The younger Barry acknowledges that
he would have acquired these skills on his
own without EBT and a mentor, but it
would likely have taken a great deal longer.
In EBT, “I was trying to fine-tune the tools
that had already been given to me,” he says.
“The mechanics of the business, I had
down; the finer points I didn’t.”
The course includes lessons that may not
have been available to veterans like Art
Barry. Once the younger Barry returned
from EBT at CBC’s headquarters in
Madison, NJ, he was able to pass along what
he had learned. “It’s exposed me to the
younger mindset, and to far more efficient
ways than the old dinosaur method of beat-
ing the streets and just trying to make it
through the network,” says Art Barry.
PASSING THE TORCH
The past 18 months have been times of
change at the Chicago office of what is now
Savills Studley. Since late May of 2014, the
venerable tenant representation firm
founded by Julien Studley in 1954 has been
owned by London-based Savills plc; since
December of last year, the Chicago office
has been under new leadership for the first
time in more than a quarter-century.
EVP John Goodman, who had led the
office since 1989 and co-led it with EVPs Joe
Learner and Rick Schuham since 1997,
turned over the reins to Robert Sevim and
Eric Feinberg. Both Sevim and Feinberg
had been members of the Chicago region’s
management committee before becoming
co-heads of the region; Goodman, Learner
and Schuham are continuing as members
of the committee.
“At the time of our merger, there was a
recognition that there was change coming
down the pike,” Feinberg tells Forum. “The
people who had been involved in leading
our office for so long felt it would be good
if we implemented some change on the
local level as well.”
The idea, says Sevim, “was to pass the
torch to two individuals whom they identi-
fied as the right people to move forward
with all of the goals and objectives we have
as a company and as an office. The transi-
tion was relatively smooth because we’d
had a lot of exposure to the day-to-day, and
the good news is we continue to have access
to the same folks who passed the torch.”
Goodman tells Forum that with the
Chicago office’s co-heads having served in
that capacity for as long as 25 years, “there’s
no denying that sometimes you lose energy
in that aspect of the business. The three of
us still have tremendous energy around our
client work, which has gone from 80% of
what we do to 95% now. But we recognized
that we were probably not the right folks to
continue to drive the organization in our
office.” Sevim and Feinberg’s “postive
energy,” along with “the ideas and observa-
tions that they were coming to us with, and
our own shift in energy more toward our
clients—those two things happened con-
currently and became an obvious direc-
tional change for us.”
Among the changes the new leadership
has brought to the office is the way in which
knowledge is disseminated. “Historically,
knowledge transfer would come from the
senior level,” says Goodman. But Sevim and
Feinberg are “changing it up,” in ways that
are benefiting the old guard as well.
For example, Goodman says that he’s
been learning “how to build relationships
and capitalize on my network through
vehicles like LinkedIn.” Previously, he
acknowledges, he hadn’t seen the value
proposition in social media, but now team
members in their late 20s are showing him
how to capitalize on that.
Moreover, Sevim and Feinberg are engag-
ing analysts on different teams “to transfer
knowledge from one team to another, and
new ways of looking at analytics and exploit-
ing our research capabilities,” Goodman
says. Our younger generation has a much
better knowledge base on how to get at data
and do research in ways that are enlighten-
ing to the old-school folks.”
One Chicago-region broker who is help-
ing point the way in using social media for
business development, at the behest of
Sevim and Feinberg, is assistant director
Patrick Brady. “The new leadership wants to
reach out to the entire breadth of the office
and make sure that everyone from every
level of experience is connected with and
make sure everyone’s voice is heard,” he
tells Forum.
He cites Sevim and Feinberg’s selection
of team members to serve on a committee
that will help them find new office space
for the Chicago region, as well as the way
in which they identified him and senior
managing director Adam Mitchell as bell-
wethers for social media use. “In a collab-
orative office, you want case studies of
anything that’s working for an individual
to be shared throughout the company,”
Brady explains.
Feinberg sums up the new approach he
and Sevim are taking. “The old-school
approach to brokerage was, “here’s a
phone, get some clients, your work is
done,’” he says. “People want more than
that now. They want to have ownership,
they want to feel like they’re part of some-
thing a little bit bigger.’
The larger Savills Studley organization
has viewed the transformation in Chicago
as “a template for evolution, a template for
recognition of those that have long-term
aspirations to shape the culture of an
office,” says Sevim. “We’re being very com-
municative and transparent with other
offices, and with our headquarters, in the
event that they can utilize some of the
things that we’re doing here.”
YOUNG GUNS...continued on page 83
Robert Sevim (on left) and Eric Feinberg are bringing a new approach as co-heads of Savills
Studley’s Chicago region, in the office’s first leadership change in a generation.
