Finalist
Investment/Financial Services
From a standing start, John Rutledge, founder, president and CEO of Oxford Capital Group LLC, has created a highly scalable and flexible business model.
That model allows him to remain lean at the corporate headquarters level while overseeing assets worth billions of dollars and employing thousands. It also allows him to lead, coordinate and employ hundreds of project-level people who work on his large-scale real estate developments without having to dramatically staff up at the corporate office. As a result, the efficiency, productivity and profitability per employee at Oxford are unusually high.
Rutledge has adapted his company for numerous opportunities as he developed momentum over the years. He started in Chicagoland, then expanded into a national footprint. He has continued to challenge himself and his team by taking on increasingly large-scale and complicated adaptive reuse projects, including converting high-rise office buildings and apartment buildings into hotels, as well as developing and investing across the spectrum, from the upper-midscale to luxury, branded to boutique and full-service to extended stay. In each case, he looks at the best way to optimize a piece of real estate, and he describes himself as commercially agnostic, priding himself on having no ego in terms of whether to develop or acquire a moderate or a higher-end product.
Oxford’s projects have become renowned for their visionary creativity in seeing opportunity where others see only obstacles for success and for executing complicated, multidimensional projects, frequently where other people fear to tread. Oxford has also gone green, opening its first LEED-certified hotel in Chicago.
Rutledge’s team is also known for its keen aesthetic eye and sense of detail, the quality level of the final physical product, and ultimately, for the service its guests experience from all of the operating team members and associates. He also believes that he and his team should be tough on the issues but soft on the people.
For More Information: Oxford Capital Group LLC, www.oxford-capital.com
