Adolfo Ramírez-Escudero, CEO of CBRE Spain, at ESADE: “It’s impossible to lead the market if you don’t have the best talent”
“On the CBRE management team, we believe that if you don’t aim for continuous growth it is very difficult to provide opportunities to get the best talent. And it’s impossible to lead the market if you don’t have the best talent. If you don’t grow, you aren’t holding still; you’re going backwards.” This reflection was shared by Adolfo Ramírez-Escudero during at the most recent session of Desayunos ESADE Alumni, where he reflected on his four-year tenure as CEO of CBRE Spain.
“The year 2013 was the beginning of the transformation of CBRE Spain,” explained Mr. Ramírez-Escudero. The first step, he noted, was to create a mission and implement a strategy to carry it out: “Moreover, this transformation coincided with a global review throughout the company. Spain aimed to be the best among our peers and globally, putting no limits on improvement.” He added: “After several years of crisis, it was clear that our approach had to be unfettered growth,” before noting that the company’s specific objective was to double its volume of business: “Our goal was to double the company’s size in every way – turnover, customers and number of employees – in three years. And we did it in two.”
According to Mr. Ramírez-Escudero, the strategic plan that allowed CBRE to post these growth figures is based on five pillars. “The first pillar is focusing on the customer, and the second is attracting and cultivating talent, which we’ve been globally recognised for by LinkedIn.” He added that corporate growth is the third pillar, which the company achieves “both by hiring new personnel and by acquiring companies – an operation that is European in scope.” The fourth pillar is digitalisation and the fifth is efficiency and profitability. “We mustn’t forget that we have shareholders and investors, who are the ones who provide the money and need to receive sustained profitability over time,” he observed.
At present, CBRE’s activity consists of three pillars, each representing one third of the company’s income. The first pillar is CBRE’s best-known activity: services, consulting and intermediation. The second pillar is real-estate investment management. CBRE Global Investors is “currently the world’s third-largest manager in terms of volume managed”, according to Mr. Ramírez-Escudero. “This division is where we manage third-party assets held in trust, usually pension funds and insurance companies.” The Global Workplace Solutions (GWS) division, he explained, is where CBRE manages real-estate assets: “Beyond the financial dimension, real-estate assets have a real dimension: to live, to store things, or to produce goods and services. Major property owners are in the process of outsourcing the management of these assets.”
Technology in real estate
One of the pillars of CBRE’s strategic plan is digitalisation. “This transversal transformation process is redefining the rules of the game,” explained Mr. Ramírez-Escudero. “At our company, we are working on customer-oriented solutions and analytics that allow better use of data, which is fundamental in all sectors, not just real estate.”
The CEO of CBRE Spain argued that today’s companies must have an open architecture and collaborate with suppliers and clients. At ESADE, he presented the CBRE Proptech Challenge, a call for new talent in the real-estate sector. The aim of this competition of ideas and projects is to apply technology in the Spanish real-estate sector. “We’ve had more than 150 initiatives, some from companies, others individual; some from universities, others from private companies. It’s been marvellous in terms of the freshness, ideas and approaches it has generated,” commented Mr. Ramírez-Escudero. The three winners of the contest will get to work at CBRE’s offices to develop their projects within the company.
