Scroll down the page to see our suite of exciting products, including (in this order) KwickKlicksTM Time Management System, Client “Fee True-up” Application, ethereaL© Reserve Study Application, Prospective Client Services Bidder, Timed Agenda, Meeting Task Tracker and our Reserve Fund Investment Manager.
All of our products and services are created to improve operations in community association management company offices and are governed by the JamesCominSolutions licensing agreement, click to view. Most of our products are designed for use in an MS Windows 2010 or more recent environment and must include MS Office. Need several products? Getting two gets you a 4% discount, three gets you 8%, four gets you 12% and five or more will get you 16% (on all costs including setup, purchase price or lease price)! Only applies to simultaneous transactions.
KwickKlicksTM Time Management System
This is a pretty big deal! KwickKlicksTM allows for real time tracking and analyzing of your most precious resource, TIME!
But, you may ask, aren’t there a lot of time management systems out there? There are, but they do not work well for our industry and your team members will hate using them and when people hate using things, well, they don’t use them. And by definition, anything that isn’t used is, well, useless.
KwickKlicksTM, on the other hand, is designed for the association management industry, with your team members’ crazy busy schedule and time constraints in mind. This product allows you to track and analyze your company’s time expenditure with great detail using only a quick click of a couple of pertinent buttons, because these buttons are designed just for you!
Current Client “Fee True Up” Calculator
Are you charging the correct fee to each client? I don’t mean the fee that the contract says should be charged. No, not that fee! Rather, I mean the correct fee, in real dollars, today’s dollars!
My research of many companies shows that usually the longer a client has been with them, the lower their fee is, relatively speaking. We all have those clients who we proudly boast to be among our most faithful clients, for after all, they “have been with us for 25 years!” But do you know that these are often our worst enemies, and a large constraint against profitability. Say what? They aren’t always, but they usually are. Now you can know for sure.
With just a few clicks and entry of two numbers (original fee and current fee), this product will project the correct management fee today based on what the original contracted fee was. It is also a very powerful tool in “selling” the corrected fee to your clients, even to your “good ole buddies”.
ethereaL© Reserve Study Application
(conversions of current studies available now, with services for creation of new studies coming late 2024)
If you’ve been providing your clients with the old style “percent funded” type of reserve study (which you most certainly have), be careful because they really don’t work. You see the “percent funded” methodology does not accurately speak to the adequacy of a reserve fund due to a mathematical flaw in the metric. An association with a lower percent funded quite often is more adequately reserved than another association with a higher percent funding. I think you would agree that this destroys the veracity of the metric.
Now I know that this is a huge proclamation, and some may disagree. But read on because the science, the math, agree with me.
I also know that this sounds pretty scary, that a whole industry is flawed. Not to worry though because a new metric is in the final stages of development, the eGrade. This one really works! And, this new patent-pending* way of determining a reserve funding program’s adequacy is being developed for use by management companies rather than reserve consultants! Very soon, we will offer you the ability to create your own studies as an ancillary service! No more saddling your clients with inadequate reserve studies with limited value prepared by third parties with inferior software! No more getting your rear end kicked by your clients for delivering a flawed product which you cannot fix! Want to check it out? Click the “More on ethereaL©” button below.
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* This product received a provisional patent in 2021. Early in 2023 it was accepted for review by the USPTO for a non-provisional utility patent. This is a long and cumbersome process, but we are nearing the finish line!
Prospective Client Services Bidder
Always bid new clients according to plan rather than to mood. With this nifty tool, you can do that while keeping your pricing strategies confidential, even if one of your trusted sales team members becomes your competitor (yeah that happens a lot). Oh, but how do you develop this plan? This product uncovers what your pricing strategy has been over the years, even though you may not be consciously aware of it. Then the system offers that as a starting point, and allows you to reset your pricing strategy if desired. But it’s not done. It then captures it in hidden algorithms to allow you to bid all future potential clients based on this strategy without disclosing it to your competitors or even to your team! Yep, it’s way smarter than me for sure!
Oh, and our product captures your bid for immediate email follow up. I remember from my days in the business, my love / hate relationship with calls or emails from prospective clients. I loved them because it meant a chance to expand my revenue stream. But the “hate” part was associated with just one more thing on my task list, I had to create a follow up bid package which was always difficult because I had my hands full with my current clients. Well with this application, follow up is a breeze, as the system captures the details discussed and builds a follow up email, in seconds!
And finally, the details of each contact are logged into a master sheet for future recall!
Timed Agenda
Here’s a Riddle. Why does a one hour meeting last for two……or three? Here’s another. Why do your managers have to come home to a cold dinner on the night of board meetings? Oh, and how about this, “why do you keep losing managers to other industries?” The answers to all are the same. Because nobody is keeping track of the time. Well, actually, let me rephrase, “nobody is diligently, relentlessly, and boldly keeping track of time, at association board meetings…….and doing something about it.
With JCS’s “Timed Agenda”, neither your manager, your board president, nor your secretary has to keep track of the time. And no, you don’t have to enlist one more of those scarce and elusive volunteers just to be a timekeeper. Our application will do that for you! That is correct, right there on screen in front of God, your board, your homeowners and everyone, the agenda moves along to the next item as per the allocated time for each! And, it will beep, and gray out the old item and highlight the next agenda item when it is time to move to it! Ok, yes, there is an out, the president may decide that it is very important to go overtime with an item. Click the “extend time” button, and it will extend the time for that item, and will keep all others with their original allotment, and move them out to adjust for the approved time add.
Additionally, it is so easy to prepare the agenda. If you have ever created a timed agenda before, it can be frustrating in that whenever you add an item, you have to then recreate the whole timing schedule. Not with our product, it rebuilds the timing when you add to the agenda! It is pretty cool, frankly.
Meeting Task Tracker
If you are like me, you have sat through many a meeting where you made some great progress, designing solutions to whatever issues were on the team members’ agenda. You felt good about your progress and creative session. Then when you met for your next monthly meeting, you, well, kinda started over. Why ? Because nobody followed through! Oh during the meeting everyone was quick to offer that they would “take that on”. Or worse yet, you all simply agreed, “yes let’s do that.” But as soon as you all walked out of the safety of that closed door fortress protecting you from the whirligig that is community association, you were hit smack upside the head with reality. There was little time to even think about getting any of this done, much less time to do it.
What was most lacking was accountability. Our Meeting Task Tracker application is an in-meeting, quick and efficient task assignment application to make sure that everyone gets a precise list of assignments out of your meetings…..and holds them accountable.
*did our pricing strategy get your attention? This little product is free to acquaint you with our newly established company, so long as you later do business with us. Just like at Costco we suspect that if you taste a little, you will be hungry for more. Details when you click the visit product button.
CRM Application (early in development)
Client Relationship Manager (Phase 1: Sales Side) – This is in fairly early stage of development, but will be a tool you will not want to be without. Our version serves two purposes, it tracks and manages relationships with current clients as well as tracking opportunities and progress with prospective clients! Yes, there are CRM systems out there, generic ones, for “normal” businesses. These take a lot of time to learn and use. In keeping with the theory that we hold here at James Comin Solutions, you don’t have time for them. I have tried them, in our industry, and unless you are large enough to have dedicated marketing staff, you are, well not going to be successful. Though most of them are adaptable, I found that they were not quite nimble enough to accommodate the “sell” process to a community association board of directors.
Watch the slide show below to see the early look of the product.
[slide show coming soon]
Client Relationship Manager (Phase 2: Current Client Issues Side) – This is similar in many ways to the “sales side”, but is not as far along. So stay tuned as this develops….well only if you sometimes have clients that have problems, or perceived problems with your team or company.
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Reserve Fund Investment Manager (in development)
Do you know if you should be cashing out some of your long-term Certificates of Deposits, even though you will have to pay penalties for early cancellation? Neither do I. Do you know if your CD maturity dates are still in alignment with your capital expense expenditure needs? Neither do I. Is your reserve study no longer accurate and going to leavy you short on cash because the cost of all of those future replacements has recently increased dramatically? I don’t know but I would say most likely.
Good news though. Even though you probably don’t know the answers to all of the above, and I certainly don’t, our Reserve Fund Investment Manager does. This system determines the best terms and laddering of your CD’s and which ones you should get rid of. This is vital now because if you are still using static CD investments to fund your future projects for which the pricing has become extremely dynamic, you lose.