More time, bigger impact: how this estate manager creates efficiency and continuity with Nines 

As an estate manager with 15 years of experience as a private chef, Melissa Winstead has a passion for being highly efficient.  

Two years ago, she took on a role overseeing four different properties in North Carolina and Washington, DC. As she worked to get up to speed, tracking down personnel information for housekeepers and building out a list of new vendors for a house her principals had just finished building, she was handed a binder full of procedures and passwords.  

Immediately, she knew she needed a better way to manage all the details. 

“I didn’t want to keep it in a binder,” says Melissa. “I wanted to be able to have it on the go, because I was on the go all the time.” 

Getting time back with a better household management system 

Melissa set out to find a household management platform that could keep up with her, and quickly landed on Nines.  

“I use it every day,” says Melissa. “I have yet to find something, especially now with the calendar, that Nines doesn’t cover my needs for.” 

With one go-to place to organize information, she was able to save time searching for vendor contact information, helping housekeepers set up rooms the right way, and finding answers to any question from a principal or a team member.  

“If I can take three less steps to get to something, then I’m able to be more efficient, and I really like to be efficient,” says Melissa. 

In a hybrid role where she was cooking every day and occasionally helping with her principals’ children, Melissa needed to maximize her time, and Nines helped her make room in the day for bigger projects.  

“If I’m working an eight hour day and I’m being really efficient and that’s really only taking me six hours, with the extra couple of hours, maybe it’s allowing me to do a more thorough walkthrough of the entire property and start noticing, ‘oh, there’s paint peeling over there, let’s add that to the contractor’s list,’” explains Melissa. 

In one of these moments of extra free time, Melissa was able to sit down and review the plans for a vegetable garden construction project. She noticed something that needed to be changed, and her principal was thrilled.  

“He said, ‘this is great, why didn’t the architect think of this?’” says Melissa. “Getting that time back to take a deeper look at things was really valuable.” 

Creating continuity and bridging the transition 

When Melissa decided to move back to California, she felt reassured leaving behind a historical record of everything she’d built.  

“It was such an easy transition to hand it off to the person filling my role there and to say, ‘everything you need is right here. Everything I’ve done at this home for the past 18 months is here,’” says Melissa. 

Today, when a household staff member on her former team has a question (for example, where did we buy the duvet covers in the children’s bedrooms?), they can find the answer in seconds, because Melissa documented everything in Nines.  

Ramping up quickly with a better foundation 

Now, Melissa is taking on a new estate management role, overseeing two properties in the Bay Area and two in Texas (one of which is in the midst of a major construction project). She was brought in to be the new point of contact for everything that needed to be done, with one of her principals telling her, “I need another one of me.” 

“As their real estate portfolio has grown, they’ve realized that there’s so much to manage, and they want to just enjoy their time and travel and not have to worry about who’s there to meet a plumber or notice that something needs to be fixed,” says Melissa. 

This time, Melissa was given access to a shared drive with the home office, filled with folders upon folders of documents, which offers little ability to search. 

“You just have to dig so deep to get to things, so I said, we need Nines to get this all organized,” says Melissa. 

In her first six weeks on the job, she’s gathering information, meeting with staff and vendors, and building out a comprehensive household manual in Nines as she goes. 

“As I’m getting going, I really appreciate having a really organized place to land everything,” she says. 

Taking a proactive approach to estate management 

A handful of key features in Nines are helping Melissa work faster in her new role. She loves filtering her 50+ vendors by property, breaking the home down by zones, getting reminders for tasks, and having easy access to photos of each zone and each asset. 

With Connections, she’s able to tie important information together. For example, she created connections between her lighting vendor, the contract that was signed with them, and a task for their upcoming meeting (assigned to herself). Whether she’s looking at her upcoming tasks, her vendor profile, or the contract document, the rest of the information she needs will be at her fingertips.  

And, with the Calendar, she’s able to work around her principals’ extensive travel schedules. One travels a third of the year, and the other travels 250 days a year, and the schedule is constantly changing.  

If the home needs a deep clean and she knows everyone is gone for a week, she can easily schedule the work for an ideal timeframe. 

“I love being able to put tasks in the calendar because I’m a really visual person,” says Melissa. “I like that I can overlay my tasks with their travel, as well as when the housekeeper is going on vacation.” 

Moving forward, Melissa says she’ll be able to easily create preventative maintenance schedules, rather than waiting for things to break and scrambling to fix them. 

“I really like to get ahead of things – I like to notice something before a principal does and take care of it, so A) they don’t have to think about it, and B) if they happen to think about it and they check in with me, it’s already done,” says Melissa. “Nines helps me to stay ahead of things, which makes me feel like I’m doing my job.” 

Want to explore how you can save time, create continuity and be more proactive with Nines? Schedule a demo today.