George Smith Partners Shakes Up Leadership

George Smith Partners is shaking up its leadership team. The firm has promoted Malcolm Davies to lead the day-to-day strategy and operations along with Jonathan Lee and Shahin Yazdi. In the new role, Davies will focus on the big-picture strategy and goals and will focus more on private events. The firm’s co-founders Gary Tenzer, Gary Mozer and Steve Bram continue to lead the firm’s overall direction and policy.

“Many of the initiatives the firm has embarked on over the past decade have been used by our specific team, the Davies Group, to ensure production was at the forefront of the company’s revenue,” Davies, principal and managing director at George Smith Partners, tells GlobeSt.com. “Our belief is that the connections we foster on behalf of our entrepreneurial sponsors is what differentiates George Smith Partners. By incorporating another partner into the management of the firm, alongside Lee and Yazdi, we are leveraging more of the collective knowledge base in our corporate growth strategies.”

Davies will focus on achieving the firm’s growth goals, which includes entering and establishing business in new geographic markets and growing on the East Coast. “In 2019, we opened a new office on the East Coast,” says Davies. “That office reports to our team from a structural perspective, and we’ve been starting to stretch our boundaries of not only being the pre-eminent West Coast capital advisory firm focused on representing the entrepreneurial sponsor, but also to working on projects in Charlotte, Atlanta, Tampa, Dallas, Houston and Chicago as well as other major cities in the US. By having a coast-to-coast solution, we are better connected to the greater capital flows from the East Coast and have better boots-on-the-ground coverage to bring our dedicated team approach to the whole country.”

In addition, Davies believes in the benefits of private events and investment in new technology. “I recognized this nearly 10 years ago with the launch of our annual events at IMN, ICSC, ALIS, Realshare and the like,” he says. I also created our first ever capital tracking system, which we customized on Salesforce’s system in 2015. These systems and events have grown over the years, and we can see the results in the firm’s production, which achieved record-breaking revenue figures in 2019.”

While the leadership is changing and the firm is growing, Davies says that the core values are not. “We represent entrepreneurial developers and owners and act as their outsourced ‘CFO’ desk in their commercial real estate financing pursuits. We have a dedicated team approach for our clients’ objectives,” says Davies. “Due to this unique team structure, a client will be represented by five to 10 individuals per transaction and since we have no outside shareholders or carry any debt obligations, we are able to provide some of the highest comp packages in the industry to our advisors. There is no outside obligation except to our client in this structure. Without outside shareholders, we can afford to put more human resources than any of our competitors into each financing assignment. This has been critical to our success.”