Does your commercial real estate business need you every day?

CRE Success Principle: Freedom doesn’t arrive after you build the business. You have to design it in at every stage of growth, otherwise the business will never stop depending on you.

I didn't set out to build a business so I could spend 13 weeks a year overseas.

I set out to build a business that gave me choices.

Over time, I realised that freedom doesn't arrive after you've built the business.

You have to design it into the business as you go.

Start With One Structural Decision

For me, it started with my calendar.

I moved client sessions into specific weeks of the month, creating recurring windows where I had no client delivery commitments.

Then came content batching, inbox delegation, and eventually a coaching structure that didn't require me to facilitate every session.

None of these decisions were revolutionary.

But each one reduced the degree to which CRE Success depended on me being at my desk in Melbourne.

That's the same opportunity I see for commercial real estate principals.

When everything runs through the owner, growth eventually hits a ceiling. The principal becomes the bottleneck for decisions, client relationships, team execution and momentum.

Build Freedom Deliberately

The question isn't whether you can take 13 weeks off when you run a commercial real estate business (that might not be a wise decision).

The better question is: What's the next decision you can make that reduces how much your agency depends on you?

That is where action underpinned by purpose begins.

I've shared exactly how I built this into my own business in Episode 281 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership.

Listen to the episode and then you’ll be able to identify the next decision to give your agency more freedom, focus and momentum.

Episode transcript:

In April 2023, I set myself a revenue target for the next six weeks.

I told myself that if I hit that target within six weeks, that I would book a last-minute trip to Hawaii to attend a business coaching conference in a program that I'd just joined.

Well, I hit the target and I booked the trip. And I remember sitting in the resort in Hawaii thinking to myself, "Okay, this is actually working."

Not the conference itself and not even the revenue. What was working was the fact that I could make a decision like that, set a target, hit it, and get me and my family on a plane.

That felt like the business doing what I wanted it to do when I'd first started.

And that was the moment that I stopped thinking about traveling for three months a year as something that might happen one day, and I started thinking about, how can I design this deliberately into the way the business is run?

Today, I want to walk you through how I did that.

Not to show off all the trips, although the trips have been pretty good, but because the decisions I made to get there are the same decisions that I help commercial real estate principals make in their business every single day.

And I think it's fair to let you know that I've actually done this, not just talked about it.

Welcome to episode 281 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm your host, Darren Krakowiak, and I'm helping commercial real estate principals to build an agency that can operate with or without them so they have the choice to work off or on the tools.

And I launched CRE Success back in 2020, which, if you remember what was happening in 2020, it was not ideal timing to start a business.

And I live in Melbourne, so there were many, many months spent in lockdown for the first two years of the business.

For all Australians, of course, the borders were closed and the commercial real estate market was going through an initial period of uncertainty. Of course, people had some, some good years in COVID as well.

On the personal side, our daughter was born in May of 2020, so I think even if I'd wanted to travel, I'm not sure how smooth it would have gone.

Those first couple of years of CRE Success were all about building the baseline, building a profile, getting clients, developing programs, figuring out what worked and what didn't.

Freedom wasn't really something that I was designing for just yet.

I was really just trying to prove that the business had legs and had potential.

Now, the Australian borders opened in early 2022 and we took a couple of overseas trips that year.

Nothing structured or deliberate about the travel at that point.

We went because we could, including to visit my in-laws in Korea who'd never met our daughter, and we did it because we'd been stuck in Australia for two years like everyone else.

At that stage, the business was very much running on how much availability I had. If I was away, things slowed down or I had to work on the go.

Now, I'm not embarrassed about that. That's the early stage of what many businesses look like during that period, especially when you're the only one there to do the work.

The question isn't whether you're at that stage. Almost everyone is at that point when they first start a business. The question is whether you stay there.

Now, 2023 was when I started to make some more deliberate choices. The first one was about my schedule.

I restructured my monthly calendar so that all of my one-on-one client sessions fell in the second or third weeks of the month.

The first and the fourth weeks of the month were clear of client deliveries, so I didn't have to have any difficult conversations with clients, no complicated negotiations over schedules.

I just started building out my monthly client delivery that way, and the outcome was that I had a recurring window of 14 to 18 days at a time with no client delivery commitments.

Now, 14 to 18 days is enough time to go somewhere, and I mean to really go somewhere, experience it, and not just pass through.

I also got more systematic about content. I'd batch everything in advance. I'd record multiple episodes in a single session, particularly if I was going overseas.

I'd write posts for LinkedIn ahead of time, and my assistant would handle all of the distribution while I was away.

The content kept going out. The audience couldn't tell that I wasn't in the country.

So over seven months in 2023, from May to December, we traveled to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Korea, and Hawaii.

And that trip happened because I made that deal with myself about the revenue target, which I've already told you about.

Now, by the end of the 2023 year, we'd visited five countries in that year, and my daughter and wife came with me on all of those trips as well, and the business was growing.

And I started to think, "What would it look like if I did this intentionally every year, not just when the schedule happens to allow it or when I've got a business coaching trip to go on?"

So, in 2024, I made two changes that I describe as genuinely structural in the way that my business operated and the way that I operated in it.

And this changed how often I needed to be available.

The first thing was handing over the management of my inbox to my assistant.

Now, this sounds like a small thing, but it was really big because before this, I was checking email constantly when I was away, and, of course, also while I was in Australia.

And even if I told myself I wasn't going to, the inbox was always there, and it always had things that I felt like needed a response.

So when I handed that over, my assistant took on the job of monitoring everything that was coming in, and she had clear instructions about what she could handle directly, what she should flag to me, and what could wait.

And any email from a private client, she would let me know. She'd ping me on WhatsApp.

Everything else she'd manage or she'd put into a certain folder for me to look at the next time I opened my laptop.

Now, the effect on how I experienced being away once we made that change was pretty big.

I stopped feeling like I was one unanswered email away from something going wrong, and the mental load really dropped.

It meant that I was actually on holidays when I was on holiday, rather than just being in a different location.

The second thing that changed in 2024 was I set up a fortnightly group coaching program, not for all of my clients, but just for a small group.

I accepted that because I was running a program like that, it would mean that I couldn't just schedule it in the second and third week of the month.

But even though I was working a little bit while I was overseas, I was okay with that.

The other thing I did was I paused that group coaching program over Christmas and New Year, and I set that as the precedent that we don't deliver for four weeks over that period, so my clients can have time off.

But also, so our annual trip to Thailand over that period, which by then was starting to become a tradition, and it's now been five years running. That would be a complete break for me.

No client delivery, no coaching calls, nothing.

So, by the end of 2024, I'd been overseas for 13 weeks across the year. In that year, we went to Vietnam, Bali, Sri Lanka, Korea, Thailand, and the business had continued growing, not contracting, while I was taking all of this time away.

Now, the thing that I'm most proud of from a business design perspective is something I did when I launched a new program in mid-2025.

And I've been talking about Sales Management as a Service back in episode 279. It incorporates Agent Accelerator, and it runs every Tuesday at 11:00 a.m.

And when I designed it, I knew that a weekly program commitment would create a constraint on travel if I wasn't careful about the design.

So rather than launching it and then trying to retrofit flexibility, I built the flexibility in from day one.

I brought in two contracted coaches who deliver the first and third Tuesday of each month.

I facilitate the second and fourth weeks of the month, and we bring in a mentor to present a fifth Tuesday in a month when that occurs.

I still attend the sessions if I'm not facilitating most of the time, but I don't actually need to be there. And if I need to be away, those sessions run completely well and fine without me.

The program doesn't stop. The members don't miss a week. The coaches are capable, so the content keeps being delivered as promised, and my assistant keeps the trains running with all of our members.

Now, the difference between retrofitting flexibility and designing it in is that when you design it from the start, it doesn't feel like a compromise. It's just how the thing works.

Now, it would've been ideal if I'd thought about that a bit earlier, but I'm glad that I got there in the end.

Now, I want to say here that I am aware that a coaching practice and a commercial real estate agency are different businesses. The mechanics are different, the structures are different, the client relationships and service delivery work very differently.

But the underlying challenge is the same.

In both cases, the principal, or in my case, the founder, starts out as the primary delivery vehicle.

Everything runs through them, and the question is whether you stay that way or whether you build something that can keep running when you're not in the room or in the office or in the country.

The decisions that I've made are not really that complicated. Schedule design, content batching, inbox handover, contract coaches, inviting selected clients into a group delivery modality.

Each of them was a specific practical choice that reduced the degree to which the business depended on me having a daily presence at my desk or in the country.

Now, none of them happened overnight. They happened in stages over a few years, as I've mapped out for you in this episode, and they happened as the business grew enough to support them.

The 2023 version of the business couldn't have supported the 2025 structure, but the decisions that I made in 2023 made the 2025 structure possible.

I reckon the question worth sitting with, if you're a commercial real estate principal, is not how do I get 13 weeks a year of travel? It's what's the next decision I could make that reduces the degree to which my business depends on me being physically present as much as I currently am?

That's a question you can get traction with, and the answer to it, made consistently over time, is how you get from wherever you are now to wherever you want to be.

Freedom isn't what you get after you build a business. It's something that you have to design in deliberately at each stage, otherwise it will never quite arrive.

I just got back from my second trip to Bali this year. Will be in Korea for the second time this year in a couple of months, with a few nights in Singapore on the way there. And I'll be back in Thailand over the Christmas-New Year break for a month-long holiday again at the end of the year.

The business will keep running, the clients will be looked after, and I will actually be in these locations, not half there with one eye on the inbox.

Now, I'm not lucky. What's happened is that I've created something by making some deliberate decisions over a few years.

I think a lot of people want to know how I get to travel so much and run this business, so I thought it was important to share exactly how it works.

And I'm sharing it with you because I want you to know that the thing that I help principals build is something that I've actually built for myself.

It looks different in a coaching practice than it does in a commercial real estate agency, but the principle is the same.

Of course, not every principal wants to take more time off or as much time as I do overseas, but I help my clients design the business that's right for them.

And I think it's satisfying to know that you've designed a business that gives you the optionality to have more freedom if and when you want it.

So, if you'd like to think through what is the next structural decision that you need to make in your business, the one that moves you a little bit further from being the only person it can run through, find me on LinkedIn, Darren Krakowiak.

Send me a message, tell me a bit about where things are at, and I will come back to you personally.

That's our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening, and I will speak to you soon.