Welcome back to our series: 5 Reasons to Outsource Your Property Operations. Today we look at reason four.
Reason Four: Better risk management
When reviewing your risk profile, there are various frameworks that you can apply to assess the probability and severity of certain activities causing harm to your business.
In our view, running daily short let operations is highly risky. There are many variables that can cause issues – local traffic, poor cleanings, missing keys, linen rejects, guest damage, maintenance issues… the list goes on. Any one of these can occur and with little warning. Therefore you can deliver your operations to 99% accuracy but it will be the 1% error that will cause you the bad review.
If you choose to keep your Operations in-house, then mitigating these risks remains your responsibility. If you choose to outsource your Operations, then you outsource the responsibility to manage these risks. You will not eradicate the risk entirely, but you will dramatically reduce the probability of that risk having a negative impact on your business.
Once your Operations are outsourced, your partner will be able to deploy all their experience, know-how, and technology to mitigate the risks on your behalf. There are many techniques and work-arounds that a specialist Operations provider can use to predict problems and solve issues.
One good example is the implementation of lead indicators, such as fleet management software, training programmes and scheduled maintenance checks. Each of these tools will help to reduce the likelihood that a delay or complaint will occur as they will predict a traffic jam, ensure that a cleaner is doing a thorough job, and guarantee the hot water will be working.
You may believe that by outsourcing your Operations, you have swapped the risk of managing them in-house with the risk of relying on a partner to deliver them for you. A Deloitte report says that 76% of companies were satisfied/very satisfied with their outsourced contracts, but 48% of companies had terminated a contract in the last 12 months due to service issues.
What this suggests is that you must follow a clear decision process for choosing an outsourced model and a partner to work with. Firstly define the solution you require, establish your partner criteria, evaluate the vendors in the market, execute the transaction and manage closely the transition and ongoing operations.
At Opago, we follow a consultative approach, whereby we listen to your requirements in detail and make a thorough proposal. This way we can be certain that we are the right fit for our clients and vice versa. So if you have your operations in-house give us a call and we’ll be happy to talk through how we can help you to deliver the service you’re proud of whilst you focus on scaling your business.
.png)
