You are all amazing and are part of the team because we trust you to make decisions without having to ask & interrupt constantly. Here is a guide to enable & empower you to make decisions the way I would as you represent me & the company. Refer back to this regularly, especially whenever faced with a decision and tempted to ping Miles.
Your job is to make me look amazing, make you look amazing to our clients. To make our team look amazing to our clients. You represent me and the company. Please do so in the best and highest way possible. This means spell check, do QA, use Grammarly, put out something polished, and speak positively about the team.
We accept accountability for our part in it (but only what we had control of). Avoid blaming people, blame the situation or process. Fix the leak in the procedure or process and inform the client that we have improved it for the future. Put out any fires immediately & stop any bleeding. Fix the cause or alter processes to prevent it from happening again. Make sure everyone is informed about what was learned or improved.
Example: "Thanks for the feedback. We're sorry our directions were perhaps unclear, we haven't had any issues with them yet, however, we altered them based on your feedback to prevent anyone else from getting confused."
Always be the clients' partner. Instead of telling them "you" or "I" use words like "Let's", "We", "Us". "Yeah I get that would be frustrating, let's see if we can get this figured out together." This helps clients so they don't feel alone or at odds with us and it lessens customer service challenges.
Everything in how we leverage all of our tools: Appfolio, ClickUp, etc. and how we communicate is designed to lower interruptions & increase productivity.
You can't have a problem unless you have a solution. Even if it's a bad idea, come up with something and bring it to the table. Bring solutions rather than problems. Do some intelligent thinking and come up with a possible remedy. "Tenant Sassafrass is upset because his HVAC is taking a long time to get repaired. I think we should get approval to put a temporary AC unit in there. What are your thoughts?"
Ask yourself how you would handle this problem? What do you think would be a good resolution? Don't second guess your gut instinct. How can you solve this problem? Put yourself in the place of an owner, it is really easy to be overly generous with money that isn't yours to make someone happy with you. Our role is to treat people fairly and be good stewards for other people in their interests, not self-serving.
Let them be free. We don't try to force any owners to stay with us, but we do seek to inspire them to want to. With tenants remember their leases and contracts ultimately affect the income of the owner so we have to make decisions that are in the owners best interests.
This pervades everything, for example, brand names should start with capital letters to show importance. Do what it takes to create the perception that we are high-value, that team members are high-value, in-demand, awesome, etc. Treat clients as high value. We are never beneath them. They are never beneath us. We lift up clients to a higher value status by holding space as high value and being an example to inspire them.
Even if you don't know the answer... you can admit such and still be confident and certain to the client that you will & can find out. Never leave them with the feeling that Welcome Home Properties doesn't know, at most it could be that you don't know in the moment but you or someone will provide that information.
When talking about future results or work to be completed with an owner — always seek to pre-frame a positive future outcome. "Your property is coming along nicely & I think you are going to love it!" or "I'll schedule a call for you with Miles, you'll likely be blown away by the awesome feedback and ideas you get during that call." "This will be a powerful conversation". "I think you'll love working with our team" "You'll find this super helpful."
They hired us to be the expert. Declare your expertise, to facilitate trust, to remove resistance. Often resistance is caused by not establishing your expertise. "Hi, we don't just manage properties, but several members of our team have their own rental properties as well. We have a wealth of knowledge here to solve any problem that arises."
If clients are reaching out to us to find progress, we are failing to inform them. Be noisy with updates and progress so they don't feel concern or worry about their investment with us.
If anyone sends anything to you, says anything to you, assigns you a task, etc. always close the loop. Complete the circle of communication. Like in tennis, if you don't hit the ball back over, you lose. Win.
Document all communication in relevant places, whether in AppFolio or in ClickUp on a project. Make sure there is a record. This protects you, us, and the properties. The palest ink is better than the best memory.
Triple check spelling, use Grammarly, do thorough QA, beware of possible problems (like hurting emails when messing with ledgers, etc.). Everything we let clients see represents us. Not the cheap, shady, easy, etc. way.
Anything preventing us from achieving the goal of completing projects quickly costs money & time. I never want to catch people doing stupid work that could have been systematized. If you catch yourself doing things that you could feel could be rolled into a process or automated, bring them up to the team right away.
Call tenants instantly if there is a serious concern or problem. When the tenant has a frustration or concern, go as deep and personal as possible. It may feel tempting to want to avoid them and keep your distance via email, especially if they are upset, but the fastest and best communication is to get as personal as possible. Also, they tend to let go of the anger and bravado when you approach them from a space of helpfulness & personableness.
Get permission from clients, be sure their permission is documented as an approval anytime there is a decision to be made by the client, before commencing work or taking next steps. This prevents additional revisions and assures we can get paid for our time to make additional changes. Be sure that approvals clarify that by making this choice what that means: such as additional costs for revisions, once work has commenced, etc.
Look for the solution that benefits us, the client, and their customers.