Why freedom makes commercial real estate businesses better.

CRE Success Principle: A leader who is energised, clear-headed and trusted by their team can run a better business than one who is physically present but feeling depleted.

For 11 years, I lived and worked in Seoul, including time spent leading a business with hundreds of employees.

During that period, I learned something that changed how I think about leadership: performance and freedom don't have to trade off. They can compound.

Presence Isn't Leadership

In many commercial real estate businesses, there's still an assumption that being visible means being committed.

But being physically present all day isn't the same as leading well.

When I was running CBRE Korea, I went to my health club for a workout every day during business hours. I also took six weeks of annual leave each year. The businesses didn't suffer – quite the contrary. In fact, performance improved and my leadership got better as I became more deliberate about how I led and built teams that could operate without constant access to me.

Start With the Constraint

Most commercial real estate principals build the business first and hope freedom eventually follows.

I suggest reversing that sequence.

Decide what you want your working life to look like, then use that as a design brief for the business you're building.

It could be six weeks of annual leave. It could be leaving early on Fridays. Or it might simply be dropping your kids at school a couple of mornings each week.

Start with something specific and worthwhile. Then build the capability, team and structure around it.

Freedom isn't something you have to earn at the end.

It's something you can design into the business from the beginning.

If you want to explore what that could look like in your agency, listen to episode 282 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership.

Episode transcript:

Not long after I became the country head of CBRE in Korea in 2015, I joined the newly opened Four Seasons Seoul Health Club.

Now, it cost about 7,000 US dollars a year, plus there was a joining fee, and I paid for it myself.

It felt like a bit of an indulgence because back then, this was like pre-Saint Haven era.

Expensive health clubs outside of expat circles weren't really a thing. And I went to it every single weekday while I was running a 300-person business. And yes, that means I was there during business hours.

What I remember about that period isn't so much the benefits and perks of the health club membership itself. It's the feeling that I'd figured something out.

I was the managing director and the country representative responsible for the entire operation, and I'd built my professional schedule in a way that made a daily workout and wind-down session at the Four Seasons not just possible, but completely normal.

It wasn't a treat. It wasn't something that I snuck in during my lunch hour when possible. It was simply how my working day was structured.

Now, that experience and others like it across my corporate career in commercial real estate formed a belief that I hold pretty strongly.

And today, I want to share that belief with you because I think it has something useful to say to every commercial real estate principal who is trying to build a business that actually gives them something back.

This is episode 282 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm your host, Darren Krakowiak. I help commercial real estate principals to build an agency that can run without them, so they have the choice to work on or off the tools.

Now, let me give you some context for that story that I told at the top of the episode, because I think it will help you understand the point that I want to make.

A significant part of my commercial real estate career, over a decade in fact, I spent based in Seoul, South Korea.

And during this time, I was the head of office leasing and tenant representation at JLL Korea, and then I was the managing director at CBRE, responsible for the entire P&L, along with several hundred employees.

Now, Korea is not a place with a relaxed attitude to work. Not as famous as Japan, but Korean corporate culture is similar in some ways because it's defined by long hours and also a visible commitment, along with hierarchy and a whole bunch of other things.

And being present at work is how you show that you care.

But I was an expat, so those cultural rules didn't really apply to me, and I also felt I had enough runs on the board to decide how I wanted to operate.

And I wanted to put that stamp on the businesses that I led in Korea.

What I wanted to do was build cultures that were based on performance and results, not just performative presence.

And so, as my responsibility grew, so did my flexibility.

During my time at JLL, the managing director there decided that everyone at national director level and above, a national director was just like an internal ranking of how senior you were in the organization.

All of those people were entitled to six weeks of annual leave.

And there was a use-it-or-lose-it policy, so it didn't roll over as an entitlement. And I can promise you that I made sure that I used it every year.

Then, when I joined CBRE, I negotiated that same entitlement into my employment contract. There were no objections. So that's how six weeks of annual leave got normalized for me.

And in terms of the health club, when I was back at JLL, we moved our office into IFC, which was a newly built mixed-use development in Seoul, and it had a Conrad Hotel.

And one of the incentives from the landlord that I negotiated for the firm was that Conrad Health Club memberships would be granted to me and my boss.

So, when I joined CBRE, the Four Seasons was the closest swanky hotel with a health club near the office, and that meant that I had to join up because I'd become accustomed to it, and I paid for it myself, and I went every single weekday, just like I would already be doing at JLL. And I did that during business hours.

And here's what I noticed across all of those years. As my responsibility increased, my performance didn't decline because I was taking more time for myself during business hours.

The businesses that I led performed exceptionally well. In fact, I'd say the performance actually got better as I became very clear about how I wanted to operate, and I built the teams and the structure to support what I wanted, while also giving the company what it wanted in terms of financial performance.

And based on that experience, what I've come to believe is something that runs, I think, counter to the way most people think about professional success.

Performance and freedom don't trade off. They compound.

A leader who is energized, who has a clear head, who is not quietly resentful of the demands that their work places on their life, that person will run a better business than someone who is depleted and present for the wrong reasons or out of a sense of obligation.

And this is not a theory or an untested claim. I've proven it to be true in commercial real estate, which is a demanding industry, and I've also proven it in one of the most demanding corporate cultures in Asia, in Korea.

And now, as I help business owners create more freedom for themselves, I believe it even more strongly than when I started practicing it, and it underpins how I run my business today.

So, I want to spend a moment on why I think this is true, and I think it's important to do that because it might not be obvious.

I think the conventional view of professional performance, you know, what hard work represents, that is primarily a function of time and presence.

The more hours you put in, the more visible you are, the more committed you look, and the harder you are working, so the better the results will be.

This view is deeply embedded in most corporate cultures, and I'd say it's still like this in most commercial real estate agencies.

But presence, physical presence, is not the same as leadership.

Being available at every moment is not the same as running a high-performing business.

And there's a version of availability that undermines performance because it signals to a team that the boss doesn't trust them to operate without constant access to them.

When I structured my week so that I could go to the gym every single day or take six weeks of leave in a year, I wasn't reducing my input into the business. I was just changing the form of it.

The work I did when I was working was better, was clearer, more strategic, more deliberate because I wasn't running on empty.

And also, because the team were forced to develop more capability, as they knew they couldn't rely on escalating everything to me.

And I want to highlight why this gets easier over time rather than harder.

As my level of responsibility grew, my capability was growing alongside it. By the time I was running the show at CBRE Korea, I knew how to lead a team.

I knew how to read a situation. I knew how to make a decision quickly and move forward.

The gym sessions during business hours weren't reckless because I'd accumulated enough experience and built enough structure that the business didn't need me there every hour to run well.

The freedom became more practical as I became more capable, not less.

And the freedom didn't come at the expense of performance. I think it actually contributed to it.

And that relationship where taking more time for yourself actually produces better results for the business is what I reckon most commercial real estate principals haven't experienced yet, because they've just never had the chance to test it.

Now, before I get into what this means practically, I just want to highlight something that I think gets in the way for a lot of commercial real estate principals.

There's this guilt that comes with doing something personal during business hours, whether it's going for a few laps at the pool, getting a gym session in, or even an afternoon round of golf, or perhaps leaving early on a Friday when you've had a good week.

It feels like you're getting away with something, like you should be doing more important things.

And the business owners who feel this guilt are almost always the ones who answer emails after dinner, who get into the office before everyone else in the morning, and who are making sure that nothing falls between the cracks of their team's pipelines, and probably they haven't had a proper holiday in longer than they can remember.

The guilt they feel doesn't match the reality.

And I'd argue it's a hangover from an earlier version of professional life, whether that's based on their experience or just ingrained beliefs.

From years before they owned the business when they were accountable to somebody else whose expectations about what a working day was supposed to look like doesn't reflect what it can be for a business owner.

Now, I was a salaried employee with obviously some good incentives when I was in those roles, and when I joined the Four Seasons gym, and I went every day during business hours.

I did it because I believed I deserved it. I didn't own the business that I was running. I didn't carry the personal financial risk.

And I still operated that way because I knew that I was delivering over and above the results that were expected.

If it was justified for me in that context, it's more than justified for a commercial real estate principal who owns the business and employs the people and takes all of the risk.

Any guilt that you have to take time for yourself is misplaced.

And to quote Elsa, "It's time to let it go."

So, what does this mean practically? Because I think the most useful thing that I can offer here isn't just permission, it's a different way of thinking about how you can build a business while giving yourself more freedom.

Most commercial real estate principals build the business and hope that freedom will follow.

Once the team is bigger and more capable, once the revenue hits a certain number, once the systems are in place, and once the timing is just right.

Freedom is the reward at the end of the process, not a design input that's there from the beginning.

So, I want to suggest a different sequence. Start with the constraint. Decide what you actually want in your working life, not just some ideal future version of it, but what you want now or as close to now as you can get, and use that as the design brief for what the business and the growth plan that you build around it will look like.

And let me just be clear here that the constraint doesn't have to be as ambitious as some of the things that I've been talking about.

It doesn't need to be six weeks of annual leave or going to the gym every single day during business hours. It might be as simple as dropping your kids at school a couple of mornings a week.

I drop my daughter to school every Monday morning, for example. That's a nice little constraint that I can build your weekly calendar around and build your professional schedule around, too.

It's specific, it's important, and it's worthwhile.

And once you've decided that's what you want, the business can then start to be built in a certain direction towards something that you actually want, rather than it just growing in whatever direction revenue happens to pull it and taking your time and input with it.

From there, as the work progresses and the business develops, the constraint can expand.

Two mornings of school drop-offs might become every morning. Maybe every morning becomes a fancy gym membership that you actually get to use even during business hours.

Maybe then that fancy gym membership that you actually get to use becomes a number of weeks overseas every year.

The vision gets bigger as the capability grows, but it has to start somewhere. And starting with something modest and honest is infinitely better than waiting for the perfect moment that never quite arrives.

Whatever the constraint that you're ready to put in place in your business, that's where we start.

Once we know what it is, we can design a business and a growth plan that builds towards it.

And, you know, that's not a soft aspiration, that's a design brief. And the design brief produces results in a way that hopefully one day never does.

So, to wrap this up, I want to say that freedom and performance are not trade-offs.

In my experience, they compound together, and the leaders who figure that out, who stop treating freedom as the reward at the end of a process and start treating it as a design input at the beginning, well, they tend to build better businesses more sustainably than the ones who just keep their head down and wait.

If you want to have a conversation about what the constraint that you should place on your business should be, including, like, what you want your life to look like or what it would take to build a business that supports that vision, this is exactly the kind of conversations that I'm having with commercial real estate principals that I'm working with.

So, if you want to have a conversation about your situation and what you would like it to look like, you can find me on LinkedIn. Just look up for Darren Krakowiak. My name's in the show notes.

Send me a message. Tell me a little bit about where things are at, and I will get back to you personally.

That is our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening, and I will speak to you soon.