Stick with what you know
Not surprisingly, Pizzuti is quick to mention his father on his short list of mentors. He also mentions him when thinking about the best advice he’s ever been given.
“He’s always preached sticking to what you know, stick to what you understand, don’t try to do everything,” Pizzuti says. “When times are good, don’t try to stretch too far into things that look interesting that may not be part of your core business or things that you don’t understand particularly well, and when times are challenging, like they are now, that pays dividends.”
This mindset has helped The Pizzuti Cos. last through the years. Like most, Pizzuti didn’t know the extent to which the economy would fall in the last year, but four years ago, he helped get Pizzuti Solutions off the ground. The new division wasn’t about jumping into uncharted territory, it was about business balance.
The division is focused on public-sector, fee-based work and isn’t totally dependent on borrowed money. It’s not exactly the company’s traditional bread and butter, but it’s certainly in the same spread. So how do you expand into something like that? You start with your talent pool. In good times or bad, if you want to adapt your business while sticking to what you know, you need to understand what skills you already possess in your industry. If you do a survey of your talent, you’ll probably find people have an array of experience in similar business extensions.
“We’ve got 14 people with 100 years of public sector experience,” Pizzuti says. “They understand the ins and outs of public-private partnerships, and it’s been incredibly successful. That’s given us a nice balance in our revenue year over year, and when the private development returns, which it inevitably will, we’ll be that much stronger.”
If you take stock of your people and find that you don’t have a lot of room to spread out, don’t panic. You can also use down cycles to do your homework on other things you’ve wanted to do. You might not have as much timeline work, but you can certainly get your ducks in a row to prepare to take off when better days arrive — much like Pizzuti has.
“Certainly development activity is down, but we have a number of really exciting projects and we’re taking this time to get those prepared for the inevitable recovery, so going through the zoning processes, planning them, getting the master plans done, working with all the communities to get everything approved, working with the municipalities to get the infrastructure done and really set things up so that when the economy does improve and things do return to some sense of normalcy, we’ll be ready to capitalize” he says.
