Few things in life are as rewarding as watching your dream grow from an idea to a functional startup and ultimately into a successful company.
Getting there is hard, especially in the real estate space where strong market competition coupled with the rising trend of unbundling services pose additional challenges.
Success is almost never an overnight process. Building a healthy business can take years of late nights and long weekends. But for most entrepreneurs, the excitement is short-lived — once you expand out of the initial startup phase, you’ll quickly find yourself facing new challenges that you’ve never had to deal with before.
Here are five of the common issues that real estate startups need to address once they begin to grow:
Expanding your team
As the founder, you’ve probably gotten accustomed to doing anything and everything it takes to keep your business going. But as your startup continues to grow, you’re going to need a team of professionals to help.
In most cases, this should begin with hiring a C-suite of leaders with significant knowledge and experience in the real estate industry. Because you’re already thinking about the future, this might be a smart time to begin considering internal career development programs for meeting your future leadership needs.
Shifting your thinking
Even with a support team of well-qualified C-level executives, CEOs of rapidly growing startups often have trouble shifting their mindset from manager to leader.
Although you’re ultimately responsible for the day-to-day operations of your company, most of your time should now be spent on strategic planning and forward-thinking. When faced with a task, decide if it would be the most effective use of your time. If not, delegate it to someone else and limit your involvement to following up on the results.
Outsourcing responsibilities
One downside that comes with increased growth is increased responsibilities. As a small startup with modest revenue and a limited number of employees, you might have taken care of things like accounting and human resources internally.
But now that you’re growing, those same areas of your business are going to become exponentially more complex. At some point, you’ll need to sit down and decide whether it makes more sense to continue these departments in-house or to outsource them and focus on building your business.
Rawpixel / Shutterstock.com
Assessing your office space needs
A lot goes into choosing the right office space for a new real estate startup and that decision only gets more complicated once you start to see growth. There’s a fine line between leasing enough space to grow into over the next couple of years and paying more than you can afford for space you don’t really need quite yet.
Also, as a growing company trying to attract top talent, you need to be conscious of whether the space you’re looking at will help or hinder that goal. You should also ensure that whatever building you’re considering has the infrastructure to provide the reliable high-speed connectivity that your business needs to survive.
Pushing for continued improvement
Your startup might be growing, but that doesn’t mean you’ve found the secret for long-term success. It takes hard work and dedication to build a $10 million company, but it takes a commitment and continued improvement to build it into a $100 million real estate empire.
Too often, leaders of growing companies make the mistake of assuming that because what they’ve done so far has worked, it will keep working going forward. But to take your business to the next level, refuse to settle for good enough and always strive to improve.
Building a company from the ground up takes a lot of time and effort, so it’s an amazing feeling when you finally begin to see some real growth.
But transitioning out of the “small startup” phase means facing a whole new set of challenges, and as a successful real estate mogul you must be ready to meet them head-on or risk damaging the brand you’ve worked so hard to establish.
Arie Barendrecht is the CEO and co-founder of WiredScore. Follow WiredScore on Facebook or Twitter.