If you are reading this, you are likely to be a commercial property manager or you know one; either way the question has hit the spot and you understand what I am saying.

It is a fact, many if not all commercial property managers have very little time to spare in their average working day. They are the hardest working of most commercial real estate people because they have to control and produce the property performance for the landlord; it’s the central part of their job. That takes time, effort and commitment.

Property management is not like selling or leasing a property where you can move across a number of projects and keep all of them moving in some form or another. In property management you have to stick with some very complex issues that can take days if not weeks to resolve. You can manage some really difficult properties with real challenges.

Add to this fact the tasks that each property presents every day with tenants, landlords, maintenance, and leasing, you have some real work to do. It is unrelenting and consistent. It does not go away. That is why you have no time to spare.

Given all of this observation, it should now be said that good commercial and retail property managers are some of the most qualified professionals in the industry. They generally know far more about property performance, tenant mix, and lease optimisation than sales and leasing people. They know how to make a property work.

To give you some idea of what I am saying here, the role of a commercial or retail manager would typically involve many things including:

Lease management
Lease optimisation
Vacancy management
Fit out approvals and controls
Refurbishment and renovations
Lease negotiations
Tenant mix strategy and analysis
Maintenance management and planning
Building income and expenditure budgets
Risk management
Due Diligence practices and systems
Energy management
Retail trade analysis and customer sales strategy
Landlord reporting and communications
So this list goes on. You can see why a property manager is really the central part of the property performance equation. A landlord needs a good property manager to help them with a complex property.

It is interesting to note that the inexperienced landlords of this world will consider outsourcing property management requirements to the cheapest real estate agency or property manager. Considering that these landlords are putting their income and expenditure in the hands of potentially one inexperienced person or group, and that person may have little real knowledge or relevance to the future of the property, the risk of damage to the property performance is very real.

So the message here is for all experienced and qualified property managers to ask for a reasonable and relevant fee for the services offered. Stay firm on your fees; those landlords seeking and taking discounts from other agents will soon realise the error of their ways and will likely come back to you when the property is financially derailed and the vacancies are rising.

When you are asked to fix a problem in a previously poorly managed property, charge a solid and fair fee for the issues involved. You are the professional and your services are worth good money. Professional commercial and retail property management is not an experiment for the feint hearted.

Marketing includes matters such as pricing and packaging of the product and creation of demand by advertising and sales campaigns. There are other options, of course, like product creation, resale rights marketing, joint ventures and the likes, but they are merely secondary to the above.

If you take the freelance route, it is important to ensure that all rights to profit from the final product, or any materials produced in its making, remain yours. Bookkeeping, physical product creation or delivery of goods can be done better with specialized help. Determining the purpose of the product is vital in niche product creation.

Implementation of Methodology – The choice of implementation of Six Sigma methodology depends on whether development is required on existing processes (DMAIC) or on new process/product design creation (DMADV). Determining what you really want to sell, something that you can be relaxed selling is the first step at the creation of a niche product. With the technological advancements in the hosting industry, from automated control panels and scripts that simplify creation of accounts; to complete turnkey solutions, there is no excessive need to worry about spending time on the actual product sold to the customer.

For instance, you should be prepared to either perform yourself or to subcontract the completion of the following tasks:- Product idea research (are there any existing products or patents already existing for this idea)- Product specification document training (what it will do, how it will look, how will it be powered, and how the user will interface with it)- Marketing study (what it will be named, who would buy this, how much would they pay, how will we get customers to purchase the product)- Schematic or electronic circuit design process- Creation of a bill of material or BOM and an approved vendor’s list or AVL for each component in the design, preferably with multiple sources identified, with a BOM and AVL for each assembly level in the product- Printed circuit board layout design process (single sided board, double sided board, or multilayer board; size of the PCB; board material)- Mechanical packaging design with user interfaces (displays, buttons, switches, key. This removes all product creation costs from your budget as a marketer.

No other database of affiliate programs offers such a possibility for profit on either the affiliate side or the product creation site. Your chosen niche should allow for the creation of more than one product or service.

There are several marketing strategies that are necessary in the creation of a successful e-commerce web site – Email marketing (broadcasting) of prospects/customers – Effective use of auto responders (generate automatic email messages) – Online Newsletter – Online Form / Survey to capture your prospect’s email address – Electronic Product Delivery (if you sold a digital product) – Advertisement (Ad) Tracking – Back End Sales – Affiliate program etc.

One of the keys to succeeding in information product creation is to break the process up into discrete steps. This frequently isn’t an instinctive reaction for the typical information marketer. Especially on the internet where small sized learning products are the norm.

However, it is extremely important to your ultimate success. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t do this you probably won’t succeed… even when you are starting out let alone as you move forward.

Your product creation system should do this for you if only to help you to understand the overall task.

But why?

In this article, I’m going to ignore chunking and focus on the practical aspects. That’s not to say that chunking isn’t important. It is. It’s important to understanding and to learning the process. But while you can use the same chunks as you move forward, long term your focus needs to be on the operation of the system not the understanding of it. Unless of course you are constantly training new people!

So why is chunking important to long term use of the product creation process? (Yes, I know systems design uses a different term for this process but I’m not teaching you systems design. So I’m going to use the word learning content designers use.)

The first reason that having individual discrete tasks is important is one of schedule estimation. Frequently it is very difficult to estimate how long the total task of creating a product will take. After all, the size and type of the products matters as does the number of products in your product funnel. And those are just the most obvious elements. However, estimating a discrete task is often much easier. The total can then be estimated as the total of the discrete tasks.

Secondly, scheduling a large task can be problematic. However, by segmenting the task into a number of discrete tasks, you gain a much greater flexibility in scheduling. Not only that but as your business begins to add people you are able to schedule multiple people to the product creation.

Finally, segmenting a large task into smaller discrete tasks allows you to have much better control over the product creation. This affects two different areas — status and quality.

By segmenting your process into discrete tasks you are able to schedule and record the progress at much more detailed level. As a result you are more in control of the status of the product creation. You know what everyone is doing. When they should complete it. And how much it should cost. You also know exactly what has been done.

You also improve your overall quality. Instead of waiting until everything is done you can check quality as you go. This allows you to immediate react to low quality products without absorbing their costs. This means that you have less rework and your rework costs less. And if the product is not going to meet its quality requirement you will know about it in time to stop the development, change the requirement or fix the product.