On this week’s edition of Whiteboard Wednesday, Andy Welkley makes the final stop on his journey through the Commercial Real Estate Property Management segment. Andy covers how to effectively evaluate and report on the effectiveness of your operations. By using the right tools, you’ll be empowered to measure KPIs, generate dashboards, and make better decisions.
Video Transcription
Andy: Hey, everybody, it’s Andy again. It’s time for another edition of Whiteboard Wednesday. On today’s edition we’re going to talk about how you analyze your business. It’s the sixth Op in our tour through the commercial property management space. We’ve looked at how you take prospects through the lease process to turn them into tenants and ultimately renew them, and we talked about how you manage and control your business. Today, we’re going to talk about how you evaluate all those things. The first thing we’re going to think about is reporting.
You have reports you have to do on regular intervals, whether it’s weekly or monthly, but you also have to respond to ad hoc reports that come up quickly with oftentimes, pretty unreasonable deadlines. How do you manage this process and make that reporting as efficient as easy as possible? We all know that this process can set valuable and productive time from our day. It’s more important to be able to work on our business than in our business. Using those reports to make decisions is far more important than spending a lot of time doing it. You need a tool that allows you the ability to answer those questions and get it that data as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
The next thing we want to talk about along those lines are dashboards. Dashboards are a visual representation of really key things in your business or KPIs that you can use to evaluate the health of your business at any given time. Usually, they’re graphically driven and allow you the opportunity to customize the view for the person that’s accessing them. You also want the ability to be able to drill down into the details of the dashboard so that you can evaluate specific data points or variables to help make those decisions. Finally, if you have a tremendous amount of data, you might want to consider a business intelligence tool or an analytics tool.
With a tool like this, you have the ability to look at long reaching trends in your business or overlay other industry information, or geographical information to help you make better decisions. You can be far more precise when you’re able to cut and slice the data in many different ways from many different perspectives. Identifying those long term trends can really help you make decisions that will impact your business in the short term, but also over several years into the future. The analytics portion of it is really critical, because you want to be able to anticipate those variables that are coming down the pike at you, as you make choices around investments as you make choices around improvements, or even in the way that you pursue tenants.
All of these things help you understand how you’re owning, operating and managing your business and how your tenants are being productive in using your facilities. Really, the goal here is to find the shortest distance between the data and the decision. So thank you for sticking with me. I think it’s been a marathon. This last one’s been a sprint. This has been Whiteboard Wednesday as we looked at the commercial property management space. Thanks very much.
