Bill Baldwin

As a leadership Titan, Bill Baldwin advises one thing that you should do every day:

Carpe Diem.

Baldwin, Managing Principal of Cresa, Corporate Real Estate Advisors, adheres his favorite quote to his success.

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” he said.

With growth being difficult to achieve in commercial real estate this past year, Baldwin proudly said that Cresa has maintained revenue consistency year over year when the industry was down 20% to 30%. Making the decision to invest heavily in marketing and client relationship development, Baldwin said he anticipates these efforts to generate a compounded return on this investment.

“We are also investing in training our team. We want to put the absolute best on the field and through investment in training we believe we have,” he said.

Baldwin added that the importance of his role with Cresa stems out in the human relationship outside of the workplace.

“This past year was unsettling and scary to our employees, and I realized my role as the leader is sometimes more than just a business relationship. I focused extremely hard on my individual connection to the team members, making sure they were staying motivated and sometimes being there to let them know everything is going to be OK,” he said. “This human connection was essential to our success this past year.”

Baldwin shared that in 2020, Cresa pivoted to focus on share growth in a shrinking market by building tools and marketing campaigns to offer new services to those impacted by the COVID-19 crisis, in addition to building strategies around returning to the workplace, portfolio optimization and financial re-engineering of the real estate occupancy cost. He added that this has led to new client engagements that are substantively different from our prior offerings.

“As a result, we have diversified our client base by approximately 30% and anticipate these new relationships to yield big results in 2021 and 2022,” Baldwin said.

He said that Cresa has doubled down on opportunity.

“Most of our clients are in a wait and see mode and we are repositioning our services to help them find clarity in an uncertain environment,” Baldwin said. “Giving our team this perspective of opportunity and abundance has been important to keep our team motivated and moving forward.”

Baldwin stresses the importance of actively seeking out opportunities in difficult times. He said the pandemic has shown us our resiliency and ability to adapt during difficult times.

“This creates opportunity,” he said.

While sure to face new challenges in the future, this industry Titan said that if we can teach ourselves to look beyond the present, we will see incredible opportunities for investment and growth.

For me, it is the success of my team,” Baldwin said. “If they are growing professionally, I know we are growing as a company and doing the right things. It is a pretty simple barometer for success.”

Presented by: