Charlie Jones tells this story of his son coming home and telling his dad he wanted to start selling greeting cards, door to door in their neighborhood. His son asked him if he would teach him how to sell.

Sure enough, Charlie sits him down and began to teach him what to say and how to respond to the customer’s questions etc. He tells his son to go outside and come up and knock on the door and do a practice run with his dad. The little boy gets his sales materials together and goes outside ready to do the practice pitch in front of his dad. He was so innocent and sweet as he walked to the front door expecting his dad to kneel and be so supportive while he fumbles through the pitch.

He knocked on the front door and his dad opens it and looks down at his son and says, “what do YOU want?” The little boy is shocked by the abrupt voice of his dad and tries to answer. His dad just slams the door in in his face. Of course, the little boy starts bawling. The dad’s wife comes running to in the room and starts asking him why he was being so mean to their son.

The dad replies “I am just getting him ready for a little living. He needs to know that everyone will not be gentle, accepting and kind. He needs to understand how to handle discouragement and adversity and keep on going”

The little boy stopped crying and knocked on the door again and the dad explained what he trying to teach him. That afternoon the little boy went out and sold five orders of greeting cards and did not get discouraged when some people were rude and said no.

That story tells a lot about real life. Many people get discouraged quickly and quit. History is full of people that if they had quit, they never would have invented some of the greatest inventions of all time. Tenacity is often overlooked as one of the most important attributes of life. You show me a person who doesn’t quit easy and I will show you a person accomplishing things in their life. KT

Ten short weeks ago, business was about packing in as much density with as many people as possible. From hotels, conventions, sports venues, air travel, resorts, retail, and office buildings – down to going to a Costco.

Now, ten weeks later, it is all about staying separate and distancing yourself from other people. How can this be possible? Because COVID-19 (‘CV”) has caused a shift in the paradigm of personal life and commercial life that no one saw coming. Ten weeks in, we now judge every face to face interaction differently than we used to.

Behind closed doors, almost every company is fearfully asking themselves, “will life as we knew it ever go back to the way it was?” The scary answer is maybe not. The most advantageous answer is it will come back but not at the same levels as pre-CV. Every company from a sandwich shop, hotels to sports venues, and entertainment are projecting different economic modeling because of the long-term effects on their industry. I was on a conference call recently discussing the various aspects of reopening the office workplace on June 1. Everything was discussed from ingress-egress, ice machine, copier to directional walking patterns in the office. The mandates and guidelines will change how people feel about in-office work, and that will be reflected in dining, travel, hotels, retail, entertainment, conferences, and so forth.

Working remotely has, for several years, been a discussion topic for many companies, but was mostly regulated to the back burner regarding its immediate need. As of 10 weeks ago, the need to implement and fully understand how to work remotely became the only focus. The results are enough to shake any industry and any company because the world was forced to learn how to make it work, and they did. Now companies are looking at everything from travel, office space, client engagement to liability insurance for potential changes in their financial modeling, possibly long term.

The actual result of the past ten weeks of CV will not become fully known until later this summer and fall. The potential changes to how businesses operate and the effects on the idea of dense groups of people in the same place will likely affect almost every commercial real estate segment going forward. For those segments where density was the objective 10 weeks ago, there may have been a longer-term shift in the way people think about it and how it affects personal movement. This shift could have lasting effects on almost all commercial real estate segments. KT