Chief Executive Officer / United States
The choices behind the service model
- Homes managed
- 8,900
- Thirty-four communities; properties owned by clients
- Management fees
- US$9.4m
- 2025; US$15.6m reimbursed site payroll reported separately
- Colleagues
- 240
- Management-company workforce at June 2026
Decisions & consequences
01Four hundred closed requests, checked beyond the screen
In 2021 the monthly operating report showed a high rate of routine work-order closure, yet resident conversations suggested that some problems were returning. The two accounts were not necessarily contradictory: a contractor could have attended and completed the authorised task while the resident still experienced the original issue. Our report did not make that distinction consistently enough.
I asked operations to review 400 closed routine requests across twelve communities, using the work record and a follow-up with the resident where available. Urgent repairs continued through the existing response process; the review was not a reason to defer them. Of the 400 requests, 360 were confirmed complete, twenty-eight required a return visit and twelve remained unconfirmed at the review date. We retained all three groups instead of treating the unconfirmed requests as successful closures.
We committed US$210,000 to coordination, manager training and follow-up capacity. The maintenance leaders were concerned that another administrative step would reduce time available for repairs. I agreed that the process had to be proportionate, and we used a sample-based review rather than requiring a central approval for every routine task. Community managers remained responsible for the next action with the appropriate maintenance specialists. The owner discussion included recurring issues and the work still needing funding, access or a contractor response.
The exercise changed what we could say about completion. It did not prove that every resident was satisfied or that maintenance costs had fallen. Some return visits required additional expenditure, which belonged in the account rather than being treated as a failure of the review. I would involve the community teams earlier in deciding which closures warrant follow-up, because they often know where the record is least likely to capture the full situation. The lasting change was a more credible conversation between the service measure and the experience it was meant to represent.
Declining a mandate after the cost of its promises became clear
In 2022 an owner invited us to manage nine properties containing approximately 2,800 homes. The proposed annual management fee was US$1.1 million, with specified central reporting and service arrangements in addition to separately reimbursed site payroll. Winning the mandate would have increased the number of homes under management and strengthened an important commercial relationship.
Finance and operations built the central-service model together. Their estimate was US$1.28 million of direct annual cost before general corporate overhead. That was not a small forecasting difference that we could expect scale to absorb. The commercial team argued that the relationship might lead to further properties and that we had already invested substantial effort in the bid. I asked for those future opportunities to be considered separately from the obligations in the contract before us.
We proposed a revised scope and funding arrangement, explaining which services required additional capacity. The owner chose not to accept those terms. I withdrew the bid rather than ask the operating teams to make the original economics work after signature. We expensed US$84,000 of bid preparation and retained that cost in the review. There was no replacement contract waiting to make the decision look painless.
The result was an opportunity we did not win and a service commitment we did not take on. I would not describe it as revenue saved or assume that our cost estimate was the only possible operating model. Another provider might organise the work differently. The relevant judgement was that Dovrienne could not responsibly promise the specified service on the proposed fee using the model we were prepared to deliver. We subsequently moved the joint finance-and-operations review earlier in our bid process, before relationship momentum and sunk effort made an economic question feel like a test of loyalty to the sales team.
Leaving renovation contracting without inventing an immediate saving
By 2023 our capital-renovation contracting activity had become a distinct business within Dovrienne. It generated US$4.6 million of revenue and US$310,000 of contribution in 2022, but its project commitments and supervision needs competed with the recurring residential-management work at the centre of the company. The issue was strategic fit, not an assertion that the team’s projects had no value.
I asked the board to consider three options: invest in a separately led contracting business, retain the activity at its current scale, or complete existing commitments and stop accepting new contracts. The first required capital and management attention we were unwilling to allocate; the second preserved the ambiguity. We chose an orderly exit, with US$380,000 of transition expenditure and a timetable that respected our existing customer obligations.
Twelve colleagues worked directly in the activity. Eight moved into routine property operations after role and training discussions; four left the company through agreed transitions. We did not describe the change as having no people consequence. The financial review also showed that only US$190,000 of annual overhead could be removed against the US$310,000 contribution being relinquished. On that simplified recurring comparison, the exit reduced annual earnings by US$120,000 before other business changes, in addition to the one-off transition cost.
Existing projects were completed and new contracting stopped during 2024. Property owners could still appoint their own qualified project providers, while Dovrienne’s role remained defined by its management agreements. The decision gave our operating leadership a clearer remit, but I did not attach an unsupported improvement in retention or service quality to it. If making the choice again, I would establish the boundary of an adjacent service before allowing it to grow around individual client requests. A company should be able to explain why it is leaving a profitable activity without pretending that every strategic choice improves the next year’s earnings.