Chris Webb

I was chatting to an estate agent recently who said something I hear surprisingly often.

“I’m flat out at the moment.”

Now, on the face of it, that’s a good thing. Busy usually means instructions are coming in, sales are progressing and the business is moving in the right direction. But the more we spoke, the more I realised she wasn’t describing a growing business.

She was describing a growing workload, there’s a difference.

I think one of the biggest challenges in estate agency is that the business which gets you off the ground is very rarely the business that takes you to the next level. Yet so many of us keep trying to grow the same business instead of accepting it needs to evolve over time.

If you think back to when you first started, you probably did everything yourself. You answered every call, carried out every valuation, negotiated every offer, chased every solicitor, updated your social media, dealt with invoices and still somehow found time to show people around houses. That’s exactly what a new business looks like. It has to. When there are only a handful of you in the business, there isn’t really another option.

Those habits are brilliant when you’re trying to get from zero to your first £100,000 in revenue. They build momentum, create opportunities and help establish your reputation in the local area.

The problem comes when your business grows but the way you run it doesn’t.

Instead of changing the operating model, you simply work harder. You fit another valuation into the diary. You answer emails later in the evening. You start working Sunday mornings because it’s the only time nobody is ringing you. You convince yourself it’s just a busy spell, even though that busy spell has lasted the last three years.

At some point, it’s worth asking yourself a difficult question.

Has the business actually grown, or have I just become more important to it?

Because they’re not the same thing.

If every decision still comes through you, if every member of the team still asks you before doing anything significant, if you can’t disappear for two weeks without worrying what you’ll come back to, then the business hasn’t really evolved. It’s simply become more dependent on you.

That’s a dangerous place to be, because eventually you become the ceiling.

Simply because no business can keep growing if one person remains responsible for every important decision, there just aren’t enough hours in the work day (and evening too!)

The agencies that continue to grow don’t necessarily have better negotiators or bigger marketing budgets. More often than not, they’ve just accepted that every stage of growth requires a different version of the business.

The first version relies on hustle, the second relies on structure, the third relies on people.

That’s why the things many smaller businesses put off until “one day” are often the very things that unlock the next stage of growth.

Standard operating procedures aren’t there to make life more corporate; they’re there so clients receive the same experience every time.

Clear roles aren’t about hierarchy; they’re about making sure everybody knows what they’re responsible for.

Delegation isn’t about doing less work; it’s about making sure you’re spending your time on the work that only you can do.

None of that feels as productive as winning another instruction.

In fact, on the day you write your first proper process or spend time training someone instead of doing the job yourself, it can feel like you’ve achieved very little.

I think that’s where many agency owners get caught out. They judge every decision by whether it helps today, when the better question is whether it makes the business stronger next year.

Every successful business has gone through this evolution. The owner’s role changes over time. In the beginning, success comes from doing everything. Later on, success comes from making sure you don’t have to.

That’s a difficult transition, particularly for people who built the business through hard work and sheer determination. It almost feels wrong to step back from jobs you’ve always done yourself.

But if the business can’t function without you, it can only ever grow as far as your own time, energy and capacity allow.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether you’re ready for the next stage of growth.

Perhaps it’s whether your business is.

Because the business that got you here may well have done its job. Now it might be time to build the one that gets you to where you want to be.

 

Chris Webb is the founder of The Estate Agent Consultancy.