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I found myself at the park during the holidays looking back toward the houses on my street. Each house has a characteristic ugly TV antenna rising from the roof line. There is a very steep hill with houses rising up it so in some cases the TV antenna is smack in the middle of the view for the house behind.

That is every house has an antenna on the roof except mine – more about that later.

Development is typically about looking at multiple options for a site to extract the one that will create the most profitable opportunity  Finding the best opportunity requires substantial analysis helped by experience, research and a little bit of thinking outside the box. Many developers by their very entrepreneurial and innovative nature seek to think outside the box, to find the new type of product that will sell out quickly and generate the greatest return on cost.

Yes there is substantial risk with trying something different and the uncertainty of success will simply be too great for many to try. However, for those that do and where the trial and error (hopefully not too much!) leads to something that really takes off the rewards are significant.

Written by two Boston Consulting Group experts in strategic thinking, the book ‘Thinking in New Boxes‘  found its way on my holiday reading list. They look at a number of ways to reframe your inherent biases, to doubt what you think should be and to explore alternative scenarios. This is all with the aim to prepare for and take advantage of prospective future business opportunities. For the strategically minded this book has a comprehensive process for executives leading a company to think differently.

A key part of their process involves ‘divergent’ thinking – that is exploring new ideas without rebuke. The rebuke or critique comes later as the ‘convergence’ phase when you must explore what is fanciful into something realistic.

One simple way to explore new ideas and think ‘divergently’ is to join words both from within your industry and other seemingly unassociated industries together.

For example in development you may chose to select all the different types of buildings and cross reference with concepts  from another industry – say aviation. Or you could choose to cross reference with verbs or types of customers or something completely random.  This will create a list of new linkages – some of which will make no sense but many should prompt different thinking in a slightly new (and hopefully profitable) direction.

From the resulting list you scan for any phrases that sound logical and warrant investigation for their commercial merit.

For example, lets take some word linkages from two basic word lists in real estate and aviation.

List one (Real Estate): Apartment, Office

List two (Aviation): Check-in, Flight-path

Combining these words generates the following matrix
– Apartment Office
– Check-in Flight-path
– Check-in Apartment
– Check-in Office
– Flight-path Office
– Flight-path Apartment

Now some of these linkages will be meaningless and some will mean more to those in development than in aviation and vice versa. However, lets take a look at four examples from the list:

1. Apartment Office – whilst not a particularly novel idea there has been a resurgence of live-work condo/apartment development in recent years.

2. Check-in Office – at some point in the past someone thought of combining check-in with an office environment for business people – ala frequent flyer lounges.

3. Check-in Apartment – could this be something developed by airports for the elite ? It could be place to stay even more accommodating than frequent flier lounges – and certainly more children friendly. Airport hotels often accommodate transit passengers but what if they were internal to airport security (and revenue for the airport) for the most discerning of travelers. Remember critique comes later !

4. Flight-path Apartment – this sounds like a stupid idea right? Well maybe not. Some house subdivision developers, who thinking differently,  have made living next door to the runway their number one sales pitch. Examples include the ‘house and hangar’ developments Pukaki Airport  in New Zealand and Skyranch in Arizona, USA.

So simply by linking words can open up a world of new ideas, puts you in a frame of mind to think differently and for some, may create significant opportunity.

Too easy you say?

Well sometimes its the discipline of actually making the lists and writing down the resultant combinations that is the first problem. However, help is at hand via this basic excel tool we developed – free for you to download and use (its very simple!).
www.aenspire.com/IdeaGenerator-aenspire2014.xlsx
Simply input some of your industry key words, borrow a few words from somewhere else and review to find your next big opportunity.

Back to the antenna on the roof. When I purchased my house, I did not even think about looking to see if there was a TV antenna but alas when we plugged the television in on our first night ready to relax after a big day moving furniture, there was only one channel: ‘No Signal’.

[Readers, New Zealand does not have typical cable TV, and whilst there are satellite operators and I had a dish on the roof below the ridge-line, I didn’t have nor want a subscription – remember don’t critique!]

The easy option was to call up a specialist and get them to sort out a new antenna on the highest point of my roof – like all my neighbors. However, putting an aerial up there would cause me a little bit of grief with my cross lease neighbor as it would impact on their view. I did call a few aerial installers and their solution was to buy a converter and stick to the satellite dish, however I wanted the full HD that digital signals now provided.

So I brought a big outdoor aerial from the local electrical store, pointed it in the general direction of everyone’s roof top aerials and placed it between the joists in the subfloor space under my house. Every channel works crystal clear!

It was only after the resident renovator expert at work said ‘that’s a bit different I would never think of that, roof space maybe but not stuck under the house’ that I actually thought I had done some of my very own ‘thinking differently’.

www.aenspire.com
www.aenspire.com/IdeaGenerator-aenspire2014.xlsx

A significant part of a managers day is following people up. This is especially so in property development and business development.

The ability to extract what you need – whether its confirmation from a client on new business or a report you have commissioned from a consultant to meet a deadline – is a core skill. It is usually fairly simple, just a note or a phone call to check-in and see how things are going. Possibly a little less pressure and more subtle when you are asking of your client, and conversely more pressure where you are the client asking of others whom you are paying. I have found to get things done, prompt follow up is critically important.

So I see the ability to proactively follow up as one of the fundamental responsibilities of a good development manager.

In recent years I have  interviewed a large number of people for roles. The roles are not limited to generation smartphone (or whatever the suffix is nowadays)  and are typically highly competitive with a range of candidates in age and experience.

Hopefully I am not getting too old and out of touch with common day communication techniques but I find it interesting to note that there is almost no direct follow up from candidates anymore.

Possibly some follow ups are taken by recruiters and never passed on, but there is nothing stopping a candidate emailing me direct – they all get a business card and are never told not to contact me.

It is so rare to receive a follow up note from as interviewee;  yes one who still does actually want the job after the interview! Rarer still is the candidate who follows up the same day as the interview, and then keeps in contact with further follow ups (which can range from asking ‘how the selection process is going’ to emailing something that may pique my interest like an innovative property trend from overseas or the like).

I just googled ‘follow up job’ and number one on the search list was this article, so I am at a bit of a loss why there is so little follow up.
http://jobsearch.about.com/b/2013/12/19/how-to-follow-up-on-a-job.htm

For something so simple, candidates who follow up proactively and directly, stick themselves well above the pack. Yes you may be the bees knees and think employers should be following you up not the other way round, but following up after an interview has made the difference to getting the job or not.

Following up is after all one of the things a successful candidate is going to be doing an extreme amount of when they work in property or business development.

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Over the last 20 years I have been on both sides of the client-consultant relationship.

The majority of this time I have been, or acted on behalf of, the client in property and business development. The minority of the time I have acted as consultant in roles covering information technology, property and business development.

Regardless of which side I have been on, I have had my fair share of experience with consulting across the private, public and not-for-profit sectors  in New Zealand, Australia and the United States.

From the clients perspective I have distilled the success of a consultant down to one key ability.

The ability for the consultant to  read the clients mind!

This may surprise the most disciplined of us who pride themselves in writing detailed consultant briefs to extract exactly what they think it is they want to know. However,  when I am the client exploring relatively high risk and innovative work, the consultant offers me the most value when they can think ahead and tell me what I need to know, before I have to figure out I need to know it.

I am happiest when the consultant is proving to me what I need to know and then giving me solutions or answers in a form I can easily use.

Consultants who can seemingly read minds get my repeat business.

All too often as a client I am underwhelmed by what consultants present. Perhaps consulting follows the 80/20 rule like real estate agency, where 80% of the value/money/production is made by the 20% top performers. Whatever it is, there are a number of attributes that I believe are indispensable to being a great consultant. These attributes give me the impression the consultant has the ability to read my mind:

Communicate instantly, early and often. Communicate to the client before they have a chance to formulate an opinion of what they think they need to know. Don’t leave the client guessing if you know your stuff or not or are even interested – certainly don’t assume you are the only consultant they are going to contact.

Don’t give the client time to discuss their requirements with your competition. Even in a formal procurement process make sure you communications are spot on. Once you pass a formal procurement selection process, ensure you cement your credibility with superior communications. Regardless of how busy we seem, clients like me need to be communicated with instantly, early and often.

A recent example is when I asked for two valuation opinions on the potential sales pricing and velocity in a particular market. One consultant came back to me instantly with a yes, thanks we will get straight onto it and the expert consultant will be in touch. That was great however the ‘straight onto it’ didn’t come for another week and by that time the other consultant approached had already given me a list of options to choose from, their delivery dates and costs and we had negotiated the brief. The first consultant’s eventual response served to confirm pricing and the brief of the other. Both had similar expert abilities, it’s just one did a lot better on communication.

Know the target audience. The client has instructed you to consult, lets say on a research project. A key first step is to establish exactly where this information will or could end up and who is likely to read it. Further how is the information going to be presented up or down the food chain?

Very few consultants are good at this, many simply make assumptions and run the risk of providing a very good report, but in a basically unusable format for the client’s real information transfer requirements.

For large corporations and especially government departments, the client who asks for the report is very often only one of many who will use the information within it. Clients are happiest when the consultant can provide their advice in a format that is easily transportable within the clients organisation, whether it is up to boards or down to operations staff. If the client gives little guidance on this and you have to make an assumption, then  choose to present your advice in a few alternative formats (without using this an as excuse to charge more).

On receipt of multiple formats, at least one of which can be forwarded to the ‘boss’, the client may think you have simply read their mind.

An example where anticipating the reporting requirements of the client became very important was when I was consulting on Internet Collaboration software.  It was only after a serious amount of trial and error and learning from how my clients presented the information I gave them that I gained an insight into how valuable knowing the audience requirements actually was. In many cases my client was a project director for a hospital or prison project and to get my software approved for use often required board approval. The information I gave to my client, the ‘project director’, was rather detailed and a lot more about the how the software can be used to reduce cost and run a project rather than the why a board should consider approving its use.

Initially I relied on the project director to take my detailed information and prepare their own presentations to their boards. However the information was complex and the project director had done their own unskilled or at least rushed job of the presentation –  if  I was lucky I was called in to save my fee and present directly to the board.

I subsequently learned to change tact and presented my clients, the ‘project directors’ both detailed proposals, showing the how you do it (and I made it very specific to their project) and also board presentation ready bullet point value propositions – something they could simply forward on to their decision makers.

There was some additional work upfront, but it effectively meant a lot less time to secure the job and a higher chance of success. Working on the client side in the government, the ability for consultants to provide effective summaries and summaries of summaries in presentation ready format makes presenting the consultants findings to executives, committees and boards for decisions all that much easier.

Always include next steps. Don’t leave it up to the client to figure out where they may have to dig deeper to learn what next to do. Don’t assume what the client asked for is all the client actually needs. Typically for exploratory briefs, what is required to be known is as much about discovery based on the consultants first report as anything else. Next steps helps prime the client to think ‘this consultant has read my mind on what we now need to explore’.

Add that little bit extra. You have prepared an excellent report for your client, it is based on a wealth of experience  by experts in their fields and follows all appropriate procedures for ensuring accuracy and minimizing liability. It is the perfect report, just what the client asked for, however it does nothing to distinguish this consultant as providing additional value from any other consultant.

Whether it is the most regular forms of written advice like a geotechnical survey or a valuation, it’s the bit extra that can make a very happy client – as soon as the client thinks I should have thought of that, they then actually start to own the idea and then reinterpret this as the consultant reading their mind!

One example where the consultant did a good job in this regard was when in a quite basic report they added a couple of lines under each heading that looked at the research in relation to the context of our overall business objectives. They were never asked for this opinion and disclaimed it heavily, but those few lines set the consultant into a new league of being able to offer additional value to our work. All the consultant had done is compared our local approach to best practice in the UK and highlighted the differences and made a logical albeit subjective position on the potential financial implications.

That going the extra mile made me feel like the consultant had read my mind. They put into context all the issues we face and how we should attempt to qualify and quantify a solution.

Make it easy. When I was trying to indoctrinate New Zealanders’ into professional membership with the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors I was faced with trying to consult candidates through a  very complex range of options to ensure they had the best chance of success. It was unnecessarily difficult and it appeared the more options you provide candidates the less their ability to decide which one to pursue – the end result being less new professional memberships sold.

The solution we found was simply make it very easy for our clients. Rather then give clients endless options and an insurmountable amount of work to figure it out,  I literally helped clients put their CV together, found the RICS pathway that best fit their experience and sorted out the clients  best way to membership before advising them. The work and time exhausted on endless sales calls and followups for candidates to figure out a complex system on their own much was much better channeled by more upfront one on one work. This resulted in a significantly shorter sales conversion oeriod.

The other side of making it easy, is to make sure highly technical and data driven information has a plain English summary directly related to the objective included. There have been a number of times as a client I have been lost in the consultants detail with no idea how to link this  information to a solution for our business objectives. Typically the best thing the consultant can do is break the information down and then link each component explicitly to the solution the client is searching for in a single sentence.

When a client can easily work with the information the consultant has produced, the client feels as if the consultant is on the same wavelength. The client is happy, it’s as if the consultant has read their mind.

——–

For consultants ESP or mind reading may be nothing more than taking the extra time to understand your client, asking how they have to on-present the information, not limiting your yourself to industry assumptions, giving that bit extra to make the clients life easier and finally give them some insight where to go next.

A happy client is typically a well paying client. It is more than likely that the consultant who can read their client’s mind will be the recipient of the client’s next fee paying assignment.

www.aenspire.com

When interviewing for junior development managers I have come across a consistent way of measuring whether the candidate has potential to be a good development manager.

The question is simple: “Imagine this office building [the one we are sitting in for the interview] is up for sale and you are to develop it into apartments, how would you evaluate this?”

The answers can range significantly but the point of the question is not what the solution could be, the point of the question is to evaluate how the candidate thinks about development.  There  is one key aspect of the answer that I listen for and if I don’t hear it fairly early in the answer I invariably think the candidate may be better positioned to a life in project management as opposed to development management.

Value.

The wrong way to answer the question is this: “well I would get an engineering report on the structure, and decide on a construction method, it will cost $2500 per meter, the building has 3000m2…..”

The development manager answers something like this: “Ok, I look at what apartments are selling for in the area, at $5500 per square meter, and assuming 5 sales per month we can afford to pay $4500 for this building so then we look at construction costs…….., however if we do this we can increase value by $300 per m2…..”

An aspiring development manager gets that it’s all about value. Costs are just one side of the equation, the sale price the other side, concentrate on only one and that will invariably come at the expense of the other.

A cost estimator or quantity surveyor can prove current costs and a valuer will give you a historical estimate of potential purchase price, but the development manager is the one you has to juggle both of these in a plethora of other variables to maximise value.

Good development managers essentially find the most value for the least cost.

When candidates volunteer information on marketing and keeping costs down and aiming for a target price and describing development as a massage of inputs rather than a singular focus on costs or prices then that is when their potential as a development manager is cemented in my mind.

www.aenspire.com