Time to get ahead: How to plan for success in 2024

With year-end rapidly approaching, a lot of property management business owners will be doubling down on their involvement in daily activities. For many, this is a necessity driven by increased workloads and exacerbated by tired teams motivated for nothing more than a well-earned holiday.

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The trouble is, as a business owner, having your nose pressed too firmly to the grindstone often means missing the big picture opportunities that are right in front of you.

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The importance of year-end planning

“New year, new you” is an oversimplification, but that doesn’t mean we should underestimate the importance of a freshly laid strategic plan. As Einstein once said, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.

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For a business to grow and thrive, it needs to embrace positive change. This is even more true in an industry like property management, where change is as inevitable as it is constant. Client expectations change, regulations change, tools and technology change. It would be crazy to expect the same business strategy to deliver the same (or better) results in the year to come.

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By taking the opportunity to step back, analyse past challenges and new opportunities, however, it’s possible to head into the new year with a brand-new, hyper-focussed strategy for success.

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How to plan for success

Create a business plan

One of the most powerful ways to update and refresh (or create) a business strategy is to write a new business plan. This may sound counterintuitive for an existing operation, but has proven to be one of the easiest and most effective ways to clarify a number of important strategic elements.

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These include:

• updated business goals based on the current challenge/opportunity landscape
• the success factors leading up to those goals
• key performance indicators (KPIs) that must be tracked to effectively measure success/progress

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With these elements clearly defined, it becomes much easier to create effective business strategies that can help define your ideal standard operating procedures moving forward.

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Key considerations

External Factors

Property management businesses exist to solve a specific set of problems – problems that shift and change as the industry/market evolves. When drawing up a new business plan, it’s important to understand these problems as well as the external factors that contribute to their existence.

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That means taking stock of industry trends, challenges, and insights; the competitor landscape; and your client and stakeholder needs and expectations.

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Pro tip: When analysing a particular challenge, consider its size, importance, and legal and compliance impact, as well as the going rate for its solution. This may bring to light an opportunity gap that could offer your business a significant competitive advantage.

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Internal factors

When drafting a fresh business plan, it’s also important to analyse internal factors i.e. your services. This needs to be done not just from your own perspective, but also that of your customers.

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Why? Because customers only pay for value they perceive. As a result, your ability to improve your bottom line depends heavily on your ability to understand that perception, your role in shaping it, and how that measures up against your customers’ evolving needs and expectations.

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To help guide your analysis, we recommend keeping the five pillars of business in mind:

1. Value proposition – What is yours and how does it speak to your customers’ needs, risks and expectations.
2. Value creation – How do you leverage skills, knowledge and processes to create value.
3. Value delivery – How do you deliver value through a skilled, motivated and supported team.
4. Monetisation – How do you monetise value and where you can improve profits through cost efficiencies, scalability and unlocking possible new income streams.
5. Communication – How do you communicate your value so that your customers perceive the true worth of your services.

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Is technology the answer?

As a technology solutions provider, we’d love to say that the right technology is all it takes to put your plans for 2024 into action. In reality, success is far more likely when you merge the strengths of technology with the skills of a well-supported team in the workplace. Read our take on that, here...

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Technology’s ability to automate mundane tasks and support efficient operations and effective oversight is a powerful asset. But so is your property managers’ ability to deliver invaluable customer service and experience. Optimising your business to make the best of both can be tricky, which is why we created a free eBook exploring today’s most effective business models.

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Lead the revolution!

Technology exists to serve us, but who defines what that service entails? It’s only by joining the conversation that we can shape technology to our purposes and avoid the slippery slope that leads to being owned by technology and those who create it.

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Choose your technology partners wisely. Don’t be afraid to make your voice heard. Lead the way by becoming an early adopter of future-focussed business models, and shape today’s most promising property management tools from within.

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Why the right technology still makes a difference

Back when we worked in the property management industry ourselves, we used our fair share of technology systems. Many of these enabled us to perform workflow-specific functionality with relative ease, but none of them actually solved any of our core business challenges.

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When we created WeconnectU, we committed to doing things differently. We don’t build technology systems here. We build technology solutions.

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Each of our three solutions is designed to actively support property management businesses in addressing the daily challenges of operations, as well as the big-picture challenges of achieving sustainable business success.

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The result is greater compliance, manageability, scalability and profitability. All of which make it easier for business owners to start working on their businesses instead of in their businesses, laying firm foundations for a strategic future – even in the midst of “silly season”.