Pay It Forward: "Find Ways To Make Your Boss's Life Easier"
"By taking jobs with the right firms applying the right strategies, I worked my way into roles where I learned even more than I would have expected, which furthered my career."
Arun Singh is the senior managing director & CFO at MDH Partners. Singh manages the company’s lender relationships and negotiates debt financings.
What has been your biggest challenge or obstacle in your particular role and how have you overcome those obstacles/? Since joining MDH Partners, our firm has grown assets under management (AUM) quickly, but we fell behind on growing the organization (both people and resources) at the same pace. We needed to hire people in the midst of a pandemic, which has proved challenging for organizations of all sizes and across all industries. As a recent hire myself, it was challenging to map the right-size organization and then plan for the future growth. The pandemic also changed the way companies hire, and we found that substantially more people were open to relocation than we had previously observed. Hiring during the pandemic also taught us to focus not just on the qualified candidates, but on qualified candidates who share our values, to ensure it was a cohesive fit. Additionally, we ran into the challenge of training and onboarding, as our organization grew by more than one-third during the pandemic.
What about your current role/position at the company are you most happy with? I oversee our ESG policy and programs, which has been a rewarding initiative to work on outside of the normal cadence of finance, accounting and negotiating. Within my first 90 days, we deployed our first ESG policy, which focused on the activities we had already employed, what we would tackle in the near future and highlighted innovative materials that materially lower our carbon footprint. Our policy touches everyone within the organization, because the “E” is driven by our portfolio, the “S” is focused on employees, and the “G” is to support our investors.
What is the best piece of advice you have received that has helped you succeed in your industry and what advice would you give to the next generation? The greatest piece of advice I have received is to find ways to make your boss’s life easier. Early in an undergraduate internship working for a CFO, my boss explained that my role as an intern was to make his life easier, whether it’s through analysis, insights, data, review or presentations. Ultimately, he told me, he was better off with me than without me. While it seems simple, the selfishness of the concept very much helped to “pay it forward,” as I have had multiple managers throughout my career give me new opportunities that may have felt early for my stage in my career.
As for advice for the next generation, I believe the best place to understand the fundamentals of commercial real estate is on the debt and financing side. Many of the large debt platforms have well-established training programs that will help provide substantial exposures to the different property types, capitalization structures, strategies and geographies that can help broaden horizons of where you may want to end up in your career. The deal volume on the debt side is many times the deal flow of what acquisition groups can review, and it also allows for a robust database of contacts.
Please share with us the best lessons learned about your unique journey. The best lesson learned so far is that every job along the way has really helped me get to where I am today. Even if that specific role was not exciting, it did help round out my weaknesses, which helped my career trajectory overall. Looking back, I had some unusual roles including working on the creation of MetLife Investment Management – which was an unusual role at an insurance company, but provided invaluable experience and insight about growing organizations, fundraising, product offering and marketing. By taking jobs with the right firms applying the right strategies, I worked my way into roles where I learned even more than I would have expected, which furthered my career.
Would you advise any younger person to begin a career in CRE? I would absolutely recommend for any younger person to enter the commercial real estate industry. I think we have bright days ahead, as the asset class matures and we’re on the verge of a few big changes which will make things more interesting and make things move at a faster pace. This includes tapping retail investors as large capital sources, leveraging data scientists to provide insights into new data sources and information, adopting new technology that improves CRE, using artificial intelligence and machine learning to streamline processes and implementing new green building techniques that can change return and evaluation perspectives.
In your opinion what take-a-ways did we learn from the COVID-19 crisis? The COVID crisis exposed the sensitivity of the supply chain, which had become too efficient in recent years and is only as strong as the weakest link. Nearly all of our clients are struggling to maintain a sense of normalcy given surprises in the supply chain, missing components, slow transportation and difficulty hiring. The summation of this is more expensive products in a slower manner than we’re used to. As a result, we’ll continue to see occupiers of warehouses expand space to ensure they have enough product to buffer the supply chain.
On a personal note, the pandemic has also highlighted the importance of maintaining balance between work and home, and measuring what is really important in people’s lives, which we have set forth through our ESG policy.
Find more CRE career advancement tips and inspiring stories from industry leaders in our Pay It Forward Series.
