Learning curve vs. doing curve

Jan here, the COO. I don’t believe in preemptive learning. What you’ve learned so far doesn’t really matter. No one will ask you about it. How many amazing things did you learn in your second semester of university? Or in 11th-grade math class? It’s all quickly forgotten.

I believe in doing.

What have you done? Because what you will do at Buena is something no one can ever take away from you. I also believe that learning is downstream from doing. You’ll be able to say that you brought a company with 10 employees from a 5% margin to 40% while increasing revenue. You won’t need to say that you learned to understand financial data, manage employees, or sell services. It'll be implicitly clear.

I don’t care what you’ve learned before or what you want to learn here. I leave that to the academic world. What matters to us is that you’ll do a lot here:

1. People management, including recruiting: Motivate your portcos (portfolio companies), help them achieve their goals, and decide with the team lead who gets hired and when.
2. Creating and improving operations and processes: Each property management company has unique characteristics that you’ll need to represent in professional and scalable processes.
3. Product development: New features are constantly built to handle more property management tasks even more effectively in our software. You can lead such a feature from idea to deployment, its first use in a portfolio company, and finally its rollout across Buena.
4. Property management: Here, you’ll work hands-on with the largest asset class in the world—and gain insights into what to consider when purchasing your own real estate. Not the most useless knowledge to acquire.

The above example is the main action for 2025. Once you have successfully integrated your set of 5-8 portcos, the playbook for integrations will be so good, we'll be able to have interns do this job. You will then move on to the next stage: increasing revenue per unit. There are a bunch of industries within residential real estate that are adjacent to property management and could be interesting. One example is insurance. Instead of having every property manager get their own deals with insurers via external insurance brokers, you could negotiate one - much better - deal for all our units directly with Allianz CEO Oliver Bäte—at the Champions League final against Chelsea.

Once you have a deal you'll test it with your portcos, integrate it into the product and finally roll it out across all portcos - and grow this business unit as Buena changes property management globally (starting with the US as the second market after Germany).

Work directly with the Leadership Team

Anyone joining us as a Business Generalist will work directly with the Leadership Team. One could say that you’ll learn a lot from this, but as mentioned above, that’s secondary. Primarily, working with the Leadership Team means two things:

1. You can do a lot: Your direct supervisor has the autonomy to approve everything and empower you to act quickly. To get a better understanding for what that means exactly ask the Business Generalists you’ll meet in our recruiting process about how budgets work here.
2. You can grow with the company: In a few years, I'll need senior execs responsible for areas like Banking, Insurance, Brokerage, etc. I want to prepare you for this development so that—even when Buena reaches €100 million or €10 billion in revenue—you continue to report directly to the Leadership Team. Or secure their angel investment for your own startup. #PaypalMafia

Your first week at Buena

9:00 "Here's your laptop; I've assigned you a Linear project where you'll find everything you need to get started."

You spend about 30 minutes reading “everything” you need to know beforehand.

9:34 "Your first two companies are our new portfolio companies in Magdeburg and Hamburg. This afternoon, you’ll have an initial call with each team lead. Here are two documents containing everything you need to know about the companies."

9:51 You go through the Buena software and review additional onboarding documents to get more context. This includes introductions to property management, our software, and materials from the last two board meetings.

11:00 You talk with Maria, the Hamburg team lead. She briefly introduces her team of 8 employees. You discuss the software currently in use and plan to meet in person tomorrow. She asks if our software can generate reports, as they have a major owner with 340 units (€30 is the minimum revenue per unit per month) who receives a monthly report. You request a sample report. Currently, these are being laboriously created in Excel. You find out that generating these reports takes half a workday each month.

12:00 Lunch break

12:45 You speak with Jakob, our Product Manager, to understand our progress on such reports. The sample report is a simple overview of all units, occupancy status, and outstanding rents. Jakob explains our previous thoughts on the matter, and together you brainstorm where this function could be integrated into Buena. The result: it will take just two days of development to enable these reports at the push of a button.

14:00 You talk with Markus, the Magdeburg team lead. He primarily needs help with recruiting, as new units were recently added. Swift action is required here—maybe the new units can be added directly to the Buena software and managed from there?

15:04 You book transport and hotels for two days in Hamburg and two days in Magdeburg.

15:41 You receive the financial data for your two companies to get an overview. Together, total revenue is €1.2 million annually. Your task will be to increase the margin from 4% to 35% through the integration of Buena software and subsequent growth in units.

17:29 You talk with Anna, our recruiter, about the situation in Magdeburg. She’s already aware, and the job posting is live. The first 10 candidates have already been contacted. Together, you plan to conduct the initial interviews on-site when you’re there.

18:06 You grab some food, and the Ops team eats together downstairs. Most have meal-prepped to save time and eat healthily.

19:00 You go over the import template. It’s a .csv file which you need to fill (via scripts or copy-pasting) to import master data from portcos into the Buena.

20:46 You walk eight minutes home to pack your things—tomorrow, you're off to Hamburg.

Hard requirements

1. Native German
2. Move near the office

Application process

1. Brief conversation to cover the basics
2. Talk with other Business Generalists
3. Case study to demonstrate your approach to new problems
4. Conversation with Jan (COO) about values, goals, and motivation
5. Office tour on-site
6. Meeting with Din (CEO)
7. Contract signing
8. Onboarding

These steps can be completed in 4 days.