Building a great company presents many challenges. As companies grow, the primary focus is serving clients at any cost. Business owners typically don’t think about the impact of their operational choices until it becomes too late. Sometimes they need expert lease consulting services.
As businesses continue to expand, operations get more complex. More people are involved with differing skill levels. But important items start falling through the cracks. Opportunities get missed. Replacing people who leave becomes harder as operational knowledge are locked in the minds of those who left. It is difficult enough to hire the right person, getting them up to speed on your clients, and all the systems and processes you use to serve those clients.
After working with a wide variety of clients, we’ve discovered what some clients do right, and others get wrong. And we realized that the companies who are best set up for success do the little things right. Everything from system design to documenting project context is well thought out. But most companies are a complicated mess of just getting by. Even if they want to improve, they don’t know the first thing about how to get started. Especially with so little time and resources.
At Grant & Lewis, our team has created highly defined consulting products to help companies like yours get started with expert lease administration. We start from the very basics of system design and work our way to more complex issues like recovery settings audit, making sure each step is aligned with the development plan. Implementing these products is a great way to imbed operational knowledge into your systems and processes, which makes it easier to train new people and scale up as your company grows. With the little things done right, your team will have much more time to focus on serving your clients and growing your company.
It’s not rocket science. Companies with the best information win over the long haul. Having the best information means the best and more efficient systems and processes that support decision making. Poor business processes on the other hand cost money. Not only is key information late, but it is often incomplete or inaccurate. Bad information results in bad decisions. Getting information late means missed opportunities.
Defining processes can be difficult because it means thinking through every detail. That means answering really hard questions about how many things should work. And knowing those answers is crucial for you to be successful in the long run. Imagine what you could accomplish by getting fast and accurate information 24/7!
Operating effectively means doing the right things exceedingly well. When companies aren’t effective, important things slip through the cracks. Simple things like rent bumps and cap adjustments get missed. Expenses to be reimbursed by tenants are not billed in a timely manner, if at all. Exclusive uses are missed resulting in tough calls with prospective tenants putting new leases at risk. Having to constantly think through every potential detail without trusting internal information or processes is incredibly taxing.
Highly defined processes can help you do the right things better. Having thought through each detail of the process and the information that will ultimately be produced will give you confidence in the way you make decisions. You won’t have to worry about missing details because your process plan will have explicitly identified how the information will be used and strategies for minimizing potential risks. Operating more effectively means less time sweating the details and more time growing your portfolio.
Onboarding a new employee in commercial real estate presents many time-consuming challenges. New teammates need to learn about all about the projects in a real estate portfolio, the responsibilities of the people involved, and the various systems being used for email, accounting, and document storage. They also need to learn about the many processes involved in managing their real estate portfolio. Few companies bother to put this crucial information on paper. So, it’s no surprise that most companies operate inefficiently. Think about it. How many times has an executive in your own company had to ask how a particular process works?
Taking the time to write this information down is a hard ask. Especially for an organization that has already grown substantially. But not defining key processes means teams are reinventing the wheel each time a process is started. The result is lower performance and a higher risk of making costly mistakes. Intentionally crafting key processes within an organization will help your team operate more efficiently while mitigating the potential for big mistakes.
We have spent years thinking about how to make the lease administration process more effective. Heck, one of the founding members even wrote about applying lean six sigma to the lease administration process for an MBA course, and the professor offered to co-publish as a white paper. Unfortunately, most companies we work with don’t start off with great practices. Most have processes that have developed haphazardly over time. But it’s not their fault. What might work in the beginning on a single property rarely works as your business continues to grow and expand. As the property types become more varied and complex, so do the requirements of creating an efficient process. The companies that have evolved this way wake up one day and cannot figure out how they got to this point. They know they’re in trouble, but don’t know how to create a more efficient and effective process.
This is where Grant & Lewis comes in. Our defined consulting packages were created to meet our clients where they are and to give them an easy path to get started. From the very basics of creating ledger accounts to simplify budgeting and reconciling processes to advanced recovery systems analysis, our consulting team can maximize your organizational output while minimizing risk.
If you already have an expert team, give them the gift of a defined operating process, and spend less time worrying about what you aren’t doing and more time on what you should be doing.
If you know where your biggest need is, we start there. If not, our team will help you evaluate where your biggest opportunities for improvement are. Our initial evaluation starts with a conversation about where your areas of concern are. We then evaluate the systems you use and how you use them. Once the evaluation process is complete, we submit a report with the areas we believe create the biggest opporutnities to improve efficiencies.
Once a path has been identified, we clearly define the engagement and what will be accomplished by the end of the project. We will set a project timeline along with key milestones and regular check-ins to make sure the project can evolve to overcome any obstacles along the way. After the plan is approved, we get to work executing the plan.
The best part of the consulting process is helping our clients implement the final deliverable. Depending on the type of engagement, sometimes this will mean reviewing the coding plan with the team. In other cases, it might mean making changes to the software currently being used to calculate reconciliations. In any case, our primary goal is making sure each engagement results in actionable step. Following implementation, our team stays engaged to support and answer any questions your team has as the new processes are adopted.
.png)
Let’s find out if we’re a great fit. Schedule a no-obligation consultation to learn how we can provide best-in-class lease administration, and enhance your real estate portfolio.
