Carr Workplaces CEO Outlines Path Forward

Published December 11th, 2009 by Jennifer LeClaire

When Preferred Group acquired Synergy Workplaces in August, many in the executive suites industry were watching and waiting to see how the two companies would become one. Then, earlier this week, the company announced a rebranding strategy that gives the two companies a single identity: Carr Workplaces.

But questions still remain. How will the new Carr Workplaces build on the innovation Synergy Workplaces brings to the table? Will Carr make additional acquisitions? What are Carr’s plans going forward? aBetterOffice.com caught up with Joe Wallace, CEO of Carr Workplaces, to discuss these and other questions about alternative office space trends.

You recently acquired Synergy Workplaces. How will you build on that innovation? What can we expect?

We were delighted to carry on the legacy of Synergy and to welcome Synergy clients and team members into the Preferred Group, which is now Carr Workplaces. From their founding, Synergy was highly innovative both in how they talked about the business and the types of users they appealed to. Their mantra was “work happy, achieve more.” Inherent in that statement is an acceptance of the notion that professional workers are not widgets; they are not mechanical in the way they perform, they are real people like you and me.

There are dozens of intangible factors that affect the productivity of real human beings, but one of them is how comfortable, engaged and stimulated they feel in the places in which they work.  Synergy took that on as their mission, and essentially said “We can positively impact the quality of our clients’ office life, and the quality of office life will have a huge impact on productivity.”  That was really the thing that attracted us to Synergy, because it very closely fits with our ideas at Preferred and what we have been trying to accomplish. We hope to build on that direction.

Are you planning additional acquisitions?

We have had a few opportunities but we’re not in any rush to make acquisitions. Our key objective is to grow intelligently and in a manner that doesn’t compromise our core ideals. Acquisitions are a means to an end. If we can accomplish that end differently—for example, by development, or by product line expansion—we’ll do that. We would like to have a comprehensive footprint in major U.S. markets, but we’re not on any timetable to accomplish that. We’re patient, and we’ll take advantage of sensible opportunities as and when we find them.

You’ve said Carr Workplaces will play a material part in the reshaping of work environments. What role will Carr Workplaces play? How will Carr Workplaces help change the way people work in the future?

If you let the professional workers and businesses of the world collaborate to script out a perfect workplace solution, they would come up with a model that was highly flexible, low in cost, high in quality, and mediated the conflict between being physically close to the things that businesses care about, such as customers and coworkers, and the things that people care about, such as families, friends and entertainment. It’s the clean sheet of paper approach. Society searches for and eventually finds ideas that are materially less costly and materially better.

We think the workplace will experience innovative change. We expect that change to start on a small scale, with smaller users who have less of an investment in the status quo. Small and micro users of space have already figured out—because necessity makes you creative—that shared space lets everyone get better quality infrastructure, at lower cost.

And the benefits are linked like a chain to one another. When clients reuse and share infrastructure, they eliminate the need for repetitive capital investment. Eliminating up front capital expenditure allows them to shorten contract durations. When they shorten contract durations, they create massive flexibility. When they add high quality communication technology into the mix, they can in many cases unhitch the location of work from the location of the company that organized it. When they hand over the keys to the workplace to someone who knows a lot about creating great work environments, they get a better experience and a reduction in distractions.

All of this sets up a future where work groups get smaller and dispersed—close to whatever is important at the time the work is undertaken—contract durations get shorter, capital constraints and environmental concerns focus business on re-using that which is still valuable. In this world, users will look to experts to create and provision work environments, and they will stop having to be the experts and the banks themselves.

Companies like Carr Workplaces will be there to accelerate these trends by providing integrated solutions. Forty-five years ago if a company needed a mainframe computer to automate a process, they had to build it. Now, one set of experts builds the box, another set builds the processes and the business deals with one expert who is an expert in making sure all those other experts do their jobs.

The company purchases from that last expert and by the way, only buys for the period of time that the solution remains relevant. The capital and obsolescence risks are shifted to the experts, where those risks belong. Workplaces will be no different.

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