Time to audit your business.

CRE Success Principle: Commercial real estate principals who pay attention to their numbers are the ones who are taking charge of their business' destiny.

As we move through 2025, assessing your commercial real estate business's performance is crucial.

The CRE Success Focus Finder is a self-assessment tool designed for commercial real estate principals who want to evaluate their business performance in three key areas:

🤝 Building the right team

🤝 Serving ideal clients

🤝 Implementing scalable systems

During this audit, you will be posed nine questions that challenge you to reflect on your leadership, client strategy and business systems.

The first category focuses on your team: do they know your vision? Are you conducting regular meetings and setting performance targets?

A strong team aligned with your goals is essential for long-term success.

In the second category, you’ll reflect on serving ideal clients, with questions about your branding and whether you’ve culled unprofitable clients.

Identifying and prioritising the right clients can drive revenue growth and operational efficiency.

The third category addresses systems: do you know your numbers, have clear strategic priorities and have documented processes?

Strong systems ensure consistency, scalability and sustainable business growth.

By answering these questions, you'll gain clarity on where your business stands and what needs attention.

If, after listening to Episode 214 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership, you find areas that need improvement, revisit past episodes that delve deeper into these topics.

Episode transcript:

 We've just wrapped up nine episodes: Three, to help you build the right team; three about serving ideal clients; and three, about implementing scalable systems.

So, I thought now is the right time to conduct a bit of an audit to see how your business is doing in those three areas.

Hello there. Welcome to Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm Darren Krakowiak. This is Episode 214. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode.

I am here of course, to help commercial real estate principals to accelerate revenue growth by building the right team, serving ideal clients, and implementing scalable systems.

And as I mentioned at the top of the show, we've just wrapped up a series of episodes to help you achieve that.

But we are now a quarter of the way through 2025. Isn't that wild?

This episode is being released on the 2nd of April, which means, as I said, we're a quarter of the way through the year.

So, I thought now's a great time to conduct a bit of a stock, take a bit of an audit to see how is your business performing? And how are you doing as a leader in those three key areas?

So, this is called the CRE Success Focus Finder. And what I'd like you to do, if you can grab a pen, that's great. If you can't, you'll still get value out of it as we ask these questions and you think about and reflect on how you're doing in these key areas.

I'm going to give you nine statements and I want you to answer true, partly true or false for each of these nine statements.

So, without discussing it any further, let's get right into it.

The first question in the focus finder is around getting the right people on your team, and I've got three questions around that. That's the first category.

So, the first question is, “My team knows what my vision for the business is.”

Is that true, partly true or is it false?

Now, the way that I define vision is where are we going? Why does it matter? And how will we know that we are on track once we've arrived?

And I think that's important to define and then talk about to get the team on board and to garner their support to help you make it happen.

The next question in category one, question two is, “I am conducting regular team meetings and one-on-one meetings.”

So, in episode 193, we talked about team meetings in detail, and I gave you my recommended agenda for team meetings.

But team meetings isn't the only piece: I also recommend that commercial real estate principals spend time one-on-one with their key staff each and every week.

And while that can seem like a big commitment of time, what my clients generally find is, is that they end up saving time because they're able to funnel communication into these one-on-one meetings and also, your team members start to understand with greater detail what it is that they are expected to do, and that allows you as the leader to put more trust in them and to give them more responsibility.

So ultimately, it's a time-saving measure. It's also a great way to build a stronger relationship with your people.

Because you can't help but get to know people more at a deeper level when you spend time one-on-one with them each and every week.

Question three in category one, “Performance targets are in place for our revenue producers.”

So, to drive results, we need to set targets. Even if you don't really respond to or need targets, many of your people do need them, and that will help motivate them and they'll respond to them.

So, I reckon we need some targets in place because we can then have like a yardstick by which we can measure people's performance and also to assign responsibility for and to hold people accountable to achieving certain outcomes.

So, is it true, partly true or false, that you have performance targets in place for your revenue producers?

All right, so those are the questions for category one.

Category two is we are serving ideal clients, and I've got three questions in this category for you.

The first question is, “Our branding helps us attract and retain ideal clients.”

Is that true? Partly true, or false? Our branding helps us to attract and retain ideal clients.

And that's not only the company branding but also your personal branding. And this matters because good marketing makes sales easier or even unnecessary.

Next question in this category is, “We have culled unprofitable, and undesirable management clients.”

So, I've got a process that I run through with my clients to help them understand what is the required ARR (annual recurring revenue) for a property management client to be profitable.

And once we know that, we can then go through and audit our property management business to just see how many managements are below the line, and then to assess if there are ways that we can give them an exception, or ways that we can get them above the line so they are profitable.

So, true, partly true or false? Have you culled unprofitable and undesirable management clients?

And our third question in this category is, “Our structure ensures that I, as the principal, am not a bottleneck for getting results for clients.”

So, you need to have the right people in the right seats, and that's important so you can delegate responsibility, so you are focused on your zone of genius – your zone of genius being, what are you good at, what do you enjoy and what does the market pay your top dollar to do.

And, you want to be able to delegate everything else as much as possible to other people in your team.

And when you do that, that means that every decision doesn't need to be run by you, and therefore you are not a bottleneck to getting results for clients in your business.

So, our structure ensures that I'm not a bottleneck to getting results for clients. Is that true, partly true, or false?

We've covered the first two categories. We've talked about getting the right people on your team and also serving ideal clients.

Category three is all about having scalable systems in your business. I've got three questions for you in this category as well.

The first one is, “I know my numbers and the financial goals that I've set for 2025.”

So, one of the first things that I actually do when I onboard a client is we do a deep dive into the historical performance of the business, what's going on currently, and then we work together to create some forecasts.

I think forecasts or goal setting is really important. I talk about that in episode 201, so check that out if perhaps this is a measure where you're giving yourself a partly true or a false.

You've got to know your numbers as a leader.

I strongly believe that if I ask you, what did your property management business do last year? How many property managements do you have? What was the performance of your sales and leasing team, top line revenue?

You should know that number. And if you don't, then you need to have a way to get that number given to you by your bookkeeper, or easily available to you through a dashboard so you can know those numbers and track them, because what gets measured gets managed.

Second question in this category is, “There are strategic priorities, and I talk about them regularly with my team.”

So, in a world of limited resources, but unlimited options, we need a strategy, otherwise we can get sidetracked or we might just be coasting.

And that's what strategic priorities give you. They're three to five things that if you focus on them and get them right, everything else becomes easier or even unnecessary.

So, do you have strategic priorities? Do you talk about them regularly with your team? Is that statement true, partly true, or is it false?

And the last question in this CRE success focus finder is, “Processes are documented, simplified, and followed.”

Now in episodes 211, 212 and 213, we did a real deep dive into systems, and in episode 212, we unpacked exactly what it means for processes to be documented, simplified, and followed.

So are your processes documented, simplified, and followed? Is that true, partly true or false?

Now, if you look at your answers, if you've got mostly falses or mostly partly trues for any category, then I want to invite you to go back and have a listen to the relevant series of episodes.

So, the series on systems was episodes 211, 212 and 213.

Episodes 208, 209 and 210 were all about serving ideal clients.

And we talked about getting the right people on your team in episodes 205, 206 and 207.

And we did talk about a specific, I guess, piece of that category, but that's a good place to start if you've found that you're giving yourself mostly, partly trues and not trues.

If you're giving yourself mostly trues, you might be a client of mine, but also perhaps if you're not a client but you feel like, “Yeah, we've got some good things in place, but you want to make it better”, let's have a chat.

Especially if you've given yourself mostly falses or partly truths, let's have a chat.

You can DM me on Instagram. Go to @cresuccess, just DM me the word ‘GROW’ and we can set up a time to talk about some measures that you can take to close the gap, to start answering true to more of those important questions.

If we're connected on LinkedIn, you can also DM me the word ‘GROW’ on LinkedIn.

If we're not connected on LinkedIn, I've got an open profile, which means that anyone can send me a DM, so just put ‘GROW’ in a DM, send it to me, and then we will sort out a time to have a conversation about your business.

That's our episode for today, we're just talking about the focus finder. I hope that the questions that we've asked have illuminated some awareness for you about where your business is and perhaps the gaps that you need to close to get it to where you want it to be.

Thank you so much for listening. I will speak to you soon.