While some may argue, social media and blogging are not measurable revenue generating activities. They build brand, create awareness and promote you/your services but they do not actively create purchasing opportunities in and of themselves. Yes, I’m aware there are exceptions but these are fairly rare and uncommon – you likely don’t fall into the…
#CRE Videos – doing video right is hard.
Video is something that everyone is trying to do. But in CRE too many fall back on bad, cliched ideas with poor execution. How many times can we watch the video of the star executive making the pitch on why you should choose them? If I wanted that, I’d invite you to visit me in…
The Supply Chain Trinity – Space, Labor, Capital.
If you are doing any work in a supply chain (or element of a supply chain) these are the three areas you must focus on. These are the three building blocks of all functions within everything. Want to put in automated sorting? You are getting less space and labor at the trade-off of more capital….
On finding inspiration for what to write.
I can’t believe that we’re a month and a half into the new year. Not sure where 2014 is going but it’s clearly doing it in a souped up muscle car. Anyway, it’s been a difficult year so far for blog topics (although I have written a handful of longer posts over at medium.com). I…
#CRE Technology doesn’t mean anything by itself.
Let me ask a seemingly simple question: what is CRE Technology? I’ll give you a second to think about that. Is it Lease Administration? Customer Relationship Management? Seat layouts along with assignment of employees to it? Work orders and maintenance requests? CoStar? Demographics and customer analytics? Times up. The answer is that CRE Technology doesn’t…
Retail real estate denial – the elephant in the room.
I couldn’t help but sit and shake my head at the backwards thinking of a new article from CoStar entitled Eking Out E-Retail Rents from E-Commerce. It trots out all of the head-in-the-sand ideas of the future that are currently plaguing the music and movie industries. A few choice highlights from the article: [Lakhmi Mathrani]…
Things that really matter in #CRE.
The transaction – not so much. The impact of the transaction on business operations, yes! Employee commute times – not really. Employee perceptions of the change to their commutes, critical! Workstation layout – eh. Improved morale from the workstation plan, really important! Work from home, already doing it (even if the boss doesn’t know). Corporate…
Keep an open mind with surprise requests.
There are times you will get surprised by requests made by people you know. Sometimes they are difficult to say yes or no to immediately. Sometimes you will have a gut reaction one way or the other. Rarely should you give in to the gut reaction. If someone has given a topic a considerable amount…
It’s a bad week to be a Building Automation company.
So the latest from the Target hack is that the hackers got in through a building automation system. Backdoor security is really important, this emphasizes exactly how important it it. Oh yeah, there’s a whole industry out there around hacking BA systems. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone but it should emphasize how you…
What my day with Time Warner Cable can teach you about customer service.
It all started with a simple statement: I don’t watch all of the channels I currently have and would like to reduce my cable bill. To Time Warner Cable I believe this is an impossible feat. In total I spoke to 7 live customer service agents and 2 agents via chat over a 3 hour…