Business process enterprise and small real estate companies

Abstract

According to the work of Churchill and Lewis (1983), the evolution of a firm follows five stages of growth. As a small company progresses through the first two stages, the entrepreneur/owner and the company act as one unit. Once small companies emerge from the first two stages of growth, they have a choice of entering the success-growth stage of small company growth. At this stage, entrepreneurs can no longer complete all the meaningful tasks themselves. This research will address the problem of how and why entrepreneurial real estate development firms have organized their companies as business process enterprises at this stage of growth. There is an important distinction between a business process and a business process enterprise. A business process is the way in which a company performs a particular task, such as developing a project or doing a deal. Many real estate firms at the survival stage of growth believe incorrectly that putting in place an individual business process is the same as designing a business process enterprise that positions a company for future growth. A business process enterprise is an orientation in which a set of well functioning processes is linked together to create a strategic service vision. Three firms that had progressed past the startup stage of growth and were using business processes as a means of managing continued rapid growth were studied. The work of Heskett, Sasser and Schlesinger (1997) was used as a framework to study the cases because the authors see a process enterprise as the way to achieve customer satisfaction. This is done through the creation of a strategic service vision that is carried out through detailed operational service delivery strategies that create measurable value for the customer. Although the firms analyzed by the scholars in this work are large multinational companies, this research has found that the concepts underlying process enterprise are relevant to small firms. Heskett's service orientation makes that theory particularly relevant to real estate companies at this time. Moreover, this work concludes that a business process enterprise orientation becomes important when a real estate company moves from the survival stage of growth to the success stage of growth.