The future of DTZ remains mired in uncertainty. But for new chief executive John Forrester, it is business as usual.
New group finance director James Thomson is more emphatic, saying: “This is not a new management team that is going to do a strategic review and try something different.”
Thomson, until last week the firm’s CFO, and Forrester, the long-serving head of the UK business, were parachuted into the top jobs last week following the resignations of Paul Idzik and Robert Rickert.
Their departures took the market by surprise. No one expected the turnaround team to be around forever, but the announcement the industry was expecting concerned a bid for the company, not the loss of its leadership.
Time for change
Forrester sees it differently. The time was right for a change, he says, and it’s high time the firm got back on the front foot. This week he backed his words with action, announcing 120 promotions globally. He may have lost another senior lieutenant – Isaac Krymolowski, head of global consulting and research, who, like Idzik and Rickert, was a former Barclays man – but the promotions were an emphatic statement of support for a team that has endured uncertainty for more than a year.
“We’re a real estate services company,” says Forrester. “That’s what we do. That’s what our clients want from us. We’ve been through the restructuring and through the rebuilding of the business through the last period and it signals the end of that and the beginning of the next stage.
“The skills that were brought by the prior leadership team were sorely required at the time. Now that’s done, the strategy is one of growing our revenues, not reducing our costs or reducing our infrastructure. James is an experienced CFO and I represent the sales function and what faces our clients everyday. We’re at that stage of moving on to more normal business.”
Thomson is matter of fact: “Bob and Paul came in together at a time when the business needed to be restructured. They’ve now done that. They were here for a transition. We are now ready to have a CEO in the driving seat who is client-facing and who comes out of the business.
“Either there will be a deal, in which case John will be leading a large part of the business into a new organisation, or there won’t be one, in which case John will be leading the whole business on a go-forward basis. It brings certainty to the senior leadership and direction at a key time of the firm’s evolution.”
Expansion overseas
Forrester says that the perception of DTZ in the UK is often different to the reality. “Noise”, he calls it. So a 50% cut in the UK headcount in recent years is not a mark of a firm in retreat, but the result of a focus on what DTZ is good at, coupled with expansion overseas. The firm now employs 1,400 people in the UK and Ireland. In Asia Pacific it is 2,150 – a total that is up by 13% on last year alone.
“If you look at the growth of our business in China, you see the type of investments we’ve been doing. Sometimes the effect of being on the UK public markets means people perceive what you are doing in their own back yard is what you are doing everywhere. And that’s not the case. We’re making our investments in markets that absorb the best returns and where our clients are screaming for us to be their supplier of choice.”
Inevitably, some of what Forrester says sounds implicitly critical of his predecessor, though he is at pains to stress that this is not the case. Idzik and Rickert did not, he insists, leave frustrated over perceived delays to an expected sale of the business to majority owner SGP or another party.
“We’ve chosen the markets and skill sets we want to be in for our clients right across the world. And getting traction for a strategy for market and revenue growth needs the engagement of senior real estate advisers – my senior colleagues – and a leadership that gets what they do.
“And I think that’s where I can make a step forwards from the prior leadership – not to in any demean or undermine the fantastic strides they took the company through – but now we want to put our best foot forward,” says Forrester. “That’s about leadership, it’s about the best advice, the best clients and the best people. And this type of leadership is supplied by like-minded people who have been in the field together for a long, long time.
“And if you look across the world of DTZ, it’s not only me who has been in the business for quite some time. I look at my heads of markets and heads of countries and we’ve been together through thick and thin. That’s why it’s a natural evolution for me and I hope it’s the same for them.”
