Tom Roses could see that The Continental Group Inc. had a lot going for it.
The property management firm had grown from a fledgling company with a handful of employees to one that had subsidiaries to handle all of the maintenance issues that might arise for its 1,300 condominium and homeowners associations.
But as the company kept growing, the list of issues needing attention kept growing and the challenge of making it all fit together seamlessly was getting more difficult. Roses was concerned the right hand didn’t always know what the left hand was doing.
“Continental owned a lot of companies throughout Florida,” says Roses, president of the 5,500-employee company. “There were multiple brands, multiple processes and various systems. One of the things that was happening was through the growth, there was starting to be overlap.”
Different brands were in some cases competing for customers in the same demographic or in the same territory.
“It wasn’t a good long-term strategy,” he says. “My goal was to unify the organization.”
Roses wanted to eliminate the confusion so there would be no more overlap. Employees needed to understand their roles and responsibilities, eliminating the confusion between markets and brands. As a result, no matter how much bigger the company got, the solution would need to be the guiding force to keep it all aligned.
“How do you create an organization that becomes scalable and able to replicate?” Roses says. “The challenge becomes establishing the right culture so that as you send people onto the far rungs of wherever your region is, they bring that culture and they bring what the company’s values are all about.”