Automated property management software

Starting a business is hard, if not one of the hardest careers to pursue. You will hear all the best epigrams:

"Turnover is vanity and profit is sanity"

“The young person who aspires to do things must early learn to do without things”

Source: Forbes - Published 1922

As we all know, there is a common understanding that 90% of businesses fail in first year, but this is not exactly true. It turns out this could be as low as 25%. But over the years there is an increasing percentage of businesses failing.

Automated property management software
Source: Statistic brain

According to this report, no knowledge of pricing, lack of planning, no knowledge of financing and no experience in record-keeping. Are listed as number 1 major causes to failure.

So before starting, it is worth preparing as we know another classic quote:

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” - Benjamin Franklin

There are a number of ways that you can enter a market. But before starting, education and experience is needed. The more you know and experience within that industry, the easier the management of that business will be.

Build up experience in any way you can. For a wannabe letting agent, have you managed tenants? If not go volunteer at a housing association. Or if you want to create a new on-line business, research your competition or read an industry standard book. Learn from them and gain experience points whenever you can.

Once you have set your mindset on your subject, start planning, write stuff down. Open a computer and create a central document of what you have planned.

If you were to build a property, you would not a lay a brick without carefully designed drawings. So why do a hasty job for a business plan? Your own business will be just as expensive to invest in.

Writing a detailed plan will enable you to start to structure the future business. And don’t start from scratch, plagiarism is a bad skill taught by schools. Go find a template to give you focus.

We humans work best when there are questions that need answering.

I did a quick search and found a good example: Business Plan for a Startup Business

Within that plan, you need to consider your business systems. Starting without them, is starting 20 steps behind. With so many affordable applications available, it is best to consider using them from the start.

As each system has been refined for a particular process, it will help guide you on the requirements of that industry and at the same time help keep you organised.

Suggested systems:

For documents and emails - Google Apps
For property management - Landmax.pro
For to-do list and planning - Trello
For social media management - Hootsuite
For customer help desk - Freshdesk

Once you have the plan and systems. Putting it into action only requires hard graft. My biggest tip - try not to waste time on things that don’t matter. As difficult at first this will seem. Lean on your experience and education to work this out.

At first the likely path is that you will set your standards based on your competitors. But they have probably spent years perfecting their business model and you will start with very limited resources in comparison.

So you need to prioritise your time, move quickly through your to-do list. Choosing what matters most and then working through that one by one.

At landmax.pro we use a lovely piece of software - Trello. It organises all our customers feedback, our build plan, our processes. Basically a super to-do list.

Automated property management software

One last tip - start your to-dos in small manageable segments. Do not try to create massive unrealistic goals. You don’t want to get bogged down by unnecessary or wasteful tasks. Which you will end up most likely not touching them or feel that the task never ends.

And by keeping it focused. Every quick task completed actually gives us a positive mental boost, that actually increases our productivity and motivation for the next task.

Keep your mindset focused, get educated, write a plan, get a system, and just carry out your to-do list.

Blog post by Omar Moulani

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