As part of Schroeder Management Company’s Asia Pham journey to becoming an Executive CPM, she recently attended the Institute of Real Estate Management Course #BDM603 Building for Tomorrow: Leading a Successful Property Management Company. Some of the topics of discussion included:

• The Making of a Best Practice Real Estate Management Company
• Talent Strategies
• Creating a Leader Development System
• Forward-Thinking Strategies for Business Growth
• Defining an Ethical, Client-Centered organization.

Although there were many takeaways from the course, here were some of Asia’s key notes:

Focus On What Is Truly Important

Many times one can spend a lot of time “in the weeds” taking care of the day to day items or “putting out fires”. The person gets caught up to feel that whatever he/she is doing is urgent, but in reality, it is just a poor job of prioritization. A leader needs to make time each day to focus on what is truly urgent and important and prioritize to use his/her time effectively.

Create A Strategic Plan

To be an effective leader and lead a successful company, a leader needs to create (or lead the team to create) a strategic plan. The strategic plan needs to incorporate an understanding of the company’s: mission, values, vision, goals, key strategies/strategic initiatives, tactical actions and performance measures/benchmarks.
Benjamin Franklin supposedly once said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”

Constantly Evolve Policies

A leader needs to constantly look at the company’s policies and procedures and ask if it has adopted the best practices, or ask if there improvements to be made?

Employees Are Important Assets

A leader realizes that the employees are the most important asset of the company. Therefore, the focus of a leader is to create:
1.)  a company with a good talent strategy in place
2.) an environment that attracts and recruits great employees
3.) an organization where employees want to work and stay to work

Succession Planning for Leader Development

A leader needs to understand the important of succession planning. Succession planning is more than just filling the CEO seat or a few top executives, but it is about planning and strategy for leader development in all positions within the company.

Become Customer Centric

A company’s strategy for the future is about strengthen the brand and becoming customer centric. Strengthen the brand is not only what sets the company apart in how it does business, it is about what others (clients, customers, employees) are saying about the company’s brand. Customer centric is viewing the company’s performance through the customers eyes. The company needs to take the opportunities to listen to the customers (owners/residents/employees) and see how it can make improvements.

Identify Opportunites for Growth

A business plan should be developed to help a company identify opportunities for growth. Without a plan it is hard to accomplish a goal.