Joe Verghese,managing director at Colliers International

After my MBA in Asian Institute of Management, I had consciously decided to focus my career in knowledge-based services organizations after having got influenced by Alvin Toffler’s “Third Wave”. This journey started at the financial consulting division in Arthur Andersen followed by a stint in financial services at HSBC. Both these opportunities instilled in me the need for a strong standardized services operation to ensure that customer service experience at all times is consistently and constantly improving.   In early 2000, bitten by the start-up bug, I joined an e-commerce start-up with a few friends and from there joined an e-business project funded by the Australian Government in Singapore. Both these experiences opened my eyes and gave me exposure into technologies that would continue to disrupt our industries over the next 2-3 decades. It taught me the need to look at change as a much-needed positive step towards challenging status quo and the importance of continually reinventing the business’s service offering to keep up with changing marketing demands.   With the Indian economic boom in the early 2000s, I decided it was time to come back to India and took up an opportunity in 2006 as the COO of Colliers International, India and in 2007 was appointed as the MD of the India business. This gave me an amazing start-up opportunity to build up a services firm from the ground-up in extremely volatile and tough market conditions when the global real estate industry went into a tizzy after 2008. Despite the slowdown in the markets, we grew from a firm with 4 offices and approximately 60 staff to one that today operates out of 9 offices and has now close to 1,300 staff on its payroll.   While constantly aiming to ensure that we continually create value and generate returns for our stakeholders, the key principle that has guided me through this journey is to start with investing in our People. We worked hard and invested significant resources in building a culture that respects people, values their contribution and an environment that encourages growth and enterprising solutions. Our commitment and value proposition to our people has been that we provide them the required platform to enterprisingly accelerate their careers in the real estate industry. This continues to be key part of the Colliers International’s DNA and is extremely valued by our employees.   The investment in our people pays itself back in the quality of service they in turn provide our clients. We have place high importance on our service quality and capability. We encourage and help our employees to look beyond the $ contribution the client can make to their personal revenue targets, to the real value our knowledge in real estate can bring to our client’s bottom line. This change in outlook helps us continuously fulfill our offer to our clients – “to accelerate their business success”.   The community is the ecosystem we are part of. While our annual CSR activities are important, it's our value system that ensures that through our interactions with employees, clients and shareholders, we are leaving a lasting impact on the community. In an industry that is reputed to cut corners for financial gain, our constant endeavor is to make the right decisions that help us build a ‘trusted’ brand over the long term. This we believe leaves an extremely positive impact on our clients, our people, their families and the people they interact with. This positive goodwill is what we believe helps us in the long term in retaining staff and our clients.   All the above finally is reflected in enhanced shareholder values via growth in market share and bottom line. While this might all seem quite basic and simple, it is very tempting in today’s competitive workplace to compromise and not manage the balance with true integrity when balancing the priorities affecting our personal, our employees, our clients and finally our shareholders. We like to look at ourselves as trusted custodians of all the above stakeholders and hold firm to the credo that –“our roles as custodians would be to ensure that each year they all end up significantly better off than the previous year”.