NEW YORK CITY-Two years after he “got the engines running” on a mandate to grow the New York tri-state region of Cassidy Turley, Peter Hennessy has seen the future. It's business development, and specifically the nearly two dozen new hires who joined the firm between the ages of 22 and 32.

Part of a hiring wave that has numbered about 130 since Hennessy came in as president of the tri-state region, the young recruits are seen as “the backbone for the future of the organization,” says Hennessy. “Because in the next five to seven years, a number of my more senior team members will start to wind down their careers. We need to replace; we need to build for the future.”

Their energy and enthusiasm has paid off in the near term, as well. “If you look at the leasing activity that occurred in 2012, total square footage was down almost 20%,” says Hennessy. At the same time, he says, the tri-state region's revenue was up almost 14%. “The telltale for us is that we're taking market share away from others. You don't grow in a declining market without taking market share from other organizations.”

Increasing that share goes in large measure to the firm's business development initiative. “Of the 14% growth, almost three-quarters of that came from the people sitting on the business development desk,” says Hennessy. Among other factors in that growth was sheer volume: “Between September of 2011 and January 2013, they set up 489 meetings with prospects that we had never worked for as Cassidy Turley.”

He adds that it's “a different model from a traditional brokerage firm, where they might have a bullpen. They report to me directly.” Amid his other responsibilities for growing revenue, Hennessy is “actively engaged” in the training and development of the younger hires. “I assign them out to a mentor/protégé program with one of the senior people for anywhere from 90 to 180 days,” he says. “And I'm managing them at a very high level and very intently, because they're going to be the future of Cassidy Turley in New York.”

When Hennessy joined Cassidy Turley to transform what was then the Colliers ABR organization, he found a culture that was similar to that of the other firms that banded together in 2008 and rebranded as Cassidy Turley in 2010. He describes that culture as “familial in nature. It's about working as a team, having a great deal of admiration and respect for your coworkers and being a team that believed in itself. That resonated between the four primary initial firms that came together, as it did with the firms that came later on.”

It became clear early on, Hennessy says, that “we don't want to lose that culture; we want to take it and manifest it in other ways within the organization. I felt it would be easier to do that, to retain the existing culture and to grow it in positive ways, by bringing in the 22- to 32-year-olds. I'm not going to suggest that they were more valuable, but they were able to help define what the culture for the organization was going to be” in the long term. “If we don't build an organization around the thought processes and images that the future of the firm wants, then we're going to build an organization that the future of the firm doesn't want to be part of.”

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