Property Millionaires is a company that offers ordinary people a range of real estate investment seminars and ongoing mentoring services. The philosophy
at
Property Millionaires is that anybody can become a property millionaire if they have the right
mind set
, education, and support.
The company was established three years ago by successful real estate developer George Kirzner. He has grown Property Millionaires into a
medium sized
business employing over 100 staff with offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Adelaide. One year ago the company’s seminar sales increased dramatically and now its operations are expanding faster than the company’s capacity to hire and induct new staff. George considers this to be a great problem to have and continues to hold the staff accountable for delivering strong financial performance.
But the company’s regional managers are not as thrilled as George with the organisation’s surge in growth. The rapidly increasing need for more consultants has forced the company to lower their employment standards, hiring many new people with little to no previous experience in sales.
Business Model
Property Millionaires generates leads by advertising free introductory seminars that explain how real estate investment can be used as a vehicle for achieving an early retirement. Seminar attendees are contacted after the introductory seminar by a consultant who invites them to a free face-to-face consultation. At this
meeting
the consultant attempts to sell the potential new client a real estate seminar priced at $10,000.
The consultants are managed by regional managers in each city. The regional managers report to a senior management team that includes George as the company CEO.
Consultants
Consultants are given aggressive sales targets that are set by the senior management team with little or no input from either the consultants themselves or the regional managers. They are paid solely on a commission basis, that is, they earn a percentage of the $10,000 seminar fee for each client that they sign up.
Each month the consultants are ranked by the regional managers according to their sales performance. The highest performing consultants are treated like royalty and given special treatment by the regional managers. Because the consultants are pitted against each other like this, the company culture is highly competitive to the point of ruthlessness.
Regional Managers
Regional managers act without a sense of the larger corporate strategy. There are no well-defined information channels for sharing information either between themselves or with senior management.
The regional managers have also surrounded themselves with “yes” men and women, and do not hear
much,
if any, bad news. They tend to leave the consultants alone because they do not understand the sometimes complex language of the consultation process. Managers have limited access to performance data and spend much of their time trying to resolve
flare ups
or unanticipated emergencies. From the information they can access they tend to focus solely on seminar sales figures and their monthly performance reports to senior management are often late or not submitted at all.
Senior Management Team
A high percentage of Property Millionaire’s business is based on new seminars.
The seminars are developed by George and the senior management team: a creative,
risk taking
group
of real estate business people. In this regard they do not act like a team but are given a great deal of autonomy and so develop seminar content independently of each other, only returning to the group once they have created something of substantial value.
There is an increasing frequency
in
the failure of new seminars.
Client Satisfaction
Client complaints are on the rise. Clients say they feel well respected and serviced by their consultants until they sign up for a seminar. At this
point
their consultant seems to lose interest in them and often fails to return their phone calls.
Risk Exposure Calculator
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