Local innovation leader with a strong team and long-standing customers
It may be the fresh Alpine air, or perhaps the young team: the employees at Grundstein Hausverwaltung in Garmisch-Partenkirchen are always in a good mood. They laugh, they are on first-name terms, they are on an equal footing. And they work together: The 16 men and women manage a total of 2,500 units. Soon there will be even more.
Tobias-Micha Treder (34) and Carl Ferdinand Hauer (33) took over the property management company five years ago. The company, located within sight of the Zugspitze, has been around for almost half a century. "The software structures and employee management were quite outdated back then," says Treder. The young company successors modernized the property management: digital document management was introduced, meeting technology was purchased and software was updated. They also switched to remote servers before the coronavirus pandemic. This allowed all employees to work from home - while other businesses were paralyzed by the virus and regulations.
A new approach to personnel management was also introduced: Putting colleagues first. "If my colleagues are doing well, the customer will do well too. If I put the needs of the customer above the needs of the team, then I run the risk of the team wearing itself out. We stand behind all our colleagues - with all the mistakes that naturally happen," says the 34-year-old business economist. This cannot be taken for granted in the industry. It also makes it easier to solve customers' problems, says Treder. "You can discuss the difficult phone calls from the morning in the coffee kitchen."
If the colleagues are doing well, the customer will do well too.
The ERP software has also been modernized and now comes from Impower. This makes it much easier to create invoices. In the past, the office was not paperless: every year, files of account folders and invoices had to be filed away. This process has been broken up with the new software: "When the invoice was approved, there was a pile of paper, which the person responsible for the invoice looked through and approved. This stack of paper then went to the accountant, who typed up the invoices and posted them to the system. And then at some point the payment run took place," explains Treder.
Impower cuts several steps out of the process; posting and invoice approval are now completed in a single step. "The property managers have now become a bit like accountants and have additional work to do. But the accounting issue has been eliminated at this point." There is currently only one part-time position in the accounting department. There used to be two.
The employees do not have to be trained for the new work steps for long. "The training required for the system is close to zero. The colleagues train each other and I am only needed to a small extent. We got two new colleagues at the beginning of October and they are already working independently with Impower - as if they had learned it. That really is one of the biggest benefits of the new software."
The training required for the system is close to zero.
At the desk next door, a colleague is training a new employee. A click here, a click there, and the invoice or form letter is sent to several recipients. "My impression is that my colleagues are very enthusiastic about the system," says Treder. Using the software should reduce the stress level in the team - and make work more fun.
"I also see a lot of freedom for my business partner and myself. But we still have growth targets. Now that we can free ourselves up, we have more room for new projects. And we can implement them better with software like this behind us and the confidence in the team."
