The work before the welcome
The best stage of every development is when families start moving into their brand new homes. This is my favorite thing to witness, hands down.
I eagerly await videos from our sales partners showing their clients walking into their new homes. I watch them over and over again, asking myself, “Are they happy? Are they smiling?”
My favorite story is about one homeowner who became impatient during the turnover briefing because she saw that the furniture delivery truck had arrived. She simply wanted to get inside and start unpacking.
In those moments, everything we do makes sense. The collaboration and the fortitude to keep fighting for every deadline we never want to miss culminate in that one moment when a family arrives somewhere they can finally call their own.
The work behind every home
What I’ve come to understand, slowly and sometimes the hard way, is that building a community is not one big undertaking. It involves hundreds of small things completed in the right order, by the right people, without any of them being overlooked.
Every year, we take time as a team to remind ourselves that we are still learning how to do it better.
Before we break ground on any development, we navigate more than 20 permits and government approvals.
That does not yet include the bank accreditations needed for our buyers to secure their housing loans on time. It also does not include the homebuilding process and the work required to ensure that the right materials are sourced, ordered and delivered on time.
Each permit involves a different agency, timeline and set of requirements. Miss one, and the entire sequence stalls. And somewhere at the end of that sequence is a family already counting down to their move-in date.
That reality shapes everything about how we work.
What it takes to deliver
Over the years, I’ve come to believe that an organization must have several things in place if it wants to deliver on a promise as serious as this one.
A shared understanding of the whole. It’s tempting to let people specialize and stay in their respective lanes. The permits team handles permits, the sales team handles sales and the construction team handles construction.
But a fragmented point of view creates fragmented results. When the permits team understands why construction needs an approval by a certain week, its members move differently.
When the sales team understands what the finance team needs from a buyer’s documents, it can prepare clients better. Everyone has to understand the business, not just one part of it, because the business is one continuous chain. That chain works only when people can see beyond their own link.
Trust more than systems. I used to think the answer to complexity was more processes and tighter controls. I still believe in good systems, but I have learned that systems alone do not deliver homes on time. People do, and people deliver when they trust one another.
That trust has to be earned and re-earned through consistency, honesty and willingness to show up for one another, even when it’s hard.
Collaboration as a daily habit, not an event. We don’t “do collaboration” only at a quarterly planning session. It happens every day in the hallway, in the group chat and during a quick call between a permits officer and a project manager at 7 a.m.
The complexity of what we do requires constant communication across teams. Alignment keeps everyone informed, aware and ready to adjust when needed.
A north star everyone can see. This is the most important of all. Our homebuyers must move into their homes within the timeframe we committed to—not approximately, not almost.
That promise, made to a family that has been saving for years and sometimes decades, is the reason every department exists. This north star gives all of us the focus and resolve to rise above challenges and keep doing better.
Striving for best
I am proud of what our team has built, but we are not done learning. Every year, we set aside time to reflect. What did we do well? What did we miss? What do we owe our homebuyers, teammates and partners that we have not yet figured out how to give?
The families waiting for their keys deserve nothing less than our best. And our best is always a little further ahead of where we are today.
The author is the president and CEO of Ovialand Inc.
