If you’re responsible for managing the operations of a home or a multi-property estate, you know that every property comes with its own chaos.
But you shouldn’t have to be putting out fires every day. If you organize the right information, you can minimize surprises, get ahead of challenges, and bring order to an environment known for turbulence.
Below, we’ll share 3 steps to making your life easier — but this is just the beginning.
Enrollment is now open for our new three-week workshop, Modern Household Management: How to Streamline Operations for Homes and Estates. During this hands-on course, we’ll dig into each of these three steps, giving you a starting point for managing your household operations. Then, you’ll start putting each of these tips into practice, so by early November, you’ll have a roadmap for the year ahead.
Whether you’re an aspiring estate manager, an assistant tasked with managing a property, a seasoned estate manager looking for a new perspective, or a home owner or a contractor who’s curious about a modern approach to estate management, we hope you’ll join us!
The course will be taught by expert estate manager Shelby Boudreau, starting Wednesday, October 19. Learn more and enroll now.
Now, let’s get started!
Step 1: Collect information around people and properties, and identify the tasks that are within your control.
When you first take on managing the operations of a property, it can be hard to know where to start. Shelby Boudreau spent 20 years managing a 16-property estate in Maine, and as a consultant, she’s helped countless other private service professionals get started with household operations.
Her tip for getting started: connect people to your property.
Who takes care of the landscaping? Who handles daily walk-throughs? Who’s responsible for maintaining the HVAC system? Every aspect of your property has a “who” — and connecting each task with the person who’s responsible for it is a great place to start.
Then, you can think through each task that needs to happen on a regular basis. What needs to happen every week, every month, every year? Once you answer these questions, you can create plans that help you map out your team’s time and get ahead of tasks that are within your control.
During week 1 of the Modern Household Management Workshop, Shelby will walk you through this step, helping you create a property overview, compile a complete contact list, and outline the checklists, planners and calendars you need to better manage operations.
Step 2: Create systems to help you better manage everyone’s time.
Once you know your predictable tasks, you can start to create systems for scheduling everyone’s time and communicating with staff and vendors.
It’s helpful to categorize tasks in four groups:
Recurring tasks / maintenance
Unforeseen tasks / maintenance
Planned projects
Spontaneous projects
If your recurring tasks and planned projects are laid out on a calendar, you know what you need to move around when unexpected tasks and projects come up. Taking control of predictable time and tasks helps you minimize chaos when things change (which they inevitably will).
During week 2 of the Modern Household Management Workshop, Shelby will dig into this second step, with the goal of helping you create a calendar of predictable tasks and a starting point for a basic operational household manual.
Step 3: Implement the systems and processes you’ve created in a way that’s consistent year after year.
In step 1, you gathered information around your property and the people who help you take care of it, and organized it so it’s always at your fingertips. In step 2, you used that information to create checklists and planners.
Now, you can start to estimate your time (and the time of everyone you with with) so you can repeat those processes year after year.
Once you’ve got the basic operations down, you can look at everything from a bird’s eye view. You can start to think of everything in four stages: planning, doing, verifying, and reporting. With a consistent system for tracking work as it gets done, verifying that it’s been done properly, and reporting on your overall progress, you can ensure repeatable success for everyone in your household.
In week 3 of the Modern Household Management Workshop, Shelby will help you see the possibilities for how to build on what you’ve learned — and you’ll walk away feeling prepared with a basic foundation for household operations.
Hope to see you on October 19!
The Modern Household Management Workshop starts October 19, and runs for three weeks on Wednesday evenings (October 26 and November 2). We hope to see you there!
The workshop includes:
3 live two-hour instructional sessions with Q&A
Guided homework
On-demand session recordings (excluding Q&A)
Several templates for easier household operations
Certificate of completion
Learn more and enroll today to tackle your household operations in three weeks.
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