2019 Multifamily Innovation Digital Magazine
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(and yourself) is that the “win” is<br />
the generation of ideas - the risk of<br />
planting and implementing. Even<br />
if an idea bombs, the team has to<br />
know that you are proud of them<br />
for taking an intelligent risk to<br />
begin with. The “win” is figuring<br />
out why something didn’t work,<br />
changing the approach, and either<br />
trying again OR abandoning it on<br />
the compost heap. Celebrating and<br />
rewarding failures equally to successes<br />
is critical because it breeds<br />
a culture of intelligent risk-taking<br />
and doing so will cause the innovation<br />
cycle to accelerate. It creates<br />
confident team members.<br />
Tending to the garden. Admittedly,<br />
my real garden at home is not<br />
nearly as productive as the garden<br />
of innovation at work. The reason?<br />
I don’t tend it as carefully. It needs<br />
weeding, watering, fertilizer, protection<br />
from animals. Ironically,<br />
the office “garden” gets far more<br />
attention and, as a result, yields<br />
more. Same with yours. Communicating<br />
clearly that new ideas are<br />
not just welcomed but expected<br />
from everyone: porters, maintenance<br />
leads, leasing, property<br />
managers - even vendors! It feeds<br />
creativity because they feel as if<br />
they are contributing to the success<br />
of the company. Even if you<br />
cannot use an idea in its entirety,<br />
use a part of an idea and then<br />
broadcast praise for the contributor.<br />
It’s like the sun and plant food<br />
- your yield of submitted innovations<br />
will multiply and it crowds<br />
out the naysayers - the weeds.<br />
What will all this yield? Start with<br />
question number one that the ten<br />
of us faced. The lagging properties<br />
with which we were struggling<br />
turned around promptly because a<br />
couple of ideas that we garnered<br />
from an auto show (of all places)<br />
helped us create a marketing campaign<br />
that got attention. Moreover,<br />
some service ideas we got from<br />
the hotel industry really improved<br />
our maintenance response times.<br />
This improved our resident happiness<br />
and by extension, our lease<br />
terms. This dropped turn costs<br />
and improved NOI. The seeds of<br />
innovation produced some amazing<br />
crops.<br />
Get planting.<br />
Patrick Morin is a partner with Transact<br />
Capital Partners, an investment banking firm<br />
that specializes in mergers and acquisitions<br />
in the multifamily, technology, logistics, and<br />
staffing industries.<br />
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