Scaling Your CRE Firm: Why It’s Important and How to Get Started
The success of your commercial real estate firm isn’t just about your ability to grow. Rather, it’s more closely tied to your ability to scale. But scaling the business isn’t an easy thing to do.
Whether you’re a small shop or a nationally-known CRE firm, it’s never too early or too late to start thinking about scaling your firm. Read ahead to learn about why scaling is important, or download the checklist now to get started
Growth vs Scale
First, it’s important to understand the difference between “growth” and “scale”.
- Growth means increasing revenue at the same rate that you are adding resources. For example, you spend a certain dollar amount on advertising and attain a certain number of investors. When you double your marketing budget, you double your number of new investors. While technically you have grown the business, you have not scaled.
- Scale means increasing revenue at a faster rate than you are adding resources. It means you can achieve exponential increases in revenue with only incremental changes in cost to the business.
Why Scale?
Scaling the business is about establishing processes and infrastructure that promote efficiency and effectiveness and enable consistent revenue growth. You can increase profits without negatively impacting your budget or the rest of the company. And more importantly, you can scale specific aspects or tasks and already start to see the impact on your bottom-line.
For example, consider which tasks can be replicated quickly or automated. Automating resource-consuming tasks (such as sending paperwork via snail mail, answering phone calls, manually updating contact and bank information, and responding to one-off emails for every investor) frees up time that can be devoted back to more value-add activities, such as advancing the progress of projects, optimizing asset performance, and deal-making.
Scaling some or many aspects of your CRE firm can provide you with a competitive advantage in the marketplace, help you better adapt to changes in the industry, and of course drive revenue.
Download this checklist for 9 tips and strategies to start scaling your CRE firm.
