So, we’ve purchased a new apartment complex in Jacksonville, AR. It’s 46 units and is currently full (no discounts given to facebook-friends). It should be a good deal. I’m 100% confident that we bought it at a great price, the cash flow projections look good, the management is solid, and the occupancy rate is high.

We’re doing a good job at aligning our properties such that they are relatively close, the management is getting better as screening tenants, contractors are more understanding of our terms, and most of the properties have similar goals.

With any organization there is a “culture” that everyone buys into… that includes the owners, contactors, employees, management and even the tenants/customers. If you can’t get everyone to buy into the culture, you either have to change the culture or change the people.

The guys at the top typically define the culture… the guys at the bottom have to buy into the culture… if you’re at the bottom and you want to change the culture, you get repromanded… thats why turnover is so much higher at the bottom…. thats why you hear of so many employees that “just didn’t work out.”

If you want to change culture, the guys at the top have to change… and I mean they have to be replaced. Changing people is too hard to do.

      

I have a hard time on small stuff. I know… “don’t sweat the small stuff”… But I can’t help it. One that I ran into last week was trying to determine who should do simple data entry that nobody wanted to do. We had two programmers that were equal, paid equal, and had an equal work load.

The difference between a large company and a small company is that in a small company you have to wear many hats. Sometimes its the “visionary” hat and sometimes its the “trash man” hat. Large companies have a trash man set aside for cleaning, small companies have owners that are sick of seeing trash around the office.

The end of the story is this… I did the simple data entry that nobody wanted to do. And although I hated every second of it, I was reminded that sometimes I have to take off my “I have more important stuff to do” hat and wear my “things have to get done” hat.