August 27, 2006
So you think you know something about management?
That was to get your attention. I'm really hoping to find a few people who really do know a few things about management...to take over this blog. In order to be effective, a blog should have new posts every few days. I just haven't found the time to do that. Also, I haven't managed associations for a while now, so it would make more sense to have people writing it who are on the front lines every day. If you have some thoughts you'd like to share about the industry, the clients, the trade associations, the governments, here's a soapbox to stand on.
If you would like to give it a shot (the mechanics are very easy), just contact me at webmaster@communityasociations.net
Posted by joewest at 12:30 PM
August 18, 2006
Your Company Was On the News - Huh?
Now and then I send notes to companies noting that their company or personal name had shown up in the news feeds. They are often surprised that I'm reading about it before they are and ask how I do it. Well, it's relatively easy and anyone who owns a company should be doing it. Its always nice to know when you, your company or your clients show up on, or in the news.
E-mail to you:
Go to www.google.com. In the search box, type in the name of your company. When the results come up, click on "News" at the top of the page. When that page comes up, look in the left column for "News Alert" and then follow the instructions. This will send you an e-mail whenever those words you typed into the search box appear in the news. To keep from receiving e-mails with a bunch of similar stuff, go back to the start and put quotes " " around your words. Then it will only pick up those words when they are together in the same order. You can create news alerts for your own name, variations of your company name and client names. You will then receive an e-mail whenever they appear in a news source around the country. Although Google will catch most of the news items, you can do something similar with Yahoo and MSN, ic you want to cover the spectrum.
RSS News Feed
If you have RSS News Feeds coming to your computer or internet browser, this will provide you with the same information, but won't overload your e-mail in-box. Start with Google, and follow the same instructions up to "News Alert". Instead select "RSS" or "Atom" based on the format your news reader uses. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 (now in Beta 3) have built in capabilities to handle news feeds, allowing you to organize them into groups, to set how many will be stored, and how long before they're deleted.
Don't be the last to know that you have an angry owner at a client association. Its your company and its good name. Keep track of how its being used.
Posted by joewest at 11:33 AM
August 1, 2006
How I Turned Into Donald Duck
I live in suburbia, in a small tri-level in a basically inactive homeowner association. I bought the house as a "fixer-upper" and spent the first summer gutting it and trying to put it back together. I know this house inside and out, having crawled, hammered, wired, plumbed and painted my way around most of it. There is a large creek across the street from my house and a woods nearby, so various critters make their way up and down the creek. Over the years, many have looked on my house as sort of an informal bed and breakfast, or inn along their journey. Right now I have a family of rabbits living alongside at least four bird's nest in the large pines in front of my house. A skunk makes a nightly trip by my lower level windows to see if anything good is on TV. Fortunately, there rarely is, so he continues his travels, leaving only a sight, pungent reminder of his sojourn.
A few years ago, I heard some noises in the attic, and when I popped my head up into it to look around, I found myself facing a rather large, protective mother raccoon, that had decided my attic made a perfect nursery for her new family. It took about two weeks to catch her and move her family to a more rustic setting. But I had not seen where she was getting in and out of my house. It got to the point that I seriously considered changing the locks on the doors, just to make sure. I didn't, of course, and two weeks later a larger and meaner raccoon moved into the now empty nest. This one was much cagier and it took almost a month to lure him into the trap and pay his relocation expenses. But, I had discovered the entrance. They were pushing the vents in my soffits up and climbing in, and then, apparently neatly returning them to their place so as to keep me in the dark. Worse, the roofers I called informed me that the only way I could seal this would be to lift the entire roof section, in order to get to the doorway they were using and close it, and that it would cost me about $1,500. My roof was only a year-old and I figured I could find another way that would be much cheaper. I thought about it, and then in my normal "Tim the Toolman" fashion, jammed some wood up in the area and nailed it in place. Looks terrible, but it did the job. Humans 2 racoons 0.
Peace reigned for the next few years. Oh, the rabbits ate up some of my flowers and the birds crapped all over my deck, but hey, this is suburbia, you expect some annoyances. Things were so quiet I turned my attention to helping out my mother who was battling squirrels over possession rights to certain bird feeders she like to have around her house. 4 years and 18 "squirrel-proof" bird feeders later, I think we're start to actually make the squirrels work for their snack.
Then, "IT" arrived. I call it "Chippendale", not after the dancers, but the Disney characters. A cute little chipmunk began visiting my home two years ago. I would see him sitting out on the lawn chair on my deck, taking a break from whatever it is chipmunks normallly do, or running around the yard. Cute. HAH! He was just reconnoitering.
I started hearing noises in the attic again. But these were very faint, not the scratching around of a raccoon. I once again cautiously popped my head up into the attice and seeing nothing began to look around. Nothing. This continued on throughout the first winter of my discontent. Noise, inspection, nothing. Spring came and it continued. The one summer day I was working outside and had the garage door up. On one of my trips in, I noticed the chipmunk sitting on my porch near the garage door. I was surprised at how close it would let me come. Then I noticed, in a small crack, between the garage wall and the concrete floor, just inside of where the door closed, a nut, jammed into the tiniest of cracks. Eureka. Human intelligence was able to determine that the noises came from the chipmunk and the nut was now blocking his doorway to my (and his) comfortable home. In the few seconds it took me to tell my wife about my Sherlock Holmes moment, the chipmunk got the nut into the hole and disappeared. The battle had begun and my transition into Donald Duck took its first waddling steps.
Traps had worked for the raccoons and traps would work for the chipmunk. Humane traps, of course. I'm an urban creature. I might run over it, but deliberately setting out to kill it, when I had no plans on eating it, was not my style. In any event, all the traps did was provide him with a steady and reliable source of food.
We worked out a routine. In the morning, I would raise the garage door, and back my car out. As the door was closing, he would pop out and head off to whatever day job he held. At night, when I raised the garage door to pull in, he would scurry back in for the night. I was still trying to keep him out, by blocking the hole with various objects, but he managed to get through them all. Then this summer I decided to get serious, I patiently waited until I saw him outside, and then quickly mixed up some fast-setting concrete and filled in the hole. I set paint cans on top to allow it dry before he could start digging. Twenty-four hours later, I removed the paint cans. Twenty-four more hours and a new hole had magically appeared in the concrete. I hadn't even heard the jackhammer he must have used, or maybe he had found an unexploded firecracker that my neighbor's kid had left laying around and blew open the hole. I started muttering to myself.
I waited impatiently to again catch him outside. And eventually I did. Quickly I used an entire bag of concrete, jamming it down the hole until no more would go and then building it up around the entrance, like a small fortress. This time I waited 48 hours before removing the protective cover that allowed the concrete to set. I hit it with a hammer---solid! It looked like hell, and I'd have to remove most of it if I ever hoped to sell this house one day (along with the wood shoved up in the roof), but he wasn't going to get in that hole ever again. And he didn't. Instead, he created a whole new door, right through the drywall in the garage, and 10 inches from his old door. And I lost it. If you remember the old Donald Duck/Chip 'n' Dale cartoons, there always came a point where Donald would completely loose it, jumping up and down and quacking something unitelligible. That was me.
But wait, he just ran past the garage door, he's not in his home. Quickly gathering everything that had accumulated in my garage over the years, I nailed, screwed and glued 2"x4"'s over his new hole. But he's tricky, so a 4' x 8' sheet of plywood was nailed, screwed and glued on the adjacent wall. Not enough. Sheet metal, that'll do it. Cover the wood in case he has a power saw or drill. (Thinking ahead, I moved my power tools to the top shelf of the tool area, you can't be too careful). What else? I tell my wife to guard the garage while I run to the hardware store. She gives me the look she normally reserves for people who drive too slowly in the left lane. I don't care. At the hardware store I buy every kind of animal repellant they sell, each guaranteed to keep some type of animal away from wherever you put it. A roll of steel mesh (let him chew through that), and some silicone spray (might make things too slippery for him to climb over). An hour later and I proudly inspected my work. My garage now smelled like a barnyard (the house did too for the next week), and what I had built now jutted into the garage so far I'm not sure we can still get two cars in it. But the payoff came the next day.
As I came home from work and pulled into the driveway. I could see my little adversary sitting on the sidewalk next to the garage. I stopped the car and got out and faced him. He stood up on his little hind legs and for the next two minutes cursed me up one side and down the other. Yes I know, I don't speak chipmunk, but some things you just intuitively grasp. I know he challenged my background, my parent's marriage state, my physical attributes and I swear, even though no one has believed me, that he extended the middle digit of his paw at me. I took a step toward him (no flips me the bird and gets away with it), but he ran down the sidewalk and stopped, turned around and continued his venting. I grabbed the shovel out of the garage and chased him around the outside of my house turning into Donald Duck again...one lap and I was panting. I parked the car and closed the garage door.
I haven't seen him around for over two weeks, no new holes in the concrete, wood or drywall. The house still smells, but some things you just have to pay the price for. Wonderful peace!
I heard a noise in the attic today.......
Posted by joewest at 8:59 AM
June 27, 2006
Improving the service
I was in California this past week, some business, some time off. I stopped by CAI's CEOMC (Chief Executive Officers of Management Companies) conference to say hi to a few friends that I hadn't seen in a while. Cynics would immediately jump to the conclusion that the meeting was to exchange the best ways to gouge associaitons and owners, but it wasn't and never has been. Usually its about ways to improve the delivery of services.
Whenever I've seen groups of managers talking, whether CEO's or those on the front line, the exchanges of information usually has to do with problem-solving and doing a better job. Yeah, there are always a few horror stories shared, but they're mostly to let the others know that you've paid your dues and put in your time.
This is still too new an industry to have thngs carved in stone, so part of the meetings always deal with what' new and what's working. The one constant of every meeting is finding good people to be managers. This is a major growth industry, with a majority of all new housing being a part of some type of association. We've talked about this in a prior blog and there still isn't a good way to bring people who will make good managers, into the industry.
Anyhow, it was good to see friends, but it was also good to see so many new faces, working to find better ways to deliver better services to their clients. Comments from the attendees were generally favorable, indicating they would be taking some good ideas home to implement. Monitoring the rant sites show many complaints against boards, but relatively few against management companies. Maybe they are doing something right.
Posted by joewest at 11:19 PM
June 18, 2006
A failure to educate, convince or communicate
Its a simple issue -- most managers who have had any education in community associations, know what the board and owners need to do in order for them to have a successful, stable and content community. But there seems to be a huge failure in taking that knowledge and getting it across to those parties in a way that actually has the desired happy ending. How many of you have consistently encountered the following:
You've developed the annual budget that call for X increase, and the board decides that X won't fly with the owners and so you get caught short or skimp on something to make it fit with the board's expectations rather than reality
You convince the board to spend the money to have a real reserve study done, only to see them ignore or undercut the funding recommendations.
A problem comes up and you recommend bringing in an outside expert to help solve it. The board just sits there looking at you and you know they're thinking "What are we paying you for?"
You see friction occuring between owners and the board and you recommend that they build a web site and get more news out to the owners to help explain what's going on. The board sends out a one-page note that causes more problems than it solves, but it was cheaper and easier.
The bids for a project come in and you recommend contractor A. The board picks B simply because they're cheaper and its your job to make sure they do the project right.
The list could go on and on. And the reasons they ignore you are just as plentiful as the problems. You spend an entire year working to get the board to do what's right, not just expedient or cheap, and then, for all your efforts, you get a new board, and have to start all over again.
Some companies hold classes for their new board members, but they can't force them to attend and so, someone always misses the message. Management contracts rarely hold the board to any standard, so when they screw up, you have to live with the consequences.
I think what is missing is a universal set of standards for boards of directors. Not in vague, general language ("The board shall do what is best for the association"), but setting specific standards that they can be measured against (The board shall select the contractor that meets the following criteria-----"). That means processes, checklists and an agreement defining the quality level expected and the willingness to pay for it.
This industry has spent a lot of time and expense developing standards for managers. Its time to take it to the next level and create similar ones for the decision-makers.
Posted by joewest at 10:47 PM
May 25, 2006
Getting Older
This seems to be a week for dealing with age issues. My 83 year-old mother-in-law passed away, my 79 year-old mother came to visit, the results of my annual physical came in (we won't talk about that, but I'm showing and feeling my age), and AARP put out a report that says that seniors are at a greater risk in a disaster. I'm sure you remember the tour boat full of seniors that tipped over in NY a short while back and the problems they had trying to survive. Getting older isn't for the faint-of-heart.
My mother-in-law would tell me that every day she had to deal with a new, unknown version of herself, because she didn't know what part of her body or mind would be working on all cylinders or stalled. I'm learning that this is the norm, not the exception for our elderly. And now, the largest segment of our population is entering into their "golden years". What does that mean for you?
It means that those of you who manage outside of Florida and Sun City (who are already dealing with this) are going to have to figure out how to deal with it on an ongoing basis. My wife has lectured at a few condo conferences about what it means and what can be done, and I'd like to add a few thoughts to what she has talked about.
A long time ago when I was a manager, I was called on to deal with a woman who was showing advancing dementia. In three separate visits I tried to find something with a next-of-kin name or phone number, with no luck. Social Services wasn't nearly as active back then as they are now, and offered no real help. I finally found a prescription bottle with a doctor's name on it and contacted him. Things got better from there. The point is that most managers usually only have name to notify in case of emergency or to unlock a door if the owner is away. Should you be collecting additional information, such as family names & numbers, medical contacts and such. Do you need to know if they have an advanced medical directive? Do you have any responsibility, legal or moral, to provide any additional assistance they may require, simply because they live in an asociation you manage? Can you, or should you treat them as you would any other younger owner? Are your associations physically "senior-friendly", with railings on steps, large easy-to-read signs, paths and sidewalks free of obstructions or cracks, etc. Do your associations have any sort of social group that regularly check on seniors? As a manager, do you have available a list of critical contacts for each of your associations, social services, medical, financial counseling, etc. Should you be doing any of these things?
I guess what I'm saying is that its probably worth a staff meeting, or discussion with the board, about coming up with some ideas on how your company and your clients, want to deal with these issues. They're only going to become more commonplace in the future. Besides, I may be moving into one of your condo's soon, and I know I'm going to need help.
Posted by joewest at 2:59 PM
April 28, 2006
Falling through the cracks
Associations change managers or management companies for a variety of reasons. But most of those reasons come down to simply things not getting done the way the board or the owners expect them to. Whether its perception or reality, things are falling through the cracks. The manager may be overloaded, or the board is communicating very well, or there was just more work there than was expected, whatever the reason, it leads to dissatisfaction, and if not corrected, replacement.
Correcting this is important to both parties. For the manager its a job and income. For the board, it means a transition and new learning curve which upsets the process and creates more work for them. So how do you avoid it?
Why do things fall through the cracks? One reason may be personal and another process. Avoidance and systems. Avoidance occurs when one of the items a manager is supposed to accomplish is either personally distasteful, i.e. dealing with an angry owner, or outside of their skills. In both cases, find some help. You may think that your co-workers or supervisor might think less of you because of your seeking help, but that won't come close to what they will think of you if the problem ends up in someone else's lap or creates more problems. It takes practice and time to learn to deal with all of the various issues a manager will face, but that learning will be a lot faster and easier if you can find others to help you work through it. If you're just avoiding it because you know its going to be unpleasant, then you have two choices: Learn to deal with it or find another line of work, because you're always going to bump into unpleasant situations. This is the time to use the manager's network and get some insight into the best ways to deal with the issue. Don't put it off.
Sometimes the problem is the process, or system you use to keep track of things. There are four basic components to a good system to handle tasks: 1) Confirming the task; 2) Scheduling the task; 3) Keeping tabs on it; and 4) Reporting on the task. There may be computer programs out there that can do this, but chances are you don't have it, so let's just look at a simple method:
At the end of every board meeting, or as a result of a phone call, e-mail or talk, you will have a list of tasks the board wants you to perfom. Confirm it back to them. Send the board an action item list and confirm through e-mail or note any item given to you through some other method. Basically say, "Here is what I believe you want me to do, and here is my schedule for doing it." This is also your CYA memo.
Now, punch this into Outlooks Tasks or Calendar, or put it on you daily "to-do" list, but find something that reminds you constantly of the items you have to do and the schedule you promised. I use Outlook's Calendar and Tasks and set reminders to pop up in my face well in advance of when the project is due. Simple, but effective for me. It doesn't get deleted until its done. Use whatever you have to, but keep these items in your face.
Use the same method to report on the completion or status of an item that you used to confirm it. At the next board meeting have your "Action Item" or "To-do" list as part of your report, along with any of the items that were added in between meetings. Make sure the board understands the reason any item wasn't completed and agrees with a new completion time frame. Keep it on the list until done.
A manager handles so many different items that its easy to lose track of some things if you don't find a way to keep them from falling through the cracks. Find what works for you.
Posted by joewest at 11:38 AM
