Name: Still busy but not growing? Your systems are the problem. How DBK fixed them - and grew their portfolio by 40% in two years
Uploaded: 2026-02-25T10:51:04.989Z
Duration: 35 min 8 s
Description: Still busy but not growing? Your systems are the problem. How DBK fixed them - and grew their portfolio by 40% in two years

Transcript for "Still busy but not growing? Your systems are the problem. How DBK fixed them - and grew their portfolio by 40% in two years": Hi everyone and welcome to our latest Alto Masterclass webinar. Quick question for everyone that's joining us today: Are you still busy but finding that you're not growing at all? It's probably your systems that are actually the problem. We're going to dive into that today. So, I'm Mark, I'm your host for today's one to one Masterclass session, and we're going to be having a lovely chat today with Jas, a director from DBK Estate and Lettings, an Alto customer a long time Alto customer actually. Now, like most agencies, and pretty much all of you joining today I expect, DBK didn't have a demand problem at all, but they did have a systems problem. The team was busy, deals were happening, instructions were all coming in, but behind the scenes they did have some disconnected tools and a lot of manual admin drag that was just slowing everything down. So they joined Alto many years ago now, I can't remember exactly the year, but Jaz will tell us when he comes on. But since moving to Alto, they've grown their portfolio by 40%, they've reduced their admin by I think, around 80% and they've importantly replaced multiple systems with one joined up platform. So today, this is just a straight conversation like we always have about why those changes needed to be made, what actually changed, and what has made growth repeatable, sustainable, and long term, all without burning people out. Before we do start and before we get Jaz on the stage with us, I want to do just a quick bit of housekeeping. So on the right, you'll find a Resources tab. So, that's the place you can download and find a whole range of useful resources. So, ebooks, fact sheets, downloadable customer stories, including one on DBK as well. And it's also worth mentioning and pointing out that we still have our Alto Agency Trends Report for 2026, which is available to download. Definitely worth doing so. That contains hundreds and hundreds of insights from agents insights from hundreds of agencies, I should say, on the trends, the challenges and opportunities they're looking at for 2026. As I said, it's built on insights from hundreds of UK agents, so it's agent led, it's not vendor led, and it really cuts through the noise to reveal exactly what agents of all different sizes are responding to in terms of rising costs, regulatory pressure, operational complexity, the kind of hidden stressors as well that's concerning them and keeping them up at night, and also the things that they're putting in place to maximise and optimise growth. So definitely worth a read. On the far right, you'll also see a book your tailored demo button, easy for me to say, for anyone who wants a walkthrough of Alto based on their agency size, their goals or your setup. And finally, before we invite Jas onto the stage, we'll be running a Q and A at the end, so do pop questions into the chat at any time and we'll cover those either as we go through the session or at the end. So, let's bring in Jas. Hi Mark, thank you for having me. Hello, no worries at all. Thank you for giving us your time today. Should we dive straight into it? Absolutely, let's go. Brilliant. Okay, so can you give us a quick I've done a little bit of forward selling, so to speak, but can you give us a quick snapshot of DPK today? What's the size of the business and what's the portfolio and what does it look like? Yeah, so we are a estate agency in West London. We've been around for forty four years now, set up in 1982 by my father. We span across sales, lettings, property management, mortgages and we have a team of 16 spread across two offices plus a virtual office and that's where we are today. Brilliant, awesome. So it looks like you've grown really fast in the last couple of years, as I alluded to. Now that wasn't always necessarily you were growing, but it wasn't always the case that you were growing kind of as much or as easily as you wanted to. Before Alto, you were busy, you were working hard, but could you kind of specify what wasn't working operationally? So the problems we were facing is it was basically, to be honest, why we're all here today, it's the CRM we were on previously, it was just holding us back. It was very much focused on the front end of estate and letting the agency and it was not letting us do all of the important stuff that happens in the back end. Another thing that was holding us back was having a spread of all of our data information processes, which was another part that we just wasn't happy with at the time, to be honest with you. Since 2015, yeah, I can't believe it. In 2015, we joined Alto. Wow, that's wild. Did it take a while to kind of realise problem? It wasn't like effort or ambition, it was actually the systems you were using. Was there like an event horizon or a point where you said that we've got data in different hubs here, we're kind of working in silos, we've got multiple tools doing overlapping jobs. Was there something that kind of made you just go we need to change here or was it just not having that clear view across your kind of sales, your letting side of your business that over time made you go this is something that needs to change? Yeah, At that time we were looking to grow the business. One thing I was very sure about is having the foundation set before we had and did action any of that growth. So CRM was a very important part. I could see there were lots of holes in terms of us being able to operate efficiently and that was important to us as a business at the time, sure that we get the CRM correct before we start expanding and growing the business. I'm really fortunate that we did it that way because I know we would have run into real trouble at that point. Did you find at the time with the former system that you were using that we talked earlier about admin? I don't think it's always clear that when I'm speaking to agents growth sometimes results in admin, and often does, right? And there's a real admin creep across businesses as a result and as an offset of growth. Did you find that admin was eating a lot of the time with you and your team each day before, even before you started to really push the gas down on the growth lever? Yeah, 110%. We were just wasting so many man hours in admin and it was unfortunate I could see it happening in front of us, know, and it's never fun. Look, we all know a state letting agency in terms of the admin element of it. Know, everybody on this call today with us knows what's associated with, you know, everyday tasks and know, you can't, especially in today's world, just cannot afford to be in a situation where you're wasting those man hours. I always say to my team those hours that we've got in the day, they're really valuable. They go by really quickly. We just can't afford to waste them. So when you've got a CRM that's doing so much of the work in the background for you, that's where the true value is and that enables you to do so many other things within the business, right? Yeah, 100%. I guess specifically, and as you say, agents will be kind of aware of this, but let's really call it out. What were those admin tasks that were really eaten into your day or even into your team's hours? So the massive one for us was client accounting. That was a huge part at the time. We were, I still don't believe how, but we were very manual based and we were adamant that whichever CRM we choose has to do client accounting for us. We were also wasting a lot of time with property management, locking issues, sending out works orders, also sales and lettings progression. There was another problem we had faced there. You know, we needed everything to be in one place, but that really wasn't happening for us and being able to view very quickly what was happening across the pipeline. So those were tasks that were just being, you know, many, many hours, unfortunately, were being wasted. And now, you know, it's all handled very efficiently for us. Yeah, and we'll definitely get on to that. But I guess, like, so you get to this point, right, you've got two options, haven't you, at that point? It's invest in a new system or invest in more people. And you decided wisely to go down the 'right, we need a new system'. We kind of alluded to it there, but what were those non negotiables when you were choosing a new CRM? What did you absolutely need? Yeah, so the non negotiables we had were had to be firstly, I needed a cloud based solution that encompassed sales, lettings, property management and accounting. And I did feel at the time that was going to be difficult to find. And I'll be honest with you, you know, long before we went ahead with Alto, there was another firm that we were trying to get on board with and it was not going our way at all. Was taking far too long for us and I'm glad that happened because we found Alto and that was really important to have that sort of in one place. There were a few other things as well. There was reporting and analytics. That was another thing that we didn't have full visibility on as a business. And again, having them all coming into one place was extremely valuable for us. And then obviously, like I mentioned before, it was client accounting as well. That was a huge part for us. And people sometimes overlook having all your data in one place that you and the team can access is absolutely crucial to understand performance across the business. You know, it's a lot in terms of operationally when you split across sales, lettings and property management, there's lots going on in a working day. So to be able to I mean, first things first, Being able to just see a snapshot of your entire business across all these departments before the day has started is extremely And valuable, that's what we want as business owners. We want to see what's going on, what's going right, what's going wrong and where do we need to shift some effort to. Before I was not able to do that, you know. Yeah, no that makes a lot of sense. Now you said you were looking at a couple of solutions, but why did Alto stand out versus the other platforms you were looking at? Again, you probably alluded to it there with the client accounting, but was there anything else that you went this is probably why we have to go to Alto? So I would say that I've touched on sort of the points in terms of where our business was and where we kind of wanted to go. The accounting side for sure was a massive thing for us And I wanted a really user friendly system as well. You know, the UX needed to work really well for, like we all have team members, new team members joining. They need to be familiar with the platform that they're using and they want to use it. Previous CRMs from many years ago, as probably people on this call know, I mean, clunky, very old school and not fun to work on. So that was another important part. Yeah, another part, like I said, was just bringing all those departments into one. I was not moving to any CRM unless it had that at all. Yeah, like I said, that was a big part for us when making decisions. Yeah, that's really important. I think the other thing you mentioned to me, and this is going back like many, many months ago, spoiler it ended up playing into kind of Aalto's mission statement really, is that you wanted a CRM that would be like the last CRM you'd ever need and you've been with Aalto now, like you say, sort of ten, eleven years. Has it sort of lived up to that promise and has it evolved? Because that's what people are asking, you know, has kept up with the demands of the agency? Yeah, I can answer this question really easily. 110% yes. It's definitely lived up to its expectation. We would not be able to operate the way we do today without Alto. I can say that very honestly and wholeheartedly. And not just that, you mentioned something else really important to me actually, which is, you know, has there been developments along the way? A lot has changed in the industry in the last decade. We all know that introduction of AI, that's a huge thing. Alto 100% have worked at their CRM. They listen to us as well, which is great. Know, I'm fortunate enough to speak with the team and, you know, give ideas and bounce ideas around Alto and things get listened to. So a lot of it has developed. You know, they're still working on things today, which is definitely improving the way we operate across all our departments. So yeah, it's moved leaps and bounds and I can see the vision of Alto and how they want to keep improving and be the market leader. Yeah, that's definitely our aim, to keep that place as the market leader. We've invested, as Jas will move to, we've invested heavily in the letting side of the functionality over the last sort of two years and even more into our UI and into our reporting. What's coming up, as Jas will probably be aware, I'm not sure how much we can talk about, it's just the AI functionality that we'll be rolling out within sort of Q2, so in the next couple of months. We are very, very excited about what that will mean for agents, not just as an opportunity to alleviate admin, but really helping build that momentum in the business and really being sort of practical use AI across the business. I'm not going to give too much, I'm not going to spoil too much on it, but you will all be hearing more about this coming up very soon. Back to the chat at hand, you mentioned admin, you mentioned kind of the operational lag. Were you able to automate a few processes relatively quickly within Alto, going back to that kind of 80% stat from earlier? Where did those come from? Yeah, would say there's quite a few elements that we were able to automate very early on when we joined Alto. Some elements would be just the speed at listing properties. Know, that is a basic thing, but it is important. So speed of listing was great. And also we were able to automate, you know, in terms of emails as well. I mean, we use the system really, I would say quite well when it comes to emailing, using the email templates. And again, you know, not having to use and, you know, go back to our outlook or whatever just to draft up emails that we know we'll be sending hundreds of them out each day. That's been so simple for us to roll out and get emails across to the relevant landlord, vendor, client, you know, buyers, tenants, everyone. And another part which is again, have touched on it, but it was just such a huge part for us as a business is the automation that's being integrated into the client accounting side. Yeah. That's been, say even for accountants, it just saves so much time. And I do know, you know, there's some new bits like you alluded to earlier that you're bringing into the system, especially with AI on that front when it comes to client accounting. We're fortunate enough to get some early insights on that. But again, that's just going to increase efficiency again across the board. So, yeah, you know massively we were helped with those early automations. Yeah and I'll drop a little spoiler for people here, but we're looking implement, functionality that will start to automate compliance at scale throughout the business, so gas safety certificates, EPCs, you'll start to see that coming in in the next couple of months and that will be an absolute game changer. Yeah. So I think, you know, in terms of we've talked about kind of what you guys did, how you've used the platform. I guess the question we haven't covered is the features that I would be quite interested actually on the features that the team use today most prominently in Alto and how you use Alto most prominently because there will be people, there'll be kind of users of Alto, like day to day users of Alto, and there'll be people looking at it going, 'Okay, I'm a director, I'm a LETMs director, I need to understand how I can use it.' Could you speak to that at all? Yeah, obviously, each of us have different functionalities of what we do day to day. On the sales side, you know, being able to assessing the diary as well, that's been a big part for us as well. Just having obviously having multiple teams, multiple offices, people going in and out, that's been a great part for us as well. And on the sales and letting side Yeah, if you could just go back over the question again as well, Mark. Yeah, no, no, that's fine. Think I am sorry, just kind of a bit of a rambling one. Was more just a question around how you use today and how your team uses Alto today and what features they maybe rely on the most. For me, it gives me a full snapshot of everything that's happening across all departments. When I meet with each department, which we do very regularly, we obviously dive in straight away. We can see KPIs, we can see all the usual bits that you need to assess. I had a meeting yesterday with our property management team. Very easily were able to go over where all the compliance side of the business was in terms of all the SERDs, were things being handled date wise, are they recorded, works orders. So it works really well for each member of the team. Each member utilises every single functionality I would say and we've done that with hard work. You do have to put time into this as well with Alto. We've fortunately got a team that likes using tech and they know deep down that this saves them a huge amount of hours in the day when they've got a CRM doing a lot of the work for them. So it's utilised, I would say, to the best that we possibly can. Yeah, I hope that answers your question. Yeah, definitely. And I guess we're not trying to claim all the credit here at all, but what role did tech and Alto play in helping you get to a position where you could scale your portfolio by 40% in two years, is the line that really stood out to me when we spoke a few months ago? Yeah, look, I can tell you, without Alto, we opened our second branch in 2019 and that same year we did our first acquisition as well, which brought on another nearly 300 tenancies to our books. And we would not have been able to incorporate all of that data. And again, you know, the merge was quite seamless, brought all the data into Alto as we needed. But had we not had Alto in place, it would have been extremely difficult to be able to basically keep all those relationships intact with those landlords, make sure the tenancies were handled correctly, make sure documents were up to date. And that's why I said, you know, from the very beginning we would not grow the business. I was not prepared to grow the business until we had the foundation set. That's such a point. I think, like, yeah, you really hit the nail on the head there is, you know, growth comes from, often it comes from merger and acquisition, And so if you're, there's big data play, but also there's a client experience, like consistency that you need to keep that moving at the same pace and the same quality that it had before. You can't have disruption in the business, right? So having a CRM that can absorb that data, absorb those operations is really key, right? Yeah, we've moved leaps and bounds since we've joined Alto, you know, getting all those man hours back has meant that we can spend time, like for example, also, alongside the acquisition, we were growing the business organically. We could go to our CRM, we could do fallouts that needed to be done to previous landlords, previous properties that were maybe on the books or maybe had a valuation. It was very easy for us to be able to do that and have conversations unlock them more. Absolutely. Now a question that I've got, this comes up so much from agencies that they're too busy to change systems, this time of year too busy to change systems. What would you say to that? You think that's a bit of a myth? And what would you say to agencies that feel busy but are time poor but also also feel a little bit stuck with where they are? Yeah, I would say I can resonate with that. I was also there many years ago and we all get busy, let's be honest, but my only advice would be, I think as an individual, as a business owner directors or somebody in a very senior position that has a handle on operation, probably my recommendation would be to just take yourself out of the business, whether it be for a day, everyone's got the time to be able to do that regardless. Take some time out and have an overview of everything that's going on. Assess the parts of the business where you can see time is potentially being wasted and that will probably bring a lot of clarity onto how to then move forward. Are you at the stage in your business that you now require a CRM to do a lot of that handling for you? And I think taking that time out will probably bring a lot of clarity to somebody. I think that's a really good point. Just go for a walk, have a think about it, because ultimately, and to put a cap on this, growth and control doesn't come from working harder. It can only come from seeing the full picture. You can only see the full picture if you have the systems in place to do that. So keep that in mind everyone. But that's brilliant. Had loads of questions come into the chat and we had a few coming event, so we will tackle those. We'll try to get through as many as we can. We are a bit short on time, so we'll cover a few here and then if we run out of time, we'll certainly come back and address those questions directly. Jas, a couple of questions for you. Are you ready? Yeah, ready. Fire away. Okay, so I think we've kind of covered this, but someone's asked how do you know when systems are holding you back? What's that point where you know that this is the time to make the move? I would say when you're not able to deal with tasks quickly and these are sort of fairly basic admin tasks that we have in agency and when they're not being done efficiently and quickly because a lot of it, as I know being part of Alto, does happen very quickly I think that's the point where you need to kind of make that move when you're just not getting things done as quickly as you should be. Perfect. That's amazing. Second question is which auto feature made the biggest difference to you? Client accounting. Client accounting? Absolutely, said that and everyone knew this, you said. I don't know how we operated before, I really don't, but I couldn't be without it. Such an important part of the business. And again, we talked earlier about just the teams being able to have visibility of things and with all of that in client accounting, we, as lots of the team members, need to see money's coming in, money's going out etc. We're not having to contact some other colleague just to get this information. It's there at our fingertips. Mean, it's so valuable. Yeah, that was a massive one for me, massive. That's awesome. So, we'll do one more. It's one and two. Sorry, there's two questions in one. And this is going back, I guess, ten years, so tell me if the memory is a little rusty on it. But the question we've got here is based around migration. So, you came from a previous CRM solution. Firstly, migration an issue coming on to Alto and was team adoption difficult? So I touched on this earlier as well and I guess there's no harm in me saying so, but we did actually proceed with another CRM before I joined Alto and I can tell you I thought they were the solution but they just were not getting things done. They were dragging their heels. There was no end in sight and again that was stopping our business from growing, That was stopping me from doing what we needed to do. So yeah, I packed it in with them. No chance was I moving ahead with them. They wasted so much of our time and lo and behold I had a meeting with Alto. I still remember the sales rep from back then, his name was Paul, amazing guy, came in, showed me everything that I could do and it was basically I found a path that they answered everything we needed it to do. So migration was once we chose Alto migration was seamless and in fact stuck to the timelines what they said. As long as I got them the information back they were able to do what they said so there was never any lies or you know holding me back. They delivered. Yeah. That's great to hear and what about the team? Did they get up to speed with the platform quite quickly? Yeah, luckily I've got a team that trusts me and they believe in the decisions that I make within the business. So team adoption was really straightforward. Of course, it's new learnings, it's new beginnings for us And of course, we need to adapt our style to a new way. But very quickly, the team just fell in love with it. I'll be honest, they got to grips with it very quickly, very easily. It is a very easy platform to work your way around. It's very intuitive, so adoption was not a problem at all. Perfect. There's one other question that I can answer actually and it's related to go live time from other CRMs or just get more go live time in general. Alto, it's sixteen days on average, because that's start to finish in terms of going live. So I hope that answers that question. If you have any other questions on that, I can signpost you to the right people to speak to about that in more detail. I think that covers everything. You've given us a lot of your time today so I'm mindful of that and I know you're very, very busy and dressed very stylishly today as well, as I mentioned earlier. I'm always happy to help, you know, because Alto has played a really big role in terms of what we have done and are doing as a business. If Alto ever reach out, I'm more than happy to reach out. Anybody on this chat, If they ever want to get in touch with me directly, I'll be more than happy to talk them through the whole platform and hopefully let them make some decisions in terms of what they want to do as a business and moving forward. Yeah, that's very kind of you to say. There's really only one or two more things to cover on this and if you're watching this and you're feeling kind of the same that we're busy but we don't feel in control, Remember that's not a motivation problem, that's not a people problem, it probably is a systems issue. So if you want to chat, take like Jas said, take some time away to think about what the future of your business looks like. And then if you want to book a tailored demo with us via the link on the screen, we can send you the full and also if you're not quite ready for that, we'll send you the full on demand recording shortly. You can take another watch of that, you can share it with your team and it's completely ungated, so you don't need to sign up to anything, put in any details into any forms, you can just watch that back at leisure. Once again, there's a lot of resources that you can get from us on the side. It's free to download from ebooks and guides, FAQs and resources to lots of other stuff you can download before you go. I think that's everything really for this session. I just want to say again, Jaz, thank you for your time today. This has been a very helpful conversation and I've really appreciated it. So I think that's us. So I'll see you all later. Cheers, Mark. Thanks. Bye bye. Bye.