Andy Poppink, a 17-year veteran of JLL, has been named President of the firm’s 20-office Western region, which includes offices throughout Puget Sound and in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also the firm’s Market Director in Northern California. He previously ran the firm’s Silicon Valley operations and Tenant Representation business in the West. Here’s a short interview with Andy about the changes
Q: You are taking on a broader role with additional business lines and geographies, what will your initial focus be in your new leadership role?
A: Initially, we will focus our energy and efforts on two key themes: excellence and empowerment. Relative to excellence, this means reinforcing a standard of excellence in all that we do. We refer to this as The JLL Way and this leadership transition provides a great opportunity to refocus our teams’ efforts by creating an expectation of excellence internally as well as in all interactions with clients and partners. Empowerment means instilling confidence in our leaders to make decisions quickly and thoughtfully. We have strong leadership already in place in the West supporting high powered teams. We want them to be able to react more swiftly and be proactive in making critical decisions around delivering for our clients and supporting our JLL teams.
Q: What do you see as your biggest challenges and opportunities in your new leadership role?
A: The pace of change in our industry has increased dramatically and will continue to do so over the next few years. Industry consolidation and the acceleration of co-working have had a big impact, and technology will begin to play a much more integrated role in our daily business. From a technology standpoint, there are a number of tech-specific players with interesting ideas. Funding is generally accessible to them and yet long-term stability remains somewhat elusive. Within the service provider industry, there is a very limited number of players with the resources and culture to be able to implement meaningful technology platforms and solutions.
I am extremely excited about JLL’s ability to be a first mover as we have a strong global commitment to tech and are attacking it in a variety of ways. Between our JLL Digital strategy and JLL Spark, our clients will begin to enjoy a very unique digital experience when they work with JLL. This is exciting but also presents a challenge. Change creates some anxiety and our industry at-large has historically been slow to adapt and adopt new technologies. This wave of change will touch all of our current businesses (transactions, project and property management) as well as create new ones.
Q: What are you most looking forward to?
A: Working with the great people we have in the West and helping them continue to build the kind of innovative and collaborative teams to deliver first class service to our clients throughout the region. This leadership creates an opportunity for some of our strongest senior professionals in the Bay Area to step into new roles with Bart Lammersen stepping in to lead the Silicon Valley brokerage team and Tom Maloney leading our Tenant Rep business in the West. I’m excited to continue my role in helping guide the firm’s technology strategy through my place on our Digital Board. Most of all, I’m going to continue to be able to do the work I love, which is working with my JLL teammates and clients.
