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Real estate or otherwise, your product or service is excellence. If you are doing business right, you are selling excellence to your customers. We all desire excellence; with it your business will grow. Now you have reputation and resources. Use your reputation and resources to impact the world, locally and globally, both as a community of people and as a physical place.
Excellence
We can define excellence in many ways, and I won’t get into the
details here, but I like to define excellence as “the quality of being outstanding.” Your product or service should stand out among the others. You want your product or service to fulfill your customers’ needs, not convince them of their need for your product or service. Your relationship with them should be beyond transactional to personal, and if you’ve got the best and most excellent product, you’ve placed yourself in a great position to build a huge, dedicated customer base.
The pursuit of excellence brings success to your company, because excellence can sell itself. Of course, there are many smart strategies and intelligent marketing decisions to be made to promote your excellence to the fullest, but at the end of the day, it’s easy to sell the best product or service. You tell the truth. Excellence should be wrapped up in the very DNA of the company, in its product or service, culture, employees and message to the world.
In our media savvy world, marketing is one of the most important aspects of a company. Yet we cannot become dazed by this importance and overemphasize the worth of our company as its message. In order to take a beautiful picture, you must first have a beautiful subject. Your first priority must be the value and standard of your product or service. We must offer excellence to our customers. With that priority established, you can package that excellence to the world. You don’t just have a real estate company; you have a real estate and marketing company. If you’ve spent any time in the marketing space, you’ll know that the second step to great marketing is telling your story in an honest, compelling way, providing real value and standing out. Excellence is the key to doing that well.
Impact
Once you have established a standard of excellence in your product or service, you will have a reputation and resources. The usage of these is the most important responsibility a company or individual has. Simplified, you have time, energy and finances—everything you need to change the world. In the past it has been enough to simply invest these resources back into the company to at best make a better product or sometimes simply to grow your company’s reach or footprint. I believe we as business leaders have a responsibility to dedicate a portion of these resources to impact the world. To me, we can look at the world in two ways. Firstly it is a community of people. Secondly it is a physical place. We can even go farther and think about the world locally and globally.
These are broad statements that could come off as “feel good” sentiments, but the practical application is powerful. I’ll use Aerial as an example. Locally, we participate in tree planting programs within the neighborhoods that we develop. We ask the neighborhood council members and presidents what they need and work to get it for them—be it new sidewalks or lights, whatever the need is; we invest in that community’s needs. Other times we ask them what is working best in their neighborhood so we can continue to increase their sustainability in that manner. We become a resource and advocate for the community, and in turn we gain their respect. Our relationship with them goes from transactional to personal, because we make the effort to understand and work with them to elevate.
Regarding sustainability, we have a team dedicated to researching the newest and most effective green building supplies and implementing them as quickly as possible. We are dedicated to saving energy and pursuing alternate energy pathways whenever possible, and continue to innovate in that space and look toward future possibilities even when it’s not financially viable yet. We don’t sell houses in a vacuum of time and space. The customer and we both live in the same world, and we try to work together to make it a better place.
There are what I call “Aligned Impacts” and “Lateral Impacts” to be made when a company is generous with its resources that come from an excellent product or service sold in an excellent way. Many of the impact initiatives I’ve spoken about can directly benefit the company. We are investing resources and many times are gaining a return, a growth in our reputation and brand. There is nothing wrong with this when a company does it for the right reasons—the benefits to the company should be a bonus, not the directive. Lateral impacts are less synergistic. They make less “business sense,” but more “human sense.”
Our lateral impacts are only lateral in the business sense. In the world and in my heart, they are as aligned as they can be. When I was 18 I went on a missions trip and saw firsthand the horror of sexual abuse that exists in the culture of some countries. My young eyes were opened to the fact that the basic needs of others were not being met, and my initial drive to start my company was to contribute to the eradication of these issues. Our company now sponsors an orphan in Kenya in the name of every person who buys a home from us. In our welcome packets for our new homeowners we include products made locally or globally that support initiatives such as domestic abuse relief and U.S. veterans support, and we let them see how their purchase helped change the world a little bit at a time.
I believe that businesses have a responsibility to be a force for good, and to use our excellence for maximum impact. Have the courage to operate your business with the mindset of “Excellence with Impact,” and join the force for good to see benefits not only personally but also in your company, culture and the world around you.
Britnie Turner Keane is the Founder and CEO of Aerial Development Group.