Lotus West Properties grew fast. They almost doubled their property count in a single year.
With fast growth comes new challenges. They were struggling to keep up with hundreds of new tenants to communicate with, make sure that the team was all on the same page, and help their team spend more time on tenant experience and less on internal coordination and documentation.
How to manage fast growth in the service industry
Lotus saw two main paths to handle growing demand and growing workload
- Hire More People: The best way to help a company grow is through hiring excellent talent, but with low unemployment and getting new employees up to speed, hiring efforts seemed like more of a long term plan
- Technology Improvements: Technology can help get the team in sync and save time for everyone, but with so many products on the market and difficult interfaces it takes a lot of time to evaluate the right product fit for any company looking to upgrade their tech stack
Lotus West decided that the only way to make future employees successful was to implement the best technology they could find and start the process now. The process needed to be perfect before adding more people to the team.
Thatch: the communications solution
The first thing they needed to manage was their tenant communications. In a highly regulated industry like real estate in Los Angeles all communications need to be documented and tracked including outbound mail and received mail. They needed chain of custody reporting for all their incoming rents, documentation for all tenant notices that are required to be mailed, and all that data needed to be searched and tracked in seconds.
“We finally felt that we had a process in place to implement new processes at scale.”
Thatch changed the game. Now all of Lotus' calls, texts, and mail were tracked and accessible to the whole team.
- Combining voice and sms made tenant follow ups much easier. Most systems do not combine phone and text.
- Accessing mailed interactions in the same view provided the team unparalleled insight into how the team can respond to inquiries
- The team leveraged technology to the point that they could wait on hiring the right person instead of the available people
