Urban Visionary Sponsor

Not long ago our firm, formerly known as AthenianRazak, engaged a recruiter to hire a new staff accountant. The list the recruiter presented included clearly qualified candidates who were all white. We took a step back and asked if they had any qualified candidates who weren’t white. The surprised and perhaps sheepish reply: yes, they did. In fact, those candidates were more qualified than those on the original list. We wound up with two great Black employees. This moment was instructive because of all the seemingly benign assumptions that led to our question. It wasn’t a difficult or complicated one, but still, in this time, apparently a necessary one.

Looking harder and making intentional choices applies to all kinds of business decisions. It’s not only staff and vendors—we realized we could apply this to the ownership of our company. Last year was what we like to call year 10 of a five-year succession plan. My partner Jackie Buhn and I had spent a considerable amount of time trying to lay the groundwork for succession, and we were committed to ensuring the continuity of our firm as woman-led. We wanted to both reinforce our agility and depth and to create leadership opportunities for women and/or BIPOC. To my mind, that meant expanding our capabilities and our business with colleagues who didn’t look like me.

Since we actually started searching over ten years ago, we’d talked with a number of potential partners, but the matches ended up being not quite right. There were plenty of experienced candidates we knew, had worked with and respected. We liked and felt comfortable with lots of people, but things didn’t come together easily. We finally decided we needed to take a step back and look beyond our obvious circle, beyond people who weren’t so similar to us. When we did that, we hit the jackpot.

Jackie first met Maleda Berhane, CEO and founder of Spruce Real Estate Partners, at an industry event many years ago. We later collaborated with her on several joint endeavors, which included management of the vacant Hahnemann Hospital campus and stabilizing and restoring the steeple of Philadelphia’s historic Christ Church among others.

Through our work together, it was clear that our values and approaches were extraordinarily well aligned. More importantly, we understood that Maleda brought skills and knowledge that we don’t have in part because she is different from us. Brilliant at assembling teams and leading complex projects, she created consensus among disparate stakeholders which would help us reach shared goals of improving communities with our work. It also meant we could all add to our native skill set to approach projects in a more holistic and transparent manner, a win for everyone—clients, contractors, property owners and neighbors.

AR Spruce LLC, our merged company, was created in October 2020 and officially announced in February, with Maleda as majority owner. At the same time, we made a dedicated employee Phil Voutsakis a partner in the business, and he brings diversity all his own. As we’ve taken on new projects in the intervening months, there’s an invigorating dynamic at play—an exchange of ideas that comes from engaging different points of view.

For her part, Maleda has said the move required her to take a step back as well. Joining with us was a big cultural shift, and having worked successfully solo, she wasn’t sure she wanted partners. It would have been easy for her to stay in her own track, but this move opened up different possibilities for her as well, not only leveraging her own skill set, but giving her the ability to work at larger scale and, as she’s said, in a better position to make a positive impact on the community and the built environment.

The path to a more diverse and inclusive real estate industry is paved not only with good intentions but with the willingness of the predominantly white male status quo (that is, people like me) to be called out at times, to listen, to ask more questions, and look a little harder for small, conscious—and sometimes awkward—steps toward change. Those of us in positions of success and advantage may see that things need to change, but we may feel we don’t know how. Let’s be honest: the merger of a small company is not going to change the world, but maybe by being more mindful we took a small step in that direction. There are no easy fixes to a long painful history, but in our process, we found one simple, concrete first thing: take a step back, look outside immediate and familiar solutions, and work harder to make careful choices.