As we begin the last quarter of 2012 our focus will be on how we want our companies to perform in 2013 and building our 2013 budgets from a workload and personnel perspective. While the economy has shown some small signs of recovery, the upcoming election will play a big role in how our economy performs over the next several years. Our biggest focus will be setting priorities as we build our business plan and our annual budget. This means we will look at what we currently do and decide what items should be the focus items and how we will accomplish them over the coming year. We need to realize that our staff and resources are already spread very thin due to cost cutting measures over the last few years. In order to meet these goals we need to look at what we can start doing, what we need to stop doing and what we need to keep. We sometimes need to realize we cannot do everything on our 'wish' list with the resources that are available. There may be things that we need to stop doing, which may be painful, but there is a positive advantage to eliminating tasks or services that really are less important on our priority list. By instilling this new philosophy of start, stop, keep our entire team structure and how employees and services are utilized will need to change. We will need to use personnel and resources in different ways than they originally imagined. You may find that individuals that were never assigned to certain tasks can become masters of that task. By beginning this new philosophy we will be doing fewer things, but we will be doing them really well, versus many/diverse tasks in a mediocre fashion. In order to succeed in this market we really need to reinvent ourselves and our service delivery in order to ensure our priorities are met to their highest potential. We will again become "experts" in our given field. This will allow us to achieve our goals and prioritize what is most important for the success of our employees and our companies. Debbie Smith, president of Southern Connecticut BOMA, is with Cartus, Danbury, Conn.