John Woodman
Founding Partner
Despite the challenging and unpredictable backdrop of the last couple of years, we have never stopped looking forward and thinking about how we can best get things right for our people and our clients. This continues to be our focus going into our new financial year which began on 01 May as we emerge from this extraordinary period defined by the pandemic and progress forward as an Employee Owned Trust (EOT); continuing to invest in our processes and people as well as embracing new technologies and ways of working.
We have developed a strategic framework capturing the areas we’re going to focus on as we continue to grow and diversify. The framework is driven by a central theme; the belief that if we ‘get things right for our people and our clients’ and embrace innovation in everything we do, then success will follow. We have also included measures that keep us focused on the journey ahead; ‘our resilience and our future’.
Our people
Hollis has always been a people business; we know our people are our strongest asset. As the business continues to grow and the ways in which we work continue to evolve, we commit to continuing our work on building and maintaining an inclusive and diverse culture; an open environment for people to learn and develop; and contribute to improving diversity across the real estate industry.
We will continue to find the fun. During the pandemic this was difficult to achieve at times, but we are now able to reconnect in person. In fact, this past week saw everyone get together for HollisFest, our summer team building day involving camping, music games and plenty of fun!
Our clients
Similarly to our people, our clients play a pivotal role in our success. We are delighted to be experiencing a great reconnection with the return of face-to-face meetings and events. At the same time, we will continue to cater to our clients’ needs which includes a surge in demand for our drone-based surveys, H360 virtual tour technology and virtual due diligence products.
Looking forwards, our key innovation focus will be in supporting the development of new products that aid visualisation and we will be further improving our offering around solar PV, thermal imaging and data services. From industrial and logistics, to retail, offices and life sciences and tech, we will continue to help our clients realign and future-proof their stock to reflect the changing needs of occupiers.
At the heart of this sits ESG. Over the next year we will continue to integrate ESG into every service we provide and have commercial and pragmatic conversations with clients about how best to improve their building’s performance. We pledge to do this internally too. Our vision is to positively impact our communities, the built environment, and the world. We are taking significant steps to achieve our vision through implementing our own ESG strategy and ensuring that we are held accountable to deliver it.
Our resilience and our future
We live in a world where anything can happen and with a likely recession coming soon, we will identify our risks – global, local and internal – and ensure plans are in place to mitigate their impacts.
We are seeking to become more efficient by improving our workflows as well as improving how we capture, retain, and share data with each other. We’re also looking at how we communicate with our clients, from the creation and delivery of a new client portal, to Internet of Things data streaming and Virtual Reality applications.
Succession planning is an important process to go through for any successful business and will be a focus this year as we identify and further develop our talent to fill leadership and business-critical positions in the future. Far beyond just being practical, this also facilitates opportunities, and creating opportunities is very much part of our DNA.
Delivering our business plan is a one team approach and that one team approach really does matter. Our new EOT structure truly means that everyone has a stake in our success, and everyone has a responsibility for it too. We look forward to working together as one team at Hollis and with our clients.