HOA Insights: Common Sense for Common Areas

138 | HOA Board Heroes: Making our Vision & Mission Statement

Hosts: Robert Nordlund, Kevin Davis, Julie Adamen Season 4 Episode 138

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What happens when an HOA board leads with purpose? Learn how vision and mission statements transform decisions, trust, and community culture.
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Most HOA Boards rely on rules and governing documents. The strongest ones rely on a clear Vision & Mission Statement. Paul Butler, board member and business consultant, shares how his newly formed HOA created a clear vision statement and mission statement to guide decisions, lower friction, and build trust from day one. This is what intentional leadership looks like when a board knows who it is and where it’s going! 


Chapters

00:00 Why should boards measure decisions against vision and values?
00:55 Why do HOAs need a vision and mission beyond governing documents?
04:29 Why would someone choose to serve on an HOA board?
05:18 How does setting foundations early shape an HOA’s future?
06:07 Why is communication essential to HOA culture?
07:26 How do business and hotel management principles apply to HOAs?
09:14 What inspired this board to act on vision and mission right away?
10:39 How did the board collaborate without outside consultants?
11:33 Why was Slack effective for developing mission and vision?
13:49 How do boards avoid making decisions outside formal meetings?
15:50 How long should it take to create a mission and vision?
16:36 How do mission, vision, and values work together?
18:53 Ad Break - Association Reserves
19:24 How does vision apply to older associations?
21:47 Why should boards revisit vision and values annually?
22:45 How will homeowners respond to a mission and vision?
24:23 How can boards actively use vision in meetings?
26:02 What does a strong HOA mission sound like?
28:02 How can compassion and accountability coexist in HOAs?
30:04 Why does transparency build trust with homeowners?
31:34 What advice should every HOA board take from this episode?

The views & opinions expressed in this program are those of the Hosts & Guests, intended to provide general education about the community association industry. The content is not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual or organization.  Please seek advice from licensed

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Paul Butler:

I'm going to propose to my two board members that we actually read the mission at the start of each meeting, and then as we finish each meeting, we basically ask ourselves for the last few minutes, are we moving the activities towards this vision of success for in this case, 2026 are we moving ourselves closer to these ultimate success metrics, and have we conducted ourselves in a way that's honorable to those values?

Announcer:

A regular highlight of the HOA insights podcast is our board heroes feature, where we dedicate one episode each month to celebrate the remarkable efforts of HOA board members to us a board hero is one of the 2 million elected volunteers who deserve recognition for excelling in a role that often goes unnoticed. Today, we're excited to spotlight one of these exceptional board heroes and share their inspiring story. If you match our definition of a board hero, or know someone who does, please reach out to us. Our contact details and those of our sponsors are provided in the show notes.

Robert Nordlund:

Welcome back to HOA Insights: Common Sense for Common Areas. I'm Robert Nordlund, and I'm here today for episode number 138, with another one of the board heroes, we're proud to celebrate regular listeners will recall the recent episode we recorded with regular co host, management and leadership consultant Julie adaman our episode 132 where she shared the value of having a vision and mission statement For your association, basically guidelines for board decision making, drawing the association forward, and not really the rules and restrictions on board behavior that you find in the governing documents. Well, we had a regular listener get excited about that episode, and he led his association to actually create a vision and mission statement following that episode. So today, we have with us Paul Butler, a business consultant and author, as his main job and a board member of his newly built 125 unit condominium association in a suburb of Los Angeles. He serves on the first homeowner board after the developer turned over control of the association to homeowners, and at this time, they're in the process of selecting a management company, a reserve study company, all the business services a new association needs, and they took to heart the responsibility to point their association, their new association, in the right direction early in its existence. So we wanted to share with you their story, the process of developing their vision and mission statement for their new association. But first, I hope you enjoyed last week's episode number 137, with well credentialed manager, Kathleen Dunn on tips for recruiting new board members. That was a valuable episode, as every organizationally healthy Association wants to keep a constant flow of Quality Board Member candidates. We call it keeping the pipeline full well. If you missed that episode or any other prior episode, you can find them on our podcast website, Hoa insights.org, on your favorite podcast platform, or on our YouTube channel, but better yet, subscribe to the podcast in order to get every episode delivered right to your phone or mobile device, almost half of our audience stumbles onto this podcast, and so subscribing not only gives you regular reminders when we have a new episode and the topic of that episode, more subscribers increases our ranking in podcast search engines, helping us encourage and equip more and more board members all across the country. Those of you watching on YouTube can see the HOA insights mug I have here, favorite of mine. I got that from our merch store, which you can browse through from our Hoa insights.org website, or the show notes. You'll find we have plenty of free items like board member zoom backgrounds and some specialty items for sale, like the mug. So take a moment after the show see what we have for you in the merch store, and at least pick up one of our free items before your next board meeting. Well, we enjoy hearing from you, and most episodes are in response to a topic you've recommended. So stay in contact, letting us know what questions you have or topics you'd like to hear us speak more about, so leave us a voicemail at 805-203-3130. Leave a comment on the YouTube video or send us an email at podcast eight, podcast at Hoa insights.org, but back to today's episode. So Paul, let's start with what got you onto the board at your new association. Why did you decide to run?

Paul Butler:

Well, I went up when my wife and I first moved to America, I quickly realized there was two three letter words that most people would come out in hives. On one was the DMV, and the second one was the HOA. And I thought, might not be up too much about the government beyond with which is the DMV, but I thought, well, in my little piece of paradise, maybe I could be a positive influence on that HOA cool.

Robert Nordlund:

So you got onto the board while it was still developer controlled, and you and as it. Two others. Yes, are now they turned it over, and you have the keys to the kingdom there at your association. Yes, okay, tell me more about what that's like. You've got the checkbook, you've got maybe some good things. You've got power, but boy, you have the burden of responsibility.

Paul Butler:

Oh, massively enjoying it, actually, in a weird kind of way, because I think it's so great to be able to come in when everything's new, and set the foundation. Forgive me for using an over simplistic method before I feel that we're actually building our own house within this HOA. So the foundation of all the things that you would know and the listeners would know very well, the we're really building the foundations, and hopefully I, you know, God willing, I'll be able to serve for as many years as people would like me to serve. But I feel that if we can just build a great foundation that will serve future generations.

Robert Nordlund:

Yeah, in previous episodes, we've talked about C words, like caring, courage, things like that. And right now, I'm starting to think more culture and the community. You're starting to set the foundation of what life and your association is going to be like.

Paul Butler:

Yeah, and I think you've mentioned a lot on episodes about communication, which I think is so vital.

Robert Nordlund:

Well, you've got to tell the our audience here by your accent, you are, you are new to the United States. Where are you from? Tell me what brought you here.

Paul Butler:

I'm actually not that new. We've been here about 20 years or so now, but, oh, yikes, I still can't get rid of this silly accent. My wife and I are actually originally from England, pretty close to strathford upon Avon, you know, where William Shakespeare is from. And long story short, I'm a finance guy. Is my original background. And I used to work for Hilton Hotels in Europe as a regional finance director, and they asked me to come over here for two years after 911 on a big project. We loved it here. Went back to England, and then my wife and I said, gee. Well, we don't say gee, in England, I'm just translating now, because I'm completely bilingual. We said, Gee, you know, why don't we set ourselves a goal to move back here? So we've been back here now about 20 years, and our kids were raised here, and we just we really love living here. Fantastic.

Robert Nordlund:

Well, on behalf of what is it? 300 million people. Welcome. Thank you. We love it. Are you new to this HOA form of home ownership. Is this your first experience living in a community association?

Paul Butler:

It is, yes. Yeah. Very much. If I could just make a quick my comment, I see so many parallels with a HOA from my experience when I was with Hilton, because obviously we'd be building hotels for investors, which I translate now to being owners. And then we're engaging vendors to run the hotel well, which is obviously what we're doing in the HOA. And then we always used to have to make sure that we had sufficient resources so that if you and your wife owned a Hilton Hotel in Europe, we've got to make sure there's money in reserves for when that roof needs replaced

Robert Nordlund:

and the carpet and the room renovations and the elevator and everything else. Yeah, I think it's fascinating how we are so used to that in some areas of our life, like hotel. When I travel, I stay at a hotel, I check out, and I never expect to get a special assessment for the carpet. I never expect to get a special assessment for the elevator. Same with the rental car, it's a daily fee. They never asked me to get an oil change on the way back in or get a new set of tires. And here in the community association world, it seems like there's so much resistance to capturing the full cost of ownership in the monthly budget, and I sometimes it just makes me crazy. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Well, take me through the process. Were you and the other two? Do they listen to the podcast too? Has they heard this episode? Or did you come at them with this vision and mission idea from out of the blue?

Paul Butler:

They're not as consistent as I am at the moment. So I've been, for want of a better description, evangelizing this podcast to them now for the last of weeks. And then we presently have six sub homeowner associations where we are in this development, which is the it's going to be the largest development in LA County's history, single largest development. And again, I've also spread the word to those other six sub Hoa is as well.

Robert Nordlund:

Okay, so you heard this episode, you started thinking, and I would imagine it's from your hotel background, your business background. You thought, you know, it's probably a good idea, so it probably was receptive in your brain. But what made you think, by golly, we we should really jump on this and let's do it now. What inspired that action?

Paul Butler:

I think to me, it's like, you know, my background is finance, so I often joke, and I say I'm a recurring accountant, but if I've learned anything at all about human behavior in the workplace, and this is, in effect, a type of workplace. You often speak, and I agree about this is a business that we're running. We're running a corporation, you know, it's a, you know, it's a big chunk of income coming in and a big chunk of expenses. And I always think to myself, like Peter Drucker once said, The Late, eminent management professor, he said that, you know, the only things that evolved by themselves in organizations are discordancy, disharmony and distrust. And great leaders set out to create an intentional culture. And I just thought, well, we could do that with our little Hoa, yeah.

Robert Nordlund:

Well, if my feeling is, if you let something drift, it's going to drift downstream, or if it's in the ocean, yeah, drift and hit the rocks. And drifting is not good. So thank you for taking this idea. Were the other two board members generally receptive, or did they think, oh, Paul, that's for businesses. That's not for an HOA,

Paul Butler:

no, they were, thankfully, very receptive. We didn't have a big pow wow meeting about it. As you can imagine, in 10 weeks, we've had a lot of things that we wanted to get sorted. So I just suggested this as an idea. They love the idea, so I took a first stab at it, and then we wrestled through through a few sentences, a few phrases, a few measurements, and then we adopted this kind of informally in the last couple of weeks, and then we're going to be formally adopting it when we have our next

Robert Nordlund:

board meeting. Okay, so when Julie was talking about, she was saying, I recall she was talking about, it's probably best to have an outside party to help you think clearly. So you didn't have an outside consultant, you didn't have, or did you have your management? Community Association manager? It was just you guys. So three of you sitting down at a board meeting. You go out to dinner someone's house. What do? What did you do?

Paul Butler:

No, we actually have a Slack channel. I'm sure most of you listeners are familiar with Slack, and so I just positioned it as an idea to them, and they liked the idea. So then I just took the draft on it, and as I say, we went backwards and forwards a little bit. We we actually tapped in as well to two of our owners, which, without digressing too much, we've got two of these owners on a subcommittee on a certain project we're working on, and so we run the draft by them. You know, people tend to support what they help create. And we said, what do you think? And they gave us some really valuable inputs as well.

Robert Nordlund:

And so how long did it take you pitch an idea? And actually, I'm thinking that slack or a text string or email might be a very good medium, because you have the opportunity to read it and ponder it and look at someone's edits and take it step by step by step, rather than just talking each other on a table.

Paul Butler:

Yeah, without wanting to do an advertisement for slack. What I personally like about Slack, and my other two board members have come to love it as well because they weren't familiar with it, is you can have dedicated channels. So we might be speaking about 17 different subjects that could get very confusing, very fast on text, but we've got these different swim lanes or channels on Slack, so we know if we're speaking about what we've called our dashboard, this mission, vision and values, that communication is within that channel and that channel only.

Robert Nordlund:

So it didn't get caught up with proposals from new management companies, proposals from a new landscaper, the developer forgot to put the finished coat of paint on this stretch of iron work. Million other things that you as a new association have going on, yeah,

Paul Butler:

and exactly. And then forgive me for stating the obvious with regard to, you know, Civil Code and protocol, etc, we're not making capital D decisions in our Slack channels. We're really just discussing things. The metaphor I always use is that I would I might love the color pink well, like we might discuss the color pink in the Slack channel, but we're not going to paint all the houses pink until we propose it in a formal board meeting. So like with this dashboard, we've had discussion on it, but we won't formally adopt it until we present it in the Open Meeting in our next meeting in about four weeks time.

Robert Nordlund:

Now, you got me thinking there's probably going to be some people who are concerned that you're having a meeting outside of a meeting, but I don't, I kind of don't think, of course, what do I know I'm not an attorney, but I have a feeling you're just tossing ideas to each other. You're not finalizing anything. You're saying it could have been Did you remember to call the landscaper? Did you notice that there's a leaky irrigation head over by unit number 13, something like that. Okay, yeah, I think you are okay. So what was the what was the net time from your proposing the first idea to having something that is a pretty clear Final Draft, about a week. She got right to it. There's going to be some people laughing at that statement, because it takes them a week just to get through their emails. And there's so many things going on at their 20 or 40 year old association that just a lot going on, they might touch it maybe once a week, going back and forth. So there will be others taking more time. But did you feel like well, tell me about the other two board members, personalities, complimentary. Friction. Did you feel like you worked as a good team on this?

Paul Butler:

Oh, definitely, definitely. I mean, obviously I was the most vocal on it, because, as you rightly say, my background, it just immediately occurred to me to be a good idea. And then the other two board members, they had no negative responses at all. They just said, Well, I think this is a great idea to set a kind of a North compass, a North Star. And I said, Well, would you like me to take a stab at it? And they said, You'd love you too. And as I say, we went backwards and forwards on 345, points, as it were. And as I say, I do regard it at the time of this recording. I do regard it as being kind of in the crock pot as it were, because we haven't taken out of the oven, because we haven't formally yet presented it to the the ownership, which, as I say, we'll do within I think it's about three more weeks time when we have our next open meeting.

Robert Nordlund:

Okay, so you've got something that you feel good about, but you know that it hasn't gone before the homeowners, and so it's not really something that you can say is published, but you're ruminating on it. And if you're like me, when you write something, I like to finish it, yeah, and then come back to it a week later and look for typos. I like to look for the grammar the way I've repeated something that didn't need to be repeated. And so you're at the it's not like you're at the cleanup stage. Okay? You You talked about it being flexible. It's flexible before you've told the homeowners, but since it's not governing documents, it's not, can we say a legal document. And so do you think this will get the association through the next five years, the next 10 years?

Paul Butler:

Oh, definitely, yeah. So again, what we've done is we've set a, you know, a mission, which, to me, is always the why, you know it's the purpose, or, as the French say, the raison d'etre, the reason you exist. And then for us, our interpretation of a vision. Because I've, I've often found that most organizations they make, they mix up vision and mission, and they often seem very interchangeable. To me, the vision is, where do we want to get to by when? And again, I'm no psychologist, but I found that most people can focus attention in an organization, say, for the next 12 months. So we wrote our vision of success for 2026 which is at the time of this recording, we're in late 2025 and this essentially ties into the budget that we've just passed. So there's no surprise here. It ties into the budget. Then, to answer your question, we actually went one step further than just our vision for 2026 we said, well, what would be our ultimate success metrics, which we've set these three ultimate success metrics, which is what we're striving for. One of them would be something I'd see us getting to within about three to four years, and the other two would be essentially statements about the status that we always want to stay within. And then the final part of that little document was the values. And I always think about the values are about, how do we want to work together? And that would be primarily about, how do we want to work together as a board. And came up with what I thought was a cheesy idea, but the other two board members loved it. I'm thinking about trademarking it. Robert, we came up with three values around H, O, A and the H was to help each other. The O was to be always owner centered, and the A was to be accountable for funds. Hoa, t, n,

Robert Nordlund:

I like that. Actually. I like that a lot, and most of our audience is board members, but I bet there's some board members, and if we have some homeowners listening, they're saying, I'd like to be in that association, some an association that values that type of thing. Well, it's about midpoint here in our recording, so I think it's time to take a quick break, and it's time to hear from one of our generous sponsors, after which we'll be back to hear more from Paul and we'll read a few excerpts from their mission, vision and values.

Paige Daniels:

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Robert Nordlund:

and we're back. Well, I enjoyed that first half of the program so much, and Paul and I were speaking more about their particular situation, and I had a question for him that I want him to answer in front of you, Paul, yours was a new association, and I think of it like putting the fins on an arrow, it's going to allow you to point your association in the direction you want it to go. And I love that. What about how a vision and mission? How does that apply to a 20 year old or a 40 year old Association?

Paul Butler:

Well, two things come to mind to me. Number one would be if an organizer, if a board does. Doesn't have mission, vision and values, I'd highly recommend that they do. So I often think about the wisdom that's on these boards. You know, people that have been inside the workplace for, you know, 234, decades and then have now got more time to be able to contribute. I'm a great believer you may have the wisdom within the board to be able to do something yourself. I don't think it needs to be over complicated. Again. In my two cents would be, the mission is the why the vision would be where you want to get to say, this time next year, I like the idea of some ultimate success metrics, which are a longer vision, like 345, years, and then the values about how do we want to conduct ourselves working together? So my first comment would be, if a board doesn't have it, it's not too late to start. You can start tomorrow. I don't think you necessarily need to bring in a consultant, although that chemistry might be beneficial depending on the characters on the board. And then the other thing I wanted to suggest is, to me, the all three components of this, if we just stood it down to mission, vision and values, all three of course, I think should be revisited by a board on an annual basis. But essentially, the mission really shouldn't change. I mean, that's your North Star, your North compass, the vision for success for, say, the next 12 months. Of course, that's going to change, because you're going to reset the clock, as it were, each year. The ultimate success metrics, I don't think are going to change. And I don't think the values really should change. If you land on some noble, honorable values of human decency, on how we're going to be together, those things are principles. Those things are universal. They're objective. They exist with or without permission. They just are. I don't think anyone's going to disagree with, you know, helping each other, treating people in the way you want to be treated. You know, listening more than you speak those types of things. Yeah.

Robert Nordlund:

Well, I think so much of the bylaws and the governing documents, the ccnrs, things like that, are you must do this or you cannot do this, and those are almost scarier rules, and you've said it repeatedly, the mission is the why it's your North Star. Where are we going here? And the values is, who do we want to be here? How are we going to treat each other? And it's probably too early at your place, but having a good set of mission vision values, that can probably be, I would hope you can be measure that in your property values, because that creates an association that you're welcoming, that gives order and it gives purpose, and it gives a guide. And I just, I just love seeing that. Oh, thanks, Robert, yeah, yeah. How do you think the homeowners will respond to this? Do you think they'll embrace it, or do you think they'll say, oh, let's add one more thing, or something like that. Well, what's your guess?

Paul Butler:

Well, at the moment, we've probably got the problem that most homeowner associations have in that of our 125 units, we might at best get 10 people come on to the board meeting. But using that C word that I hear you mentioned so much about communication, we've actually come up with a little bit of a game plan as to what we would do to then communicate this document. So it's not just going to be, let's say, the 10 people that are on our next meeting, but we're also going to assemble this out as an E blast via our management company. We also have a discord channel, which I'm sure people are familiar with it's like a social channel, which we've got an isolated channel just for our developments, who's just only residents of our development that could see it, and so we post it on there as well. So I'm 99% sure that no one's going to say no. That's a dreadful thing. I'm hoping that if we do have a handful of people that say, Well, what about this verb or this adjective? Or could we change this on my all ears on that. But of course, what we want to do is we want to get this in situ. We don't want to spend the next three months kind of arguing over fonts, right?

Robert Nordlund:

Yeah, no, I get you there. What's your experience already? Okay, this is new to you. You're new to the board, but you now you have this new guiding, these guiding principles. Are you already feeling them settle in, that they're helping you think about we are here in December, think about budgeting for next year, or how I don't know any other things, but are you already sensing that? Now we have some principles, so it's already helping us know what's right and what's wrong.

Paul Butler:

Yeah, so without being too robotic about it, what we were, and I think this actually came from one of your prior episodes, because as you know, I've become a raving fan of the podcast. I've gone back into history and listened to you as a younger man,

Robert Nordlund:

when I didn't have so much gray hair,

Paul Butler:

your voice was a lot higher. And anyway, what I was about to say was, I think I've heard it come through on one or two of the episodes where they actually read the mission. So ours is fairly concise. So what I thought we might do is, I'm going to propose to my two. Board members that we actually read the mission at the start of each meeting, and then as we finish each meeting, we basically ask ourselves for the last few minutes, are we moving the activities towards this vision of success for in this case, 2026 are we moving ourselves closer to these ultimate success metrics, and have we conducted in ourselves in a way that's honorable to those values.

Robert Nordlund:

Yeah, I like that. At Association reserves, we have a weekly executive leadership team meeting, and we talk about that at the beginning, we go around the table, and each one of us takes a value and just we talk it, because we're just reminding ourselves. And I think we we're humans, we need to be reminded of that. Paul, are you okay if I read your mission statement,

Paul Butler:

only if you can do it with an English accent.

Robert Nordlund:

Oh, gee. Okay. Then, then you're up. You don't want to hear me trying different accents I could do with the Californian accent. Okay, okay, you're up. You have it handy? I do yeah. Do you want me to read just the mission? Read just the mission. Just give people a flavor of where you went on this.

Paul Butler:

Yeah, certainly. So out of respect, I won't name the association, but if I'll say our mission is the mission of the blank, blank neighborhood association is to show love for our neighbors by serving our community with integrity, promoting fairness, protecting property values and fostering a peaceful, neighborly environment. I mean, who's going to disagree with that? We then say we're, individually and collectively as a board, committed to ensuring the efficient and optimal use of operational funds. And there's a conjunction maintaining strong reserves to support future repairs and community improvements.

Robert Nordlund:

Yeah, you've got a lot of words there, and they are soft enough that people will have different definitions of love, they'll have different definitions of fairness, different definitions of neighborly. But I think they're all pointing you in the right direction. They're easy words. They're words that are easy to embrace. They're friendly words, words that make you want to participate in that now you're going to have delinquent homeowners, and you're going to have to balance that love with fairness, with making sure you have the operational fund you can't let them not pay, so there's always going to be a balance, but you've at least put it here on the table that I am kind of interpreting, that you're going to tell them that you signed up for paying the monthly assessments you're 60 days overdue, and it's not fair for you to make the other people pay for your stuff. We love you. Do you need a payment plan? You're communicating this, and that's kind of how I see this. You're balancing these different attributes so that it's going to guide how you deal with these people, rather than just throw them to the attorney and say, good luck. Is that fair?

Paul Butler:

Oh, gosh, absolutely spot on. And you actually said on one of your episodes, and I won't go into too much detail, I had a respect for the homeowner here, but we had a homeowner here that went through a devastating situation, so with love, we agreed a payment plan for that person to catch up. And guess what, she's all caught up now, and she's so so grateful.

Robert Nordlund:

Yeah, well, you treat your owners with respect. You treat them like grown ups. You treat them like CO owners or CO investors in your company, your nonprofit real estate investment company, that is your Association. We're in this together. We need the money to be able to take care of the asphalt, to take care of the roof, to cut the lawn, all these kinds of things that we need to do because it's our association. I love that kind of idea. You've got ultimate success metrics. You've got our values. You spoke about that, Hoa, you've already told me you're unofficially going to trademark this. So don't anyone go sideways on this, but it's help each other, owner centered, owner centered and accountable for funds. So just tremendous stuff. If I can also share you created a multi page document that has a pie chart that says, Where do your monies, where do your funds go? And I think there's so many homeowners that would appreciate because when there's an absence of information, everyone becomes, I shouldn't say everyone, it creates an opportunity for people to have concerns and doubts and fears. And you're right here, from the beginning, being proactive on saying where our dues go. Insurance, this much, reserves, this much landscaping, this much management, debt collection, other expenses and free cash flow. You're telling them what the major heavy hitters are in their budget. And if I was a homeowner, I'd say, oh, okay, kind of hard to embezzle a quarter of the money if it's going to pay these bills. So I just like what you've done. And to communicate and be proactive to your homeowners.

Paul Butler:

Two very quick comments on that. Robert. One was, I just thought, well, to seek, first to understand and then be understood as it were, that principle, we thought, well, if I could, if we could interpret, what are those two questions most top of mind to owners, you know, where do my dues go and why are dues going up, for example, next year. And then at the bottom of that document, as I'm sure you saw as well, we actually then showed how we've divided the vendors up between the three of us. Because, yes, we have a management company, but no one's going to oversee those vendors better than the board members, because, in effect, we're the owners as well. So we've divided them up between us. And then shock Hoa, we've actually put our contact details on that document and said, You got any comments, questions, suggestions, we're here for you.

Robert Nordlund:

Just let us know. Yeah, and I think that's like so many things done. Well, if you can catch a problem when it's small, it keeps it from being a big problem. And you created an open, transparent community there, where, if they have an idea or a complaint, they're going to get to you first before it becomes festering and a big thing where they're going to explode and have a real problem with the board. So again, so many good things I like. Well, Paul, I'm looking at the time here, and I want to thank you for taking the time to join us on today's program, and for for taking this podcast seriously enough that you listened to an episode and took what you learned about vision and mission to improve your association. So any final thoughts or words of wisdom or do you have a challenge for fellow listeners that you'd like to share?

Paul Butler:

Two things come to mind. Number one, I would massively encourage you to recommend this podcast to others. I just think it's an incredible, incredible resource. And then the second thing I'd say, if you don't have a mission, vision and values, I'd really encourage you to do so hopefully, if you took anything from this episode, it's really not that complicated. There's value in, obviously, considering a consultant, and I think there's also value of considering a DIY approach, but it's been a real joy, Robert. I'm so pleased that I've come to know you, and so pleased that I've come to know this podcast.

Robert Nordlund:

Yeah, well, you talk about it, you've brought this down to something that I we can do, and it's going to help our association. And when it helps our association, it helps the homeowners and boy, that leads to a more peaceful community. And in Kevin's words, I can hear him saying, it's lowering the temperature. So lots of good things. Can we put up a redacted version of your vision and mission as a some of the show notes? Absolutely yes. Okay, okay, we'll work on that. We want to publicly acknowledge Paul for performing a thankless job well, and for doing a remarkable job of building community with a vision and mission statement at his new association, we are so glad that there's board members like Paul scattered all across the country, and we're fortunate to have him to tell his story. We hope you gain some HOA insights and encouragement from Paul's observations and experience that helps you bring common sense to your common area, and remember, if you match our definition of a board hero, or know someone who does, please reach out to us. We love having board heroes on our program. Our contact details are provided in the show notes. Thank you for joining us. Subscribe to the podcast, and we look forward to having you join us for another valuable episode next week.

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