Interaction

 3 minutes with Jonathan Hayden from Hayden Real Estate

1. What is your core business?

Rental Property Management

2. What sets your business apart from your competitors?

By Developing a relationship with owners, so as they view Hayden Real Estate as their experts with regards to property.

Our service levels are extremely high, as property managers have less properties in their portfolio than most agents, allowing a more personal service, with a longer view to profitability. We personalise our sales market by only offering views of properties by private appointment only. 

3. What elements of your business are currently running in the cloud?

• Google Apps - Mail & Calendar
• Salesforce - CRM, Email Marketing, leads and follow up scheduling for clients
• VOIP phone system

4. Why do you feel it's important to operate your business in the cloud? What were the main factors/hesitations to consider in moving your business in this direction?

Factors:

•  Microsoft Outlook used to be on our server, which, resulted in large licencing costs & high technician bills. In addition, there was also a fairly sizeable capital outlay to upgrade the mail server for our team. With Google Apps you get "like for like" functionality & increased accessibility for the staff. It was the logical step.


• Salesforce is the market leader and we decided to move here form a traditional server based solution. However, we did experience a lot of trouble with the implementation and ended up hiring someone in house to do our customisation. So bare this in mind. As a result there was a long time to value for this product.

5. What functions/elements of your business are you looking to consider moving into the cloud next? (e.g. CRM, mail etc.)

• Property Management Software
• Xero - Accounting

6. What are your biggest bottlenecks in your current processes?

It was our trust accounting. However, we've now outsourced this to a specialise REST (Trust Account Software) organisation to look after our landlords/clients reporting in a very timely and efficient manner. Our Property Management piece is still being ironed out, we are hopeful for a link to Xero to increase our real time reporting and therefore our real time decision making capabilities.

7. Do you find that you gain extra revenue or saved on costs by running your business online? If so, what creates the revenue/reduces the expenses and how you have tracked it?

 Costs

• We've saved around $24,000 p.s. on our phone bill by moving to VOIP, which, is around 50%.
• Google Apps has removed the mail server capital costs and IT service costs for this facility.

Revenue

• As a result of implementing Salesforce, we know have greater customer knowledge which is leading to better business. Over the next 12 months, we are looking to develop marketing KPIs so we can measure the real impact of marketing methods on our business growth.

8. Why do you run your accounting in the cloud? What platform do you use and why?

At present our business uses MYOB. We use this package as this package as this is what historically we have used. We are looking to move to Xero in the near future.

9. What other products do you link with your online accounting package? 

Once implemented, we will link the following software to Xero, where possible:

• REST - Property Management Software
• Paycycle - Payroll

10. Where would you spend $100,000 on your business and what benefits/ROI would you expect to see?

Recruiting and training two more property managers to bolster the core offering. We would expect that with and additional two property managers, we would see a return of >120% inside of 12 months (including time and costs for training).

11. What is the best sporting triumph from the 2nd last weekend in July: The Wallabies winning against South Africa (finally)? Cadel being the first aussie to win the Tour De France, 4x100m Mens Freestyle Gold Meal @ the World Swimming Championships?

By default, it's gotta be Cadel.

I wasn't aware the other two events had taken place on the weekend. Cadel deserves it because it's a great achievement and he's a star! 

Big Thank You to Jonathan from Hayden Real Estate for his time and views on their cloud story.