Richard Spinelli on running a small company

Richard Joseph Spinelli uses the word company for Sandhills Real Estate deliberately, and several of his essays are arguments about what that word should mean at 27 units. The usual assumption is that a company begins at some headcount, with departments and a handbook. His essays define it by function instead: if purchasing, leasing, repairs and the move in day all happen, a company exists, whoever performs them.

The claim at the center

Small is a real company states that position most directly, in his September 23 essay on the operating company. He walks through an ordinary week, from a cellar inspection on Monday to a shower valve carried up three flights on Friday, and argues that the payroll is the only thing a small size describes. The category he claims is hardly marginal: the federal Office of Advocacy’s 2024 data release¹ counts about 34.8 million small businesses in the country, employing 45.9 percent of private sector workers. A student in a back bedroom, he notes, measures the heat against expectations brought from elsewhere, and that yardstick does not shrink for a small owner. The practical conclusion is that routines have to be written before the staff exists to need them.

Integration is geography explains why the arrangement is workable for him at all. Handling every function in house, he argues across several essays, depends on the buildings sitting close enough together that the same people can reach all of them.

Three essays ask where the knowledge sits

The other two ideas come from three Blogger essays that read as a single inquiry. Student Housing Repairs Need a Small Bench of Trades begins with a plumber who already knows which shutoff works because he has been in the three houses before, and repetition builds familiarity is the name for that effect. The essay also concedes the dependency: a few retirements and the advantage is gone. Outside data sharpens that concession. Construction Dive’s report on an Associated General Contractors survey² found 91 percent of employers struggling to fill openings, mostly craft roles, so a small owner who loses a trusted tradesperson is competing for a replacement against much larger buyers of that time.

A Walkable Portfolio Changes Who You Can Hire turns to staff. A new hire walks one loop past every door by noon of the first day, and he argues that the loop teaches more than experience elsewhere would. Formal programs often fail at that job, which lends the loop some support: SHRM’s report on onboarding³ found that most human resources leaders judged their own programs to be working poorly, with a large share of the time spent on paperwork. Large apartment owners face the same hiring problem from the other end. A 2023 trade report on maintenance hiring⁴ that maintenance roles were the biggest single category of apartment job postings, and that some managers now send floating technicians between properties to cover vacancies that can take weeks to fill.

Building Maintenance History Belongs in Writing then names the gap the first two leave open, which is knowledge lives in people. A boiler short cycles, three people have an opinion about its last service, and nobody has a record. He proposes a short dated entry for every event, kept in one shared file per building. City rules already demand a thin version of that record: the housing agency’s signage requirements⁵ oblige owners to post who the janitor or super is at the entrance and who holds the boiler room key, so that a resident always knows which person to reach. MIT Sloan Management Review on corporate brain drain⁶ arrives at a similar conclusion at far larger scale: teams that left a written trail of their work handed off more smoothly when a veteran departed.

The general subject of owners who also manage, and how that model compares with hiring outside managers, belongs to the owner operators subject hub on richardjspinelli.com, which is the main article on that wider picture.

The handoff he has not solved

The theme ends on a problem he names rather than settles. His closing essay admits that some of the systems he trusts still live in his own head, including where the boiler shutoff sits on each block, and that growth requires a first handoff to people who were not there when the habits formed. He calls that transition graceless for everyone involved. The three Blogger essays can be read as early work on exactly that handoff, and whether written records and a walking route can carry a standard he now enforces in person is the question the theme leaves open.