The New Account
By Julie Adamen

Whether you are new to the business or an experienced manager, you have, or have had, a new account. Maybe it’s new (meaning developer new), or maybe it’s new to your company, or you have recently become the on site manager of a property, new or old. The principles of managing a new property are pretty much the same. Below are just few of the challenges you will face, and some suggestions for dealing with them.

Speak with the Board President. If you haven’t been introduced, or only perfunctorily introduced, speak with the Board President. He or she may give you valuable insight in to the board’s and the owner’s perceptions of what has, or has not, gone on. For those working for management firms, this may be painful and can be embarrassing, especially if you work for the same company as the last manager (and the manager before that…). In this case, a lot of crummy things might be said about your firm.  Resist the urge to go on the defensive (or worse, to agree). Maintain professional impartiality, and when remarks are made be attentive yet non-committal - you look worse “dissing” the last manager or your firm than the Board does in complaining about them. Respond in a positive, “let’s move forward” fashion.

If you are meeting with the Board as a whole, be careful to observe all the inner board communication --- verbal and non verbal. How are they positioned? Who talks? Who simmers? Who looks at the floor? Who do they defer to? Who’s the gadfly? Crucially, who and how many are engineers or retired military? It will also give you valuable insight in to the inner machinations of the politics that will become your life, especially if you are an on site manager.  Pay attention to what is said, and sometimes more importantly, what isn’t said.

Dealing with the paperwork – hard copies and electronic. Chances are paperwork is a disaster. Where to start? Evaluate and Prioritize! This is no small task, as this includes evaluating everything from the association files to the piles of paper left in boxes, on file cabinets, your in and out box, diskettes, email, CDs and the hard drive. Take care of potential liability issues first,  such as insurance issues, tax returns, overdue invoices, and legal papers.

Once you have taken care of liability issues, move to the next phase (contracts insurance dec. sheet, recent correspondence (that most likely hasn’t been answered), contractor list, the ageing, the owner list.  If you have employees for whom you are responsible, where are their files? Performance evaluations? Job descriptions? Do not expect to have this entire task accomplished in a short amount of time – it may take a month or two to see everything.

Homeowners: Perform pre-emptive strikes on the squeakiest wheels.  If you haven’t been told by the board who your “problem children” are, you’ll figure it out through contractors, employees or by looking at the last week’s phone messages. Don’t wait –  you contact them. Sounds odd, but contacting your squeaky wheels first opens a line of communication you can bet they feel wasn’t there in the past. You appear empathetic, and that is 50% of the battle. The good news is, you may be able to deal with the issue fairly easily! Phone calls or visits to your office by your problem children will decrease because you are viewed as a problem solver. You have managed their problems, and your time, effectively by dealing with them up front. 

Resist the urge to implement immediate change. If you are a competent, Type A manager, this is a very hard thing to do but can be crucial in your longevity with the association – especially if you are an on site manager. Do not propose or implement sweeping changes in policy during the first thirty days you manage an account.  It is very important to observe the association as a whole going through its paces for a period of time. Why? Because even though you may see immediately what the problems are and know how to fix them, you don’t know how to fix them in the context of their community politics.

There are many people (homeowners, board members, contractors, employees) who were there before you and most likely will be there long after you are gone. They were doing just fine, thank you, without your professional butt-insky ideas.  Implementing changes that directly affect them without giving them the courtesy of observing their practices, will only send them the message that what they have been doing is wrong or unimportant. By instituting a waiting period and getting to know the machinations of the association, you will not only appear to respect what has been done in the past, but you may see more clearly how to effectively implement the changes you know must be made.

When you take over an account that has been neglected, you can manage them effectively and immediately by getting a handle on the politics, taking care of crucial paperwork issues (and deferring others), handling your problem owners up front and pro-actively – and resisting the urge to make sweeping changes overnight.   Realize that it is not your job to “fix them” right away – indeed, they may be unfixable. You job is to get them out of the ditch and on the road again. Whether they stay there or not is another story.