This past weekend I built my son, Samson, a loft bed so that he could sleep above his drum kit, freeing up floor space in his tiny bedroom. The smell of a freshly cut board always takes me back to my PawPaw’s cabinet shop in Hemby Bridge and to the construction sites where, growing up, I’d work with my dad.

Coming up in an environment like that, the old advice about measuring and cutting gets pounded into your head, and with good reason. If you’ve ever built anything from raw wood, you know the misery that can come with a bad cut.

At best, you have to walk back to the saw and cut the board shorter. If your error was on the short side, you could find yourself driving back to Home Depot only to find that someone else just bought the last piece of 1x8 southern yellow pine they had, and all of the sudden your whole project comes to a grinding halt.

But measure twice, cut once isn’t just about building houses or cabinets or loft beds.

It’s not just about cutting boards.

It’s about planning.

As we prepare to launch a property management division of R.W. Price Realty Associates I’ve been researching the cloud-based platforms available to help manage properties, investors, and tenants. Many of them are turn-key and can handle every aspect of the management business - all you have to do is plug in the properties.

From the brokerage side of the business, we have a lot of clients who own investment properties, and some of them will be eager for us to take over management. In just a few hours, with one of these platforms, I can have a fully functional website that can screen tenants, accept online rent payments, and electronically deposit checks into the property owner’s bank account.

It’s tempting to jump right in and start plugging in their properties.

But that would be like cutting all the boards for Sam’s loft before I measured the width of the wall it’s attached to. I might wind up with something he could sleep on, but more than likely his mattress would still be on the floor.

So instead of taking clients, right now we’re taking the time to plan.

Figuring out things like who we can rely on at 3:00 AM when a toilet is backed up in a house that only has one bathroom. Or what to do if a tenant is served with a foreclosure notice because the property owner has been collecting the rent but not paying the underlying mortgage.

(Yes, both of those things happen)

Planning how we’re going to run the business isn’t as much fun as running it will be, but hopefully it means that the business we’ll be running is built from the correct parts that are all the right size and fit together perfectly.