I had the great opportunity to present at the WorkTech New York 2019 conference last week. It’s one of those great events that are highly focused on how to actually achieve things. The talks are not just theory, it’s how to get things done. The people are not just trying to sell you stuff.
Along that same vein, my presentation was focused on the journey from idea to business as usual with all the mess that comes in between. I enjoyed putting it together quite a bit and figured it would also make a nice set of posts here (seeing as I have been a bit negligent on keeping new stuff coming through).
My thesis can be summarized as Real Estate strategy is hard with progress taking time to demonstrate with opportunities to fail to occur often. Plan for a 5-year roadmap. The steps are pretty straightforward:
- Identify the opportunity that you plan to go after.
- Build a 15-month plan to show first progress (no less).
- Fight to maintain momentum after you can show early success.
- Reach a tipping point that allows you to push for more.
- Turn your program success into the everyday environment.
- Start again.
When I was part of the service provider side of the world, we always said that you never make money on the first contract. It wasn’t until the renewal that you could recover your original investment. Why was that? Because even third parties have to go through the same steps above.
There are no shortcuts. There are no easy roads. There is no cheat code.
Real estate is a hard business. You can achieve a lot on a site by site basis in any given 18-month window. You can even achieve a lot of short-term victories by just holding back the checkbook (or opening it up). But real, fundamental change takes 3, 4, 5 years. And even then there are no guarantees.