W. Allen Morris is the chairman and CEO of the Allen Morris Co., a real estate developer and a Florida-based Realtor. He spoke with Crain Currency about the three pieces of advice he gives to next-gen family members and the business lessons he has learned from driving race cars and flying planes.
You're known for mentoring a lot of next-gen leaders and future leaders. What are the three key pieces of advice that you give them?
The most important things that I focus on with next-gen leaders are what I call the three C's. The first “C” is commitment. Make an outrageous commitment to becoming more knowledgeable, more expert, more conversant on that particular topic that you're interested in — go after it, in other words. Go all in, if that's what you're interested in.
Second is creativity. Don't get locked in a box of only one area of interest, because all the diverse things that I have learned in my life, I know, have all contributed to my ability to be creative. Studying the architecture in unusual places like Switzerland, as well as the famous places like Paris and London and Singapore, I always stay interested in wanting to learn new things because it is my creativity.
And the third is communication. To learn how to be a good communicator; to work at it; to get training in it; to study communication; to study how to write, how to communicate in writing; how to communicate verbally and how to communicate one-on-one and how to communicate with an audience. Because you can have people that are brilliant and expert at what they're committed to, but nobody understands what they're talking about.
You have a very substantial real estate empire. What are the trends you see in that sector this year?
I think we're going to see increased office absorption; creative office spaces can continue to be the highest in-demand products at the highest price. By the way, with all those other cost increases, we ended up increasing our rental rates by, like, 50% of what we perform at. Our headquarters building in Miami and our other major office building in Orlando are all at 98% lease, so I feel really grateful for that.
Part of it is being very tenant-oriented. Our mission is a really simple mission. It's just three words: inspire, impress and improve. We want to inspire people with every building that we build. We want to impress them with the excellence of their experience, whether they're a resident in our apartments, a guest in our hotel or a tenant in our office building or a visitor to those properties. And we want to improve the lives of everyone we touch.
What would you advise, let's say, a next-gen family office member who wants to get into real estate for the first time?
I think that there's nothing that compares to mentorship — it's the only way of really learning. And I think it's important to start at the bottom and learn the nuts and bolts and the basics.
When I came into the company originally, my father put me in the accounting department doing spreadsheets and cash flow projections, big green pages and a really big eraser. Back in the days before it was all digitized. So I learned the financial fundamentals and the accounting fundamentals. And then I worked in property management. I worked as an on-site building manager — fixing air-conditioning drip pans that were making a mess and working with locksmiths to change locks, and cleaning companies and landscapers and dealing with all that; to moving into office leasing and brokerage. And then I went to went to work in our development operation. I discovered that that's what I really loved.
I love creating and being able to paint on a huge canvas, building new buildings that would hopefully inspire people and hopefully be an asset in the community where we build them and not be an eyesore.
I wanted to ask you about your 2022 book, All In: How to Risk Everything for Everything That Matters. I can imagine that's a scary prospect for many family office members who can be risk-averse, because they're trying to preserve their family's legacy. How do you help or how would you advise them to overcome those fears?
I don't suggest that you risk everything, but when you do step out of your comfort zone, it feels like you're risking everything. It feels uncomfortable. It felt scary and uncomfortable when I stepped into residential development for the first time in, like, 2013. I had never done any residential development, only office buildings and industrial and retail. And, you know, our first project was a 58-story luxury condominium on Brickell Avenue and a luxury apartment building in St. Petersburg. And both of those worked out really well because we had some really talented people working on it.
In the book, it's primarily about risking stepping out of your comfort zone in your personal life, to take a look at things that you may not have ever looked at in your personal life — your personal relationships, your personal priorities. And the reward is that it can be hugely transformative, especially if you've come to a place in your career where you've lost the joy of what you're doing.
I know you are a race car driver and love extreme sports. What lessons have you learned from those experiences that can be applied to business?
I'm a scuba diver and I drive race cars, but my real love is flying. There's a lot of similarities in flying and running a business in a highly competitive environment. They say that flying is just hours and hours of sheer boredom with an occasional instant of stark terror. I talk about one of those instances of stark terror in my book, where I had a catastrophic engine failure right after takeoff one night with six passengers on board. And what happens is, when you are prepared, when you've done your homework, when you stay on top of things, then when things go wrong, the number-one thing is you don't panic. Panic kills people.
When, for instance, we had the financial meltdown of 2007-2008, a lot of people panicked. A lot of people in real estate abandoned their properties. I had just announced a new major development. I had just gone long, closed on the purchase of the best development site in Coral Gables. And everybody defaulted on me. So I want to remember not to panic and just say, “OK, how are we going to get through this?”