Company:  Apartment Life - http://www.apartmentlife.org/
Name:  Kelly Jones
Title: VP of Operations
Name:  Sarah Simmons 
Title: IT Manager
Industry:  Apartment Industry

Company Profile:

Apartment Life is a faith-based, nonprofit organization passionate about helping apartment owners create authentic community to attract and retain residents by establishing long-term relationships and a genuine sense of caring.  Apartment Life’s CARES program is the leading onsite retention solution in the apartment industry.

Founded in 2000, Apartment Life serves hundreds of apartment communities across the United States.  They help apartment owners and managers create a sense of cohesive, caring community, which ultimately increases apartment profitability and minimizes expenses by fostering long-term tenant lease retention.

The Apartment Life Business Problem:   Until 2002, Apartment Life tried to keep up with all aspects of 50 internal and 250 external people using a collection of loosely related spreadsheets.  Getting timely updates and consolidating the various spreadsheets to get accurate reporting and evaluations had become overly labor intensive and prone to recurring mistakes.

The spreadsheets began simply enough, but after two years they included widely disparate data necessary to prepare reports for several interested parties.  The spreadsheets included details about:

• Unique characteristics of a multitude of properties
• Each property’s ownership, facts about the owner and other customer data
• CARES teams members actively serving each property
• CARES team members available for properties
• Properties served by their CARES teams
• Prospect properties
• Specific events conducted at each property like cook-outs, games, parties, new tenant meetings, lease renewals, and 
• How each CARES team specifically helped tenants.

The MBI Solution: 

Apartment Life hired MBI Systems to customize and implement SalesLogix as their core operational business solution.  The custom solution enabled Apartment Life to manage its local and remote personnel in real-time by storing and reporting on people, properties, groups and their relationships in a natural way that allowed CARES team members to work from wherever they were and supported management’s needs for centralized, recurring and ad hoc reports.

The MBI solution saved Apartment Life substantial time, money, frustration and unnecessary complexity.  It allowed for secure, easy, online access to detailed information from and about each CARES team, the apartment complex it serves, about events and relationship results.  The result supports ongoing CARES team operations and provides for all necessary reports to clients, donors and internal management in a timely and efficient manner.

MBI’s customized reporting solutions streamlined operations, increased Apartment Life’s marketing value proposition and saves them many hours weekly in assembling and creating reports.  One report shows CARES activities with each new tenant and includes who and how each CARES team member assists new and renewal lease residents.    Another report helps staff supervisors and leaders manage apartment complex and CARES team relationships more efficiently.  MBI also created a flexible reporting tool that empowers CARES leaders to produce tailored reports on the fly.  They may then e-mail the reports to appropriate property managers and any other interested party with just a couple of clicks. 

Background and Prospects for the Future:

Kelly Jones, Director of Operations at Apartment Life, originally chose SalesLogix as the CRM product choice in 2002.  At the time, Kelly was working toward her Master of Science in Engineering Technical Management in Oklahoma State University’s distance learning program. Kelly completed her degree at OSU while working full-time on a variety of project assignments for Accenture. As part of her thesis work, she completed a detailed, apples-to-apples comparison of SalesLogix and Microsoft CRM.  She compared and contrasted each tool’s ability to meet Apartment Life’s important Customer Relationship Management business needs.  SalesLogix was ultimately the clear choice because Microsoft CRM could not compete with proven SalesLogix features and benefits.
 
After carefully considering several competing SalesLogix consultants, she chose to work with MBI Systems.  In the final analysis her decision came down to the fact she “felt” a better connection with MBI.  Whether that was due to our core values, company size, communication style or the outstanding responsiveness of their inside sales person she can’t be sure.  What she is sure of is that price was only one factor in the overall decision.  “Price is always important, but the long-term costs of a business relationship aren’t always obvious at the beginning of a consulting engagement”.

Dale Warner and Rob Ellis did the technical parts of Apartment Life’s original CRM proposal and today, Dale and Rob still perform ongoing work for them.  Kelly typically gives reporting work to Rob and the more complex project work to Dale.  Rob has begun his own business now and Kelly appreciates the fact that MBI doesn’t mind sharing the work with Rob and that we don’t seem threatened by it.  Here, MBI’s adherence to the Golden Rule makes a huge difference in Apartment Life’s total cost of CRM ownership.  MBI’s attitude and behavior isn’t common in the consulting business and it sets MBI apart from their competitors in her mind. 
 
One of the things Kelly especially appreciates about working with Dale is the fact that he allows and encourages her to be deeply involved in the software design effort.  This has been the case from the very beginning our working relationship.  Dale is very flexible about who, what, why, where and how clients achieve design and communication work.
 
According to Kelly, “MBI’s faith statement didn’t play greatly into my decision at first because I was most focused on their ability to execute as my key selection criteria.  Shared faith certainly simplifies our working relationship, but ability to execute on the plan has to remain most important in a business relationship”.  Many successes beyond the initial SalesLogix implementation contribute to an exceptionally high level of trust that now exists between our two firms.  Shared faith plays heavily into the picture, because it’s become obvious “MBI doesn’t just talk the talk, they walk the walk”.  Part of MBI’s “Common Sense Computing” approach relies on the fact that trust takes years to develop, and a split-second to destroy.  MBI tries hard NOT to assume a “trusted advisor” relationship until and unless we’ve proven our ability to execute on our commitments.

Today, after working together since 2002, the trust level between MBI systems and Apartment Life allows frequent common sense shortcuts for simpler projects.   Kelly appreciates the fact that MBI can be as formal or informal as circumstances warrant when estimating and scoping new work.  If a formal proposal makes better sense than a back of the napkin design, MBI can and will provide either or both.  Whether it’s a fixed-price proposal with a tightly bound scope of work, or a loosely defined time and materials effort, Kelly appreciates the fact that MBI always focuses on what’s best for Apartment Life instead of how best to ensure MBI gets “all the business that’s on the table”.

Kelly also appreciates having direct access to appropriate people at MBI.  Many other consulting firms insist their clients call “the sales department” and wait in queue for answers to her questions and concerns.  Another aspect of MBI’s “Common Sense Computing” and a benefit of MBI’s quest for a few good customers rests in the fact that MBI provides Kelly the cell phone numbers of everyone at MBI she may want or need to talk with.  MBI doesn’t involve employees when doing so adds no value to the client.

Recently, Apartment Life deepened their relationship with MBI systems by engaging Richard Kilgore as their Director of Information Technology.   Again, Kelly appreciates Richard’s common sense approach to IT strategy.  “Richard understands technology is just a tool, and does an excellent job of picking the right tool for our needs”.  Richard is quick to see that the old IBM 286 pc gathering dust in the corner will do just fine as a backup fax server, and routinely looks for situations where he can save clients cash whenever it’s possible and appropriate.

All in all, MBI and Apartment life are deeply satisfied with and appreciative of each other’s business.  Apartment Life is counting on MBI to help them achieve their recent “Add a Zero” marketing objectives. Apartment Life recently deepened its relationship with MBI Systems by asking Richard Kilgore to step in as their Information Technology strategy director.  

Both firms look forward to growing our relationship in the years to come for the mutual well-being of everyone in both of our businesses.  

At this point it's just a matter of common sense.