In this episode of Scale HER Up, I'm joined by Lyndsay Yuill — director of Rent Locally, a letting and property management company with an estate agency wing, based in the Central Belt of Scotland.

Lyndsay didn't plan to be in property. She worked in the care sector, running a project for young people in Edinburgh. When the funding was cut — as part of an equal pay anomaly that redirected council money — she landed in a letting agency while waiting for disclosure checks to clear. Within a year, she'd been headhunted to open a branch. Within the year after that, she set up on her own.

That was 2008. She founded Live and Let. Her now-business partners founded Rent Locally the same year. In 2012, they merged — same size, same stage, different geographies — and Rent Locally has been growing by acquisition, by systemisation, and by a relentless focus on communication ever since. They have 29 employees, a large network of subcontractors, and have won the gold award for Scotland's best letting agency at the ESTAS — voted for by customers.

We cover:

• What Rent Locally does, and why communication is their number one differentiator
• Balancing two sets of customers — landlords and tenants — and why 99% of the time it isn't actually that hard
• The 2008 financial crash as a fast learning curve: watching entrepreneurial landlords navigate the cycle
• Why Lyndsay merged rather than competed — and the smart logic of putting two companies together to unlock growth
• Growth by acquisition: why buying an existing book of properties is faster than growing one-to-one
• Matching personality types to roles — why the wrong person in the wrong job is a management failure, not a people failure
• Work-life balance: what it actually looks like in practice, and why booking downtime is an active, intentional choice
• The networking events Lyndsay runs — and why collective collaboration makes you bulletproof
• Being in cycle two of property after two decades: how you start seeing the same patterns and can help clients navigate before things go wrong

Quote of the episode: "Collective collaboration makes you bulletproof." — Lyndsay Yuill