Despite solid systems. Why is the business still depending on me?

Some home truths can sting. The biggest lesson I took from growing my property management business wasn't about property management at all.

The biggest lesson was about me.

As the business grew, so did the team. Hiring early and training people well, I told myself that employing these good people would naturally reduce the long hours I was putting in day to day.

Wrong. So wrong. The opposite happened.

Growth had made the business became increasingly dependent on me. Not because the team lacked capability.

But because I was the person who held all the knowledge, experience, and where people went to first for decision making. Initially I didn’t see this role as a problem.

I thought I was helping to supporting my team.

For example, every morning I would work through the emails that had arrived overnight.

Before the property managers had even logged in, I had already read the emails, identified the issues, and sent each property manager my thoughts on how I believed they should respond.

I'd remind them about the history of the property. I'd explain what I knew about the owner. I'd suggest the best way to approach the situation.

I though I was helping. But I was becoming part of every decision, which over time, allowed another pattern to develop.

I hired for likeability, not experience, and as you would expect, the property managers would regularly come to me with questions.

Initially, they wanted answers.

"What should I do?" I was more than happy to jump in and solve each problem.

As the property managers gained experience, they started giving opinions, asking for confirmation rather than how-to.

"This is the problem I have, this is what I think we should do. Am I on the right track?"

That was real progress.

It showed they were learning. But it also showed me that the business still relied on my judgement to validate important decisions.

Now what have I done! We are getting bigger, but the business wasn't becoming more independent.

But it was becoming more experienced. That is a probably a subtle but pretty important difference.

I wasn't the bottleneck because I wanted control. I genuinely wanted to support the team, help them succeed, and give our owners the best possible experience.

But good intentions don't always produce scalable businesses. Eventually I realised my role had to change. My job wasn't to answer every question. It was to build a business where fewer questions needed to come to me in the first place.

That meant I needed to document, and clearly outline all our systems. Not just in office, but out of office. So we went off to the stationary store, bought a big book of paper big enough to put on a painters easel.

We drew a circle in the middle for us, and all around the edges of the easle were circles representing all the touch points we have for all aspects of our business. How we talk to people, what we provide people and what we project to people. That was the easy bit. The brainstorming, the squeezing sentences into circles before we ran off the edge of the page.

We then broke it down further into different scenarios on different whiteboards.

Documenting knowledge was the first step. Encouraging judgement instead of providing instructions came later. Encouraging people to make decisions, occasionally make mistakes, and continue developing was the key for us to expand, without expanding the pressure on me.

Every decision the owner makes personally is one less opportunity for the business to learn. The irony is that the more capable I became, the more valuable I was to the business. But that didn't necessarily make the business more valuable.

It simply made the business more dependent on me, which may have been one of the biggest mindset shifts I experienced as a business owner.

Success wasn't about becoming the person with all the answers.

It was about building a business where the answers increasingly came from the the people within the business itself.

Niall Heeran

Niall helps business owners understand what buyers value by identifying the operational drivers that influence business value, buyer appeal, and sale readiness.

Former Principal of Copo Property Management, which he built from a one-man operation into a fully systemised business that was successfully sold to a national operator.