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!
New jacobgrant.com is Live
7 Dec 2011 | 1 Comment | posted by jacobgrant | in Company Information, Rental Owner
We have been working on the idea of a new jacobgrant.com for about 3 months now. It has been a lot of work but we finally launched the website this week. The purpose of this post is to give an overview of the website. You will find the website divided in 3 subsections.
- Listing services and information for prospective tenants.
- Services for current tenants.
- Property management services description.
- Login accessibility for current owners
Prospective Tenant Pages
The category rental listings is the entry page for prospective tenants. The listings are updated every 24 hours. The feed is viewed directly out of the website rather than sending them somewhere else. This improves the likelihood that people looking for rentals will find these listings and apply online. The ease of the process makes applying with jacobgrant.com attractive to prospective tenants. We suspect this will improve traffic and therefore reduce vacancy. Another notable item is offering discounts to people with good credit. We want to attract the highest qualified tenants possible to improve profitability for owners.
Tenant Services
Tenant Services pages outline the services for tenants. Excellent customer service means more profitability for owners. Tenants can pay rent online which increases the amount of rent received on time. You will also find a maintenance trouble shooter. In the past, jacobgrant has received maintenance requests for items that don’t warrant a call (ex tripped breaker). These types of items can be very costly. The maintenance FAQ is designed to reduce these types of requests to save owners money. Tenants are required to review the FAQ before making a call. If tenants still need to make a service request they can do it easily online. Tenants can also find lease information, move out information, and other items applicable to their tenancy.
Property Management Services Pages
More management information is available under the property management link. It outlines our services in detail. There is an FAQ section. If you have more questions let us know and we can add it to the FAQ section. You can learn more about all aspects of management services in this section.
Owner Login
Owners can login to see accounting statements. On the home page at the bottom you will see a green arrow that says Owner’s Portal.
As owners of residential rental properties in the Idaho Falls area we understand the slim margins and the importance of continually improving efficiency and delivery to rental owners and tenants to increase profitability.
