Is Your Manager Terrible? Get a Bigger Hammer!

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, your manager just doesn’t work out. There can be many reasons for this. Maybe they didn’t pay attention when you were training them. Maybe they thought that their way was better. Maybe you didn’t have enough systems in place to help them stay focused and accomplish your goals. Maybe the person you hired is the wrong person for the job. However, the worst way that you can handle things is to turn a blind eye and hope for a different result.

If you think that the problem is the training, then you need to go back to the manager and retrain them. When you buy your first property, you should spend some time behind the desk determining how you want things done. While you are behind the desk, you should create training manuals of how you want things done for the property. The great thing is that once you have created these manuals, they will need very little tweaking for each new property. By having these training manuals in place, your managers will know exactly what you want them to do. That way there are no excuses when things don’t get done that way. If you don’t have training manuals, you need to make them. This is the only way that your managers can be successful.

If you have great training in place, then the next thing that you need to look at is your systems. What do you have in place to support your manager? Do you have software that helps them identify who hasn’t paid their rent yet? Do you have software that reminds them who needs to have their rents increased? Do you have software that tracks inquiries so that they can follow up and turn those into rentals? Do you have automatic withdrawals, so they don’t have to call every client to collect payment each month? If you don’t have systems in place to help them be successful, how do you expect them to meet your goals? You need the right tools.

Finally, if you have great training and great support systems and things are still going badly, you may have to look at your management. Are they doing what you asked them to do? Are they meeting your goals? If not, you may have to get a bigger hammer. You might have to set your expectations and let them know that if they are unable to meet those expectations, they will be replaced. You cannot take a loss each month because you are loyal to a bad employee. If they are not cut out for the job, you have to find someone else.

There are a lot of good managers out there. Don’t get stuck with someone who will drag you down. Make sure that you are managing your managers so that you know what is going on with each property. If you aren’t doing that, start today. You need to know what is happening inside each property. You want your self-storage empire to be successful. When there are problems, get a bigger hammer until you are able to correct the problem. As always, happy investing.