Project Management Inside Your Real Estate Business

As real estate agents and investors, most of us have pretty small businesses (all things considered). Most of the time this means that we have to play the role of CEO, CFO and COO, plus management, marketing, accounting etc.... Depending on the size of your operation you're pretty much playing all the roles.

One thing I've learned over the years is related to project management and project managing our staff, outsourced help and vendors. As our companies grow, we get more sophisticated industry software, we put new business processes in place, we put new accounting principals in place, new marketing practices in place and someone has to run point on all those things. In a perfect world, it would be great to outsource those things to an employee, but most of the time you have to do the heavy lifting first in order to fully understand what’s going on in your business.

It is possible to hire someone to run point on something like getting new software for example, but they probably won't know exactly what you want. If you have good employees in place who are very capable of running point on a project, that’s great, but I think it's important to understand how the software works, the process, the whatever it is capable of.

For instance, we have a software program that we recently implemented and there are a lot of things that needed to be set up up front like specific custom fields and how the reporting will look. Your employees, no matter how trusted, don’t always know what you will want. More importantly, I like to become familiar with things like this just so I know what’s going on.

Even though I don’t want to do data entry or the daily key strokes,  I do want to understand how all of our programs and processes work and I want to set them up. By knowing everything that is going on inside my business, I can properly train somebody and if for some reason they don’t work out, I can train someone else to do it the way I want it to be done.