Phil Harris – Vision in Pink

Written by Acme Mag

Acme: This edition of Acme Magazine focuses on the power of a vision and how it is the fire behind planned action. Back in 2010, did you ever envision that Harris Real Estate would be where it is today?

Phil: No, definitely not. In fact it was actually the goal to stay really small and boutique; that was the strategy when we left the previous organisation. We had a goal to keep it under 20 staff, and at that stage I thought 20 would be large and that would be the max. 

Acme: Funny, and how many staff do you have under the Harris Real Estate banner now?

Phil: 10 years later, over 170.

Acme: Just a little over that 20 then?

Phil: [Laughs] Yeah, so things didn’t go according to plan, but you know, you pivot. It was a different outcome to what we were aiming for.

Acme: You come across as a very all-or-nothing individual and this has been a key driver for Harris Real Estate’s unparalleled success. How similar is the Harris Real Estate brand’s culture and persona to your own?

Phil: I think like most organisations, that culture generally stems from the leadership of that organisation and that obviously started with me. I am pretty focused and intense around certain things, but that’s largely driven by the self belief of wanting to see people become the best version of themselves, and then we relay that to business and so, my mindset has always been ‘how do we continually make things better?’. For us, there’s no finish line, there’s no destination, it’s like ‘how do we look at a process, how do we look at a marketing item, how do we look at our people and how do we have a mindset of just growth focuses in terms of continual improvement?’ and that has washed across our culture.

Acme: Upstairs you have the Harris Real Estate values framed – did you come up with those or is that a collective thing?

Phil: We’ve actually made a few changes to our values. I’d say those are probably our second go. We did that as an organisation, we got the team together (at that stage it was 50 or 60 staff) and said ‘what are the things we want to stand for?’, and they were the values that we came up with. Moving forward, we are a continually changing organisation and going into next year we’ve actually got new values that we’re releasing.

Acme: We’re approaching Harris Real Estate’s 10 year milestone, can you share with us a memorable, pivotal moment?

Phil: I feel as though, Harris, with the growth that we’ve had… put it this way, we had more bad moments than people get in 50 years and we had them all in five. There’s always that continual anxiety or nervousness of ‘is this thing actually going to work?’. When you start a business, all of a sudden it’s like ‘we got through year one, are we still going to be here in year two?’. That feeling of we actually arrived and made it, I think that was probably the pivotal moment for me, and that was only going back three or four years ago that I thought “you know what, we’re actually now here for good’. Other key, pivotal moments for me would be the calibre and quality of the people we’ve been able to attract. I started out selling houses in the southern suburbs of Adelaide with an average price range of about $220k, and the vision was to make it over to the higher side of town [in Adelaide] and to think that some of the best agents in SA choose to work here, that’s been a great achievement for the organisation. In terms of challenging moments, at a personal level, we’ve had staff members with serious health issues and family challenges that we’ve seen. When you work in a small company like Harris, they become family members and I think seeing the challenges that our people have faced are probably the biggest things that have been hard to deal with.

Acme: More than ever, there seems to be a separation between New School vs. Old School professionals. For those who are aligning with the old school mentality, what advice do you have to help those agents push their career ‘into the now’?

Phil: Well, there’s a few ways you could go with it. I think if you’re really at the tail end of your career, if you’ve only got two or three years left of selling, you’ve probably got to go into survival mode and just try and get through.

Certainly, what we’re seeing now is that agents that are strongly database driven, highly effective professional people, really corporate athletes are now taking more and more market share than I have ever seen before. I’ve never seen such a big shift between a smaller group of agents doing a larger volume of business. I think the challenge is for people that are part of that old school mentality, the reality is only going to get tougher and tougher, so I don’t think you have a choice – you need to get on board and make the change that is required. 

Acme: Without a doubt, social media has opened the floodgates to consumer voice and opinions. As the consumer is more prevalent than ever, how has Harris Real Estate’s marketing changed to reflect this?

Phil: I think the biggest change for us is getting really clear on where our customers are actually coming from. From my perspective, social media, whilst it’s a really important part, it is only part of a marketing plan. It seems to me that there is more confusion in the market place now for agents to actually know where their business is coming from. People get so carried away with having a massive social presence here or maybe letterbox drops over here but they don’t take the time to actually look at where their business comes from. I think from Harris Real Estate’s perspective, we’ve now become very clear around what generates for our business and what doesn’t.

Acme: Do you have any advice on how one might establish where their business is coming from?

Phil: The best thing to do is to print out a list of your last 100 sales and find out what the lead source was on those. That’s what we do with all of our agents. We focus on not what [you] think, what we actually know, from what is hard core data of where listings have come from. So, before we put any plans in place, we focus on those areas that actually deliver results before we start looking for new lead sources.

Acme: You were an early adopter of videos on social media however, these have become a thing of the past as you felt that they had become over saturated. How do you define when an action or marketing asset is ‘oversaturated’?

Phil: There’s no question, video marketing has become saturated and it’s hard to jump on social media and not see a real estate agent walking through a property, giving a market update or whatever it might be. I think this comes back to interaction. Are we actually providing this and getting results or are we doing it for personal ego? I’m not huge in that area but everything has to be results focused and engaging, and if you’re not getting that, then really you could be spending more time with your kids or doing something more fun than posting yourself on social media.

Acme: You once said “The industry has come a long way since I first started, but it’s still got a long way to go to have a set of professional standards that we all adhere to”, is there a certain professional standard that you see needs to improve more than others?

Phil: I still stand by that, and I think we have come a long way as an industry. I still think that an agent’s definition of what quality service is still has the greatest opportunity for improvement. Not my opinion, but if you look at the data, CoreLogic put out a great report about two or three years ago on buyers and sellers. Almost one in two buyers still rate their experience of buying a property with a real estate agent as below average. So the challenge is, agents need to understand what they’re being compared to, so when I look at customer service at Harris Real Estate, I’m not comparing our customer service to another real estate office down the road, instead we’re going to compare it to what people’s expectations are as a consumer out there in the marketplace. If you go and buy something online today from the Nike store, it’s just a beautiful online retail experience. If you walk into a nice hotel, you get a much higher level of customer service experience – because of that people’s expectations are through the roof now in terms of what they expect from a real estate agent. 

Acme: Continual learning is a large part of your career prowess and you’ve previously said that you wished you had focused more on learning before starting out. Are there particular resources for learning that you’re fond of?

Phil: Yeah, very much so. I continually learn, there’s a few things that I focus on. One is I continually focus on sales so I am regularly reading or attending sales specific seminars, as well as property management, but where I spend the majority of my learning curriculum these days is in the leadership space, now that we have 170 staff. I didn’t go and get formal education around leadership and now I’m looking at ‘what does it take to be a great leader?’, so I do a lot of personal growth and development in that area.

Acme: From a management perspective, does Harris Real Estate pay much mind to competitors and what they’re doing?

Phil: We have an awareness, but I wouldn’t say that we have a focus or an obsession. [In real estate] there’s an obsession with what other people are doing. We’ve just come out of a business meeting this morning with our management team and we have an implementation list longer than my arm of all of the things that we’re not doing good enough and where we need to improve. So, whilst we still have so many internal opportunities to grow our business, we don’t really need to worry about our competition – we just need to worry about ourselves and continue to get better. Certainly, you need to have an awareness of growing trends and patterns, but I’m certainly not waking up and looking at somebody else’s website to say “hey, they’ve got that, we need to do that”. 

Acme: In 2012 the balance of listing, selling and managing lead to you feeling lost within the business, and you made the decision to bring in management. From your perspective, can you walk us through the experience of letting someone else take the reins of managing Harris Real Estate at that time?

Phil: It was very challenging. We’re up 60, 70, 80 staff or whatever it was and that required me to stop selling and be a part of that management team, but I kinda, I got a little bit lost in the business to be honest. My focus had always been very clear – go and list and sell as many houses as you can. I think that in a lot of instances, the business leader can become the blockage if they’re not prepared to humble themselves and get out of the way (and put better and smarter people into certain roles than what I am capable of).

Acme: Your management of Harris Real Estate has changed over the course of its triumphant history. How do you decide and balance where you focus your energies?

Phil: I have a good group of people around me now that are very blatantly honest. As businesses grow, and because I am the owner and my last name is Harris, I need to be careful that I don’t just put a group of people around that will just “yes, Phil, yes”, where they just tell me what I want to hear as opposed to saying “hang on, this is actually what’s required”. As the business has matured and grown, we’ve got quality people who can actually assist me in what I’m good at and the reality is, Harris gets a lot of credit for certain things, but I’m only really good at probably one or two key things. My level of expertise is very strongly around that sales focus and I’m strong around the leadership space for our organisation and recruitment on top of that, in terms of attracting people to work for our organisation.

We look at a skills matrix, and go “Phil, let’s get you working in that space, with what you’re good at and then get other people to run the other verticals of the organisation”, and I try and stay out of their way. 

Acme: Finally, vision is an ever moving target. Where do you see Harris Real Estate in the next five to 10 years, and where do you see yourself?

Phil: As far as where we would like to see Harris in the next five or 10 years, if we could continue at the same growth rate, that would be great, I’d love to see that. We don’t have plans on expanding interstate or anything like that, we have a niche market here in Adelaide and we still look at our market share and see that we have a massive opportunity there. We look at both sides of our business, property management and sales and there is so much room for improvement. Whilst revenue growth and profit growth is certainly important, the actual real driving focus is just being better at what we do and then those outcomes are kind of a by product of that. That’s what I’d like to see for the business.

On a personal note, I’m enjoying the leadership space now of mentoring and growing other people, both internal and external to the brand. So, if I can spend more time on those areas then that would be great for me.