CBRE’s Mark Ravesloot: The Renaissance Man With the Gift of Gab
By Daniel Geiger September 18, 2012 7:30 am
reprints“I bought a couple of books at Barnes & Noble on how to write a business plan,” Mr. Ravesloot said. “And I wrote one. I would like to hire 12 or 14 people and continue as a team that received commissions.”
Though Mr. Ravesloot’s team would be the sole commission-based group at the company, management embraced his proposal, in part because then, as now, he was a consistent and reliable earner for the company.
“I think we were the only group that turned a profit every year,” Mr. Ravesloot said.
The proposal also thrust Mr. Ravesloot into more of a managerial position; he became directly responsible for the group he had convinced management to preserve. He did well in the role. By the time he left Jones Lang Wootton in 1999 (for CBRE (CBRE)), his team, which had started its run at the company with about $2 million in revenue, was pulling in around $20 million.
Mr. Ravesloot was primed for adversity and being forced to develop skills on the fly. His father was a Harvard-trained mathematician who became an executive at IBM, operating laboratories the company had in Europe. Mr. Ravesloot essentially grew up overseas, shuttled across a host of countries as his father was assigned to different locations.
He remembers being enrolled in a school in France without being able to speak a word of the language. His teachers took him aside and handed him a copy of Les Misérables, the classic tome of French literature.
“My assignment for the year was to translate the whole book,” Mr. Ravesloot recalled.
It was an arduous but cultured upbringing, and Mr. Ravesloot now speaks several languages, including French, as a result.
“It’s something that was tough to go through, certainly, but something you appreciate looking back,” Mr. Ravesloot said.
Having to constantly prove himself was a skill that came in handy in brokerage.
“We have picked some very good companies over the years,” Mr. Ravesloot explained.
“But in brokerage it’s important not just to be able to pick up business but also to stay with your clients. The skill set with a 10,000- to 20,000-square-foot tenant is much different than one for a two million-square-foot tenant with space across country.
For instance, we started with working with TD Waterhouse, which is now TD Ameritrade, when they were 3,000 square feet. Now they’re two million square feet. You have to grow with your client.”
Part of the challenge is outlasting the inevitable regime changes that take place as companies expand, junctures where even long-standing relationships can be quickly shed.
“It happens when a new administration comes in and I have had a contract with them that stretches for another six to 12 months, and so I have that amount of time to prove myself,” Mr. Ravesloot said.
“For me, it’s giving a client the services they didn’t know they needed before they realized they needed it. That’s how you prove your value.”
dgeiger@observer.com
