A fresh take on growth through collaboration with external partners.

CRE Success Principle: When the spirit of cooperation and collaboration runs deep through your business, your people will get more opportunities to learn and grow, which brings better results to your clients, and ultimately grows your revenue.

One of my clients shared a great idea with me recently.

He’s started bringing in external experts to speak with his team—everything from lawyers discussing the intricacies of retail leases to strata management pros sharing their best practices.

The impact was significant…not only did it deepen his team’s knowledge, but it’s also generating new business opportunities.

The takeaway? You don’t have to be the expert in everything.

When you invite external partners in to speak with your team, it not only bridges knowledge gaps but also creates a culture of learning and collaboration that pays off into the future.

If you’d like to find out how you can adopt this strategy, take a few minutes to listen to episode 198 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership.

Speaking of collaboration, thank you to Cirrus 8 for partnering with CRE Success to become the newest sponsor of the show.

Episode transcript:

I don't know about you, but when think about collaboration in a commercial real estate business, my mind typically turns to people within a team working together productively and also timely and transparent communication between departments within a business.

But collaboration can run deeper than that, you can also collaborate with external partners.

And when the spirit of cooperation and collaboration runs deep through your business, what you'll find is that you'll discover more opportunities to help your people learn and grow to deliver better results for your clients, and also to grow your revenue.

Hello and welcome to episode 198 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm your host, Darren Krakowiak. Really appreciate you joining us for another episode.

If you'd like to get the right people in your team serving ideal clients inside a business that just works, then I'm here to help.

Today, we do have a new sponsor to the podcast to introduce to you.

It is Cirrus8 who are a commercial property management and accounting software provider and they've got a great offer for listeners of the podcast.

We'll be playing those sponsorship announcements throughout the audio version of the show.

But if you are watching us on YouTube, I'll just tell you quickly what that is.

If you mention CRE Success, you'll get a discount on your migration costs.

For more information, you can visit cirrus8.com.au/tour

Now, if you're already a Cirrus8 customer, you can't take advantage of that offer.

But you can do me a little favor and just mention to your Cirrus8 representative that you've heard that they are now sponsoring the Commercial Real Estate Leadership podcast, which is hosted by me, Darren Krakowiak from CRE Success.

And there's a very good chance that your Cirrus8 representative will say, “Huh? Never heard of it.”

No, I'm just kidding. But who knows if they've heard of it, but definitely the marketing team know about it.

And if you do go to cirrus8.com.au/tour and mention CRE Success, you'll get that discount for your migration costs.

So, thank you to Cirrus8 for being here.

Look, if you're looking to collaborate with external partners, you might not have a podcast.

But there are still ways that you can collaborate with external partners.

You can ask service providers for example, to sponsor your marketing efforts to mitigate the cost of producing that marketing or of putting on events and you can turn it into a revenue stream.

You can for example, offer a service provider who might want to get in front of your clients, the opportunity to have some sort of a sponsored piece within one of your email blasts.

So, what we're talking about today is working with external collaboration partners.

A sponsor of this podcast is one example.

to make it even more relevant to you, I want to tell you a story about one of my clients who is discussing having experts, external experts come in and speak to his team.

Now, he's got a relatively small business of around seven people, but he's still managed to get in some fantastic guest speakers.

For example, lawyers to speak about the Retail Leases Act and Strata managers to talk about owners' obligations.

This is a great form of managing and mitigating risk by getting external partners in to talk about these topics that you as a commercial real estate principle might not be the expert in.

But it's also proof that you don't need to be the expert at everything when you have an external partner who's willing to come in and speak to your team.

And this is something that I've done recently for my private clients inside CRE Success.

Just last month, we had Tameka Smith who is a property management expert and also the head of training at the real estate Institute of Tasmania.

And she runs her own self-titled consulting business. She's the former owner of her own very successful real estate agency that she has since exited.

And I don't want to reveal too much about her story. But if you are one of our private clients, you can get access to that recording and it's very inspirational in terms of what she's achieved.

Earlier on this year, we did sessions with Megan Mander who's now the general manager of operations at the Real Estate Institute of Victoria.

She's also owned and sold her very own commercial real estate business and also had her own self-titled consulting firm.

We did a session with her on Managing Property Management.

With Tameka, we did Growing Property Management.

Also, earlier this year, we did Harness Your Numbers with Gavin Smith. He's an ex-executive from a big accounting firm.

He's had many different entrepreneurial ventures and he came to speak to us about cash flow, about P&L’s and also balance sheets.

We had a Virtual Assistant expert come and speak to our people earlier this year as well.
It was Ian Crawley from REassist.

And in the past year, we've also had Mark Sinclair and also Kristen Porter come and speak to our private clients. They're experts, one's a lawyer, one's a business broker and valuer of rent roles.

And we talked about things like partnerships, rent roll, sales and purchases and how much your business is worth.

And in terms of how you can thank these people for coming to speak to your team, there's a couple of ways.

Some of those cases, some of those people had good reason to be speaking to my clients because my clients were potential clients for them.

In that case, I think that is the trade of value if you like.

But in a couple of cases, some of those people actually didn't have anything to sell per se. So, I wanted to show my gratitude to them.

And one way that you can do that is by offering to make a donation to the charity of your guest speaker's choice.

So, in one case, we provided a donation to a dementia charity.

And another case I went through the website of this person and I could see that there were a number of causes that they supported, but it wasn't clear to me which one I should offer to make a donation to.

So, I asked that person and they came back and they told me that they knew of a nine-year-old boy who had a friend who had brain cancer and he wanted to raise $5000 to donate to that boy's medical costs.

So I went to the website that they had the ‘Fund Me’ type page. And I'm like, “Yep, this is legit and definitely a good cause and I'd be very happy to make that donation.”

Now, the other thing that I would say that if you're going to get external partners to come in and speak to your team is we want to make sure that we really capture those learnings from those sessions and that your team has some really good takeaways to ensure that they've retained the information and that they can put what they've learnt into practice in your business.

So, what I wanted to do right now is just share with you some of the learnings that I got from the session most recently with Tameka Smith, which is all about Growing Property Management.

Some of the things that she spoke to our commercial real estate principal clients about included having a defined exit strategy from day one.

And when you've got an idea about where you want this business to go and when it's time for you to exit, then you've got a kind of a North Star that you're working towards.

And Tameka's approach included setting goals for each stage of business growth and making sure that you were ready to sell once those goals were achieved.

Because once you've achieved everything that you want to achieve, well, then it's kind of like your job is done.

And you can have that sense of accomplishment because the things that you set out to achieve have been accomplished.

We also talked about the importance of quality over quantity in property management.

And this is something definitely I've worked with some of my clients on more in terms of being willing to let go of undesirable clients, clients that the business perhaps has outgrown.

But Tameka told us how she was very disciplined and selective about the properties and clients that she took on as property management clients.

She really focused on high quality properties with committed landlords. And that led to a sustainable respected brand in the market in which she worked.

Her clients were more loyal and she had no turnover issues with her team, partly because of the quality of the clients that she intentionally decided to work with.

And that she was, as said, very disciplined about ensuring that her clients met that criteria before she actually invited them to become a client of her business.

Another thing she talked about was the importance of ensuring a strong cultural fit when we are hiring people.

So instead of recruiting, always experienced property managers, Tameka focused more on hiring for attitude and cultural fit.

So, I always recommend we've got to look for attitude, we've got to look for the attributes of the person but also their aptitude, their capability to learn what it is that they need to learn to acquire the technical skills that maybe they don't have, but they should be able to pick up if we train them properly within our business.

And by getting the right people into her team in terms of those attitudes and cultural fit and attributes and also their capability, it created a very cohesive team.

They were aligned, they shared her vision and values and that was a model that helped her continue to grow the business.

A couple of other things that I took from her presentation, which by the way, one of my clients said to me, “Oh, you know, it wasn't obvious to me about how this related to commercial real estate because Tameka had a residential real estate business.”

And then I reeled off all of these different takeaways.

So sometimes the link won't always be obvious to your people.

So, if it isn't, and it's also a great opportunity just to follow up with your people and to have something to talk about in your future team meetings, you can bring people back to what the key takeaways were or what the key takeaways that you would like them to have.

So, another thing that we talked about with Tameka was building a profit share and incentive programs for teams.

In her business, she had very clear, transparent profit share arrangements and that gave her team ownership over the business success.

And it got people thinking long-term about what is important for the business and that got them for example, more focused on things like controlling costs and making sure that we've got the right clients, the right tenants in the properties, the right service providers.

And that ultimately enhances the engagement of the employees and also their loyalty to the business.
A couple of other things I want to share that Tameka told us about in this session was investing in team wealth building initiatives.

So, she was a property investor outside of her business and she encouraged her people to be property investors as well.

So, the things that they talked about would really resonate and be relevant to their clients who are obviously, if they are renting out properties are also property investors.

That supports the financial growth of not only her business, but also the people who work in her business.

And I think that can drive motivation, dedication amongst her staff if they know that the business owner is supporting their long-term financial aspirations.

And the last thing that Tameka talked about was just having a reputation of being a high value provider.

So, Tameka had premium fees, she was very firm on what the fees were and she believed in the value of her services.

She had great people in her team, so she knew she could backup those higher fees with quality service which were delivered by a committed team.

So, there are a lot of takeaways in that session and there are a lot more takeaways in all the other sessions that I've mentioned that we've had for our clients over the past year.

The only way to get access to them, by the way is to be a private CRE Success client.

So, if you'd like some support with growing your business, it's a great time to be thinking about it as we move into the end of the year.

And if you want to come into 2025 with a clear plan about where your business is going, a vision about where you want it to go and also a system in place to make sure that it operates as efficiently and effectively as possible, I invite you to visit my Instagram page.

It's @cresuccess on Instagram.

Just send me DM with the word ‘GROW’ and we'll set up a time to have a conversation.

That is our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening and I will speak to you soon.