Pay It Forward: "80% of Success is Just Showing Up"

What has been your biggest challenge [co-leading] Blue Vista and how have you overcome those obstacles/? Reflecting on a 20-year run is always a bit of a challenge, especially as the pandemic disruption is still being felt. I think the biggest challenge for any organization is establishing and maintaining a culture that works for both management and team. Ensuring there is a balance between delivering excellent investment results, making sure the team feels they are well appreciated and compensated, and instituting a clear path to increasing job responsibility is hard for a small-to-medium sized company. The fact that we have been working mostly from home for the last 2.5 years (up until very recently) has made striking this balance even more difficult.

What are some of your best accomplishments? I say this all the time, I am most proud of the Blue Vista team that we have assembled, trained, and watched blossom under our guidance. This includes folks of all ages and all stages of their careers. We have created an environment where folks get a tremendous amount of responsibility, sometimes at a very early stage in their career, and are provided with support to make sure they learn and grow.

What is the best piece of advice you have received that has helped you succeed in your industry? Also, do you have any advice specifically for the next generation? I couldn’t point to just one piece of advice that has helped me be successful, rather an amalgam of observations and common sense that have stuck with me, including: there’s no substitute for hard work; people like to do business with people they like and trust; the only thing that you have is your reputation-once it’s questioned, it’s very hard to regain other’s confidence; be curious; find a mentor; ask for more work from the folks whom you admire.

Would you advise aspiring investment professionals to enter CRE? What would you advise them to do to get a foothold in the industry and how does this advice differ from what you may have received when you were starting out? I began my career in the real estate industry as a real estate transactional lawyer. I’m not sure I received any advice but did spend a long time observing those lawyers who were successful, some of whom were exceptionally brilliant and others were great advisers to their clients. I think the adviser types provided the most value to their clients and I’ve tried to emulate that in my career, both as a lawyer and as a business leader. As to advising aspiring investment professionals to enter CRE, I am an enthusiastic industry cheerleader. People need to be sheltered; people need a place to work (even if it isn’t 5 days a week in an office anymore); a place to be entertained. Moreover, the industry is broad enough to accommodate folks of all sorts of talents including those who are highly analytical, great marketers/salespeople, business managers, and visionaries. This is especially important when the economy cycles through and folks need to re-invent themselves without needing to change industries.

Please share with us the best lessons learned or a surprising component of your unique journey, or share an initiative that you are working on that you are most proud of. I suppose the irony of approaching the 20^th anniversary of starting Blue Vista is that I am not a natural entrepreneur-I’m a risk-averse lawyer by nature and training. Despite this, we have figured out a way to overcome those proclivities to create an enterprise that has succeeded on many levels and is well-positioned for future successes. As far as particular initiatives, we are currently hard at work on a real estate social impact strategy which draws upon our prior experience. I am confident that this strategy will make a huge difference in the careers of a diverse group of real estate investment professionals.

In your opinion, what takeaways did we learn from the COVID-19 crisis as an industry? What we’ve learned so far is that firms with well-established cultures have been able to endure an extended period of time operating under very unusual conditions. We’ve also learned that what we took as a “normal” work experience is being questioned throughout the world and how this great experiment resolves itself will also be an interesting journey. I haven’t given up on the value of an office location for creating/extending a firm’s culture. We’ve also learned the power of the many technological advances of the last few years-thank goodness for Zoom!

What three words, phrases, statements or mantras would you use to describe your work mindset? In a weird way, my work mindset has always been grounded in the popular view that 80 percent of success is just showing up. I think that I have always been perceived as a dedicated, hard-worker. That mindset has helped me succeed but maybe even more importantly, it’s been observed by others who have also adopted this outlook in their own journeys. The other ordering principle has been to live my life by striving to do the right thing, no matter the cost to be incurred, nor the circumstances. Finally, I live by the belief that if you remain dedicated to your work, your business and, ultimately, doing the right thing for your peers, co-workers and employees, it can be expected that over time, most things will work out in your favor.

Find more CRE career advancement tips and inspiring stories from industry leaders in our Pay It Forward series.

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