If there was one bit that kept me up at nights when deciding to transition to a self-employed model, it was the loss of control.

It’s the biggest challenge when you are used to having full control of how and when your service is delivered, and if you (for the most part) have done it to a high standard then it’s especially daunting.

I started my career as a corporate estate agent, working my way to a regional manager. I quickly learned that to run a successful multi-branch operation, you can only deliver this via inspection of systems. You can have great people, but fundamentally there are certain jobs that when people get busy, they stop doing. Marketing updates and feedback are one of these systems that drive customer experience.

I also used to run a company called Boomerang. This company undertake customer experience surveys for estate agents. We did them over the phone and used the NPS (Net Promoter Score) metric. There were two key bits of feedback that came back time after time.

1. I want to know who my point of contact is
2. I want regular communication

A self-employed model structurally deals with the first point, which is why retention rates can be so good. One of the biggest weaknesses of a ‘lister’ based model, where your best person goes and sells the service, is that the reality is that they aren’t the person delivering the service. If the service doesn’t meet expectations, they are likely to feel that if that lister had been the person looking after them, things would have been better.

On the second point, how do you ensure that your self-employed agents are delivering pro-active, useful and timely communication to your sellers?

The key is using a system and having an SLA (service level agreement) with consequences.

In our model we try to keep it simple but targeted at the key elements.

A pro-active marketing update every 7 days. Feedback fully completed within 48 hours of the viewing. You might have differing views on this, but within Greenhouse OS we have a dashboard that allows us to reveiw this with every self-employed agent.

More importantly they can see when they are or aren’t within SLA. This gives them a chance to self-correct and keep visibility on where they can improve.

The consequence that we have to not being within SLA is that we don’t book anymore valuations into their diary. The idea is that the system becomes self-regulating.

Finding solutions to maintaining a high quality service whilst at the same time moving to a mentoring not managing approach is a really tricky balance.

Fundamentally, it needs to be acheived through systems rather than through management or else the ‘self-employed’ team members become de-facto employees and therefore could end up falling on the wrong side of IR35.

Businesses like Uber achieve incredible level of compliance with the businesses goals through natural consequences to poor behaviors. If you deliver poor service as an Uber driver, you don’t get as much work. If you deliver great service you get more work, so it’s in everyone’s interest to maintain a fantastic experience for customers.