Wang Hongjie: Has dedicated 26 years to hard, dirty, and exhausting work, achieving annual revenues of billions. He wants the entire industry to be respected.

Ask AI · Why did Wang Hongjie choose the property management industry as a lifelong career?

Source: Zhenghedao (ID: zhenghedao)

Hi, friends. Today, I’d like to introduce you to a special entrepreneur—Wang Hongjie. He is the Chairman of Chengxinhang Property Management, a company known for integrity. He is also the Executive Chief Delegate of Shandong Zhenghedao. We’ve been on the island together for 8 years.

What he does might be the most unremarkable line of work. He deals with the so-called “grimy, laborious jobs” that others look down on, yet over more than twenty years, he has built a “three-noes” company—one without projects, funding, or experience—into one earning tens of billions in annual revenue.

Wang Hongjie’s entrepreneurial story starts with a discovery.

In 2000, Wang Hongjie made a decision that left people around him puzzled—he resigned from his public position at the Shandong Provincial Department of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, then went into the property management industry.

At the time, he was in charge of property management across the province within the department. He noticed a phenomenon: in Shenzhen, property management practitioners enjoy a relatively high social status. But on the Shandong side, people still did plenty of work, while their income lagged behind by a wide margin, and they were always looked at with colored glasses.

He held onto a determination: “I want to build a property company so that this industry can earn respect.”

At the beginning of his start-up, the company had “no projects, no capital, no experience.” He ran around to register everything, his legs worn out from the paperwork. The office was a windowless little dark room, and projects in the suburbs had to be handled with direct, on-site coordination.

The first project—Yantai Xingfu Town Xingfu Village 3—was also what truly helped him find his direction.

When training employees, he applied a slogan: “Treat owners like the Lord.” A cleaning lady raised her hand and asked, “Manager Wang, what does ‘the Lord’ mean?” He was stumped. After thinking for a long while, he said, “It’s like a god.” The employees burst into laughter: “Gods don’t exist.”

He didn’t give up. He went to observe on the front lines. He found that when an owner’s home water pipe leaked, employees often weren’t in a hurry; but when his own relatives called, many people would rather take leave and have their wages docked than come to help.

In the second lesson, he changed the way he explained it: “Owners are your bread-and-butter, your life source. They don’t just support you—you also need to support their children. Don’t you think you should help owners solve problems as promptly as you would take care of your own family?”

From then on, Chengxinhang’s “family culture” took root: colleagues treated each other like family, and they treated owners the same way.

Over more than 20 years, Wang Hongjie had many chances to switch careers—real estate development, sales agency—any of them could make more money than property management. But he never felt tempted.

“My original intention is to make property management a respected industry. If I give it up for profit, I definitely won’t be able to last long.”

To achieve this, he reshaped the organization through culture, and drove service upgrades through digitization—bringing Chengxinhang from Jinan to across China, and then to the global market, becoming a benchmark for independent property management companies.

In Chengxinhang, there is a philosophy called “1000-1=0.” Every employee serves customers 1,000 times; as long as there is even 1 instance of dissatisfaction, customer satisfaction becomes 0. Wang Hongjie often says that customer satisfaction is the starting point—service has no finish line. What he wants to bring to customers is “satisfaction + surprise.”

Today, Chengxinhang has operations in 21 countries and regions, with annual revenues in the tens of billions. But what Wang Hongjie cares about most has never been just these figures.

Someone asked him what the standard for success is. He said very plainly: “When one day the property management industry is fully recognized by society, and every property professional receives the respect they deserve—then I can say I’ve achieved something. Before that, I have never been successful.”

“Some ideals are etched deep in my bones. But as long as I keep doing this, and can make the industry change even a tiny bit—that’s enough.”

Do you have an entrepreneur like this by your side? Come chat in the comments.