What we believe, how we work, and how we treat each other and the people we serve. Read this on day one. Re-read it during a hard week. Hold each other to it.
Property management is a quiet profession. Done badly, it's a thousand small failures that compound into broken trust between owners, boards, and the people responsible for the building. Done well, it's boring in the right way — assessments processed on time, repairs that happen when they should, boards who feel competent because the information they need is in front of them, and owners who go years without thinking about us because we don't give them reason to.
CMG exists to be that kind of management company in Tallahassee. Reliable. Transparent. Technologically sharp. Honest about what we don't know.
Boards don't hire CMG for excitement. They hire us because the assessments hit on the 1st, the financial statement matches the bank, the records request lands in 3 days instead of 3 weeks, and the BOD packet is in their inbox 14 days before the meeting. Most of our daily work is repetitive on purpose.
We tell boards their reserves are underfunded before they ask. We tell owners they made a procedural mistake before it costs them. We tell each other when work isn't up to standard before performance plans become necessary. The hardest conversations · early · with respect.
The audit log is the truth. The hash chain is the proof. Every consequential action — every approval, every payment, every communication — leaves a trail. We don't rely on memory or "he said / she said." This protects boards, owners, vendors, and us.
Our fiduciary duty is to the association, not to ourselves. We lose deals because we don't pay for placement. We replace D-graded vendors even when they were friends from 2018. We bid out our own services every 3 years even when boards forget to ask. We disclose every conflict.
We are 6 full-time people running 18 associations. We can't afford to silo. We can't afford to be precious about who owns what. When somebody's drowning, we throw the rope. When somebody's brilliant, we copy them. Tizi sets the rhythm; everyone runs it.
FL property management is local. Tallahassee + Leon County knowledge compounds. Remote-only roles are rare and intentional.
We ask for an example of a hard conversation you initiated. If the answer is rehearsed or sanitized, that's a signal. Real candor in 30 minutes.
FL CAM credential preferred for portfolio managers. But more important: someone who cares enough to ask "why" twice in a conversation about reserves.
We back-channel every senior hire. Two-way reference: their references talk to ours. Reputational alignment matters more than résumé.
Senior roles get a 14-day paid trial on a real (low-risk) workstream. We need to see them work; they need to see us work. Both opt in or out.
Comp bands are documented. Negotiation is fine; we don't penalize quietly for it. Annual review aligned to band updates so nobody is underpaid by accident.
Most decisions happen at the level closest to the work. Managers decide what color paint is on a tenant balcony. Tizi decides what insurance carrier to use. Founder decides whether to add a 22nd association.
Reversible decisions: default to fast. The cost of being wrong is small; the cost of being slow is real. Manager makes the call; if she's wrong, we fix it.
Irreversible decisions: default to slow. Get the data, talk to AGF, sleep on it. Big-dollar capital, contract changes, hiring/firing, anything that affects an owner's title — these get measured twice.
When stuck: the meta-rule. Choose the option that's easier to explain to an owner if it goes wrong. Usually the right answer.
Property management at the floor of the market is property management you can't trust. We tell prospective boards: if cost is your only criterion, we're not your firm. We'll lose those deals · we win the right ones.
5 portfolio managers. Real bandwidth limits. We turn away business when we're full · onboarding poorly damages everyone (the new board, the existing portfolio, the team's morale).
If our vendor scorecard tells us a vendor is sliding, we replace them. Period. Long histories don't grant indefinite tenure.
Owners and boards find out anyway. The only choice is whether they hear it from us first (cheap) or from a Reddit thread later (expensive). We always go first.
Not departing clients. Not competitors. Not vendors. Not even the worst-behaving owner. The market is smaller than it looks; everybody talks; reputation compounds.
Every consequential action gets logged. If it's worth doing, it's worth documenting. If it's not worth documenting, ask whether it was worth doing.
I started CMG in 2009 because I'd been on a Tallahassee condo board and watched my own building's management company quietly fall behind for two years before anybody noticed. Reserves were under-funded. Vendors were on auto-pilot. Records requests went unanswered. The manager wasn't a bad person; the system around them just wasn't built to make excellence the default.
17 years later, this team and this platform are my answer to that experience. We are not the cheapest in Leon County. We are intentionally the most thorough. Most of what makes us boring in the right way — the audit log, the platform, the playbooks, the SOC2 work — exists because somebody's trust got broken once and we don't want to repeat it.
If you're reading this on day one: welcome. The work matters. The team is real. The standard is high but humane. Ask anyone anything.
— CMG Founder
Read on day one. Re-read at the 90-day mark. Re-read at every annual review. Re-read after a hard week or a tough conversation. Each value gets revisited at the year-end retrospective; if one is being violated systematically, that's a real conversation.
