Tristan Roszkowski’s Post

Resident appreciation celebrating National Pecan Torte Day! It's nice when 10 years of baking for your kids comes in handy for work! 😆

I am not the best at taking pictures 😆. Our pool party was a huge success. The music was awesome! Brandon Crocker performed and it was like being on a beach at a resort! The food and drinks flew. It was a perfect, sunny day full of smiles. :)

It's been a long time for me! Did you miss me?! I have been working away and living in traffic to the Atlanta airport running my kids to camp grandma and camp aunty's. It has left little time for dreaming and depressingly even less for the observations of beauty and improvement that make me genuinely happy. I caught the landscapers yesterday. I have weeds the size of my head growing and it appears they were sprayed and are in the process of dying. 🙄 When a weed looks like it could play a starring role in Little Shop of Horrors, it should be pulled, not sprayed. Your time for spraying is long over at that point. I don't think my landscape company liked me telling them that but too bad so sad! My assistant manager and I redid the package room. It was organized by home number and the mail people really just threw packages in there. It was difficult to find anything. So, we printed out new signs and laminated them moving it to an alphabetical organization. I tried first on canva to make a sign and look, sometimes with canva I do ok! 😆 My first attempt though was not good and my assistant manager stepped in for the rescue! She found a beautiful background to print the branded signs on. She and I will now go in every day to label the packages by last name so it is easier for the residents to find their stuff. We also add dates to the packages so if they sit for too long, we can call them and remind them they need to pickup. Today is a busy day for me. I do something I love, pretty much unpaid (although I'm salary so there is that.) I am catering our pool party! I have my menu planned out. I'm planning for 100 people to be safe as I have advertised for weeks. I have a coconut mojito signature cocktail as it is a caribbean theme! I bought a foldable bar table that comes in a nice bag so the property will have it for all future events. I am doing steak and chicken kabobs and my service manager is going to grill them for me. I'm making a mango sticky rice (mine is more savory versus the Thai dessert version), jalapeño cornbread, fruit salad, salad bowl and fried plantains. As I think people will fill up on the food and drinks, I'm keeping it simple for desserts. Costco has these awesome sorbets in fruit shells and a variety of Popsicles which I think will be a nice light ending to the meal. But why? Even my mother loves to ask this. This is not in my job description. Food is love. When you stay home with your kids for ten years answering the endless question of "what's for dinner?" until you die, that is the realization you come to. I think my goal as I am older is to just pour love into everything in my life. This world is ugly and cruel at times. I can't change that. I can only control myself and my contribution. I choose to love and hope that my kids grow up to choose the same. I will post pictures on Sunday so you can share in some joy with me! ❤️

What is beauty? What impact does beauty have on the human experience? We grapple with this philosophical question every day in building and property management. When you build a community, you want to make it beautiful! When you see those property pictures with a resort-style pool and top-tier lounge, you daydream. I know I did. Back before I got into this business, I was a pre-law major graduate with no idea of what I actually wanted to be. I dearly love my parents but I looked at apartment communities online and I dreamed about moving out to a new life that was truly my own! I had a new hire orientation at the corporate office today and downtown Atlanta is such a fascinating dichotomy. The vibrant street art, the lush greenery outside of our corporate office stand in stark contrast to the extreme modernism of the buildings and the emaciated drug user hovering under an alcove one block away. My community is beautiful from every macro perspective out there. Sales objections are about overcoming weaknesses and you try to look at it through a lens of using beauty, incorporating beauty to soften the flaws every community inevitably has at the micro level. A manager today from a different market said her prospects loved juliet balconies. My prospects dislike them. It's all stop sign red buying signals we work and work to overcome. How do I build value in something that was designed to provide value people just don't see? Juliet balconies were designed for ventilation and airflow, great conceptually but utilitarian really. You can't sit on your juliet balcony and wave at the neighbors or read a good book while you listen to the pool fountains or children joyfully splashing around. So many people have this dream for themselves. So, I shift the focus to beauty. Plants. Flowers. A beautiful windchime. A sculpture. You take a modern building and you add trees. You take a gray concrete wall and you add street art. You make a space come alive. You make a home. You add culture. You add personality. You soften the blow of the sad drug addict on the corner that wears on the soul. Real life is messy. It's sweet and sour. We can try from our tiny little offices in our small little communities in the grand scheme of this wide world to beautify what we can, to bring softness, to give water to those who thirst for it. There will always be the ugly. Without it we would have no contrast to dream of all the beauty that could be and I never want to stop dreaming of what could be. I never want my clients to either.

I have enjoyed putting my leasing cap back on this week. My lovely assistant manager is a promotion from within so she has been filling in for another staff member's PTO at her old property. Next week she is all mine! 🥰 You forget how many personality types are out there and it's a fascinating clientele in Alpharetta. I met a chief lab scientist I ended up leasing who is going to bring me supplement samples! I am a willing guinea pig as long as it's natural! 😆 He is very interested in all the nightlife opportunities Alpharetta has to offer. If you just listen to people, you find new things out about your community that can help your sales process. A prospect I toured yesterday is an avid walker. I have not exactly explored the Alpha Loop directly off my property but this nice lady patiently got on Google earth on her phone as I told her I share her enthusiasm for peaceful, nature-filled walks. She showed me the Alpha Loop where it cuts over to Avalon. She is going to drop me a pin to where they can get on exactly from my community today! She should be applying any time now. These conversations also can open you up to glaring flaws that need to be corrected. Do you have the room dimensions? (Not on our floorplans!) How will I know if it has white or gray cabinets? (Not written down anywhere I can find.) The hardest one I have encountered so far is "how do I know which one bedroom has a shower/tub combo versus a shower only?" It doesn't appear floorplan specific and isn't written down. 😐 This is a BIG one for a lot of people. My family (cough teenagers cough) I swear sucks half the water in Fulton County taking baths. I would never want to lease somewhere without a tub and some prospects just adore a shower only option (this would be my husband.) If you are a lease-up manager, you need to be walking your homes with an eye for the long game. Every possible feature, room size, wall color, cabinet color scheme, unique features like build-ins, flooring type....it all should be on a master list! I have come to the conclusion I need to complete a full property inspection where I walk every home, occupied and unoccupied. Once we have notated all the missing items, anyone can see how much stronger the sales process will be!! It's fine. This is what I do. I fix things. I make them better. I just wish it was all done yesterday!! 😆 I am selling through the holes but who wants to keep doing that?! Plug your holes. Fill the gaps. Make it flawless!

The Anxiety-Driven Worker Have you ever worked with someone who has anxiety? I watched this great clip of a comedian. It made me laugh so hard! He said he never realized he had anxiety until he went to therapy. He would be on a plane traveling somewhere with his wife and would make a plan to exit the plane. He would mentally map out exactly when to get up and pull his baggage. Then when it is time, he is yelling go, go, go to his wife! 😆 He thought he was just a polite person. His wife asked, "what the heck is wrong with you?!" Anxiety, that's what's wrong. I laughed because I am this person. I usually exit the plane last because I am so anxious about offending someone with improper timing I would rather just wait until the runway is clear! Anxiety demands you make order from chaos. It demands a certain level of perfection. It demands a plan of action for everything. It keeps you awake at night when you fail to meet those demands. Sometimes anxiety requires medication. I am fortunate as mine doesn't. If I manage mine by bringing order to the chaos, it leaves me alone. Not everyone is so lucky and those people have my deepest sympathy. I personally think anxious people make great workers. We sit around and envision all the ways we can fail and push ourselves toward all the peaks our minds think we should be capable of achieving faster than is likely realistic. What do anxious people need to be successful at work? I know I need a feeling of security. Those tiny pats on the head of "good job on that!" At my last job my boss was so quick to say, "we are so glad you are here." Also, "it's OK to make mistakes when you are new!" Man does that help. When an anxious person tells you something is wrong, we want it fixed, yesterday, or it runs us up the wall until it is. We rarely forget critical things because if we do, our brain will gleefully beat us up for hours, days, weeks....heck I have memories that still make me want to dig a hole and bury myself from 25 years ago. How can you get the best performance from an anxious employee? The biggest thing is to let them work. Give them goals and let 'er rip! Let them tell you the problems without getting defensive. Get out of their way. Back them up while they take that bundle of energy and direct it at your issues. Anxious people don't care how it looks, whose fault it was, how long the problem ran on unaddressed. They just care that they walk in the door tomorrow one step closer to one more problem resolved so they can actually sleep a whole night through. Reassure them you are glad you hired them, glad they are here and you welcome them solving problems you never even knew you had! 😁 Be consistent. Be predictable. Anxiety loves boring. Give me a thumbs up if you are an anxious person or love one. We are critical infrastructure in the business world. ❤️❤️❤️

I lay with my youngest son every night before bed. We are OBSESSED with Sarah Lavender. If you would have asked me what ASMR is a year ago, I would have blank stared you. I had no idea what it was and then I found this magical lady. Toby and I watch her videos every night. We like her whispers and her tapping on a variety of objects. It relaxes him right to sleep and it has become our thing. He was laying beside me and suddenly blurted out, "Mom, you are starting to look old." He didn't mean it as an insult. I think it was just a curious observation he made. I told my husband in the morning with a chuckle and he was mad on my behalf. I told him don't be. Aging is a gift denied to many. In the grand scheme of things, I am aging well. God loves me, I love myself and am loved by many and love always shows. My wrinkles are formed from so much joy. I have zero urge to freeze them with bovine concoctions. 😆 (If you choose to, no judgement, you do you and be happy!) This, I tell my kids, is why it is important to put love into everything you do. Everything ages but it doesn't all age well. Love leaves an imprint on everything. When you walk into a home filled with life and laughter, it has a glow. It wraps you in what feels like a warm hug. This isn't imaginary. We all have an electromagnetic field around us. We emit energy and can impact the energy fields around us. We all know real love takes time. You meet someone and your eyes are swimming with stars. That isn't love. That is infatuation and it does not permeate the walls. I remember back to my lease up days. We started with a beautiful building and infatuation. It took long months of our staff pouring love into that building to make it into a home. Every day I do feel like I'm getting a little bit closer. One soft look from a resident. One warm conversation. One funny dance to get a giggle from my assistant manager. One careful watering of the beautiful orchid my regional manager gave me. Little by little, drip by drip, we pour our love out and let it be absorbed. In a few months, we will take this beautiful building and give it the love to shine, to age with the splendor it deserves, with feeling! You can look at aging with sadness or even horror or you can marvel at all the memories one body or one place can hold. Are you headed to an ending or to a place where your glass is finally full? Do you have a new building or do you finally have a home? 😇 Go watch some Sarah Lavender on YouTube. Ponder the meaning of life over whispers and tapping. 😆 Say a little prayer of thanks that you made it far enough to be looking old! ❤️

🐝🌙🐝 Apparently NASA has a poster hanging with bees that reads: "Aerodynamically a bee's body is not made to fly; the good thing is that the bee doesn't know". The law of physics says that a bee cannot fly, the aerodynamic principle says that the breadth of its wings is too small to keep its huge body in flight, but a bee doesn’t know, it doesn’t know anything about physics or its logic and flies anyway. This is what we can all do. Fly and prevail in every moment in the face of any difficulty and in any circumstance despite what they say. Let us be bees, no matter the size of our wings, we take flight and enjoy the pollen of life. Soul Alchemy. art | 1890. Scientific Illustration of Bees/Insects. Alfred Edmund Brehm

When I was young, I used to go for long runs. I grew up in the country and it was pretty remote. I ran a 5 mile loop through the mountains. My dad would go even further. It was 10 mile runs for him. I have fond memories of dry heaving on the side of the road with him laughing, running circles around me. My dad always liked to do hard things. My parents saw me through so many hard things. They used to joke that I liked to do everything the hard way. Broken bones and broken hearts. Not sure how they kept me alive past the Darwin age of youth. My dad would always tell me to step out of my comfort zone. Never get complacent. It isn't comfortable for a caterpillar to turn into a butterfly. Massive change is never easy but it's worth it if you ever want to fly. I try to remind myself of how I was raised when I have moments of insecurity. It's like a blanket for me, the family mantras. On hard days, I draw from the well of my memories. I am built for difficulty. There is no challenge greater than I can rise to. I am strong enough to get through it all. I will do the right thing, every day, one thing at a time. Those things will add up to something bigger than me. I will leave a positive impact. I will affect change to the good. I won't change what isn't broken. I will forgive myself for honest mistakes. I will take ownership for my failures. I will be the person I want to see in others. I run because I do hard things. I was hired because I am the person who overcomes, who builds momentum, who leads from the front. It was my parents who forged that. They gave me a steel core underneath all the softness. It's a gift greater than gold and as I age and watch them age, I am so grateful. There have been several times in my life where I thought I was going to fail. They never mentally let me stay in that place. Now, I am all grown up and I find I don't need them anymore for that. They have given me everything I need to dig myself out of my own mental holes....now it is me telling them to hang in there. To take care of themselves. To not give up. It's wild when you get to the age of role reversal with your parents. I think I have hit peak adulthood. I finally know my own strength and my parents' fragility. I hope when I get to where they are, I have given the same gifts to my own children where difficulty inspires them to rise. I hope my faith in them and their abilities helps them to move every mountain in their path. I pray they become the leaders who do hard things and know they are more than enough for any possible challenge life may throw at them.

It was a better day today. We have been in the midst of an IT transition and I realized something. Having too much work does not stress me out. I'm a work horse! 🐎🐎🐎 The inability to get work done due to not having the requisite tools....THAT stresses me out! 😆 I finally felt momentum today! It was my first variance report due for this property and, honestly, I think I rocked it! I had a few nagging blank spots but nothing egregious. I didn't quite hit the 5 pm deadline which bummed me out but I happen to think late is better with quality work than turning something in early that looks sloppy. I found this neat little blurb on the energy consumption of a 40 watt versus a 60 watt bulb. Research, Google level! 🤓 I can't say for sure yet if switching bulbs might be a reason for an overage, but I bet this will make any managers reading this realllllly look at those light bulb purchases now. I saved $60 per invoice switching us from paper invoices to emailed with our elevator vendor! Cha-ching! I caught some reclasses and some overaccruals, finally connected on Teams with my incredibly helpful accountant I am dying to get to know. I always love my accountants. We share joy in numbers! Simpatico! Speaking of numbers, I made sure to go over with the staff the importance of understanding how charges work in our software system. You savvy managers out there know (SHOULD know) that when scheduling a charge to hit at a later time, in Yardi at least, you have to bill an entire month of dates. For example, I would use 6/1/24 to 6/30/24 to not only bill on the 1st but bill the entire amount of the charge. If I try to put in 6/1/24 and end the charge on 6/1/24, I would only have a 1 day pro-rate of the 30 days I needed to charge for. I have surprisingly seen this error at many jobs I have had now so I am careful to call the staff in to train them on it and variance is a great time to do so. I am already knee deep in ledgers and accounts. I think if you want the staff to care about numbers, it needs to be an easy and consistent conversation. The teams need to know that every light switch flipped off, running toilet fixed, charge done right in the system, matters to the bottom line. Seeing trash out in public areas drives me nuts. When the sides of the highways look like a landfill, I want to cry. It all starts with one person thinking what they do doesn't matter. Then a bunch more think, what's one more piece of garbage gonna do? If we want beauty, we all have to care. We all have to try. We all have to have the knowledge and wisdom to know one person's actions can make a difference. Then we fight to pass that passion onto others and pray that we break through.