Believe it or not, a lot!  Steven explains in the essay below:

 

 

 

 

In general, there are many skills and work experiences that that are transferable from one industry to another.  Even more so when you work for a small business because you typically wear many hats.  For example, most businessess need accounting, HR, taxes, marketing, etc.  There were mornings when I did book work, (and of course gave myself the CFO title for those few hours), and in the afternoon I was CJO (chief janitorial officer).  Get the picture?

 

But more specifically, my product development background taught me that anything can be "productized".  OK,   maybe there are some exceptions, but go with me on this for now.  Whether it is developing and managing financial products, insurance products, or real estate products, there are similar steps required to figure out what works (corporate geeks, think of it as "best practices"), document it, and package it, and voila!  You now have productized your service.  Now you can more easily replicate it.  

 

That is why I liked the software business.  I call it the "Invest once, and sell many times" model.  This seems obvious when talking about software, but real esate is kind of similar.  Typically, we "invest once" when we purchase a property and sell "many times" when we rent it out from year to year.  Sure, there are some ongoing expenses, but it's not like say, building and selling cars, where there is a big expense for every car you build and sell.  For the accoutants out there, think of our model as having a nearly zero COGS.

 

I'm not saying that everything from the corporate world makes sense, or can be transferred to a small real estate investment business.  I'll be the first to make fun of corporate cliches, but I feel that I can get the best of both worlds.  For example, Big Time Inc. customer service associates have to strictly follow the corporate SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures).  If they don't, they will be written up and possibly fired even if they took some initiative that was benefitial, but did not follow the SOPs.  In our business, we do have procedures to follow, for say, approving a rental application.  But, they are more like guidelines versus a strict mandate.  You probably can't go wrong if you use them, but if a situation comes up where it makes sense to approve someone, our managers can do so even if it does not strictly meet our guidelines.

 

Lastly, many products I developed in the past have found its way into our real estate business either directly or conceptually.  We are currently working on accepting payments based on a high level goal I was given when I was the product manager for a bill payment service years ago  -  

...... the ability to make payments at any time, from anywhere, with any device.  

 

So hopefully 'The checks in the mail' will be a thing of the past!

 

Many other examples, although I don't want to publicize them here.  But I like to talk!  So if you want to know more, just give me a call.