Work record / Operating / Village San Juan

Village San Juan: winning a board vote to keep a contract

The board of a 446-unit community could have replaced its maintenance vendor, and I had to earn the vote to keep the contract. I pitched an operating design, not a lower price, and I did it twice.

The seat

I led property operations at Tellus Management on this account. I knew the property from the ground up, because I had worked it as a laborer on weekends and summers until I was twenty-one. The contract came to Tellus Management in 2015, and I ran the account until 2022.

What I was brought in to decide

Village San Juan sits in San Juan Capistrano, California, and has 446 units. It has condominiums and single-family homes around lakes, three pools, walking trails, dog parks and play structures. The same contract also reaches part of the condominium exteriors, fascia and painting. A board of owners governs the community through a third-party management company.

The maintenance and critical-response contract had sat with one vendor for twenty-two years. When it passed to Tellus Management in 2015, I found an operation running on one full-time employee, with no technology. The board rarely heard from its vendor, and the rates were years under market.

What we did

• I pitched the board an operating design and not a lower price, and I made that pitch twice. The board was really deciding three things: who would turn up in person, who would arrive at two in the morning, and how it would learn what it was paying for.
• Capacity came first. I set it up as a full-time lead, seasonal hands and a wider pool of trades. Every other defect I had inherited was the same single point of capacity showing up again.
• I went through the contract file line by line against the market, then rewrote and revalued it. Then I restructured the deal into a monthly retainer, with the annual services broken out on a line of their own.
• I divided the work into two systems, routine and emergency. A maintenance calendar covers predictable wear. A crew kept in reserve covers calls that cannot wait, and its size is set by how quickly a truck can physically get there.
• I put severity windows in writing. Dispatch got a three-question intake rule: Is anyone in danger? Is water or gas flowing? Is a unit uninhabitable? Any yes is top tier, and any doubt moves the call up a tier, never down.
• I reviewed every top-tier call and every missed window. The board went onto a weekly, monthly and annual reporting cadence, and the reserve crew is justified again each year against that year's calls.

Results

• After two pitches the board voted to keep the contract. Tellus Management ran it for seven years, from 2015 to 2022, 2020 included, when the emergency crew and the routine calendar could be adjusted on their own.
• The account ran as an operation priced at market. Project work had its own line, and I had one project lead beside me.
• The board now had a vendor it could read. Every emergency call came back with its tier and response, and every deferred item came with a reason.
• It is the work I am proudest of at Tellus. That is not because it was the largest account. What counted was a design strong enough that the board said yes on the merits.

The lesson

Fix capacity before the contract file, and the contract file before the deal. The order of the fix is the pitch.

Stories from this work

Questions about Village San Juan, answered

Firm record

Common Ground keeps its own account of this engagement: Village San Juan on the Common Ground wiki.

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