A business owner we’ll call Gus started his own real estate management firm after spending a decade working for others. Gus just knew he could do a better job of taking care of customers’ problems—aka pain points. To this point, Forbes explains addressing client pain points is at the heart of every business. But after running his own for ten years and scaling operations to manage dozens of high-profile commercial properties in southern California, Gus hit a wall. Put simply, he realized his company had its own pain points.
What didn’t he know until working with my organization, Louder Co? That AI was the key to applying ancient advice: “Physician, heal thyself.”
But first, like most business leaders, Gus focused most of his energy on solving the external problems of his clients, not on the internal pain points plaguing his organization. There are a few reasons why he wasn’t overly worried. At least not at first. For starters, his company was successful and growing. Second, none of the challenges were so severe he considered them “fires” needing to be put out. Despite these mitigating factors, it became clearer Gus did in fact suffer from several pain points. These held him back from even greater successes.
As a real estate expert, Gus knew the best time to manage fire hazards is before your assets start burning down. He soon noticed a pattern to those things keeping him up at night. Also, he realized how dwelling on certain work tasks in the mornings made him want to avoid the office. Now, not wanting to go to work may be common for some office drone trapped in dead-end job drudgery, but not for Gus. Once upon a time, he loved what he did. To ensure he wasn’t experiencing some mid-career crisis, he consulted his most trusted employees. To a person, they all reflected similar negative feelings. Like Gus, they were fast approaching burnout.
It was time to fix his company’s weak points before things worsened.
Inc. Magazine explains four types of pain points are common to the business world. The first is cost, also the easiest to understand. This begs the question: Is there a cheaper way to accomplish a task effectively? The second is productivity: Are employees spending time on busy work that hurts morale instead of highly productive tasks, resulting in happy workers? Third is ease of process: Is a business task more complex than it ought to be? The fourth is availability of assistance: Can employees get help on tasks when necessary?
As we’ll soon see, Gus’s internal pain point touched on all of these issues, but primarily it was a matter of productivity. A byproduct of rapid organizational growth. You see, each commercial building contained many clients with leases varying wildly from unit to unit. Gus’ company lacked a cohesive system for quickly finding exact lease provisions. (These tended to get lost in a sea of other leases from the same building and those in the same city.)
As expected, this quagmire produced multiple negative impacts affecting performance. Gus’ best employees usually spent the better part of their day resolving thorny questions instead of more productive work, like meeting with potential clients. Worse yet, such a disorganized approach to data management created considerable risk for the whole organization.
To Gus’ horror, his company faced non-compliance issues. That’s because employees found creative ways to cut through all the red tape. Example: Some built unofficial excel spreadsheets to quickly retrieve lease provisions. A poor business practice, the information could easily grow out of date. It could also be exposed to competitors via shoddy security practices. More, the staff relied on the knowledge of key employees to resolve tricky lease issues. Should one of those subject matter experts suddenly quit, Gus’ other workers would be in deep trouble. Not to mention, him.
Thankfully, like millions of other business owners, Gus recently learned about AI thanks to the ChatGPT craze, He soon came to Louder Co. with a simple question: “Can AI help me turn so much chaos into order?” Our answer was a resounding yes.
Utilized properly, AI can solve most pain points. By working closely with Gus and his senior staff, my team and I determined the heart of the problem concerned unproductive work no one enjoyed doing. This drudgery involved pulling the correct lease, searching carefully for applicable provisions, and providing answers to stakeholders, ensuring all parties complied with the lease.
On its face, this is not a good task for ChatGPT and similar AI products. But these represent only the tip of the AI iceberg. Louder Co. works with the entire universe of AI platforms and service providers. In effect, we possess a huge arsenal of solutions designed to resolve very specific pain points.
Through documenting Gus’ business practices, Louder Co. determined ThoughtTrace would be the ideal tool to right his ship’s course. Designed to make real estate management companies more intelligent, the results were staggering. After a few short weeks of implementation and training with our team, Gus’ people could pull up multiple documents and use contextual search to find answers to complicated questions. Not in days or hours. But in mere minutes. Tasks that once required mind-numbing analysis, not to mention, playing telephone with stakeholders suddenly weren’t so painful.
Even better? Gus and his senior employees didn’t wake up dreading going to work anymore. Instead, they looked forward to productive days knowing their time would be spent advancing the company’s place in the real estate industry. The change in mood was undeniable. After just six months, Gus reported back his ROI is now “off the scales.”
As Gus’ story shows, AI can revolutionize your business. It can execute the tasks that you (and your most capable employees) hate to spend time on. But just as your customers are most successful when they work with you, finding success with AI is a matter of choosing the right platform to suit your organization. As this recent Forbes profile attests, my team and I specialize in helping you select the right AI tool and onboard it for unprecedented organizational success. Contact Louder Co. today to learn how we can make your pain points vanish. And make work fun again.