Our leadership

Lakes Property Management is operator-owned. The founder is still operationally engaged, the maintenance crews are on our payroll rather than a subcontractor’s, and the five people who run this company are named below.

A board is not hiring a logo. It is hiring the person who will answer at 4:30 on a Friday.

Ryan Southwick

Chief Executive Officer

Ryan grew up watching his father, a career Air Force officer, buy and manage rental property on the side. He went into engineering instead of the cockpit, and spent the first decade of his career in manufacturing — running Kaizen and continuous improvement programs at a contract manufacturer serving Toyota and IBM, managing the Sun Microsystems and Compaq server storage programs, and taking those programs to the United Kingdom to establish supplier partnerships. At twenty-five he was running a greenfield manufacturing facility in Massachusetts as design and project manager. He later ran sheet metal operations at Mack Molding in Vermont, where his team supported Stryker’s orthopedic division with tooling for hip and knee replacement systems, working in laser fabrication and titanium.

In 2004 he and Naomi bought Lakes Property Management from his parents, who had founded it in Lake Geneva in 1994, and moved back to the Midwest.

That background is why LPM handles capital projects differently. A roof replacement or an envelope repair is a project with dependencies, sequencing and cost variables, and most management companies hand it to a contractor and hope. Ryan scopes, plans, manages and documents these the same way he managed production programs for Sun Microsystems and Stryker — broken into steps, variables controlled, and repeatable across buildings and phases so the second building costs less than the first.

Ryan holds a B.S. in Manufacturing Engineering and Business Management and is a licensed Wisconsin real estate broker and agent. He is a member of Community Associations Institute and of the Alliance of Community Association Managers – CEO, a national peer group of management company owners and senior executives that has met annually since 2011 to benchmark operations against one another. He leads company culture, new client relationships and strategic direction.

Naomi Southwick

Chief Financial Officer

Naomi holds a B.S. in Business Marketing and came to LPM from Catholic Charities, the New Hampshire Conservation District and Lincoln Family Historic Properties. She bought the company alongside Ryan in 2004.

She owns corporate accounting, human resources and organizational structure. When LPM adopted the Entrepreneurial Operating System, Naomi built the leadership structure the company runs on today — defined seats and clear accountability across accounting, community management and service operations, so that the business stops depending on any one person being available.

Naomi is a member of Community Associations Institute.

Alesya Joitke

Accounting Director

Alesya runs the financial side of every association we manage. Assessment billing and collection, accounts payable, monthly and quarterly reporting, bank reconciliation, budget preparation each fall, audit and tax support, and the CD and FDIC monitoring that keeps reserve funds both insured and earning.

For most treasurers, she is the person they actually work with. When a board asks why a line item moved, the answer comes from her team.

LPM runs accounting through AppFolio and association management through FrontSteps and Caliber, with connections built between them so data moves without anyone rekeying it. Alesya owns that pipeline. It is the reason our financials close on a schedule rather than whenever the bank statements happen to arrive.

Nick Staggs

Director of Community Management

Nick leads the community managers — the people assigned to your association who run board meetings, build board packets, draft minutes, enforce the rules, coordinate vendors and process architectural requests.

He also owns the thing boards rarely think to ask about until it has gone wrong: how many communities each manager carries. Manager overload is the single most common reason boards fire management companies, and it is a staffing decision made long before anyone notices the symptoms. Nick makes that decision deliberately.

If your board is not getting what it needs from its manager, Nick is who to call, and the answer will not be that a ticket has been opened.

Jess Smith

Service Manager

Jess runs maintenance. Work orders, inspections, seasonal scheduling, vendor dispatch and emergency response.

The distinction that matters here: our maintenance crews are LPM employees, not subcontractors, and they are on properties every week. Most management companies of our size coordinate maintenance and bill you for the coordination. When something fails in one of our communities, Jess can often have our own people there the same day, and the person who shows up already knows where the shutoff is.

She also owns the emergency line, which is staffed around the clock.

How we got here

Lakes Property Management was founded in Lake Geneva in 1994. Ryan and Naomi Southwick bought the company in 2004 and completed the transfer of interests in 2010.

What they brought to it was not a property management background. It was Toyota’s process discipline: question every requirement, delete what does not add value, simplify what remains, compress the cycle time, and automate only after the process is clean. Every system here has been rebuilt in that sequence — board reporting, maintenance dispatch, financial review, owner communications. AskJohn was the last step in that process, not the first.

Today LPM manages more than 3,000 units and roughly $350 million in property assets across southeastern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, with in-house crews on properties every week and client relationships averaging more than ten years.

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