This week I am not going to highlight a client per se…but rather 2 clients, and the person on the front lines of both.  That person is Tom Figert…and the 2 clients are FirstWorthing and BH Management.

Tom’s commitment to Lupine shows me that we are doing something right.  More on that in a minute.

Tom actually got his start in the Navy doing some sort of top secret thing.  After he completed his service to our country he went to work with Brinks Home Security in their IT department as an analyst working his way up to being a network administrator.  From there Tom moved to FirstWorthing – where our paths crossed for the first time.

From Tom:  “I guess my first exposure to Lupine was at FirstWorthing, shortly after committing to convert from RentRoll to Yardi.  Brian (Wood) commissioned David to shepherd us through that process.  That turned out being a pretty extended stay partly due to Lupine being a small company and they could give us that kind of attention and partly because we were pretty needy.  So we got a lot of good face time with Lupine in the early 2000’s.   It was a success overall.  I mean it was, there were some hiccups in the road like there always are but, when I think back about the experience it was a positive experience and I think that held me in good stead when I went to BH because they were on the cusp of a decision.”

Several years later Tom made the move to BH Management in Dallas…a 3^rd party property management company about double the size of FWC.  They were in a mode of needing to upgrade from an old DOS system to a more dynamic operating environment.  I’ll let Tom tell the story.

“As I understand it they (BH) had been in the decision making process for some time and as important as having the right one, they just wanted one.  So when I came in I had a feeling they were just…my role there was just to get them over the hump.  They had courted the three majors.  It was RealPage, Yardi and MRI and they had gone way too long without making a choice.   Because I had done a Yardi implementation, and they knew I had, so I felt like they really were getting me for that experience.  So the first thing we did was to go back through the cycle.  We had these three vendors – let’s do some analysis and some of the hoop jumping that goes into making that decision.  Again, in retrospect I really feel like everyone had kind of made their mind up on Yardi and were just wanting for someone to crystallize it for them.”

“At that point I called David and said we need to get that same kind of “ship shepherding”.  That same kind of tutelage we had at FirstWorthing we need it at BH because nobody had been through this.  The culture had grown very accustomed to the old DOS RentRoll so there was a need there for that kind of stewardship.”

Our implementation at BH was probably our ‘best’ project in terms of the sheer amount of work we were able to get it done in a short period of time.  Easy? – no.  Acrimonious at times? – yes.  Effective? – absolutely.

I have thought a good bit about this in the past few years…why was this engagement so effective?  Our implementation methodology is so tight and proven that we now pretty much run all of our jobs the same.  The variable is usually the client.  And that’s the answer to my question.

The reason this job went so well is because of Tom Figert.  Here are the things Tom did that made a difference:

He realized that rolling out 100 properties was going to be a training challenge.  He went through the internal process to make sure that BH hired a training director to oversee this process.  He didn’t sub it out to the software vendor and he didn’t give up when the initial answer was ‘no’.

He realized that converting the data for 100 properties was going to be a technology challenge…and he also realized that paying Lupine to do the conversion was not the best use of the implementation budget.  So, he went through the internal process of having a person dedicated to this process during the rollout period.

He let Brian and I do our job.  I think some of this was due to the fact that we had been through the wars together once already and there was a large amount of mutual trust already established.  DW and micro-management does not a good match make.

He managed.  He kept his head, eyes, and ears above water always watching out for potential problem areas.  He allowed his staff to focus on the tasks at hand…because he was able to pull off items 1 and 2 above.  (By the way there is a HUGE lesson here for everybody – not just you IT guys.)

Obviously, I am a huge Figert fan.  He’s one of these guys who understands that there is this and there is that.  We hang out sometimes and he was very helpful in some of his (pointed!) comments while reviewing my book.  On the other hand, I am a service provider to him and he wants his stuff done…right and on time.

One of the nicest things as a consulting firm is to get a call from an old client and have them say that “we need you…”  That’s when you know you are doing something right.