Being Busy Is Not the Same as Being Valuable

There's something oddly reassuring about being busy. A full inbox, a packed diary and a growing list of things that need doing can make us feel indispensable. We finish the day exhausted, look back at everything we've dealt with and congratulate ourselves on having worked hard. In property management, where there's seemingly always another email to answer, contractor to chase or piece of paperwork to process, that feeling is particularly familiar.

But there's a question we probably don't ask ourselves often enough: how much of what we've just done actually needed us to do it?

I don't mean whether the task was necessary. Plenty of administrative work is essential to running a compliant, professional lettings business. I mean whether having a human being carry out that particular task improved the outcome in any meaningful way. Did their experience, judgement or personality make a difference? Was the customer better served because they were involved? Or did somebody simply spend fifteen minutes doing something that could have happened automatically, with greater consistency and less opportunity for error?

That distinction has shaped how we've approached technology at Base for almost twenty years, and it ultimately led to the creation of The Depositary.

The difference between doing something and adding value

When we launched Base in 2004, property management was an extraordinarily manual business. Documents were printed, signed, filed, photocopied and posted. Information was entered into systems, transferred between people and frequently entered again somewhere else. Much of what happened behind the scenes depended on somebody remembering to do something, checking whether somebody else had done it and then chasing them if they hadn't.

At the time, that was simply how agency worked. It wasn't necessarily a sign of poor management or inefficient people. The technology available to us was limited, and the industry had developed processes around those limitations.

From around 2006, we started exploring what technology could change. Initially, the improvements were relatively modest, but over time the process became something of an obsession. We stopped looking at individual tasks in isolation and started questioning the entire journey. What were we doing, when were we doing it, where did the information come from, how was it being handled and, most importantly, why were we doing it that way?

That last question often produced the most interesting answers, particularly when the explanation amounted to little more than habit.

Our thinking gradually developed into a principle that still guides me today: where a human adds no value to the outcome of a task, all they add is risk.

That's not an argument against people. Quite the opposite. It's an argument for recognising just how valuable people are and being considerably more thoughtful about where we deploy them.

If somebody's involvement doesn't improve the result, we're potentially introducing inconsistency, delay, human error and unnecessary cost without receiving anything meaningful in return. Meanwhile, that same person could be doing something where their experience, empathy or judgement makes an enormous difference.

We've been asking these questions for longer than people might think

One of our earlier projects was working with Jupix around 2008 to co-develop PropertyFile, which brought landlord and tenant access to information such as documents, maintenance reporting and updates, and rent ledgers.

At a time when online portals were far from standard in agency, we could see how much unnecessary work was being created simply because customers had no straightforward way to access information about their own property or tenancy.

A landlord wanting a document shouldn't necessarily have to email their property manager, wait for somebody to find it and then wait for it to be sent over. A tenant reporting a maintenance issue shouldn't need to rely entirely on telephone calls and email chains to understand what's happening.

Making that information accessible didn't diminish the role of the property manager. It meant the property manager could spend less time acting as a human filing cabinet and more time actually managing property.

That distinction became even more important when we started examining tenancy conclusions. We found a process involving numerous stakeholders, repeated requests for information, avoidable delays and a remarkable amount of manual administration. We started pulling it apart, questioning each stage and looking at what could be eliminated, simplified or automated.

The Depositary emerged from that work. It wasn't born from a desire to create another piece of software for letting agents. It came from recognising that an essential process was consuming an enormous amount of human effort without that effort consistently improving the experience for agents, landlords or tenants.

The most expensive words in business

There are two phrases that have probably protected more inefficient processes than any others: “That's how we've always done it” and “If it ain't broke, don't fix it.”

Both sound perfectly reasonable until you consider what they actually mean.

A process can function exactly as intended and still be unnecessarily expensive, slow or frustrating. Something doesn't have to be visibly broken to be worth improving. Indeed, some of the greatest opportunities in business come from questioning things that everybody else has simply accepted as normal.

The history of business is littered with organisations that were very good at operating the model they already had. Blockbuster, Kodak and Toys “R” Us are familiar reminders that being established, successful or even dominant doesn't guarantee that your way of doing things will remain appropriate.

I'm not suggesting the average letting agency faces an identical challenge. But I do think there's a dangerous comfort in believing that because a process has worked for twenty years, it must still be the best way to do it.

Property management is particularly susceptible because so much of the work is repetitive. When somebody has carried out the same administrative task thousands of times, they become extremely proficient at it. That proficiency can disguise the more fundamental question of whether the task needs to exist in its current form at all.

We sometimes celebrate people for being extraordinarily good at work we should be trying to remove from their desks.

Why are we so obsessed with getting bigger?

There's another industry habit worth questioning: our fixation with growth.

Agency conferences, business awards and industry conversations are full of discussions about increasing market share, winning more instructions, opening branches and acquiring competitors. Growth is often treated as the clearest measure of success, regardless of what it actually delivers to the people running the business.

Of course, growth can be a wonderful thing. It creates opportunities, increases reach and can build considerable value. But growing a business and improving a business are not necessarily the same exercise.

If an agency is operating on relatively thin margins, adding more managed properties without addressing its underlying processes can simply mean adding more work, more people and more operational complexity. Revenue increases, but the fundamental economics may barely improve.

The industry has long been associated with relatively modest profitability, and that should encourage us to think harder about the resources we already have. Rather than automatically asking how we can increase headcount to handle another hundred properties, why aren't we asking whether our existing team could comfortably manage those properties if we removed some of the unnecessary work?

It's the old saying: turnover is vanity, profit is sanity.

That becomes especially relevant for business owners who aren't planning an exit. If you're building a business you intend to own and enjoy for the foreseeable future, sustainable profitability, resilience and quality of life may be considerably more valuable than being able to announce another record year of turnover.

Yet we often treat efficiency as something to investigate only after growth has stretched the business to breaking point.

Your best people shouldn't be your busiest people

During a recent Viking Chats conversation with Nicola and Paul Broomham, we discussed the challenges of building their new business together. Nicola is an experienced recruiter whose value comes from her relationships, judgement and ability to match people with opportunities. Paul brings decades of agency leadership, commercial experience and business consultancy expertise.

They quickly recognised that spending Nicola's time on VAT returns or routine financial administration made very little sense. She might be perfectly capable of doing those things, but they weren't the reason clients wanted to work with her.

The same principle applies throughout a letting agency.

Think about the experienced property manager who spends an hour copying information between systems, the senior administrator manually assembling routine documents or the branch manager repeatedly checking whether straightforward actions have been completed.

Those people may be exceptionally good at those tasks. They might even take pride in doing them efficiently. But does their involvement actually improve the outcome?

And, perhaps more importantly, what are they not doing while they're occupied with them?

We regularly describe agency as a people business. We talk about relationships, trust, personality, local knowledge and the importance of delivering a genuinely personal service. Most of us would agree that those are among the things that distinguish an excellent agent from an average one.

So why do we construct working environments in which our people spend so much of their time doing things that don't require any of those qualities?

There's an obvious contradiction in claiming that our people are our greatest asset while allowing routine administration to consume the majority of their working day.

Technology should give us more humanity, not less

When we discuss automation, AI and digital processes, the conversation often drifts towards replacing people or reducing headcount. That's a remarkably narrow way of looking at the opportunity.

I prefer to start with two questions. Can technology perform this task as reliably, or more reliably, at an equivalent or lower cost? And if it can, what could the person currently doing that task contribute elsewhere?

The first question addresses efficiency. The second addresses value.

Imagine a property manager who suddenly has an extra hour available each day. That hour could be used to speak to landlords about their longer-term plans, identify opportunities to improve a property's condition, proactively support tenants or resolve issues before they escalate.

They might have time to call a landlord who has been on a let-only service for years and explain the benefits of full management. They might build stronger relationships with contractors, improve communication with residents or simply give greater attention to the more complicated situations that genuinely require experienced human judgement.

Those activities can improve customer satisfaction, strengthen retention, create commercial opportunities and make the business more enjoyable to work in.

And yes, perhaps some of that time should simply be given back to the employee.

If better systems allow somebody to finish at a sensible hour, feel less overwhelmed or work a shorter week without compromising service, that's a meaningful outcome too. We shouldn't assume every minute technology saves must immediately be filled with another task.

A less exhausted property manager is likely to be a better property manager. A team that has space to think can often make better decisions than one permanently operating at maximum capacity.

Don't confuse automation with improvement

None of this means that every process should be automated simply because we can.

A poorly designed process doesn't become a good one because we've added software. Sometimes we simply make an unnecessarily complicated process happen more quickly, or create a new layer of administration around the technology itself.

That's why I believe the starting point must always be examining the process, not shopping for a solution.

What are we trying to achieve? Who needs to be involved? Which decisions genuinely require judgement? What information is already available elsewhere? Which steps exist because of historical limitations rather than present-day requirements?

Sometimes the best improvement is automation. Sometimes it's an integration that prevents somebody entering the same information twice. Sometimes it's changing the order in which things happen. And sometimes the answer is simply to stop doing something altogether.

The temptation with technology is to measure progress by how many tools we've adopted or how sophisticated our systems appear. But an impressive technology stack is of little use if the people operating it are still spending their days joining everything together manually.

The real measure is whether the business works better as a result.

What would your agency look like if you started again?

I often wonder what a letting agency would look like if we designed it today without inheriting decades of established processes.

Would we really choose to have experienced property professionals manually moving information between disconnected systems? Would we build processes around printing, chasing, checking and re-entering data? Would we employ people for their communication skills and judgement, then spend most of their working week preventing them from using either?

I doubt it.

Of course, none of us gets to start entirely from scratch. We have existing businesses, established systems, longstanding clients and teams who have learned particular ways of working. Change requires thought, investment and a willingness to challenge comfortable assumptions.

But we can start asking better questions.

The next time somebody tells you how incredibly busy they are, resist the temptation to assume that's evidence of how valuable they must be. Instead, look at what they're spending their time doing, whether their involvement improves the outcome and what opportunities are being lost because they're occupied with it.

Being busy can feel productive. It can even feel important. But the businesses that thrive over the coming years won't necessarily be those whose people work the hardest or whose teams process the greatest volume of administration.

They'll be the ones that become much better at distinguishing between work that needs doing and work that needs a person.

And then make sure their people have the time to do the things that really matter.