Leadership is Real Estate

Leadership and real estate are like vanilla ice cream on oven kissed peach cobbler. #PerFecTion

To be in real estate you already have leadership coursing through you, and to build on the natural talent you already exhibit, there is no better guide to start with than Admiral Hyman Rickover.

Who? In short, Rickover was born in the ghetto of Warsaw in 1900, migrated to the United States and is widely respected and remembered as “The Father of our nuclear Navy”.

Rickover has covered a lot of real estate, even if it is only in the radius of a nuclear blast. Rickover used his natural leadership to build a nuclear Navy against a highly risky, complex world of government operations; In any day and age getting anything done within the world of government operations is a majestic hard won feat.

Taking that into consideration, applying Rickover’s leadership rules should make any of your undertakings be like a knife slicing through butter on a midsummer southern California day. #EasyPeasyLeadershipSKILLS

Rule #1 You must have a rising standard of quality over time, and well beyond what is required by any minimum standard.

Get better and be better at everything that you do. Constantly seek a better way to do things! Improve on daily performance and response times to leads, Improve on the quality of the care and candor you give each client.

Rule #2 People running complex systems should be highly capable.

Your successful business is a complex system of meetings, sales, buys and marketing. You need capable people who thinks things through. Employ people who can think things through in your absence and can continue that standard of performance and candor you have set for your clients needs.

Rule #3 Supervisors have to face bad news when it comes, and take problems to level a high enough to fix those problems.

The primary goal of a supervisor is at it’s most basic level “systems implementations”. When you are busy with a high profile client and a catastrophe strikes your business, your supervisor needs to be capable enough to enforce your standards and remedy the problem with out you. Your supervisor needs to care about your business as much as you do. Your supervisor needs to protect you, your business and your employees. Any business that befalls tragedy can usually be traced back to a supervisor not behaving like a supervisor.

Rule #4 You must have a healthy respect for the dangers and risks of your particular job.

Every business and job has risks, and consequences for not doing things right can be dramatic, expensive and embarrashing. Paperwork not being filled out properly, signed documents not being passed on in a timely manner can cost you clients. The basic rules of Risk Management (RPM): Recognize, Prioritize, Mobilize. Recognizing and prioritizing risks appropriately allows you to mobilize and prevent those dramatic consequences.

Rule #5 Training must be constant and rigorous.

Everyday is an opportunity to learn something and to train in it accordingly. Focus on training on the tasks in every job description that has the possibility to cause you grief. Not just you, all your employees! You must be assured that all of your employees are adequately trained to address the tasks that give them no time to think, and yet they understand the value of thinking things through when time allows.

Rule #6 All the functions of repair, quality control, and technical support must fit together.

Audit! We do not have the luxury of assuming that all is going well. We must have control measures in place to assure things are done right. Do not confuse this with micro-management, if you do not have the formal and informal audits in place you may not find out about problems until they become consequences. Consequences can range from an upset client or business loss to finding yourself uncomfortably seated in a meeting with lawyers. Auditing is a tool used to keep accountability and a strict timeline of data that allows you to easily monitor the success of your business daily.

Rule #7 The organization and members thereof must have the ability and willingness to learn from mistakes of the past.

Analyzing past data is the foundation of risk management. We can learn so much by studying those mistakes large and small protecting our business from lawsuits, injuries and organizational embarrassments. The best part? You do not have to learn from your mistakes alone! Look at every experience or story you hear as a learning experience that helps you stabilize your business into the competent, reliable, trustworthy experience your client learns to seek out in their time of need.

Admiral Hyman Rickover is our inspiration and guiding light in providing you with the absolute best experience IBC Property Investments can when you contact us for all your real estate needs. We hope you can use his seven rules to build your leadership goals towards your own fleet of nuclear naval militia, or at least score that job promotion.