It takes a savvy business owner to recognise when they are not the best manager of the business and find someone else to fill those shoes. As a top business manager, Mandy Wurth from Toop & Toop Adelaide, really understands the mechanics of an organisation and how to ensure it runs like a well-oiled machine.
Ms Wurth’s real estate career started 10 years ago in property management and has included running a sales team and sales training before she took up her current role where she is responsible for 155 staff across eight offices. She manages financial controllers and seven team leaders, and reports to Toop & Toop’s CEO, with the prime reponsibibility of driving the company’s profit. In her time in the industry, Ms Wurth said she had seen many problematic issues, however the biggest was principals who didn’t understand their business. “A lot of principals were great sales people, who could list and sell property, but really running the business was not in their skill set. Running a business is about managing people, and a lot of us don’t have the skill to manage people and understand who people are, because it’s people who make your business grow,” she explained.
This lack of leadership leads to ineffective systems, no structure, bad figures, poor training, high staff turnover and unhappy management because nobody is overseeing what is actually going on in the office. “If you don’t deliver, you can’t expect other people to follow you, and the best way to be a leader is to learn to delegate and empower people to do their job,” Ms Wurth said.
“I think it’s really difficult for a professional sales person to also run a business and grow the business; they’ve got to grow the business at some point. If they’re best at being out there and winning the listings and getting the sales through the door and supporting the sales team in that way, they’ve got to hand over the running of the business to someone who’s an expert in that, because that’s their field of expertise,” she added.
Choosing the right role for themselves and their business is the way business owners can ensure there will still be a profitable business running and growing in 10 years. Ms Wurth said principals who have this vision for their business should grow someone into the role, starting off as an office administrator so they have complete understanding of the business before they are responsible for running it.
“You need to be looking at what it is that you don’t want to do, that’s not your skill set, because you’re hiring that person to be this person in your business to manage your business.”
“To start with you hand over the everyday running of the office to make sure reception’s right, procedures are in place - and if you don’t have procedures and policies, it’s a good way to get started with someone new coming into the business, because if you build that together they’re going to start to learn about your business,” she explained.
Starting as an administrator means the future business manager is making sure the office is working at the back end which supports the sales people and property management team to grow the business. Ms Wurth calls this red, blue and black, where red is administrative work, blue is dollar productive and black is strategic. “They will put the foundations down for you to grow and you make the money, but they will take care of all the red work and work with you on your black work within the business,” she said. “This also gives you the opportunity to watch this person to see if they can work through projects and get them completed because if they can’t, you’re going to have a problem in the future because they’re not going to be able to oversee people to make sure that they get projects completed.”
A business manager also needs to be on the look out for new opportunities all the time, because the top sales person/ principal might not always be around. This makes innovation and creativity essential skills.
Beyond the smooth running, systemising and profitability of a business, the most important factor is the people in it. “Whether it’s a big business or a small business, you can’t lose that fact that people want to talk to you about them,” she explained, saying there has to be a level of intimacy with the business manager that goes further than asking how their weekend was.
“I believe that if you have unhappy people, you don’t have a dollar productive office. So you really need to have a great understanding of people and what makes them tick and the problem is that in this role, there is a very fine line between being their friend and being their boss. You know you spend the best part of your life at work and if they’re not enjoying it, you’ve got a problem.”