A resident gets a birthday card signed by the entire maintenance team and posts it to Instagram.
Tom Peters made his name on excellence. Then he argued excellence stopped being enough. You have to WOW people. The difference is the distance between adequate and unforgettable.
For decades he pushed one idea. Aim past competent, all the way to remarkable. It takes imagination and nerve, and it rarely takes money.
In multifamily operations, every resident touchpoint is a chance to WOW, and almost nobody uses it. A maintenance team signs a birthday card. A package notification carries a handwritten note. A tech fixes the item you reported, then mentions the one he caught on his way out. The budget line for all of it is zero. What it costs is a team with standing permission to be remarkable.
In a commoditized market, WOW is the edge that lasts. A competitor can match your price tomorrow. Your product, they’ll clone within a year. The feeling of being genuinely cared for? That one they can’t lift without rebuilding the culture underneath it, and that takes years.
She posted the card on Instagram. Forty-seven people saw it. Three asked which property she lived at. Two toured the next month, and one signed a lease. The card cost nothing. The culture that produced it cost months of intentional leadership. Both were worth it.
WOW is a permission structure, not a budget item. Give your team permission to be remarkable, then get out of the way. — Mike Brewer
Discussion Prompt: Design one WOW moment for a resident this week that costs nothing and takes real creativity. Execute it. Watch what it produces.