Growing pains? George supported his team with a remote professional
Ailo
23 April 2024
George Southwell is the CEO of Ray White Rural Canberra / Yass, and with a small but rapidly growing property management portfolio he’s been on Ailo for 18 “exciting months”.
Since rolling out Ailo and his vision for better property management, George’s rent roll has grown by more than 55%.
One of the biggest draw cards for local property investors was his team’s customer-first mindset. But as the business’ portfolio grew, George noticed more and more of their time was getting sucked up by administrative tasks.
The Ailo platform removed a lot of the admin, but the team still needed support as they grew, especially because recruitment was a challenge in their rural market.
That’s when George decided to turn on Flex, Ailo’s embedded support staffing solution. Within two weeks, his team had a full-time remote professional (who already knew how to work in Ailo) hit the ground running.
We sat down with George to learn how he turned his growing pains into business gains.
You've been on a steep growth trajectory. How does Flex help you deliver better service as you grow?
Our property management department is such a central part of the wealth within our business. We’ve been growing quickly, and I knew full well that I couldn’t have our highly-skilled property managers doing literally everything. From going out and getting business to keeping our investors and renters happy, to conducting inspections, managing repairs and maintenance, leasings… and all the administration that goes with it. We couldn’t do it all with just the team we had on the ground.
“Today, we are dealing with investors – not property owners. And investors don’t want every time the phone rings to hear their property manager telling them the dishwasher is broken or that they have a big repair bill coming up.”
— George Southwell, Ray White Rural Canberra/Yass
We had to create capacity in our team to be able to proactively reach out to our clients with good new stories too – whether that’s an offer for a financial health check or just seeing whether they’re happy with the way their property is being managed.
We realised we had to free our team up from the monotonous administration that comes with the job. And this is what encouraged us to explore Flex.
What made Flex stand out compared to the other remote professional and VA solutions on the market?
Cultural alliance. [Hiring a team member based overseas] did confront me personally at the start. I’ve always believed in employing locally, but the capacity to do that from a profit point of view simply wasn’t there. Since bringing on Eunice, our Flex team member, she’s really assimilated into our business. And it's been really cool to not only expose our local team to a culture from another part of the world, but also expose them to the new ideas and work ethic that comes with it.
What was it like onboarding a remote professional into your team?
It was so easy. It was an awesome transition.
Eunice has a great support network behind her from Ailo’s Flex team. And although we had prior knowledge of how to work with people based remotely, the Flex team explained very easily how to assimilate them into our business and with our on-site team.
Eunice has really come into the team; she’s a part of the team. She’s in our WhatsApp chat. She’s in our sales and property management chats that happen throughout the office.
“To be honest with you, the onboarding was seamless and a hell of a lot easier than what we were expecting.”
— George Southwell, Ray White Rural Canberra/Yass
One month in, what has impressed you most about your remote professional, Eunice?
Her efficiency and her work ethic are incredible. We didn't have enough work for her for the first two weeks, and she was very diligent in coming back to us and saying, what else can I do? What task would you like me to do? And so we started filtering in some sales department tasks as well. But the efficiency and the work ethic just simply hasn't dropped off.
What’s next now that you have freed up more capacity for property managers?
I like to focus on the facts, and the facts are pretty clear: in the last month that we've had Eunice onboard from Flex, we have given the capacity for our property managers to go and get new business to expand. And we're already seeing those numbers filter through quite healthily.
And moving forward, I’d say that our property management department will grow with the number of assets that we're managing quite rapidly. And that means Eunice will need to move into that team 100% of her time to help our skilled property managers manage those assets for our investors and our tenants.
What it’s also done is allowed us to look at it as a solution for our sales department as well.
We are talking to Ailo at the moment about bringing in another Flex team member.
That way they can pick up the processes that Eunice is currently writing for the sales department, and allow them to do all of the onboarding and marketing and planning for our sales department as well, which is really awesome.
What would you say to property managers that are considering turning on Flex?
Ask the difficult questions! I've always loved that about the Ailo team and it was no different when talking to them about Flex.
I asked all the difficult questions: What happens when they leave? How do we replace them? When do we pay them? How do we pay them? What are our responsibilities as employers? And it is just seamless with the contract that Ailo provides.
And if at any point you want to pick up the phone, give me a call! I'm happy to have a yarn to you! And I also know that Claire from our office would be happy to spruik the benefits of getting Eunice involved with our team and what she’s been doing through Flex.
Header image credit: Ray White Rural Canberra / Yass