When a management company feels it doesn't have the hands to manage more condominiums, the natural reaction is to think about hiring. But before growing the team, it's worth applying a simple, old principle of operational management: eliminate waste before adding capacity. Often, the problem isn't volume — it's process.
Where the Time Actually Goes
The classic efficiency principle distinguishes between work that creates value and work that's pure process waste — avoidable repetition, waiting, rework. At a condominium management company, waste typically concentrates in four areas:
1. Answering the same question repeatedly. "When's the next assembly?", "What's my dues balance?" — repetitive questions that consume human time on answers that could be self-service.
2. Manual payment reconciliation. Manually cross-referencing bank statements with paid dues, condominium by condominium, is high-volume, low-value mechanical work.
3. Searching for scattered information. An old contract, minutes from two years ago, a policy number — if it's spread across emails, folders and the memory of whoever handles it, every search is time lost that repeats every month.
4. Preparing documents from scratch, repeatedly. Notices, minutes and receipts manually drafted every time, when the structure is essentially the same month to month.
The Principle: Eliminate Before Automating, Automate Before Hiring
Order matters. Hiring before eliminating waste just means paying someone else to keep doing unnecessary work. The more effective sequence is:
- Eliminate — identify tasks that don't need to exist (reports nobody reads, redundant approval steps)
- Simplify — reduce the number of steps in tasks that remain necessary
- Automate — only once simplified, automate what's left
- Only then, if capacity is still short, hire
Applied in Practice
- Repeated questions → a portal or channel where owners check their own balance and upcoming dates without needing to contact anyone
- Manual reconciliation → automatic split calculation (ownership share, equal shares or manual) and automatic cross-referencing with bank statements, instead of a line-by-line spreadsheet
- Scattered information → a single, searchable record per condominium, instead of email folders by subject
- Repeated documents → automatic generation of notices and minutes from the assembly's existing data, instead of rewriting the structure from scratch each session
What Shouldn't Be Automated
Not everything benefits from automation. The human relationship with a difficult owner, negotiation at a tense assembly, the decision on a controversial repair — these still require human judgment. The goal isn't to remove people from management; it's to free their time from mechanical work for what actually needs human judgment.
How This Translates Into Scale
A company that manages to cut 10 hours of mechanical work per month, for every 2-3 people on the team, doesn't just gain time — it gains capacity to manage more condominiums without growing the team at the same rate. That's the logic behind scaling a portfolio without hiring at the same pace as growth.
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