The End Goal

Westhill Property Management has some pretty unusual influences. We're definitely not your average property management company. One of those influences is Walt Disney who once said,

"Money is something I understand only vaguely, and I think about it only when I don't have enough to finance my current enthusiasm, whatever it may be. All I know about money is that I have to have it to do things. I don't want to bank my dividends, I'd rather keep my money working.... Money - or, rather the lack of it to carry out my ideas - may worry me, but it does not excite me. Ideas excite me."

What Walt was basically saying is that money was only a means to an end for him. It was not the end goal. The end goal was the creation of something worthwhile/inspirational/educational/life-changing, whether it be through theme parks or movies or cartoons. The impact he made on human lives for good was the priority. That had a higher value than money. Money just helped him achieve it.

The problem with many, if not most, companies today is that they have inverted this system of priorities and made money the end goal. How the products and services improve quality of life is no longer the most important thing. Instead, these are all simply geared towards increasing profit margins. This reversal of priorities is behind every soul-less company you have ever dealt with. Every bad customer service experience. Every unnecessary legal threat. Every over-priced product and every unfair 'processing fee'. These are the companies everyone dreads dealing with.

Football provides a topical example of what I mean by this. Many Premiership football clubs were, in times gone by, primarily about the joy of entertaining fans, creating a sense of belonging and bringing civic pride to local regions. The clubs were indelibly linked to the communities around them. Money was just a means to those ends. Today, foreign investors are coming in with inverted priorities. Making a profit has becoming the end goal for them and so they do anything necessary to make that happen. As a result the clubs have become soul-less and somehow disconnected from the average person on the street.

Property management, in-keeping with our culture today, is an industry that has generally speaking fallen into the trap of making money the end goal. They milk clients for extra cash at every opportunity, using hidden charges to squeeze margins. These companies tend to be difficult to deal with and unreliable in their duties. If it doesn't have a direct impact on profits, it's not considered as important as things that do.

Westhill Property Management is about returning to the Walt Disney model. The end goal for us is to have made a positive impact on human lives in some small way. We can't do anything as spectacular as Walt Disney to achieve that, at least not yet, but we can make sure that people come home to well maintained gardens and clean hallways and that they pay a fair price for it.