Part 2 of 4 - A letter to my company in the pursuit of harmony... embracing our IS...
Dear Colleagues:
We are walking toward our “mountain” and committed to “making good art”!
Last year, as our companies came together, we watched Neil Gaiman’s Commencement Speak (video link below) together with the executive team as we set our strategy for the coming years. If you have 20 minutes, I encourage you to watch it. I find it an inspiring and entertaining perspective on the pursuit of individual growth & success. So many of the concepts apply equally well to our pursuit of growth and success as a company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plWexCID-kA
My goal is not to sell you on what we are doing, but to share with you what we are doing and why. And, hopefully, to get your thoughts, feedback, and ideas as we move into 2016.
How often do you stop to think about the impact that we have as a company, and as a team, on our world? I know sometimes when we talk about our impact, we tend to shy away from it. It’s awkward. We are so ready to own every aspect of where we are deficient. Let’s do ourselves the favor of also considering where as a company we make a positive impact.
- We have over 500 employees. What we do together at EMG impacts the well-being of 500 plus team mates, and fairly directly, the 1,000 to 1,500 people that make up our families at home.
- We have nearly 1,000 clients per year. What we do at EMG together impacts the well-being of nearly 1,000 clients… which indirectly affects the livelihood of likely 5,000 to 10,000 people easily in their colleagues and their families…
- We visit around 40,000+ properties / sites / buildings / stores per year… each one of those properties has people that work there, do business there, live there (affordable housing & multi family)…40,000+ properties… easily 4 million+ people coming in meaningful contact with the sites and properties that we asses and manage projects…
- In the Chicago housing project alone we visited 100% of the units – 17,000 units in all!
- MILLIONS of people come in contact with the properties that we assess and execute projects on EACH YEAR… We make homes, schools and work places of safer, more comfortable, more energy efficient. We help ensure access by disabled people. We improve the experience of people going out to dinner or going shopping or simply going out. And, importantly we help our clients make better decisions on the properties they own or occupy and execute their projects better….
We indirectly or directly impact millions of people and their experiences as they come into the buildings and facilities that we serve, each year… THAT’S PRETTY AWESOME!!!
THE NEED
FOR OUR CLIENTS:
Companies that own, lend on, or occupy real estate and facilities NEED help;
- To understand what assets they actually have and don’t have
- To understand the condition of their real estate assets or properties (and the equipment they include)
- To understand how their properties may not be within regulations and industry standards…
- To execute projects to repair, maintain, construct or enhance their space(s) / property(ies)
The more properties that a client has – the bigger their need. And, those needs become more significant and harder to satisfy when their properties span different geographies!
FOR US, the EMPLOYEES of EMG:
The biggest challenge to EMG was the variability of work between any two months. Our company is under constant “stress” – either so busy it’s hard to keep up with the work, or working to make sure we can keep our team busy. Our strategy has been to expand our offering into services that have longer turn around times and leverage similar skill sets. This is why EMG started the Asset Management division in the late 1990s. And, why the merger with QPM made so much sense.
The biggest challenge for growth to the QPM company was the lack of “experience” in industries outside of retail, and the perception that the team was a little small versus some of its larger competitors. QPM had a fantastic reputation in the retail space, but the size of its staff combined with its lack of “variety” of clients made growth more challenging.
Both companies had the challenge that travel presents (both in terms of costs to the project, and importantly in terms of the toll that it takes on our field staff).
We want a diversified and stable company, a great opportunity to grow professionally and the ability to improve our work – life balance over time. The more we grow – the more we make those things possible.
THE OPPORTUNITY
There is no company, to my knowledge, that better addresses the clients’ needs listed above than EMG does today… and we are committed to doing it even better tomorrow!
At EMG, we
- Offer the BREADTH of services our clients need “across the lifecycle of real estate”. There are ADA companies, PCA companies, Phase I companies, Facility Condition companies – but few that are focused on the FULL set of services.
- Are able to offer our services to meet our clients’ needs NATIONWIDE. Many companies providing these services tend to be focused local or regional.
- Offer up front technical assessments and project management services as our CORE COMPETENCE. Of the companies that are out there “nationwide” offer some or many of the services that we offer – most if not all tend to have core competences outside of assessments or project management. They want to sell you equipment, or a new roof, or they want to manage your property, or they want to sell you a loan, etc. Most companies offer technical assessments in order to gain additional business in their core competence. At EMG, technical assessments and project management IS what we do. And our only interest is to provide our clients with upfront intelligence with great integrity so that our clients can make and execute the best possible decisions and projects.
OUR STRATEGY / OUR MOUNTAIN
Our ‘mountain” is to become the very best provider of technical assessments & project management in the United States. And, we are doing just that!
We want to be our client’s preferred partner for their facility needs. Providing them technical and executional excellence in a scalable way… accurate, consistent, timely and insightful assessments and project management nationwide… We want to be the very BEST at it!
We want to do this to ensure the success of our clients’ businesses. And, we want to help our teammates take meaningful steps toward their dreams.
Together, we developed a list of items that we needed to accomplish in the short term to MOVE us toward our mountain.
We needed to integrate ourselves into ONE company, with one set of policies, benefits, brand – which we did this year.
We needed to integrate our scheduling system into ONE system – which we are almost done doing.
We needed to integrate our sales efforts (cross selling) to help our clients understand how we can better help them – which we have started in 2015 and will be doing for many years to come.
As we go into 2016 we will be working again on “cross training” our resources and “cross resourcing” our projects. And, we will continue to push on “cross selling” which we are confident will continue to pick up momentum as our clients better understand our story.
IN SUMMARY – WHAT IS IN IT FOR YOU?
EMG is growing. We will grow nearly 20% this year with Asset Management growing 50%+ and Project Management growing 25%+. It is exciting (and exhausting) to be part of a fast growing and winning team. We appreciate everyone’s efforts in keeping up with our expanding business. We want to and need to consider our growth and help ourselves be better prepared to deliver on it. Learning how to grow deliberately and consuming less of our team is a very important key to our success.
The more we grow – The better we serve our clients – The better we will ultimately serve our employees… Growth is our goal!
WHY? GREATER PROFESSOINAL GROWTH & MORE OPPORTUNITIES TO WORK WITH LESS REQUIRED TRAVEL IN THE LONG TERM
1. Our Clients (specially our larger clients with properties in multiple geographies) have a broad range of needs for assessments and project management.
2. WE are well-positioned, and arguably uniquely well-positioned, to deliver with excellence on our clients’ needs!
3. Delivering with excellence on the breadth of our clients’ service needs will make us a more valued partner.
4. Becoming a more valued partner with our strategic clients will drive our growth which will increase the number of people in each geography, and the skill sets within our team.
5. Having more people in more geographies with more expertise – will allow us to EXECUTE BETTER & FASTER (good for our clients) and EXECUTE MORE LOCALLY (less travel for our PMs).
6. The more we grow, the less we travel, the better we serve our clients’s needs, the more opportunity that we create for our team mates…
I realize that for the majority of you, the world hasn’t changed much, if at all, since the merger. In fact, for many of you, it has gotten tougher as we try to keep up with the growth. Perhaps, a few administrative things have changed. Perhaps you have a few different frustrations. Growth is demanding. And, making the value of our strategy real for our clients and employees will take some time. Meaningful and sustainable growth doesn’t happen quickly. But, it’s the kind of growth that will transform the stability of our company and that we will look back on with great pride.
It will take time for our clients to learn about the greater value that we can bring them. It will take time for our employees to learn the different services that we provide. We need to integrate and consolidate our systems to make sharing the more work between divisions easier.
While many ofyou may not have seen anything change, nearly 200 of our 500 employees worked across divisions in 2015. We cross resourced many projects in 2015 and will be doing more in 2016. As we grow, much of our “cross resourcing” is going toward providing capacity for the growth, and is not converting to reduced travel for employees. Importantly, many of our colleagues are dealing with more interesting and complex professional initiatives thanks to the merger, or are getting opportunities to try new and different services.
Realizing the synergy of the merger for everyone will take time… It will take years to materially change the % of travel that we are seeing. We see the synergy happening, and we will work to make it more deliberate and faster. And, it will take time.
We are making our way toward our mountain and transforming our company to create more value for our clients and more opportunity for our teammates.
We will always want to be better and do what we do better. It’s who we are. Here we grow!
Providing technical and executional excellence in a scalable way nationwide, is the unique and valuable “art” that we are making together.
MILLIONS of people are indirectly impacted by our work ever year… and thousands are impacted VERY directly as an employee or a family member of an employee.
What you do everyday, matters!
And, we hope you can see better why we believe that our strategy makes great sense and servers real purpose.
It is a challenging, exciting and deliberate strategy…
It is a challenging, exciting and deliberate journey…
Sincerely grateful for your great effort, patience, and trust… And, looking forward to taking our next step together into 2016!
Nestor Benavides | President