MARKETING & SALES
Challenge
Two top residential marketing and sales firms merge to capture a greater share of the market but lack a strategic plan and an integrated organizational structure.
Response
Gazek Consulting facilitated a company-wide process to articulate a shared vision and core values, create a strategic plan, improve communication and develop an organizational structure with clearly defined roles to optimize resources and delivery of client services.
Results
One year later, new business and revenue goals are being achieved with clear increases in collaboration, productivity and effectiveness among teams.
DEVELOPMENT
Challenge
Developer-builder lacks organizational platform to scale business for growth and the seasoned leadership to run it, while maintaining family culture and cost structure advantage.
Response
Gazek Consulting conducted an organizational assessment, facilitated a strategic planning process, helped re-structure the organization, provided leadership coaching and served as an ongoing advisor for process improvement and change management.
Results
Restructuring well received, new hires and internal managers in leadership positions, process improvements made consistent with strategic plan, multiple new projects underway, family culture thriving.
CONSTRUCTION
Challenge
Construction division of development company struggles to achieve organizational stability due to hiring gaps, insufficient training, weak systems and processes, and unproductive communication, leading to destructive conflict and high turnover.
Response
Gazek Consulting identified and mapped the structural and behavior patterns that create and feed this “cycle of frustration” and worked with leadership to break those patterns by bringing new focus to self-awareness and a consistent approach to problem solving, improving hiring and mentoring practices, clarifying responsibilities and communication protocols, strengthening internal systems and processes, and expanding checks and balances.
Results
Accountability and efficiency rose, leadership messaging was more direct and transparent, communication was more timely and effective, chaos and stress were minimized and better managed, and turnover rapidly declined, enabling the division to achieve the organizational stability needed to meet the growth goals of the company.
DESIGN
Challenge
The founder and owner of a leading purveyor of fine architectural hardware wants to sell the 20-year- old company and retire but his continued, day-to-day involvement is needed to maintain the level of sales and production because of the absence of a professional management team that can successfully operate the business without him.
Response
Gazek Consulting is working with the owner and his key staff to refocus the company vision and values, create a more functional organizational structure, define more collaborative systems and processes, and increase levels of accountability as part of developing a professional management team.
Results
The management team is stepping up to the plate and driving an increasingly greater level of sales and production, reducing the level of oversight needed by the owner and demonstrating that the business can be viable without him.
START-UP
Challenge
Partners of a start-up service provider struggle to build a shared vision for the company and blend skill sets and leadership styles.
Response
Gazek Consulting worked with the Partners to map their communication patterns, help them disrupt their counter-productive cycle of actions and reactions, identify their threshold needs, and create a framework to address differences and build common ground.
Results
Partners understood and accepted their incompatibility and dissolved the partnership amicably, enabling the CEO to run the company and the Founding Partner to remain on the Board and start his own company.
CORPORATE REAL ESTATE
Challenge
Corporate real estate services for a major high-tech firm in Silicon Valley leading the movement to office hoteling needs to convince its business units to give up its private offices.
Response
Gazek Consulting was an early leader in the change management process by creating a communications and training program for change agents to roll-out workplace protocols, educate engineers on the convenience, productivity and cost benefits of the program and acclimate them on the use of the new technology.
Results
Office-to-employee ratios and, therefore, real estate operating expenses were dramatically reduced across the company due to the high acceptance rate of office hoteling among business units.
PUBLIC SECTOR
Challenge
The Redevelopment Agency of the City of San Jose was under enormous pressure from the Mayor and City Council to significantly increase the delivery of new housing units in Downtown over five years - beyond the projects already in the pipeline - to take advantage of the improving economy.
Challenge
A large manufacturer of water heaters was closing its business and terminating its land lease on a 5-acre, triangular parcel known as the Bergamot site owned by The City of Santa Monica, which had acquired the site for a future Red Line Station and was struggling to determine what the highest and best use would be for the property in the interim.
Results
Within eight months, the Task Force delivered Housing Implementation Strategies to the City Council, which they unanimously adopted. City Departments then worked with the Agency and City Council to align the General Plan and Zoning with the recommendations, adopt policies to capture more of the housing market, incentivize a wide range of construction types, unit types, unit sizes, and affordable housing, provide public amenities and infrastructure, and increase financial mechanisms, including Agency funding.
Response
As Director of Downtown Redevelopment for the Agency, I led a 10-member Housing Implementation Task Force, including representatives from the Agency Board, City Housing Department, local businesses, property owners, and residents with input from housing and marketing consultants – to collaborate on a strategic plan that would seize economic opportunities and address obstacles, including high construction and financing costs and impeding market forces.
Response
Gazek Consulting led a strategic planning process with the City Resource Management Department to develop an interim land use and marketing plan for the site by facilitating workshops, interviews and site visits with City staff and the brokerage community to determine potential land uses, objectives, and site assets, liabilities, opportunities, and issues.
Results
Consensus was reached on a market driven strategy to repurpose the large metal buildings into an artist community of galleries, workspaces and performances spaces. Known as Bergamot Station Arts Center, it is a leading arts and cultural hub of visual and performing arts organizations on the west coast - so endeared by the community that the Red Line Station was built nearby instead of displacing it.