Business is in Michael DeAscentis II’s blood. His father, Michael Sr., was in the excavating and housing business in the 1970s
and 1980s before the father-son team started Columbus-based Lifestyle Communities in 1996. Today, the father serves as the
company’s chairman, while the son runs the day-to-day operations as CEO. Since it was founded, the company has built more
than 3,500 apartments and condominiums and created 18 communities in Ohio and Kentucky. By focusing on its brand —
creating living solutions for young professionals — the company has grown to 195 employees and $92 million in 2006 revenue.
Smart Business spoke with DeAscentis on how he maintains his core strategy.
Establish your brand. When people talk about
brands, they think about their products and
their services, but really, it’s the unique
relationship you want to have with your
customer. From our standpoint, we want
to create a competitive advantage with the
customer experience.
We communicate our brand to our leadership team in two pieces: One is from the
bricks-and-mortar standpoint, and the other
is the human side of the business and the
personal interaction with our customers.
Develop a set of employee values. As we grew
from a start-up into a developer, we started
to see people in our organization that were
very successful, and some people that
weren’t very successful. We started to talk
about their attributes: What is it about their
competency set? What is it about their values that either align with our organization
and our vision or don’t align? What are the
essential qualities that are required to execute our vision? We outlined five or six key
elements, and we integrated those into the
recruiting and hiring process.
In doing this, we clearly saw a benefit in
our ability to execute on a day-to-day basis
and our ability to grow and to perform. We
saw our market share and our profit margins increase. We saw an influx of ideas
from employees to launch other services or
businesses around our brand and discovered growth opportunities within our existing business.
Hire communicators. We value people who
can communicate clearly no matter how
difficult the topic. We don’t want to hire
people that tell us what we want to hear.
We want to hire people who can have crucial conversations and talk about tough
topics.
People need to be willing to share information. You have to have this open-source
philosophy that you’re not the only one
who has a good idea: Everybody’s smarter
than somebody. The ability to effectively
communicate in an unselfish way, with
integrity and honesty, is important.
Look for performance and leadership
skills. People who are results-oriented and have a strong work ethic are adaptable.
They like and understand what it means to
be held personally accountable, but it’s also
having passion for what you do and a commitment to do it better than anybody else.
The other quality that’s tough to find —
but I’ve seen it deliver the biggest results —
is people who have leadership skills.
Leadership’s not a position but an individual commitment and approach to your
business. You practice it with your actions.
Leaders deliver on commitments. They fix
mistakes and don’t fall blame with people.
Leadership is the toughest quality to ferret out in an interview. The best way I’ve
found to do it is take the successful leaders
in our company and put them on the interview committee. Like people find each
other.
If you value it, reward it. We’ve been pretty
good at creating a culture of innovation. If
a staff person or a middle-management
person comes up with an idea, seeing that
idea get launched is a huge reward. It’s not
just ideas falling from the top and sprinkling down through the organization; it’s
really the other way around.
Empower your team. When you find people
on the management side that line up with
your values, extending an invitation to sit
at the decision table is important to them.
There’s a tremendous amount of personal
satisfaction in knowing that you’re participating in the success of a business. The
financial incentive is a part of it, but there
are a lot of nonfinancial things that go
along with it: the ability to take on more
responsibility and the opportunity to move
up in the company.
Know your customer. We started out in 1996
as, predominantly, an apartment developer,
and our products and our communities
didn’t look much different than any other
apartment developer. Then the vision
came: What’s going to make us different
than everybody else, and what’s going to
create a competitive advantage for us?
We came to the conclusion when we
looked at our customers, there was this
concentration of young people choosing
their housing solutions for the very first
time. We focused more on them and their
needs than what the product needed to be.
Then we started to change our marketing,
our product, our amenity package and our
services.
It’s everybody’s responsibility in our company to understand our customers and to
stay current, whether you’re a maintenance
tech, sales agent or a construction superintendent. Your employees interact with your
customers every day; they see the brand of
car the customers drive, how they dress,
what they look like, what work hours they
keep, as well as their habits. Our people are
our best brand ambassadors.
You don’t start this initiative, figure it all
out and stop. It’s something that’s constantly evolving, and it’s a discipline that
we felt was very important to imbed in the
culture of our company.
Be prepared. Years ago, my father gave me
some advice: Always be ready for the competitor that comes out of nowhere and will
try to try to take your market away from
you. You have to constantly refine and
retune your business to keep it fresh. That
permeates everything we do.
HOW TO REACH: Lifestyle Communities, (614) 883-4663 or
www.lifestylecommunities.com
