How to take five weeks off without your commercial real estate agency falling apart.

CRE Success Principle: Don't wait until you're on holidays to find out whether your team can operate without you. Test their decision-making while you're still in the office, and expand their responsibility so that you can relax more when you’re actually on a break.

In commercial real estate, there's an especially quiet five-week period between Christmas Eve and Australia Day. So why don't more principals take advantage of it and enjoy an extended break?

The obstacle is often the business's dependence on the principal.

If every important decision needs your approval, taking a holiday can feel like an unnecessary risk… even when the market is effectively shut down.

But there is a better way.

Stop Being the Decision-Making Bottleneck

I recommend tracking every decision your agents and property managers bring to you over the next couple of weeks.

Then categorise them into three groups: 

• Decide: Your team makes the decision without involving you.
• Decide and tell: They make the decision and update you afterwards.
• Bring to me: They need your input before proceeding.

You'll probably find that the third category is much smaller than you expect.

Create a One-Page Holiday Handover Guide

Once you've established those categories, document four things:

1. Limits: Set clear financial and commercial authority limits.
2. Escalation: Create a clear rule for what needs your immediate attention.
3. Communication: Nominate one channel (like WhatsApp) for urgent contact.
4. Reporting: Establish how and when you'll receive non-urgent updates.

Test Before You Take Off

Don't wait until you're on holiday to discover whether your team can make decisions independently.

Start asking agents what they think the right decision is before giving them the answer. Build their confidence while you're still in the office.

The goal isn't to become completely uncontactable while you’re away. It's to stop being the person who needs to approve everything so you can actually enjoy a break.

If you want to build a commercial real estate agency that can run without you, listen to episode 295 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership for more practical strategies.

Episode transcript:

I don't think there's many people in commercial real estate in Australia who would disagree with this statement: Virtually nothing happens in our industry from a couple of days before Christmas through to Australia Day.

So here's my question: If that's true, why aren't more principals taking five weeks off from the week of Christmas through to Australia Day?

When I encourage principals to take more holidays, the same fear comes up almost every time.

The business is going to come to a grinding halt because the team are used to bringing every important decision to the principal, and without them there, the team won't know what to do.

So in this episode, I want to talk about how you can take some real proper time off work over the break without the business stopping while you're gone.

I've got a few practical ideas to share with you, and they start with how I would handle this myself.

Welcome aboard. This is episode 295 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm your host, Darren Krakowiak. I'm here to help commercial real estate principals to build an agency that can run without them, so you've got the choice to work on or off the tools.

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All right. So, I don't run an agency anymore, but I do run a business with clients who expect me to be there for them. 

And I spend about 12 weeks a year overseas, usually during school holidays, taking breaks with my wife and my daughter.

And there are three things that make this possible for me.

The first is my calendar and how I've designed it.

I schedule fewer recurring client calls in the first and last week of the month because school holidays usually fall around the start or the end of the month.

So when I am away during school holidays, my calendar is already lighter than it would usually be, and that means there's fewer meetings for me to reschedule if I decide that I don't want to do any calls while I'm overseas during school holidays.

The second thing is how I've empowered my assistant, who manages my email, and she's been trained on how to handle certain decisions without having to come to me first.

And the third thing is one simple rule that decides what gets escalated to me for my immediate attention. Basically, it's anything from an existing private client or someone who wants to become a private client.

That comes to me via a WhatsApp message straight away so it doesn't slip through the cracks.

I can deal with those from my phone sometimes when I'm by the pool at a hotel or maybe on the laptop in the lounge in the hotel.

I'm not trying to disappear when I'm on holidays, when I'm overseas. That was never the point.

The point is just to be able to do less and to not be in Australia and at my desk.

Now, your setup will probably be a little bit different because running a commercial real estate agency is different. It's a different business to what I do at CRE Success, but the principle is the same.

Decide in advance what needs you and make sure that everyone else knows what they can handle without you, even if it's just one person.

Now, where I see commercial real estate principals getting stuck is thinking that they need to be completely uncontactable while they're on holidays, which can feel a little bit daunting.

So they either don't go at all because they can't imagine being out of reach for an extended period of time, or they go away and they spend their whole holiday checking their phone anyway.

The goal isn't zero escalation. It's making sure that the right things get escalated to you and that everything else stays on the plate of someone who can already handle it without you.

Now, your agents can still contact you about some things while you're away, and depending on the situation, that might be completely justified.

The more important question is whether they know which things that they should be coming to you with and whether they know what they're allowed to decide on their own.

And I want to give you a simple way to work that out.

Over the next couple of weeks, just write down every decision that your agents, your property managers, people in your business are bringing to you.

A quick question in the corridor counts. A text at 7:00 PM counts. An email that says, "Just checking with you first," counts.

All of it, all the decisions that they're coming to you with, and I want you to sort those decisions into three categories.

The first category is decide, and that means that the agent can make the call and they don't need to tell you about it.

It might be confirming an inspection time, passing on buyer feedback to an owner, or maybe approving an expense below a certain threshold.

That is something that they can decide on their own.

The second category is decide and tell. This is where the agent still makes the decision, but you want to hear about it afterwards via a quick update.

That might be about a split on a conjunctional deal or some client feedback that can be dealt with by the team, but you just want to be across.

And then the third category is bring to me. These are things that should be coming to you and that you want to be able to provide input on before they are processed.

It might be a client asking for a discount. It could be a serious complaint from a major client, or maybe a new opportunity that would be a significant appointment for the firm.

Now, the list that you create will reflect what's going on in your business, but I reckon you'll find that third group, which is the ‘bring it to me’ category, is a lot smaller than you might expect, especially if you're motivated by the idea of your phone not ringing constantly while you're sitting on a beach somewhere.

Most of what comes to you today sits in the first two groups - decide and decide and tell.

It's coming to you anyway out of habit, not because it truly needs your expertise or your input right away.

And in my experience, that's not because your team isn't capable. It's usually just because nobody has ever told them where the line is.

So they bring everything to you because that's the safest option for them, as we've talked about on the show before.

Now, once you've sorted all the decisions, I want you to put some rules on one page.

I'm not talking about a policy manual, just one page that your team can use, a little cheat sheet for how to handle things while you're away, and there's probably four things that I would put on it.

The first is limits. Your team needs to know where their authority stops.

So, for example, can they approve marketing spend up to a certain amount? Can they agree a fee down to a certain level? Can they go back to a vendor with an offer within a certain range of the reserve?

Wherever there is a number, write the number down. Just saying, "Use your judgment," is open to interpretation, and it's effectively asking your agents to guess what you would want.

The second is one rule for what needs to reach you while you are away. Now, my rule is anything from a client or someone who wants to become a client. That's what I want to know about right away.

Yours might be anything that could cost the business a client or any new opportunity above a certain fee amount.

Keep it to one sentence so nobody needs to think too hard about it.

The third is the channel. So, how do you want people to be reaching you?

For me, it's WhatsApp. Pick one channel and make sure that everyone knows what it is. Everything else either waits until you're back or goes to whoever's in charge while you're away.

And for any listings that you're running, let your clients know before you leave that you'll be away and who on your team is handling that in your absence so that person is their first port of call.

You can also reassure them that you have escalation protocols in place, which your team will use if required.

And the fourth thing you want to put down on this list, on this page, is how you'll hear about the decide and tell category items.

So keep it simple. It's not immediate information that you need, it's something that you want to know about.

So it might be an email at the end of each week while you're away. That's probably sufficient, right?

What was decided, what was anything that you need to know about, that's what that email needs to contain.

If it turns into a daily report, you're probably not really cutting the cord for them in terms of dependency or yourself in terms of having a break.

Now, if you feel really bad about stepping away completely, here's something a former colleague of mine used to do.

He made a deal with his wife that he was allowed one hour of work every single day when they were on holidays together, and he would do it after they played golf, but before cocktail hour kicked in, right?

So that was the hour that he had an agreement with his wife that he was allowed to work, and that his team understood that he would be available.

If you want to do the same thing because you feel uncomfortable stepping away completely, or if you want to set some boundaries for yourself so you don't work any more than one hour a day, you can make yourself available for that hour.

You can use that hour to deal with anything that comes up over the previous 24 hours, and you can even tell your team what that hour is back in the local home office time so they know when they'll hear from you, and also they know the time that they can reach you if it really escalates to that point and they need to be able to contact you.

The rest of the time, the other 23 hours, is for you and your family while you're on holidays.

So one thing that you might not want to do is just to go away and see if this works. You might want to test it before you go. Test it while you're still in the office.

So if you do want to do that, I'd say over the next few weeks, when an agent brings you something that's on the decide list, don't answer it straight away.

Ask them, "Well, what would you do?" Or, "What do you think the answer is?" Most of the time they'll give you a pretty good answer.

When that happens, you can tell them to go ahead and that next time they don't need to ask. That can become a decide and tell situation rather than one that needs your input.

So before you take your next break, or if you've decided that you're going to take three, four, or heaven forbid, five weeks of holidays between Christmas and Australia Day off the back of hearing this episode, here's what I would do.

I would keep track of all the decisions that your team is bringing to you over the next couple of weeks, sort them into decide, decide and tell, and bring to me, and then put your limits, your one rule, your one channel, and your reporting on a single page and test it before you go.

And by the way, given nothing much happens in commercial real estate between Christmas and Australia Day, there's not going to be a lot that needs your attention anyway, hopefully.

Bar, of course, some emergency. But, actually I shouldn't make that promise, should I? I should just say, in all likelihood, not that much will happen, and that makes it a relatively less risky time to give this a go.

And then perhaps you'll be able to start taking more holidays throughout the year and being able to really switch off, and also to be transferring ownership of more to your team.

I want to leave you with one question right now. What's one decision that your commercial real estate agents and property managers bring to you today that they should be making without you?

Start with getting that one off your plate and then work on the next. If you'd like some help working out what your team should be deciding without you, you can find me on LinkedIn, Darren Krakowiak.

Send me a message, tell me a bit about where things are, and I will get back to you personally.

That is our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening, and I will speak to you soon.