The Last Load

The Last Load...It sounds like I would be talking about compost or mulch that I might be spreading in the garden. Nonetheless it is still a load that should feed some healthy growth. Today I moved the last load of stuff from the downtown office to Little Creek. A year and a half's worth of drawings, reams of paper, some bound uniform standards, a drafting table, chairs, and a few other odds and ends were all there to remind me of how far we have come in a year and a half. People keep telling me that it must be hard to take a step back like this after growing so fast, but I really can't help but think it is a necessary step to keep moving forward so fast.

Just a little over a year ago we were hand drawing our designs, cutting and pasting print from various Microsoft programs and making multiple trips to the printers to get a product we liked only to be thrown away and revised after one meeting. Now we are going straight from cad to online presentations, and getting revisions to our clients in hours when it used to take days. The Management Plans, Uniform Standards and Care guides we used to print and bind dozens of copies of for maybe two people to actually read would then be thrown away and reprinted with revisions. Now they are all now hosted online, and our clients can email us questions from the same page as they go through them. If this isn't growth I don't know what is.

All of this has really allowed us to do what we want to do most and do the best, which is help other people grow at what they do. There was a Broker's event at one of our properties this week, and people who represent all of our clients competition couldn't believe how good the property looked. They all asked who was hired to do the renovation, and speculated to the tens of thousands of dollars it must have taken to do the renovation. In reality the property wasn't renovated at all; they way it is cared for was.

Instead of paying absurd rates to bring in a company from out of town, we effectively have taken what six months ago was a weed eating crew and are turning them into a fine gardening crew. The client provides the materials which we project annually and quarterly. The vendor provides the labor for a lump sum to do the routine maintenance tasks, and we manage a list of to-dos for them to do in between the routine tasks. For the same price that we would pay for a maintenance crew to go their everyday for part of a day, we have full time resources who are making capital improvements that also reduce the amount of time it takes for the routine tasks. This allows us to make renovations without paying for extra crews and change orders to get them done. We are truly growing the people that are growing the place.

Just as I was hauling that last load out of the office today I realized how those guys must have felt yesterday when they were putting down that last load of mulch before the event. Six months ago they were fighting for a pay check, taking orders and being belittled by someone who really knew no more than they did. Today they have formed a legitimate company and are learning skills that will allow them to make a living long after we are gone. Not only are we growing another company for our clients to work with, but we are growing another company that we can use when we take on another client down the road. This isn't about the last load, it is about the first of many.