Staying Motivated

Turning around a mobile home park is work. Anyone who attempts to tell people otherwise has not actually done it! There are lots of facets to getting to the end result, and it is not a fast process. The ATM machine spitting cash does not happen on day one, ten, one hundred, or three hundred. Instead, you feed the machine; not only cash, but time!

The first thing encountered is resistance. People don't like change, especially if they have been able to live without rules in a mobile home park! Their immediate thought is "I am not going to have this guy tell me what I can and cannot do." Although you would think that this would be a one-time thing to overcome, it is not. It is a continual process.

Even as you improve the park and the living conditions of the residents, you are there on a daily basis and cannot see the tiny stages of the improvement. As you look around you see what NEEDS to be done rather than what HAS been done. It takes outside eyes to open yours so you can see the progress that has been made.

You aways take two steps forward and one step back. This is pretty normal in the world, but somehow you have entered this project thinking it will only be forward movement.

We have found that we need to do a few things to keep motivated:

Take regular time off. It is easy to "get in a rut" and work all the time. Turning a mobile home park around, like anything else, requires time away from the project. To assist us with this, we (attempt) to not work on Sundays and to make regular trips to our own home. When we make a trip home, hopefully about every 6 weeks, we try to stay there for a week. Timing of the trip can change how we approach this. For instance, this month Jim is going home (a business meeting to be attended there) but Ellen is staying at the park. Why? The meeting is scheduled for the 3rd of the month and we make every attempt to be here during the first five days of the month for lot rent payments as well as the 15th-19th, since house payments are due on the 15th. Jim, however, will return to Arrow Woods ready to hit the ground running because he had a good break. (Just in time for two new homes to come in!)

We have also tried very hard to get involved with things in the community. We attend church every week, Ellen goes to choir practice every Wednesday, Jim has changed his VFW membership to a local chapter as well as joining the DAV local chapter. This is allowing us to meet local people who are NOT our tenants!

Besides doing things on a personal level and a community level, we attend mobile home functions and keep in touch with others that we have met there. We are currently planning to go to the mobile home show in Mississippi in late March, MHM in Austin, Texas and MOM in Madison, Georgia during this year. We will add other functions as we become aware of them and decide that they would be something we want to do. Attending trade shows and seminars keeps us up on what our friends in the business are doing and sends us back here with increased enthusiasm to move ahead with our project.

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