Article from SeniorsNews.net

Florida Property Managers ‘Serious’ About Happiness

The executives of the Continental Group, a Florida property management firm, examined exactly what it is their clients -- residents and homeowners associations, including many active living communities -- want them to do.

Lists after lists were made in meeting after meeting and the bottom line, Gary Pyott tells Selling to Seniors, was "our customers just want to be happy. That’s all. They just want to be happy."

Which explains the billboards, bus benches, radio spots and printed media exclaiming throughout south Florida, "Happiness Is Serious Business."

"Our new tag line is just that -- "Happiness Is Serious Business" -- and it’s a tagline for a company moving forward," says Pyott, president of South Florida for Continental, a subsidiary of FirstService Residential Management. "Of course, happiness takes different forms, but at the end of the day they want to be happy when they drive into their community, the guard at the gate house says hello, the grass is cut, everything is in its place, people say good morning and call them by their names at the club house . . . So for us, as property managers, to be able to deliver that, we have to take happiness seriously."

The campaign, launched earlier this year, was designed and implemented by Taglairino Advertising Group and is directed internally as well as externally, Pyott says. "It’s also about the people who work for us; they’re the people who project the image of happiness. If we’re a great company and we have happy employees, they’re be able to make the customer happy."

‘Silver’ Service for Active Adults

Continental manages 1,500 HOAs and more than 310,000 residential units. A significant number of those, Pyott says, are "55-and-better communities," and for them, there is an additional program called Continental Silver, which, he says, "targets what we call ‘product segments.’"

Management found industry expressions of services too generic and limiting, so they "honed in on all of the different product segments that we have in our 55-and-better communities and associations and listed everything we do. We were amazed at how much we do for our customers, and we just never communicated all those things before."

Marketing materials have a new emphasis on the activities, health initiatives and amenities that abound at a Continental-managed community. And to be certain nothing gets left out, managers meet frequently with community boards or hold general meetings for residents to "brainstorm about things were doing or what’s coming up or something that we’re not offering," Pyott says. "Sometimes we have to sit back and take a deep breath and see if we’re doing all that we can do. We need to deliver the program that they want to make them happy.

"At the end of the day it’s all about making them happy."

And that is serious business.

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