Building Company Culture
4 Mar 2012 | No Comments | posted by jacobgrant | in Community, Company Information
Last week I went to a property management conference in Las Vegas. My friends at BMG Rentals and I took a break and went to do a tour of Zappos. Zappos is a company that started out selling shoes and eventually many other products. Zappos is famous for there company culture and intense sense of family that they have built around employees, vendors, and customers. I strongly recommend the book “Delivering Happiness,” written by their leader, Tony Hsieh.
The one thing I took away from the book and the company is that every company already has a culture. The questions I asked were, “What is our culture? What are we doing to actively create the culture that we want? Beyond survival, What is our goal?” One of Zappos’ values is to Create “Wow” through service. Their goal is to create WOW with employees, vendors, customers, and anyone else that comes through their door. They created WOW for us by: giving a free tour, providing free transportation to and from the hotel we were at, giving each of us 2 books (culture book and a book of our choice from their “culture library”). Can you say WOW?
Jill, Melanie, Dan and myself joined for a meeting to specifically focus on our company culture. It made sense to me that we would start with a written mission statement. Once we started brainstorming and coming up with words and values it became evident that we were not ready for a mission statement or anything too official. We decided to give some time to search out “Who are we?” and “Where are we going?”
Though we do not know exactly where we are headed, we know we want to learn, and move in that direction with purpose. Each person on our team is going to do one thing next week to improve our culture.
Dan will organize a coffee spot in our office so we can get together once per week to have coffee. Melanie is going to bring some paints and we are going to meet up and personalize our own coffee mugs to be kept at the coffee mug spot. Jill is going to organize and schedule birthday events, and Jake (I) will bring nerf guns for everyone in the office because everyone at some time needs to be put in check 
.
We celebrated after we 1 way each of us could improve our company culture.
As you can see it doesn’t take much to motivate us to be weird (Wyatt, Chad, Jake, Clint, Joe BMG Rentals). Thanks Zappos!
This is their conference room.
Thank you for sharing Zappos! WOW!
Fight Homelessness with The 12 Days of Christmas
13 Dec 2011 | 1 Comment | posted by jacobgrant | in Community
Donate Resources or Cash to Local Homeless Shelter
OOOO The holiday can be so much fun! I don’t know if I am alone in thinking this, but I continually catch myself saying, “That would be fun to do a fundraiser for Christmas,” or “lets donate some money to a good cause,” or “lets do something nice for a family in need.” For me, these often end with good intentions. This year we want to do more than talk!
The Haven is a homeless shelter in Idaho Falls, Idaho. They are part of the the Eastern Idaho Community Action Partnership. There role is to provide shelter for local homeless families. In addition, they encourage independence with therapeutic support programs and GED educatio0n programs. This encourages people to “be self sufficient and be productive members of the community.” You can find more information at http://www.eicap.org.
The Haven is very good about expressing their specific needs. Sometimes they need toilet paper other times shampoo and conditioner and other times toys. Jacob Grant Property Management will be choosing one of those needs and working hard to collect items to meet that need for the residents of “The Haven.” Each day leading up to Christmas we will focus on one item. You can donate items or cash donations are also welcome. Check out their needs. If you would like to make a cash donation click here >>
If you intend on doing something good for the community this holiday season, please move forward with us as we contribute to a great program serving homeless families in Idaho Falls!
PS For every Facebook Like we receive until Christmas, we will donate $1 to The Haven (up to $500). Please join us in fighting homelessness in Idaho Falls.
