May 27, 2016 6:18:50 am

Boulder Valley Mercury 100: Staying on task — All County manages it

By BizWest Staff

“Go deep, not wide” can be translated many different ways. To Simon Heart, it means to stick to what you do well and develop that rather than spreading yourself thin.

As owner and president of All County Boulder Property Management, Heart believes that a lot of property-management businesses dip their toes into too many waters — doing things such as managing homeowners’ associations and buying and selling real estate. They take their eye off the ball, in his words.

“We do one thing and we do it well,” Heart said. “We focus on residential property management.

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“I went into this knowing it would be important to stay in my lane and continue to get better at it while networking and letting people know we exist.”

“We do one thing and we do it well,” says Simon Heart, owner and president of All County Boulder Property Management. “We focus on residential property management.” Jonathan Castner/for BizWest

He relies on a monthly calendar to stay on top of how operations and property management are balancing out customer service.

Heart credited a lot of his success to the help he’s gotten from the All County Property Management franchise. “They help us know how to scale the business and provide systems and tools, saying that if you do certain things you’ll grow.”

One of the points on which the franchise training focuses is teaching owners how to pick right properties to work with and how to set up relationships with owners and tenants.

Finding the middle-ground properties — rather than high-end or low-end — makes the business flow more smoothly.

“Some tenants think they’re in a five-star hotel when they’re paying $6,000 a month in rent and they expect a lot more,” Heart said. “Low-end properties can have issues like people not paying or not taking care of things.”

Sticking to consistent agreements with clients helps streamline efforts as well. “We’re not a total cookie-cutter business,” he said, “but we don’t make exceptions or promise strange things to clients.”

Heart’s background as an environmental engineer gives him additional skills to bring to the table. “I’ve had a lot of leadership training,” he said. Some of those skills have helped him be patient with staffers as they learn their jobs and focus on building loyalty and a long-term vision with them.

“In the beginning, we’re not offering fat salaries but inspiring people to join us on faith that there’ll be more money down the line,” he said.

Since a lot of clients only call when they’re not happy with something, having employees that have thick skins and bring good energy to the job are vital, he added.

Heart’s business strategy has been to grow his clientele and keep offering good service, so he hired enough people to make that possible early on.

“If someone is trying to be profitable from day one,” he said, “they wouldn’t have hired as many people as I did.”

In his fourth year, Heart now is starting to focus on making a profit.