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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.