This month we celebrate 20 years of dedicated service with the MD of Atterbury Asset Managers (AAM), Lucille Louw. Lucille joined Atterbury in 2000, the year of the millennium, and today manages a property portfolio across Africa, Europe and Mauritius worth more than R43 billion. She looks back over two decades of growth and job satisfaction.
Congratulations! Did you ever think back then that you would be receiving a 20-year long-service award in far distant 2020?
No, I didn’t! But if I look back I can see why I am still here. Firstly, I consider my colleagues to be like family. We’ve worked very hard to appoint team members who completely buy into the company culture and as a result, the team is like-minded and we all love working and socialising together. Secondly, our team is quite diverse, so we challenge each other constantly, but at the same time we respect each other and are closely bonded as a group – this keeps the work environment energised and dynamic. And there’s a third reason: the very nature of Atterbury asset management’s business requires solving problems and overcoming challenges. Finding solutions to some of the issues we deal with on a regular basis makes for really high levels of job satisfaction. If I loved my job then, I love it even more now…
Knowing the secret to building a strong team is clearly a huge asset! How do you maintain this key skill?
It is an asset, for sure, and we have very low staff turnover as a result – in fact, I like to tell the story of how our chairman, Pierre Tredoux, told the management team a decade ago that we were creating a problem by treating our people so well that they never want to leave! Of course, you also need new blood every now and again to bring fresh ideas and new energy into the team. We recognised that and over the past 10 years we’ve started to embrace some churn to achieve that… and it has worked to bring diversity and youth into the company.
When you talk about problem-solving, Covid-19 jumps to mind, of course. How has that challenged the team and how have you dealt with the issues?
Yes, the challenges that the pandemic presents have been unique – we’ve never had such far-reaching changes imposed on us in such a short space of time before. The biggest challenge from an asset-management perspective has been how to pivot the relationship between landlord and tenant. Covid-19 has made us realise even more that we need one another to survive. We have to accept that we’re totally dependent on one another, and we have to put ourselves in the shoes of whoever is sitting across the boardroom table. But what has also become evident during this time is that our in-depth understanding of our retail tenants’ businesses has equipped us to understand where and how help is needed. We had to ensure that we assisted where it was needed most with the means available to us.
If you consider the different classes of assets that you manage, from retail and office to industrial and residential, which requires the most attention?
Retail is definitely the most demanding of all, because it often requires more empathy. In retail you often deal with someone whose whole life is tied up in an optometrist’s business or a stationery shop, for instance. Whatever happens to that business impacts the retailer’s life almost immediately, while in the other property classes tenants are generally corporates who have more built-in resilience. Retail can be very intense, but at the same time, more satisfying when you can find solutions and reach agreements.
Covid-19 moved entire workforces out of offices and into private homes – how do you expect this to impact on the demand for office space in future?
It is too soon to tell, but what I can say is that the whole industry is holding its breath to some extent. We have been very fortunate in that Atterbury’s office tenants have shown great resilience so far, and what has happened is that we’ve seen different perspectives develop on how companies worked in the past. We’ve seen, for instance, that it’s not necessary to spend so much time travelling to in-person meetings when online meetings are so efficient. I think certain segments of the office market, such as call centres for instance, could exit the formal office market and work exclusively from home. I reckon that in some point in the future the sector is likely to reach a balance with flexi-work arrangements and social distancing. Many staff want to be back in an office environment, because it is nice to be there with people you enjoy working and socialising with – we’ve definitely seen that at Atterbury!
As a veteran who has reached your position by steadily rising through the ranks, what would your advice be to young people just joining the job market?
There is no silver bullet, and the job market has never been more challenging, but what I did was to make an effort to be the best I can be. I did what I had to as well as I could and enjoyed it; I took every opportunity I could lay my hands on to learn and progress. Finding a mentor is invaluable – I was fortunate to have Louis van der Watt, Atterbury’s co-founder, as a mentor, and I’m indebted to him for teaching me everything I know. If he didn’t know enough about a particular issue, he would send me to someone who did. We are trying to do the same in our team, by paying it forward and putting succession plans in place. Although I have more women than men on my team, it is the culture of the company that always comes first. Life will throw challenges at all of us, and what is important is to ignore distractions and not to allow them to weigh you down.
Are there any particular challenges that you still look forward to tackling?
I came to a realisation earlier this year that we, as the so-called older generation, can learn from young people, who are so much more attuned to achieving balance in their lives. We sometimes feel that the younger generation doesn’t work as hard as we did, or still do – my generation often put our heart and soul into our work, sometimes to the detriment of our personal lives. Today’s young people want to work hard and achieve financial success, but they are also quite adamant about wanting a quality, balanced family life right from the start. When my son was born six years ago, it really opened my eyes to the possibility of a different kind of future. I’ve had a fantastic career and working life and wouldn’t change that for anything, but especially now that Covid-19 forced us to reconsider ways of doing business, I feel the time may be right to acknowledge that the younger generation is onto something in the way they establish work-life balance much earlier in their lives. It is certainly something to learn from.