Now let’s talk about some of the challenges that you may find when outsourcing in your real estate business.
The first thing that I can think of that is going to be a huge change to the way that you are doing business currently is when training or mentoring staff. When they are sitting in your own office, it can be very easy if you would like to train them or show them something. You can have them on the shoulder and show them the tasks that you’re wishing for them to complete. You can monitor them. You can mentor them. You can make sure they’re at the desk. You can make sure that they’re producing. However, if you’re hiring a team off shore, some of these challenges you will face come in line with exactly what I just mentioned.
How are you going to train them? How are you going to mentor them and how are you going to monitor them? You may already have a system, whether it be training manuals or in the cloud, however, if you do not, there are many tools out there which you can use that will assist you with training tasks management – such as Trello, Sweet Process, Slack, and Asana. There are many items out there that will help you. You will need to have a very good system around training and videoing. Documenting a procedure to show somebody online, is very different to creating a manual procedure which would generally be a paper procedure that would be sitting around in your office as a training manual.
What you are going to have to do is create one of these, that can be easily visual online. One of the ways that the staff work over here is that they are way more visual and way more process driven than that of your internal staff. So, by creating videos around the specific tasks that you would like to be done and then chopping those videos up into procedures that can easily be seen and followed online is the best way Then, in regards to consistency, to make sure the task is done in the same way every time one of the things you really need to do is make sure that you’ve got some great checklist in place.
All of these things, I will cover off a little bit later in systems and training. These are some of the challenges that you may face around not having the staff inside of your internal office. The second thing that you will find is that the Philippines is a totally different country. It runs in a very different way to that of Australia, United States, England or New Zealand. Culturally, the staff here are very different. They have different ways of learning and may have different terms for certain things.
It may not be a fact that they don’t understand what you’re talking about. They may not understand the term that you have actually put out to them. So, in regards to things as simple as tissue paper vs. toilet paper, tissue is the word for everything. This is just a very small thing. However, you will find that it will come up a few times when there is a word or something that they do not understand. The process is extremely important. The way that the Filipino works, if you don’t have a process in place, it is very hard to get them to complete a task. They are used to having middle management and somebody in charge of them driving productivity.
So, having all these things online and ways that you can trigger this to happen, is extremely important. Some of the funny challenges that I have had across the time is in regards to some really simple things that are really easy to fix, such as house types. When you look around the Philippines, there is not that many different house types. There’s a lot of different shacks. So, when we talk about things like a duplex vs. a group titled plan, you’ve got townhouses, villas, acreage, rural, farmland, normal land subdivisions, splittr blocks, these are some of the many different things that have to be explained.
These are some of the challenges you may have, around giving them an understanding of Real Estate in Australia. One of the particularly funny things I’ve found is around maintenance, when we were trying to implement procedures for my own business, Reval Estate Agent. What type of person should go out to complete what type of job. Since living here in the Philippines for three years now, I really, truly understand why they have some confusion around this, because I have had a handyman out, who is also the electrician, who is also the plumber and he’s wearing the exact same thing.
He’s got no safety gear, he’s got thongs on, a singlet on and he will go and fix the PowerPoint and then go and fix the doorknob and then fix the leak, all in one go. So, when identifying somebody to go out and do a maintenance task, obviously in Australia, we are fairly specific. A plumber does plumbing, Electrician does electrical. So these simple, little things like that you may get stuck on. These can be easily overcome and we will go into that later in systems and training. These are just some of the challenges you may face. It is just something to prepare for, when thinking about your Real Estate Outsourcing journey.
