to talk about these things. Can you give me an idea about what she might be concerned about? What her aspirations might be? And maybe five questions that I could ask her that would show her that I am somebody who would become a reliable partner for her in the future. And it will give you the answer, right? So rather than racking your brain for I mean, we could sit here and probably brainstorm for two hours about what that person might be concerned about and still not get there. ChatGPT has the information, right? So rather than making life hard for yourself, make it easier by asking ChatGPT for a little bit of help with those sorts of scenarios. So, get over that blank page problem. That would be a specific way that I would recommend using it. Another way would just be to, one that I use, which maybe for those of your listeners who work in a corporate environment or work for a firm where they have a CV that's already been written for them, that's sitting on a website. But then they don't have much going on in their LinkedIn. The simple one is just to ask ChatGPT to act as a LinkedIn profile writer and to take your expertise and turn it into an about me section in your LinkedIn profile and make sure that it sounds and then give three words that describe how you are as a person and how you want to come across in terms of the tone and the character of that. And then from, (like judges doing sound effects for your audience) ChatGPT will do that for you. And I guess a third way that I recommend is like on LinkedIn as well. You know, for posting, for repurposing on Instagram. So, if you're doing stuff on LinkedIn, you think, 'yeah, it's going well'. I want to try an Instagram, but you don't know anything about Instagram. You can just say, "Hi ChatGPT, you are now my Instagram social media marketing go-to expert and I want your help with turning my LinkedIn content into Instagram content. Here's the first example. What do you recommend? And, you know, it will give it to you. And if you're doing this for marketing campaigns, I've got an example I ran through with a few of my students recently where we said, "I've just won a shopping center listing in a regional area." And we gave all these different things and I said, "Create a 30-day Instagram campaign that focuses on the retailers, the community and prospective tenants and tell me what I should say in the posts, what the creative should be, and you know, a bunch of other things. And it creates the table that it even gives you like the hashtags and everything." So now I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's 80 percent there. So that's the sort of thing that would take you a long time to do on yourself or spend thousands of dollars to you know, instruct a creative or content agency to do that for you. ChatGPT can do it really, really fast.

Will Tong

Yeah, that's brilliant! I think I'm definitely not utilising ChatGPT as much as I should. I've got a premium account, but I think I log in once every 2 weeks.

Darren Krakowiak

So, you've got a premium account. My tip is like create GPTs. You know, you can create your own GPT?

Will Tong

Yes.

Darren Krakowiak

So, I've got a GPT that for example, Will. This is giving away one of my little secrets. What it does is, it analyzes the transcripts of my meetings with coaching clients and analyzes what's happened based on what I've told her. I want to know. So, you know, that's a specific scenario that I've created that then ChatGPT then knows what to do when I just put a transcript of that meeting in there. So, you know, you could do that for your sales calls, for example. You know, you just ask the GPT, you are analyst within my sales team. And once the sales call is over, I want to be able to hand over the brief to, you know, one of my analysts or associates or whatever, please prepare the brief for me. And ChatGPT can do that. Particularly if you've got a GPT that has all the background knowledge about your business because you've given it all of that specific information within that GPT.

Will Tong

Yeah. Wow. So that potentially saves you hours of work.

Darren Krakowiak 

Yeah. And again, it's not a hundred percent, and there's more and more content out there about how to talk to ChatGPT. And you just Google it, right? And you'll find some. Or, you know, speak to somebody who has experience in using it. Ask your friends. Are you using ChatGPT? Like, what are you using it for? Why? And I think like, one of my friends told me that they were creating, I don't know, poems in Latin or like in oldie time English. But it was like, just give me the script for Star Wars scene, but write it in year old English or stupid stuff like that.

Will Tong 

Shakespearean or something.

Darren Krakowiak

Yeah. And it'll do it. Right? So, whatever you want, it will do it. It's just, you're just going to be able to think of it.

Will Tong

Yeah. Okay. Now I'll definitely need to spend more time using these tools. I'm definitely not a product of those dinosaurs.

Darren Krakowiak 

I don't think so. Don't think you're a dinosaur. We're in a podcast studio.

Will Tong 

True. Thank you for saying that. I want to go back to something that we touched on just a little bit earlier, just about the roles of commercial property agents and agencies. And I think, you know, with technology evolving at the moment with the emergence of AI, blockchain technology and all of that, it seems like the traditional role of an agent is evolving. Someone sort of mentioned this to me a few weeks ago that very soon we'll be able to transact peer to peer, like real estate peer to peer without the use of an agent, using blockchain technology, you know, that's, we're a trustless system. I kind of see that potentially happening, but maybe on a small-scale transaction. I still see that, you know, real estate agents are still going to be used as trusted advisors on a deal. So, my question to you is, do you think commercial real estate agents are you going to continue the role of being a broker in a deal, or do you think they're going to evolve to become more consultants and advisors?

Darren Krakowiak

Interesting. So, there's a few different things that I'm thinking about in my mind. I'm not an expert in like, you know, blockchain and that sort of stuff. But a couple of things that I'm thinking of. One is, like I think there will be some change in sort of how agents operate. For example, you can see a lot of the bigger owners, they have a lot of in-house capability in like leasing, for example. So that means that there is, I think, more importance in the tenant rep function. So perhaps there'll be an increase in the number of agents who specialize in representing the buyers or representing the tenants as opposed to working on the landlord side. And certainly, if you look at how the market works in the US, the way that agents are compensated, particularly on leasing deals, there's much more weight given towards the financial compensation of a tenant side broker than there is to a landlord broker. So, the tenants still need that advice, but the landlords can just get their stuff out there through a listing broker. Even though I don't quite know the answer from a blockchain perspective, one thing that I think might happen is that we might see more specialization within agencies in terms of the part of the transaction process that you cover. So, if we think about like most businesses, you have a growth function, you've got a fulfillment function and you've got some sort of an operational function, right? Now, the growth function in our business is getting listings. The fulfillment function is turning that listing into a transaction. But that function, the fulfillment function is also a sales and marketing kind of activity. So therefore, in our business the growth and the fulfillment function are performed by the same person, which is the agent. But I have a bit of a theory, which is that we're likely to see a bit more specialization within who does what within commercial real estate firms. And certainly, if you look at in residential firms, you've got more of that kind of like, you know, pods and you've got more I guess, some people do the listing presentations, some people handle the buyers, you know, there are different functions that people have. And it could be that if blockchain or something else comes in to provide some level of disruption from a technology basis into how transactions occur in agencies that perhaps we'll start to see you know, some people call it swim lanes, right? So, people will be more focused and more specialized on a part of the process than they are now because most commercial real estate agents and going back to a question you asked before is what is it that stops people's success? It's doing all of the things, right? It's not being willing to recognize that your time is worth probably, you know, if you're making 200 grand a year, your time's worth 100 an hour. So therefore, if you can get someone else to do something for 20 an hour, then that's a very smart move for you to make. Because that allows you to reinvest your time to increase your average hourly rate. So, I think that while it might be that there are certain parts of the transaction that blockchain or other changes in technology might make human beings maybe redundant, then, you know, whether it is advising or whatever part of the process that can't do, I think is where the business will gravitate towards.

Will Tong

Yeah. Interesting. I agree. I think, like you said that the growth phase of the fulfillment phase is typically done by the same agent. And I do see merit in potentially separating those functions and having separate specialties with those functions. Yeah, that's interesting. I guess we just have to wait and see.

Darren Krakowiak

We will. Come back in five years and see what happens.

Will Tong

Yeah. That's right. I will talk about your coaching business a little bit more. And you know, what are your visions and long-term visions for your coaching business?

Darren Krakowiak

I wrote down my vision a little bit recently because I prescribe the creation of a vision with for my clients. But I can't remember what I wrote down. Am I allowed to look?

Will Tong

Yeah, you can get your cheat notes.

Darren Krakowiak

I can't remember what I wrote down as my vision, but I did write it down. So, let's see. I have a back end 2004 vision. Let's see if I'm willing to share this. Okay. We have a more leveraged group coaching delivery model, right? So, what that means is that I'm getting close to the point where I'm full. And I don't have the capacity to take on many more clients under the current model, which is one-on-one. So, I want to see if there are some clients who might be willing to move to a more leveraged model. And actually, I'm testing that at the moment and I'm seeing that actually that the benefits for the client is really great. Because they get to work with other people who are going through the same problems as them. So, that's one thing I want to do. And that allows me, I guess, you know, what is the point of that? Well, it can produce better results for my clients. And also, it allows me to help more people. So that's part of my vision. Okay. We will be known in the market as the go to provider of leadership and business coaching, training, and speaking for commercial real estate agencies. So that's part of the vision. And I think, yeah, I don't just want to be like one of the only ones. I want to like people to think about it and for people to proactively seek me out for that. That's part of the vision. And the third one is, oh, this is a funny one. Darren is spending three months a year on holidays. That is part of my vision for my business.

Will Tong

I love it. So, your visions when they come to fruition, what impact on the industry would have?

Darren Krakowiak

Oh, okay. Well, you know, and I don't want to be like, you know, sit here and bash the industry and say, I need to do this, this better and that better and all of that. But we still have some pretty average mediocre leaders in the industry and I think it's getting better. I think the industry's improved like it's not just about now, like elevating the person who's done the most deals into a leadership position. Because bigger commercial real estate firms are more complex. They're not just you know, doing sales and leasing. They're doing a lot more corporate work. So therefore, it needs a different type of person to be in that position. So, I think that is a change. And also, there's more of a focus on you know, diversity, equity, and inclusion. And more of a focus on also more efficient ways of doing things and not just, you know, the person who works the longest hours wins. So, I guess, you know, what change would I like to have on the industry? Well, I'd like the industry to have better leaders. I'd like people who have chosen to become a business owner to have a model of leadership that maybe they didn't learn on their way up through the ranks working at bigger firms, but that I can help them to one, be true to who they are. So, to be genuine and authentic in the way that they lead, but also to be effective and successful in terms of the results that they create. Probably that's the main sort of benefit that I would like to provide to the industry is elevating the leadership and making it a better place for everyone to work because there are better leaders in that industry. And that is, I think, an aspiration of a lot of people. The people that want to work with me, it's not always make me a better leader. It's usually the need comes from my business isn't growing fast enough. I've had turnover of people. I can't find the right people. Like I'm burnt out or whatever. But I think it all comes down to leadership. And you know, that's sometimes it's around delegating. It's around creating the vision as well. So having other people buy into that vision. Yeah. So yeah, I think if I can boil down your question, like, what is it that I want to do? I want to make this industry a better place to work because there are better leaders within it.

Will Tong

Yeah, that's great. I love it. I wanted to ask you about leadership bodies within the industry. So, you know, if you look at all the different types of industries around the world, there's always a leadership body that not necessarily govern, but provides certain standards and assist with the industry's performance and improvements, things like that. If I look at Australia, I've looked at the commercial real estate industry. I can't think of a leadership body that really services the industry well. I mean, obviously you've got the Property Council of Australia. They do a decent job at it. You've got RAI, but they're really Resi focused. You've got fair trading you know, but they're not really initially body leaders. They just get you know, governance.

Darren Krakowiak

The valuers have API.

Will Tong

Exactly. So, I personally think there's a gap there. But the initiative seems to be performing okay without a substantial, you know, leadership body. But what are your views? Like, how important do you think it is for us in this initiative to have one? Or do we have one, or have I completely missed the boat?

Darren Krakowiak 

I don't think we do have one. So, you know, I think I sort of had a smile there when you said you know, the industry is performing okay without it. So, like you just sort of pinpoint on the fact that leadership is important, right? But what I'd be interested in knowing is, are there equivalent bodies within other industries? So, you know, do accountants have a leadership? Or is it that there's a leadership function or a leadership focus within the professional organization or the body that serves those industries?

Will Tong

Yeah. Well, I mean, I can't speak on behalf of other industries, but you hear about law societies and things like that, right? And I'm sure the CPA had their own society, CPA society, whatever it's called, I can't remember what is called. I think many industries would have it. I mean, a lot of labor unions would have it for certain industries. But if I look at the Australian commercial real estate industry, nothing really comes to mind.

Darren Krakowiak

Yeah, I can't think of one right now, although there would be you know, leadership organizations that maybe have some representation of commercial real estate business owners, principals, directors within them. But I reckon one of the challenges with one body for leadership is that there are different people who resonate with different styles of leadership and so forth. That's why you know, I can't be that for everyone because some people just don't like me. Right? Because you know, that's you can't please everyone. So, I think maybe the market is the right place for this to be sorted out. And some people maybe will come to me for that. And some people perhaps will go to others when there are other businesses that provide that for, you know, specifically for commercial real estate businesses. And you know, I think there would be other leadership coaches and other real estate coaches that would have some representation of people from commercial who are commercial real estate leaders or business owners. So, I think, it's there, it's provided, but I don't think there's one sort of anointed business body that's sort of like a peak organization, if you like. So maybe the market sort of just sorts it out and some people go in certain places when and where they need it.

Will Tong

Yeah. Fair enough. Well, I just mindful of time and really appreciate you coming onto this podcast. But are there any things that you'd like to share that maybe you've never shared publicly, or people should know about you, know about Darren?

Darren Krakowiak

Not really, I mean, I have spoken publicly about the fact that I don't drink anymore and explained the reasons why, so that's all there and documented. It's been four and a half years since I've had a drink. And you know, I think in our industries, and I don't really talk about that much, because I don't want to be the guy who gave up drinking because he used to get too drunk. But I think that whenever I do share that and like when it's an anniversary, I might post something on LinkedIn. There's always like a bigger response than anything else I talk about. And I think that's partly, there's a couple of lessons that one, if you're going to talk on social media, talk about things that are real and that are important to you, because that is often what resonates and cuts through. But also, if there's something that, you know, you've made a change or improvement in your life that you could share with others, then it's kind of like your responsibility to talk about that occasionally, just because there might be other people who need to hear that message. But also in our industry, there are a lot of people who you know, however you want to call it, party too hard, burn the candle at both ends. A hedonist, probably I was a hedonist, right? And you know, just don't know where to stop. And you know, this requires some self-reflection and some introspection and that would be, if that's something that is relevant for you, I'd encourage you to take a moment and to reflect on that.

Will Tong

Yeah. That's amazing. Well Darren, where can people find you?

Darren Krakowiak

So, I would say that the best places are LinkedIn. So, find me on LinkedIn. You can google CRE Success. Or just find me on LinkedIn, Darren Krakowiak. It's hard to spell, but check the show notes. We practiced it before and he has nailed it every time, which I'm so impressed about. So yeah, what I want you to do is DM me the word "Will". If you DM me the word "Will", that will tell me that you listened to podcast and then I'll really sort you out. So, you can do that on LinkedIn. Or you can DM me on Instagram. I'm @cresuccess. Again, DM me "Will". That's the code word. And then I will take care of you.