Innovate your space
Another thing about sticking to what you know is that it doesn’t mean you can’t be innovative. During a good business cycle, that means pushing for something slightly new. During a down cycle, that means creating more value-added products or services.
“These times are interesting, and it teaches us a lot of things,” Pizzuti says. “No. 1, the best companies that do things in the most effective ways will certainly survive, get through this and be stronger on the back end. But, to get through these times, it’s important to be creative, to exhaust every idea we can to keep people interested in what we’re developing, to keep our projects moving even though it’s challenging right now.”
That tone needs to be set at the top.
“Always set a tone of entrepreneurialism and wanting to constantly drive to be the best in your industry and always be innovative and keep on pushing the creative envelope,” Pizzuti says. “When that starts at the top, it permeates through the entire organization.”
Setting that tone requires you to open up your mind to employee ideas on how to reshape what already exists. Pizzuti is in weekly contact not only with people in the company’s Columbus headquarters but also those in the Chicago, Atlanta and Orlando offices. The goal is to make everyone feel included in the brainstorming.
“We have open lines of communication with every person in every city,” he says. “We are intimately involved in every deal; we’re working candidly with everyone, whether it’s one of our chief development guys or moving all the way down to accounting, maintenance, property management — there’s an open-door policy and there’s a lot of collaboration between us and them.”
But including people in innovation conversations alone doesn’t do it all. If you really want to hear new ideas, you have to ask people for them. Pizzuti notes that his team leaders are like specialized industry experts for their particular subject matter.
“A lot of the best ideas in our company don’t come from me or my dad, they come from all the smart people that work with us,” he says. “Everyone knows that in their particular area of expertise they have a deep understanding of it and if they have an idea or a concept or they think we should push a certain initiative, we take it seriously.”
All of this means you have to be willing to check your ego to hire, promote and listen to people smarter than you.
“That’s the culture we’ve had at our company for a long time, and it’s worked pretty well,” he says. “Again, we hire the smartest people we possibly can, and part of the reason we hire them is they do have good ideas. That makes my life easier.”
Pizzuti has seen his people adapt to the downturn with ideas like a promotion for its Prescott Place development that put a Smart Car in the driveway of new sale agreements. Letting employees tackle an innovative project like that won’t just help you get through tough times, it also means you’ll have better employee engagement and commitment. At The Pizzuti Cos., the average employee tenure is more than nine years, a rarity in a field known for its turnover.
