Today we have a great business, we are proud of what we have achieved and learnt, we have great clients that we enjoy working with, and we are profitable
To me, a great busines is one that is enjoyable to be part of, but of course it needs to be profitable.
Our business is involved in the project sales and marketing of residential land. I have been in the industry for almost 40 years. When I was young, I wanted the busines I was part of to be the biggest, mainly driven by ego, not profitability, although I suppose my naive mind at the time thought biggest company and profitability ran hand in hand. This was not the case, you end up with large amounts of overheads, stress and the in-ability to achieve outstanding results for your clients.
Even when we started Latitude Real Estate 9 years ago, my son James (my business partner) and I thought we should go for growth. Going for growth really meant reducing the level of real service to our developer clients and as a result the sales in volume were not achieved so making profit was a real struggle.
We then took a good look at what we were doing and as a result today we have less projects, we are involved personally in every one of them and that includes working in the field with our sales team. I have personally been involved in 6 sales over the past 10 days. The sales results on each of our projects is now something we are both extremely proud of, we are enjoying the business and the time we get to spend with each of our developer clients and also the time with our team. It is a lot less stressful having the involvement we do as there’s no guesswork in what’s happening when it comes to the finer details of the business, we’re involved with it all.
We have been selective in choosing the projects we would keep and those that we will take on in the future as part of our restructure. We have chosen to avoid projects that wouldn’t openly accept our expertise and continue to underperform, which would be at a cost to us and only serve our ego. Given these choices, we are now in the position that we could handle 2 more quality large master-planned communities without it impacting the quality of our service.
Today we have a great business, we are proud of what we have achieved and learnt, we have great clients that we enjoy working with, and we are profitable. It goes to show you, that no matter how much experience you have in an industry or business, personal and profession growth shouldn’t ever come to an end and I am proud to say that these lessons have served us tremendously well.
