About nine months ago, I quit my day job to become a full-time independent consultant focusing on product management and development for web projects, mostly in the social media space. I’ve also been investing in real estate for awhile, with a few residential properties in my burgeoning portfolio.
Through some real estate networking events in San Francisco, I met the partners of a small real estate brokerage here in town called Star Realty that focuses on helping residential investors make the jump to commercial real estate investment. They’ve only been around for a year, but their business is solid and they’re just now starting to really think about building a system to enable strong growth over the next 5-10 years. The two partners aren’t very tech-savvy but they understand that this is the direction the industry is going and they have a chance to be on the cutting edge if they start now.
We’ve been discussing working together for awhile and we have decided to move forward, so I’m very excited. I’ll be working on helping them overhaul their brand and build long-term brand equity online. As this combines several of my favorite subjects, and is a chance to get in early and have a meaningful impact on their long-term success, I’m very excited and have tons of ideas on how to help them succeed. I’ll post more about things once we get setup, but just so you see what kind of challenge I have ahead of me, check out their current site:
Update: I’ve heard concern from a couple of clients that this will impact my work with them or that I’m giving up consulting altogether. Just wanted to reassure everyone that I’m still very much available for consulting work and will be for the foreseeable future. This is just a client engagement that I’m particularly excited about because I feel it will have a strong impact and further my knowledge of marketing and building brand equity in the social media space.