Kaden Czerniawski Career Background
What is your biggest career achievement?
- What I’m most proud of in my career was the opportunity to run the budget & strategic planning process for a top 5 multifamily firm. As I mentioned in my video interview, I started my career in Corporate as an executive assistant to the President of the firm. I grew my career to be a key advisor for the President and leadership team through assisting in Budget Season, planning Leadership Committee Meetings and overseeing the initiative roadmap for our company’s goals. Within that timeframe, we hired a new CFO and the only person that had experience with our current budget process was me. I had some experience with the budget season through my previous role, but I had to figure out how to, not only get a bunch of executives to listen to my direction, get us from A to Z to deliver a finalized budget for our partners to review.
It was an exhilarating experience to build a process that worked for me and the leadership team and figure out a way to prepare leadership to build the best possible budgets, as well as strategic plans, in a matter of six weeks. Although no project is perfect, we delivered an incredible budget, strategic plan, and partner’s presentation that set us up for success for the next year. The visibility into a company’s financials, goals and roadmap was extremely enlightening. What I valued even more was the ability to prove myself to leadership that I was more than just an executive assistance in their 20’s, but someone who can help them build a better budget and plan for the year to come. I built so many great relationships through this experience and it was a honor to hear all the leaders of the organization talk about their goals for their regions or department. I still hear their voices in my head, giving me different perspectives into my current circumstances.
Throughout the experience, I learned to look at an innovation, new initiative or a broken process through the lens of the whole picture. By connecting the story to the numbers, I had a beautiful visual in my head, showing me how everything connects and interacts with each other. I now approach every scenario with the lens of “how do we thoughtfully find a solution that benefits all that are involved.” Having this experience so early on in my career shaped the fundamentals of how I perceive the business world which ultimately set me up for success in my career path.
What is your ultimate career goal within the rental housing industry?
- I’m going to be honest and tell you that I don’t know what my career goal is, let alone my ultimate career goal, within the rental housing industry. I’m aware this isn’t a typical answer and I know I could fudge this for my applications sake, but I don’t want you, or me, to see this as a bad thing. Sometimes I’m jealous of the people that are driven by what title they have or the status in a company. I’m especially envious of the people who have the desire to build and manage their own company one day. They have defined goals and are going after what they want. I applaud them. I’ve always struggled with not knowing what my end goal was for my career and for the life of me, I can’t put a finger on what it will be. Ironically, this is very odd for me as I’m the type of person who has my personal life planned out down to the age I wanted to get married and have my second kid. For the record, my “life plan” has been incorrect 110% of the time but I love to imagine my version of my future. However, when it comes to my career, I draw a blank at my future.
The only constant dream is that I continue to learn as much as I can so that I can make an impact with my teammates. I want to work with thoughtful, educated leaders and always feel that I am the dumbest person in the room. I want to brainstorm with people with unique points of view and different backgrounds and learn their perspective. I want to take that knowledge and apply it. I want to build great things with great people, things that truly make an impact on people’s lives. As I continue to dive deep into my future, my goal because more fluid then a title or a position in leadership. I guess my goal becomes within every position in a company, I learn something new and make the best of the opportunities that come because of it.
What's one rental housing trend you have your eye on?
- This is such an interesting question and I love hearing everyone’s perspective. When it comes to technology in our industry, there are so many options!! Alternative Renters Insurance providers, Lease Lock, Concierge, Valet Parking or the 1001 in one Marketing providers. All of these new technologies have so much value to bring into our industry and are important on different levels – but none have the power to change the rental housing industry like a robust Business Intelligence Platform.
Business Intelligence gives Property Managers the tools needed to make real time, proactive decisions on behalf of our clients. It gives transparency into trends and allows us to make decisions based off of facts, not emotions. Instead of spending the day culminating various reports or waiting for month end to see what happened last month, property managers can quickly diagnose the asset and prescribe a solution. As Business Intelligence grows and combines multiple technologies into one, there is no other tool more powerful than Business Intelligence.
This question is timely as RangeWater is building an internal BI Platform, giving us full control into our data. The initiative fits so well inside their company goals to grow, improve and execute. I’ve been a part of the team to build out a Project Charter and build our plan to execute on this initiative. I’m excited for the technology and the powers it holds – but I’m most excited about the our plan to grow our team’s ability to think analytically and see things through an ownership’s perspective. We’re rolling out a new training program for Regional Directors to see data as their biggest advocate for their success. We’re creating monthly segments with different leaders in the organization, focusing on different categories each month. As a Regional Director, I would love to hear from the VP of Asset Management on what they look for on a P&L or what the VP of Marketing looks at when they look at a SEO Report. We want to share knowledge with our teams and give them all the tools they need to be successful. We’re creating stories and engaging our audiences. We want to empower them and build confidence when they log into the system. After all, a technology is only as good as the users.