We were lucky to catch up with lisa wise recently and have shared our conversation below.

lisa, appreciate you joining us today. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

Servant leadership and an abundance mindset lead to success. Drive, direction, and structure, in that order, are, empirically a function of leadership. But I believe, from there, leadership is largely up to the leader. For me, a servant leadership model works best. Because it puts leaders where we metaphorically belong: last. Servant leadership paired with a purpose-driven business is a natural philosophical marriage, which explains its popularity among organizations and companies that are mission-based. Like mine.

Servant leadership as a practice and an approach, it is particularly relevant and effective in a service-based organization that relies on human talent to deliver a best-in-class experience. Traditional hierarchical models privilege a top-down management approach that places power in the C-suite. Servant leadership eschews power grabbing in favor of power sharing. The most effective servant leaders operate “in service” to their teams. This approach cultivates stronger, more robust, and more collaborative teams. And it’s a model that has penciled out nicely for our family of companies.

One approach to servant leadership is to feature your staff. Let them lead and represent the company in different ways. Servant leaders don’t need to be out front. There’s room for plenty of folks to have signature authority and represent the company. That’s where you cultivate a strong leadership bench because, with the right people and a shared vision, you can operationalize every area of your business more effectively. You will have more highly functional teams with the ability to design and implement complex systems and solve complicated problems.

To deliver on this model, service leadership tells us not to just give talent and teams a voice, but to actually listen to them. Service leadership also recognizes that we don’t just manage talent, we manage humans. Developing a staff with staying power requires supporting their work, as well as their lives. That’s the only way to create just, life-changing jobs.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am an entrepreneur, author, and justice advocate. I’ve been tending to homes and residents since 1997. I bought an 1893 adobe duplex. I paid $83,000 for the whole shebang – when I inherited a Honda Civic. I promptly sold that car for $8,300. Then my life changed forever.

I was a broke homeowner but I was also a landlady. I painted, patched, plumbed, and tiled my way to a future in real estate management. I invested fifteen years in the NGO space and realized, I was working hard, but not making much change. My new mission was home management.

In 2008, l launched Nest DC with a simple vision. Take great care of property, and residents and build stronger, happier, and more robust communities.  We care the most.  We did the work with an eye toward justice. It worked. Today we’re Washington’s well-known management firm caring for residents, clients, and community. Bootstrapped from the start, built for impact.

Today, we oversee $2 billion in housing, supporting more than three thousand residents across single-family homes and small/mid-sized multi-family homes. Operationally, the team has experience with multi-family, mixed-use, and single-family home management in a high-density, urban environment. Leadership has over 40 years of combined experience overseeing multi-family management. As a point of pride, Nest DC is designed to advance justice. We are vocal advocates and practitioners of fair housing policy and housing justice. Nest navigates federal requirements alongside the complexity of the District’s (evolving) housing policy. Nest puts people and place first.

Today, we’re managing homes and residents in every quadrant of the city and close-in Maryland communities. We have a team of almost 50 folks who call Nest their work home.
We have expertise in single-family homes, condos, multi-family housing, and mixed-use property in high-density, urban environments. We are the only local firm managing Co-Living, an exciting new category of living and housing. Nest leadership has over 40 years of combined experience managing homes across all housing categories.

As a point of pride, Nest DC is designed to advance justice. We are vocal advocates and practitioners of fair housing policy and housing justice. Nest navigates Federal requirements alongside the complexity of the District’s (evolving) housing policy.

Nest puts people and place first. In 2020, I founded and launched the birdSEED Foundation, a housing justice foundation granting no-strings down payment grants to first-time BIPOC home buyers.
This work is disruptive, creating new giving models that challenge the philanthropy paradigm of the past.

We’re building generational wealth and working on the racial wealth gap. In 2022, birdSEED was named a World-Changing Idea by Fast Company. By the end of 2023, twenty grantees purchased homes. And yes, we want to add many zeroes to that number:)

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Fire clients before you fire staff. It builds resilience in spades.

On one Friday night (and it’s almost always a Friday night), we received a call from three young women sharing a 100-year-old house in northeast DC. They had locked themselves in the bathroom. This was because a raccoon had found its way into the house and, in doing so, cut itself badly. Then, in its desperate efforts to exit the house, the creature proceeded to bleed over pretty much every square inch of the unit. Given the behavior of the raccoon, we had to assume it was rabid. Like all client problems, we set about solving this one with a smile and had a technician on site in 90 minutes. He chased the raccoon out of the home, liberated the tenants from the bathroom, and had the young women relocate to friends’ houses for the evening. He then called an environmental cleaning company to safely address the biohazard. After committing to about $8,000 for the cleanup/remediation (and discovering how profusely raccoons bleed), we were able to get the residents back into their home. All the while, we kept the owner up to date in real-time about the status of the emergency, our resolution, and his responsibility for the raccoon breach. While we updated the owner by calling and writing as all this unfolded, we received no response from him during the thick of things. But our sense of right and wrong — and the contract — gave us the latitude to act ethically and quickly, so we did just that.

Naturally, we felt so heroic, we reached for our capes. Our valiant efforts brought no comfort to our client, however. He not only disagreed with our approach, but he also blamed us for the raccoon’s break-in since we hadn’t sealed off access to the unit. (This is despite the fact that he specifically asked us not to perform maintenance on the property since he would personally handle issues to economize before renting it out.) He also somehow held us responsible for endangering the lives of the tenants. So there we were, knowing we did the right thing morally and legally to protect the residents (and the owner) and nonetheless finding ourselves staring at an $8,000 bill, an angry vendor, and an owner threatening a Yelp attack. We were getting crushed by unforeseen events that I knew we’d handled well.

I’ve always told my team I would do anything to save a client relationship, but I knew there would always be exceptions. I would not preserve a client relationship at the expense of our flock. I fired that client and we (literally) cheered the decision over drinks at the corner bar the same night.

It was a hard lesson, but a valuable one. It was important for me to recognize that I couldn’t rely on our clients and residents to appreciate our hard work and commitment to delivering the best outcomes. Instead, I needed to budget for bullies and irrational behavior. When dealing with people’s homes — typically their largest asset — and their wallets, the role of a property manager becomes suspect and invites endless second-guessing. It’s no wonder most property managers choose to deliver the most baseline service and take a pass on a customer-forward approach to the work. When clients don’t begin by assuming the best, it’s unlikely we will convince them otherwise, and the time and energy invested in doing so stops penciling out after a while. I could either lower the caliber of our service to protect us from delivering time-consuming experiences that were underappreciated, or I could double down on our commitment to service and divorce clients who couldn’t appreciate our model. I chose the latter. I have no interest in delivering mediocrity just because it’s the path of least resistance.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

I came from a political organizing background. Getting attention is the name of that game. Having a small brand meant I could use street marketing and curiosity to build a following. Neither requires cash investing – and we didn’t spend money we didn’t earn.

We were able to cultivate a brand identity like no other in the industry. Even our name told a different story. Nest, was intentionally intriguing in its identity. Our quail pays homage to both freedom and the bird we admired most from my days living in the desert. We stole the sensibilities deployed in the real estate sales space and applied them to our own portfolio, opting to invest in high-quality photography and light staging of spaces before we listed them. We wanted residents to feel a sense of longing when they browsed our listings and clients to understand that working with us was an exclusive proposition. We positioned ourselves as city experts delivering exceptional client experiences and worked to be everything traditional landlords weren’t: stylish, approachable, sophisticated, community-focused. We hit Facebook hard, did open houses, networked, and kept our fees reasonable to build a quick book of business.

Our best move in those early days happened in year two when we made a play to win DC City Paper’s “Best of” nod in their property management category. We only had 18 properties at the time, so we had to get creative. As someone with an abundance of grassroots organizing experience, I knew how to build a campaign, even if I wasn’t sure how to manage a full-sized portfolio. Plus, coming from the nonprofit world, I was keenly aware of how much people love free things — especially tote bags. We pushed out pleas for votes in exchange for an adorable, organic tote bag. And we put a bird on it. The bags, including shipping, meant we were spending about $10 per vote. It was a sleepy category at the time, and the combination of strategy and luck got us to the top spot that year. Heads turned, local residents took notice, and we added 80 properties to the “board” — a growing wall of glass, Ikea “whiteboards” where we tracked our listings. We still keep those boards populated with thousands of addresses, and today, they reflect light as they take up an entire wall of one of our offices. I get excited every single time I walk by them, even though they no longer serve any useful purpose. Eventually, we figured out that using glass Ikea whiteboards to track and manage our portfolio — and the endless number of activities needed at each site — was seriously inefficient. But there’s something to be said for keeping your project management prototypes around for nostalgic reasons. Even Wells Fargo has a stagecoach in the lobby.

That was a pivotal time for Nest. The future began to come into focus, and we started seeing our “birds in the wild.” A tote bag tossed over the shoulder of a shopper only reinforced our marketing strategy, particularly when folks would send photos of our then-branded mini-cooper or totes around town. We were showing up and standing out. Even if people weren’t sure what we were all about, they wanted to know more. We were eager to tell them. We sent a weekly “Nestletter” that profiled what was happening in the city, offered insights on local and national politics, and, when Trump was elected, tips for modern activism (a repurposed section that had formerly been known as tips for modern dwelling.) Have some folks been turned off by our unapologetic, politically-forward business model? Absolutely. Consumers have choices, we’re just making it clear why they would (or would not) choose to do business with us.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.nest-dc.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisawisedc
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lisa.wise
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisawise/
• Other: I’m the author of Self-Elected. How to Put Justice Over Profit and Soar in Business. You can learn more about the book and me at www.meetlisawise.com