Realestate.com.kh (REAKH) is the leading online real estate platform in Cambodia. Part of Digital Classifieds Group (DCG), an Australia-based company with a portfolio of real estate portals across Southeast Asia and the Pacific, REAKH helps local and international property seekers to find and secure properties for sale and rent in Cambodia.
With offices based in Phnom Penh, REAKH provides a convenient and comprehensive property buying and renting experience, bringing together all parts of the real estate industry. The platform streamlines the process of property search and transactions, empowering intelligent property decisions for buyers, investors, homeowners, real estate agents, and property developers. With this unique approach, the trusted platform helps thousands of people secure a property each year.
We had the opportunity to meet with Thomas (Tom) O’Sullivan, the CEO and Director of REAKH since 2015, and discuss everything from real estate and digital transformation in Cambodia to leadership and working with humans. Tom has had extensive business experience in Australia and Cambodia, with an educational background in entrepreneurship, and has worked with NGOs and social enterprise initiatives in Cambodia.
Mäd: Thank you for joining us today, Tom. To begin, our readers would be interested to hear about your background and route to success with REAKH. Could you describe what led to your keen interest in the Cambodian real estate sector and, subsequently, your appointment as CEO and Director of REAKH?
Tom: I first moved to Cambodia from Australia 10 years ago, initially to help a friend who has an NGO in Battambang with a new project — starting a social enterprise training restaurant. I had just finished a job in Melbourne and acquired my degree in Entrepreneurship and Commerce, so I had some time off and thought I'd visit briefly (as many people do).
For the NGO, I had to design the restaurant, hire and train all the staff, and find international investment from hospitality companies. I fell in love with the project and felt six months wasn't long enough — so I ended up staying there for almost three years.
I'm naturally entrepreneurial, and I felt that Cambodia presented many opportunities that were not as accessible in more developed markets. I had come from Australia, which was much more tech-advanced than Cambodia or other emerging markets; at the time (around 2012-2013), things like the digital economy and tech adoption hadn't exactly reached Cambodia. That's where I saw the opportunities.
Eventually, I had to move on from the NGO project, but I wanted to stay in Cambodia. I had always observed developments in tech and platform businesses, and I got in touch with a friend who was working in Papua New Guinea and had started a real estate portal.
We identified that Cambodia had nothing like this. So I took the opportunity and connected with one of the original founders, Mathew Care, who has deep experience in the real estate industry in Australia and was at the forefront of platform businesses and real estate tech there. He is also the CEO of Digital Classifieds Group (DCG), the parent company of REAKH.
This was around 2015. At the start, I was the person on-ground in Cambodia, working with Mathew, the CEO of DCG, and James Rodda, the chairman. We had a weird name — Online Real Estate — but then, coincidentally, we met Moek Chenda, the original founder of Realestate.com.kh. He had built the initial platform in 2009 and had already started to get listings. We decided to invest in his business to the level that we owned the majority share (although he’s still a sizeable shareholder today). This is how it all came together.
Mäd: That’s an inspiring origin story! So when you started your collaboration with Mr. Moek Chenda, what was the motivation for your team to continue developing the platform? What pushed you in terms of the people you wanted to serve?
Tom: DCG group focus on emerging markets. There is a considerable upside in such markets: the ability to play a role in developing a young, eager workforce, help drive digital adoption, increase transparency in real estate markets, and, most importantly, make it easier to buy and sell real estate. The motivation for Chenda was also the motivation for us — in fact, the inspiration for many platform businesses is that you see something that is frustrating for a consumer and offer a solution.
As a property seeker, if you were looking for a property to rent or purchase, you used to have to check the newspaper or drive around and look for properties for sale. Later, you could also check Facebook, but you can't filter it, so finding and comparing options is not convenient.
What a real estate platform business offers is that it brings together all the real estate in the market in one convenient place. The property seeker doesn't have to waste time — they can visit one digital marketplace to find all the properties available. There is a similar model for job seekers, for example, CamHR, which pulls together all the job openings, and in most markets, there is a used car portal.
This is what we were trying to solve: how can we make it easier for a property seeker to find properties and for real estate agents and property developers to sell more real estate as seamlessly and efficiently as possible?
Mäd: Since Cambodia was a bit late to develop in terms of the internet, digital platforms, and tech, how were you able to gain the trust of the local consumer? Because even now, with other apps, new software, and platforms, it takes time for people to understand how to use them and to trust them, not to feel like they could get scammed.
Tom: Right, especially in the real estate business, there can be a lot of fraud. As a platform, trust is born from ensuring that we’re clear to our listing providers about who we are and what we do. Real estate agents and property developers have to trust us to give us their listings and house their properties on our website.
At the very start, there were probably some trust issues — in theory, we could steal leads and give them to another agent or developer. It was crucial to build trust from that side of things, but also, apart from listing properties, we produced a lot of educational content (both written and video). We focused on educating the market and reporting the truth, even about things like payment terms and interest rates. This is how we gained the trust of the property seeker.
Mäd: We certainly agree with that — it's one of the things we do at Mäd as well, publishing informative articles and insights on our website and socials. This helps us inform the audience and potential clients about what we do and that we have substantial knowledge in our area of expertise. It’s important to establish your positioning as an expert.
Tom: Indeed, trust is a major thing. But also, there are apps and products that can clearly solve a pain point but fail to get proper marketing and end up in obscurity. So businesses also need to inform the market that they exist!
Cambodia’s real estate and construction sectors have seen remarkable growth thanks to nationwide economic investment and a new generation of middle-class Cambodians looking for homes close to key urban centers.
Mäd: The mission statement of REAKH is We exist to serve the property seeker.
So what kind of offerings and solutions does REAKH have for its customer base? Could you also share some notable figures on how the portal has been performing?
Tom: There are over 30 thousand properties listed on the portal, and it’s market-wide (all provinces in Cambodia), so it hosts every property type for rent, including land, apartments, villas, offices, and for sale (finished and unfinished houses, land, villas, condos, etc.). We have all the new developments — every condominium and borey (residential compound).
In terms of website traffic — buyers, renters, and property seekers, — there are around 200 thousand visitors on the website every month. We also have an app with about 30 thousand active users. This fluctuates, of course, especially during COVID-19.
Currently, 60% of our traffic is Cambodian, and 40% is from overseas (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, US, European, and Singaporean are our top international markets), which also reflects the leads we generate and the people who buy and rent through us. For rentals and secondary market purchases, we co-broke with the leading agencies in the market: we work directly with real estate developers (end to end), as we have an in-house team that facilitates sales between buyers and developers.
Mäd: That’s a really extensive and varied customer base! How about homeowners and agencies — how many developers are using the portal to list their properties? And is it only for real estate companies, or can individuals also list their properties?
Tom: Great question. There are many individuals that upload listings. As for real estate agencies, there are thousands of agents’ accounts from different agencies, but there are probably about 100 or so very active agencies that upload a high volume of properties. In terms of property developers, there are up to 100 condominium developers with over 120 projects (as some developers have multiple projects), and there are similar numbers for boreys.
Mäd: You mentioned that the traffic on the portal fluctuates, especially in the last couple of years due to COVID. Have you noticed any improvements and challenges during that time? It must have been difficult for real estate: say a foreign buyer or investor is interested, but they cannot travel to see the property because of restrictions. How has that affected the business?
Tom: Traffic numbers certainly dropped during COVID, especially international users. But as a business, we invested more into marketing, so we could get the visitor numbers back up.
Of course, it was also harder for overseas investors to make transactions, but being an online platform allowed us to maintain a good volume of sales from people living abroad. This circles back to trust: we knew we were in a prime position, as property seekers from overseas were already aware of who we are and what we do. Any article or webpage they read about real estate in Cambodia had been written by us, so we were in a great position to keep doing transactions even during COVID.
Surprisingly, local traffic didn’t drop in number — in fact, certain parts of the market did really well during COVID. Generally, these were properties under market value because some owners were under stress to sell more urgently, and there were local investors ready to buy.
What changed the most is that pre-COVID, our traffic was around 50% Cambodia-based and 50% overseas-based. During COVID, that went up to 75% Cambodia-based and 25% international. And now, it's coming back to almost where we were before.
Mäd: That's impressive! We thought that the real estate market might have suffered more during COVID. But it seems that thanks to marketing, you were able to make it work, especially because you have that pre-established trust.
Tom: I don't want to be misleading, as many other areas of the market really struggled during COVID, for example, rentals and condominium sales. Local sales generally did fine, but anything that was geared to focus on international buyers and expat renters suffered.
As a business, REAKH had to make a huge pivot during the pandemic, and it wasn’t easy. Pre-COVID, we only focused on marketing and running campaigns. But now, we are 100% success-based — meaning we get paid if our partners sell or rent real estate. I’m confident we have a much better business model, though.
Mäd: REAKH is certainly quite active with marketing — it’s undoubtedly a necessary part of a business that is primarily online-based. What combination of marketing and other strategies did you find helpful in improving your business model?
Tom: Before COVID, we were a very basic platform real estate portal: REAKH listed the properties, and agencies or property developers paid for marketing. We wrote articles about them, created videos, featured their listings, shared their properties through our email and app, and placed banner ads.
This was great because we had stable, recurring revenue. In that sense, it was much easier to plan ahead because we knew how much money was coming into the business. However, the problem with that business model was that we had to focus on marketing for clients that paid us the most. And, with our knowledge of the local market, these could be projects that we didn’t think were the best for our customer base to buy. And yet they were still being marketed in our portal.
Now, it’s less about marketing — our core business model is that we only get paid if the agency or developer is able to sell. We generate leads, we deal with the buyer, and then we co-broke. Our internal “buyers” agents always tell customers about both the benefits and the pitfalls of a particular property and can recommend them better options if needed. We have access to more properties than anyone else, so we are not forced to oversell something to our buyers.
We’ve also built a more diverse team internally, so we cover many specialties and languages in-house in order to deal with both local and international clients. After all, some people are buying for investment, some are buying for living, and many of them speak different languages: Chinese, English, Japanese, Khmer, and more.
We still run marketing campaigns, and our strategy and marketing channels haven’t changed much. We have a huge email database, we also work closely with the Khmer Times, and we do Facebook and SEO — but, truthfully, the best source of leads and high-quality traffic is organic SEO on Google. We invested heavily into that at the start, producing a lot of content and building trust, so we rank highly in Google search results.
This is especially important to attract international investors. Google is an intent platform, and people use it to search for what they're actually looking for. Whereas Facebook is mainly push marketing — in our experience, this results in low-quality leads. In the end, the best marketing is organic SEO, which can be very costly if you want to get a good SEO specialist (like we did).
Mäd: That's great — it's obvious how customer- and human-focused the business is, so it works for a wide customer base.
Part of many marketing strategies is on-ground activities, and we know that REAKH has hosted some events to bring the local real estate community together. Could you tell us about notable events, such as the Real Estate Property EXPO that happened in mid-2022?
Tom: As much as we are online-based, it’s clear that offline is also very important for any business. Early on, we tried to do a few roadshows (common for real estate companies), but it was difficult to represent our whole business with one small booth. So we decided to try a property expo and found that it was a true representation of our business. We brought together all the local real estate agencies and all the property developers in one convenient place — this time not online, but offline.
Typically, we host three major offline events annually. The first is the Cambodia Real Estate Awards, an industry-wide gala dinner event in collaboration with the Ministry of Land and the real estate regulator in Cambodia that brings together over 600 people in the industry. Top developers and agencies enter to participate in the awards, which are judged by industry professionals.
Then, we run two property expos. One is a locally-focused Home and Lifestyle Expo, which attracts many condominiums and boreys, banks, insurance companies, and, of course, lifestyle brands, such as cars and jewelry. This event mainly targets the local Cambodian middle class.
The second event is called the Cambodia Real Estate Expo, which is usually hosted at a hotel and focuses more on international buyers, expats, and affluent Cambodians. Last year we combined the two expos into one event in July. It was truly a celebration for the whole industry: developers and agencies, as well as buyers, who could finally be out and about. We were a bit worried about the audience, but then again — we were backed up by the fact that we have strong databases, quality website traffic, and the most effective marketing channels. It’s pretty powerful and something we are very proud of. There were 15,000 attendees across two days.
But really, the true measure for us is how many sales and transactions get done during those events. Believe it or not, we sold over 30 million USD in property sales at that one event!
There are definitely months of build-up that lead to that, so although you could say it all happens in 2 days — which it does — don’t forget all the other work that goes into that.
Actually, the day before a big expo (for me, not for the Marketing and Events team) is very quiet. All the work has been done.
Mäd: That must feel amazing! After the intense preparation, you can finally just sit back and watch.
Tom: Yeah, it's incredible. So — our events are really important to complement the online.
Generally, in terms of our above-the-line (ATL) marketing strategy, we do execute two major campaigns each year, which coincide with our events. So, we have a lot of ATL marketing around our big events that market both the platform itself and the event, and then not much in between — I think this has done amazing things for our company.
While ATL marketing is expensive, we find it an incredibly effective strategy as it helps to both attract people to the event and increase our online traffic. Not being able to do this during COVID really affected us.
Mäd: It sounds like you've found an effective balance between the digital real estate market and bringing it all to life. The build-up is so great that it really generates a lot of profit and a lot of traffic.
Tom: It’s very impactful. When we're selling and marketing an event, our company is a very happy place to be!
Mäd: I can imagine! Speaking about the company, your team seems to be not only Cambodia-based — you're also supported by some international teams in Australia and Laos, right?
Tom: Sort of. Our parent company, Digital Classifieds Group (DCG), owns platforms in Papua New Guinea, Cambodia, and Laos, and some investments in Thailand. We have teams in each of these countries. For REAKH specifically, our web development and tech team is based in Australia, and we have developers all around the world. But I can proudly say that our app has been developed in Cambodia by an in-house team.
We have a group accounting team in the Philippines, as well as graphic designers and some content writers. But the Philippines-based team mainly serves the business in Papua New Guinea; for REAKH, there is plenty of that skillset in Cambodia.
The team in Australia is relatively small: the group CEO and COO are based there, and they work with a few business analysts for the company as a whole.
Mäd: That’s a very international team!
Moving on to the topic of tech, I recently read an article on proptech by REAKH. Could you tell us more about this — what exactly is proptech, and how has it contributed to improving both the customer experience and the sales process?
Tom: Proptech — property technology — is all the tech tools that real estate professionals can use to optimize how people buy, sell, research, market, and manage property.
When we first entered the market, we tried to sell a CRM (customer relationship management software) for real estate agents. You can upload properties to CRMs, which go directly to your website. When someone visits your website and enquires about the property, the lead goes back to the CRM, where you deal with all the leads and keep them in one place. If you have leads in different places, like Telegram, WhatsApp, and email, it’s easy to lose track of potential clients. Within a CRM, you can also do your accounting and manage your internal team.
It was difficult to sell at the time, as people didn't see the value of proptech and didn’t want to move online — they wanted to continue using Excel to track leads and store photos of properties on their computers. But now, certainly, every agency knows what a CRM is, and most successful real estate agencies use CRMs and other proptech to run their business.
Mäd: Thank you for this overview. Along with proptech, what are some other key benefits of conducting real estate business via digital platforms?
Tom: The adoption of media, like high-quality photos and videos, has improved out of sight. So one benefit of using software and digital channels is that we can include better photos on listings — a game-changer for lead generation.
We’ve also experimented with virtual 360° tours since well before COVID, and it didn’t really succeed. But during COVID, we added full virtual tours for almost every project listing, and the views surged up as people couldn’t physically view property.
Some more advanced technologies in digital real estate combine fintech and proptech, or focus on fractional ownership (real estate through tokens), adapting to the modern client. At REAKH, what we’ve focused on in terms of business and proptech is finding ways to make the property-seeking and selling experience as seamless as possible and making buying real estate in Cambodia as easy as booking a taxi.
Foreign direct investment (FDI) in Cambodia has increased by over 800% in the past decade, as many foreign investors are starting to realize the potential of the Cambodian real estate market. This brings us to the topic of the target clientele of REAKH.
As REAKH aims to serve a diverse audience, making the service and platform inclusive and accessible is essential. From our experience working with local service providers, such as banks, we find that a lot of effort goes into intuitive design and clever UX/UI solutions to be accessible to all users.
Mäd: Talking about a seamless experience for conducting the real estate business online — as a CEO, do you often think about the strategy for web design and development? Do you focus a lot of your time and attention on the user experience and what the interface looks like for people to want to engage with it?
Tom: I have spent countless hours, days, months, and years stressing about this.
There is often a barrier to entry into the digital marketplace. For instance, in Australia, people speak English, and the real estate portal is available only in English. If you don't speak English, then you have to work out how to use it — because you’re not given any other option.
In Cambodia, it’s very important to have your platform in Khmer, English, and Chinese. But it turns out every consumer and property seeker uses a website differently! So we’ve had to develop a unique UX and search experience for Chinese, English, and Khmer users. It’s certainly not easy to do, and I often question whether it's ever perfect — but that's something we've struggled with for years. And it's certainly better now than it ever has been.
When we first developed the UX/UI in all 3 languages, I thought it was great because I speak English and use the website in English. But we have a Chinese team, and my Chinese manager approached me one day and said, "Tom, Chinese people can't use the website." And I thought, "What do you mean? It's in Chinese, we've done the proper translation, it's hosted in China, people can access it from Baidu — what more do we need?"
And then she showed me Chinese real estate platforms, and actually, a Cambodian team member at the office thought it was code — it was that confusing! But we have to understand different consumers use websites differently.
As a business, it’s so important to determine who your absolute number one target market is and work on winning it before focusing on the secondary ones.
Mäd: That’s really user-centered — focusing on the human who is actually going to be using the website and how. It's always a work in progress, especially because things just develop so fast, and website trends are always evolving.
Tom: Yes, that's right. Code, for instance, goes out of date very quickly, so we invest a lot of time and money in constantly updating the platform to ensure it's smooth and fast. We have to spend resources to almost rebuild something that essentially looks the same — speed is critical because if you go on a website that's very slow, you will want to leave it immediately.
Sometimes, our tech team celebrates a huge victory because they’ve completed a rebuild, and I’ll look at the website and say, “Well, it looks the same…”. But there is actually so much effort put into just keeping things running.
Mäd: Let's move on to your future predictions. Do you think the real estate market (both in Cambodia and globally) can ever become fully digital? Or do you believe there should still be an aspect of on-ground interactions, marketing, tours, roadshows, etc.?
Tom: I'm convinced there will always be a need for real estate agents offline, even though the real estate market is becoming almost entirely digital. During COVID, most of our interactions and transactions, especially with international clients, took place online. They could connect with our agents via free calls on our app, sign contracts, and transfer money, even though they had never been in the country.
So it’s definitely possible to digitalize the whole transaction — inquiring, buying, signing contracts — but there will always be agents, whether they’re consulting online or in person.
Mäd: That makes sense. So, looking ahead to the next 5-10 years, what kind of opportunities and threats do you think this poses for the real estate market? What sort of potential is there for this, and maybe the drawbacks that it might cause for the market?
Tom: I believe people in the market must shift and change toward the consumer and learn what the consumer actually wants. In terms of marketing and sales, agents and developers will have to continue to move where the market is to find buyers — and all the buyers are online.
But developers also need to consider non-digital factors, like sustainability and the environment, when building property because this is what consumers are now concerned about. Typically, developers in Cambodia don't think about these things — they think about building as many condos as they can possibly fit on a piece of land.
Mäd: It’s great you mentioned this, as Cambodia actually has one of the fastest urbanization rates in the whole of ASEAN (25%), which has led to massive growth in construction and infrastructure development. Do you think it can continue at its current pace, or is it too unsustainable? What could happen when the pace is forced to slow down?
Tom: Pre-COVID, the condo market in Cambodia was like a gold rush. Developers couldn't launch projects quickly enough: there seemed to be a new launch every week.
Strangely enough, COVID has created some positive long-term changes in the real estate market. New launches slowed down, overpriced properties decreased to a more realistic level, and developers were forced to start to focus on the local market. There has been some correction across the market.
There have been some developments that have been “caught out” with high prices and poor quality. Developers that have priced projects fairly, as well as considered livability, lifestyle, amenities, etc., have actually performed well during COVID and increasingly better as the market has started to come back.
Let me give you some Real Estate 101. Today, good projects combine three things: location, price, and quality. For example, in Phnom Penh, we have up-and-coming areas like Chroy Chongva, with reasonable construction, decent quality without being super amazing, and good value for the price. Projects like that are selling well, and occupancy in these buildings is high.
Then, of course, we still have an increasing urbanization rate, and the Cambodian middle class needs more housing in the capital and other large cities like Siem Reap and Sihanoukville. There's a large supply of condos and boreys coming into the market, but only the ones with good price, good location, and good quality will be successful. There is also the other side of the equation: developers that rarely think of lifestyle aspects like parks, playgrounds, and public spaces, which are essential for future occupants. So developments that miss these details will not be as successful.
So yes, there is a need for more housing — but how much more housing? And what will happen to all these people who had bought properties when they were convinced to buy them but now realize that some of them were not very good purchases? Because some developers at the time were just after a quick dollar and did not think about lifestyle elements, the end consumer, or the renter.
Mäd: Yeah, completely understandable. Speaking about this rapid real estate development and over-supply, how is REAKH adjusting to this? Could you also share some broader strategic goals that you have for the platform moving forward?
Tom: We adjust to changes in the market by shifting our business model. As I mentioned, we can now properly advise property seekers on which properties are good to buy and which we don’t recommend. REAKH has videos and written content for diverse location profiles, so we can speak to the buyer directly about prime locations, up-and-coming locations, and infrastructure developments happening in the area. This allows us to communicate potential future growth in a purchase. We can also tell clients which developments we don't think will be complete and which properties don't have a construction or sales license; we can inform them about the developers’ history and background.
Regardless of over- and under-supply for certain properties, we at REAKH know exactly where to pivot: whether the real estate market is good or bad, there's always a need for a real estate platform, right? For instance, if people are trying to sell under market value, then the buyers need to know where to find them. We will constantly have to shift and adapt to the market, but there will also always be real estate transactions.
Mäd: It’s certainly important to be flexible in such a dynamic business environment.
Moving on to the final section of today’s interview, we’re always on the lookout for knowledge and advice on the subject of leadership and management. Since you handle a major role in the company as CEO and Director, and there are always many things to do and decisions to make, what is your framework for organizing these responsibilities and tasks for yourself? How do you figure out how to prioritize and make time for everything?
Tom: Number one: you must have a strong team, and you need to trust that team. If you've trained and supervised them, you must truly believe they're capable of handling their roles — whether it's the marketing manager, the finance manager, the sales manager, or whoever. This is essential for me because I literally don't have enough hours in the day to do everything (which is what I used to do). I still work 12-hour days sometimes, but I used to do around 15-16 hours — I thought if I didn’t get things done, then no one else would.
Also, when it comes to managing your team, some people need to be micro-managed, and I'm not a very good micro-manager. The people in management will not want to be micro-managed, though. If they feel they are being trusted, their minds are freer, and they can do their jobs well. If they are controlled all the time, like constantly being asked when things are done or having their work criticized, you kill their creativity and passion. And then they just become robots.
That was a major lesson I've learned as a CEO: believe in your core team. That's when you get the best out of them.
The second thing is that there are two types of leaders, and I know I am one type. My type is: believe in your team, give them autonomy, encourage them, and ensure the company is a place where they feel like they can make mistakes. When they have an issue, they can come to me, and we'll discuss it together and make a joint decision about how to solve it. As a leader, it's about asking the right questions: more often than not, people know the solution — they just need to talk it out.
The other thing that has been life-changing for our company is a “morning hurdle” with the core team before we do anything in the day. It's a 15-minute meeting around the table, going through the management team that represents the whole company and all its departments. We discuss the following questions: What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? What are your roadblocks?
That meeting solves so many bottlenecks and roadblocks for the company. It improves communication and ensures that everyone is aware of any issues and that the relevant teams can find ways to fix them.
Mäd: This is similar to what we do at Mäd — every Monday morning, we have an all-hands project update meeting with the whole team. And talking about management, our founder/CEO Manny has a similar management style to yours. So everyone has quite a lot of autonomy but also a strong sense of responsibility and accountability.
Tom: Let me also mention the other type of leader, which I think is especially needed in Cambodia. In my management team, this would be my GM and COO, so I can use my natural leadership style, and they complement me with their leadership style.
This other type of leader is a person that will teach, follow up, and give feedback repeatedly. If we have an intern program and interns at the office, they need to be working with managers and supervisors like this. These are also people who will take care of processes, procedures, and organization within the company.
Mäd: That's a great balance — thank you for this insight into your working culture.
Finally, one last question: how do you measure success in your team? Is it based on what kind of output they give, or is it just the environment at work — seeing improvements at the office and then, as a consequence, observing improvements in the business itself?
Tom: There are so many measures of success, but number one in our company is attitude. I always say to my team:
Attitude over experience.
You might be the best salesperson, but if you have a terrible attitude, you're not going to last in the organization. And if you have a good attitude and a willingness to learn, and are consistently getting better, then you'll always be able to stay. So this is one of the ways I measure success.
For revenue-generating roles, like sales, there are sales targets and KPIs. Again, to me, showing a good attitude and growth is often more important. Also, there are two types of people in sales — order-takers and consultants. And the best salespeople are consultants.
There are also more specific metrics in the business to measure how well we're doing. Generally, we track data like traffic, leads and converted leads, views, and time on site for our online portal. Time on site is actually more important than traffic: for instance, our time on site is around 6 minutes, which tells us that when someone is on our website, they're actually looking to buy or rent property. That's a big measure for us.
Mäd: That’s very insightful! And as a small consulting firm, we can definitely relate to a lot of your points on management and team culture. At Mäd, we have team members of varying levels of experience, but we always encourage upskilling and support individuals with taking any relevant courses and qualifications.
On that note, we’ll draw this discussion to a close. Thank you for joining us today for a very informative conversation!
