Three steps to building effective systems in your business.

CRE Success Principle: Your business is only as scalable as your systems—if success depends on what's in your head, you’re the bottleneck.

Do inconsistent results and inefficient workflows slow down your business? The issue might not be your team – it could be your systems.

Many businesses create systems but fail to implement them effectively, leading to confusion, wasted time and poor results.

A system that isn’t properly documented, is too complex or simply gets ignored won’t deliver results. To ensure your systems work as intended, focus on three key principles:

1️⃣ Documented – Capture processes in writing or video so they’re clear, scalable and easy to follow. This ensures consistency and accountability across your team.

2️⃣ Simplified – Remove unnecessary steps, use automation where possible, and introduce checklists and templates to streamline workflows. A complicated system will only slow things down.

3️⃣ Followed – Lead by example, train your team properly, reinforce processes regularly and monitor their effectiveness to make ongoing improvements.

When you and your team create and refine systems together, they become more effective, and accountability improves. Giving each system a clear, meaningful name helps ensure it’s understood and used consistently.

Stronger systems mean greater efficiency, fewer mistakes and a better client experience.

For a deeper dive into how to create and implement effective systems, tune in to episode 212 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership.

Episode transcript:

When something's working really well in your business, you want to capture it, you want to grab a hold of it, maybe pour it into a bottle, and then be able to reuse it at any time.

Well, if you want to do that, you can't literally put things in a bottle, but you can take what's happening and turn it into a recordable, reliable, and repeatable system.

And we're going to show you how that happens in today's episode.

Hello, welcome to episode 212 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm your host, Darren Krakowiak. Really appreciate you joining us for today's episode.

And I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge our new sponsor, which is LJ Hooker Commercial.

LJ Hooker has been a fantastic supporter of my business.

In fact, the first bit of corporate work that I did when I started CRE Success back in 2020 was thanks to Matt Tiller, who was at the time leading the commercial network.

He's now the head of research at LJ Hooker Commercial and LJ Hooker Group.

I want to say to Tom Donnelly and to everyone at LJ Hooker Commercial, thank you so much for supporting CRE Success, and it is wonderful to have you on board as our newest sponsor.

Now, if you're looking for a way to be able to support this content, the best way to do it is to make sure that you're subscribed to the show where you are listening to it or watching it on YouTube, and also to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast player.

All right, so last week we talked about all the different types of systems and processes that you can have in a commercial real estate business.

And today, I want to talk about how you can get systems like the ones we talked about last week, established in your business.

And when we think about the common struggles that businesses have, commercial real estate businesses in particular, when it comes to systems and processes.

It's usually that they are undocumented, they're overcomplicated or they're simply ignored.

So, what we want to do today is talk about how you can set up systems which are documented, simplified, and followed. So, they're the three.

If you like principles of strong systems and processes in your business, we talked a little bit about that concept last week.

On today's episode, I want to really drill down and talk about how you can make the systems that you do establish documented, simplified and also followed.

So, let's talk about documented first.

Now, if your systems aren't documented, well, they're just in someone's head, and that can lead to inconsistency, inefficiency, and also errors.

When we write down systems, when we document them somewhere, that creates some clarity.

It means that we can hold people accountable to, one, the system that's been created and then ultimately, everyone following that system.

And also, it creates some scalability because it means that the individual who has the knowledge doesn't need to be involved in the execution.

Now, documenting a system can be as simple as creating a checklist. It could be a screen recording of you doing the task. That's a really popular way.

There are programs like Loom. If you don't know how to use Loom, you can literally just set up a Zoom call and record the Zoom call with you sharing your screen, talking through how the process is done.

You can also ask team members to create step by step instructions that can be followed by someone else.

So, the instruction to give your team is to ask them to imagine that they're creating the process to hand over to a new hire or another member of the team.

Now, if there is more than one person who is completing a particular task and you want to ensure that you capture best practice, what I'd recommend is that you make it a team effort to document the steps involved.

You can also ask a peer to review a system once it's been documented to ensure that there's nothing missing.

Now I want to give you a bonus tip for each of the steps of making sure that your systems and processes are documented, simplified and followed.

And my tip when it comes to documenting your systems is that you can get help from ChatGPT to take all the steps that you've completed when you've documented something and turn it into a process that's more easily followed.

So, I visited a client last week who was using ChatGPT to help them create systems of escalation and authority within their property management department.

That is a type of system, and they were getting ChatGPT to help them with creating the instructions for their team.

So, if you want help with documenting systems or you don't know where to start when it comes to what a documenting of a system should look like, go to ChatGPT and say, “Hey, I'm looking to document the steps involved in this process. Can you help me with an outline of what that might look like?”

And then you can go in and fill in the gaps in anything that is particular to the way that you get things done.

OK, so let's talk now about how we make our systems simplified.

Now, simplification is important because when systems are overcomplicated, it creates friction. People can't understand them or they just won't follow them.

If a process takes too long, if it's difficult or it's too confusing, it won't stick.

And that's why we want to keep things simple.

You've heard of the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid). And that's what this is all about.

And this is also a bit of a review process to make sure that the process that we've documented in the first step is actually, easy to follow but also not superfluous.

So, what we want to do in this stage is to get people who will use the system involved in the simplification process.

And a few things that you can do to simplify a process include removing unnecessary steps.

So, if you're looking at a 15-step process, we want to check that every one of those steps is absolutely necessary and adds value.

So instead of a 10-step lease negotiation process, can you streamline it into being 6-steps, for example?

Also, when it comes to simplifying processes, we've got to make sure that we're looking for opportunities to use technology to automate, to use CRM auto reminders email templates, for example.

So having a list of canned responses to certain questions that can be all part of the simplification process.

We can also use checklists and templates instead of long standard operating procedures, which can be difficult and time consuming to create and also to follow.

A couple of other ways that you can keep it simple is to make sure that we're creating documents which are easy for other people to use.

We don't want people to have to start from scratch every single time.

So, if we are going to create templates, make sure that they are easy to use rather than a long “how-to” manual, but also don't oversimplify it.

If something is complicated, it needs to be explained. And if a step can't be avoided, well then, it has to be in there.

Now my tip for you when it comes to simplifying your systems is to make sure that you continually review your existing systems to check if they can be simplified.

Because technology is constantly improving. There's always these new AI tools and other software that we can use.

So, I think that part of setting up systems is making sure that we regularly review them to ensure that they are as efficient as possible.

Okay, so we've talked about documented. We've covered simplified. Now let's get into followed. Because even the best systems will fail if they're not consistently followed.

And when our systems are followed, I think that creates the efficiency, it improves client experience and also it reduces errors.

Now I'm going to give you my tip for this part of documenting, simplified and followed.

I'm going to give you my followed tip upfront, and that is to name the system that you create, to publish it and promote it.

Keep it somewhere accessible. Make sure people know about it.

I was talking to a client last week who was dealing with a team member who was complaining about the fact that there were a lack of processes in the business.

And he said that, “Well, actually, I've got these processes. I'm just not doing enough to promote them to let people know how they can leverage the resources that we have.”

So, we've got to make sure that people know about the system.

And I think one reason why we want to name it is because we can name it in a way that makes it accessible.

I can remember one of the big firms that I used to work for used to call the way that you would access information from various service lines or geographies “The Matrix”.

And it just made it sound a little bit foreign and complicated in my opinion.

We want to make our systems sound as easy as possible.

We want to make it sound like it does the thing that it's supposed to do.

So, for example, we might call something “The done deal checklist” because the deal is not done until everything on that checklist is completed. And we can make that the definition of “done” in the business.

We can also name it and make it sound like a thing.

So, I talked about the Prospecting Power Hour Playbook, which you can grab at cresuccess.co/power

That is a "thing" that I've created and I've named it the Prospecting Power Hour Playbook.

You can make your own, like the ABC Commercial Prospecting Playbook, for example.

And I think making sure that the name reflects what it is, also means that people understand easier how to use it.

And this idea I think was best reflected in a conference that I attended a couple of weeks ago where they were talking about virtual assistants as offshore professionals.

And the reason why they call offshore professionals that and not virtual assistants, is because a virtual assistant maybe doesn't sound like a real person, whereas an offshore professional is someone who is offshore, who is a professional person.

One thing that I remember back in my university days when I used to sell mobile phones was that we used to have this thing called “The Fighting Fund”.

The Fighting Fund was a certain amount of money that we were given to provide incentives to potential clients to sign up on the spot.

And that was the Fighting Fund. It was what it sounded like. It helped us fight and get bigger deals done as we needed to without pre-approval because we already had that amount approved for us to use in a Fighting Fund.

I guess the other advantage maybe of naming something is, is that when people name it, they have a little bit of ownership over it as well.

So how do we ensure that people are actually following the systems apart from just giving it a cool name?

Well, first step is to make sure that we're leading by example.

So, if leadership follows the system, then the team is more likely to do that.

If you expect people to enter information into the CRM as the single source of truth, then you as the leader, need to be doing that as well.

We need to also train and reinforce what our processes and systems are.

So regular refreshers for the team, we can talk through and describe the way that it is used and provide the context about why it actually matters.

And of course, as I mentioned before with the simplification process, we also make sure that people are more likely to follow it by continually monitoring and tweaking the systems and also the way that they are used in the business.

So have a look at how effective they are and make any adjustments as needed.

And I think that if you're getting any resistance from people around, “Well, I already know how to do this, I don't really need to follow this every single time.”

I think the classic example that you can provide people the analogy, if you like, is the pilot always does the preflight checklist before they get moving.

So, we've got to make sure that we're following the processes to a T, so that the business runs smoothly, so that our clients are served better, and so that our people can be more efficient.

There are a few ideas about how you can set up systems and processes in your commercial real estate business to make sure that they are documented, simplified, and followed.

I'm going to come back with one more episode on systems where I'm going to talk about a specific system that you can embed in your business.

I'll talk about some of the ways that I've created this system and then that's going to give you even more context.

One, about how you can use that particular system, but two, how you can set up more systems in your business.

Now, if you did find today's episode helpful, go ahead and share it with someone who you think could use better systems in their commercial real estate business.

That's all for us today though. Thank you so much for listening. I will speak to you soon.