Real Estate and Construction
George Livermore
CEO, First American Corelogic LLC
By John Nank
Smart Business Orange County | May 2007
When First American Real Estate Solutions merged with Sacramento-based CoreLogic Systems Inc. in February, it was just
another day at the office for George Livermore. The newly formed company, First American CoreLogic LLC, is what Livermore
— who serves as CEO — refers to as a “melting pot of cultures,” the product of the acquisition of more than 20 regional real
estate information companies nationwide. The result is a culture and a management team that reflect the diverse backgrounds
of its former companies and a spirit for entrepreneurialism — a word you might not expect to hear at a company of 1,200
employees that posted combined annual revenue of around $325 million in 2006.
Smart Business spoke to Livermore about the
importance of collaboration and the positive effects of making a mistake.
Make leadership a team effort. We have a
strong management team here, and we
have built our strategy in this business
together.
It isn’t an autocracy where everybody is
waiting for me to tell them what to do, by
any means. I don’t care for an autocratic
leadership style. Everybody becomes dependent on that one person, and it breeds
weakness.
Participation is important, and it’s not just
a meeting you go to. Part of the job of my
management team is to weigh in and help
create and continue to modify and nurture
our strategy.
It’s not up to me by myself. Everybody
has a piece of the action, and they’re constantly coming in and making recommendations. For me, that’s critical.
If you’re doing those things together as a
team, it makes it really easy to communicate to the rest of the employee population,
as well as to your clients, who you are and
what you do and to be very consistent
about that. You don’t have to be constantly
worried about, ‘I wonder if the people in
this location really get what we’re doing.’
You know they do, because your entire
management team is on the same page, as
opposed to you cooking it up in your office,
coming out and telling everybody what
you’re doing and then figuring out who
doesn’t understand what you’ve told them.
Share information with employees. We’re a
publicly traded company, and we typically
don’t disclose our detailed revenues and
profits outside of the building, but we tell
our employees everything. They know it
all.
If they leave the company and go to the
competitor and tell them, so be it. We tell
them about our product development initiatives, we tell them about our strategic
deals, we tell them about acquisitions that
are pending when we can. It’s so good to
keep people on the same page. I would
hate to work in a company where I didn’t
know anything until I read in the newspaper and saw that we had acquired somebody.
We’re very open here, and we do a lot of
communicating about our strategy, our
plans and how the boat is floating financially. What happens is that it ultimately
keeps people informed, but it also allows
your managers, who are responsible for
their functional areas and objectives, to
have a consistent framework within which
to make sure people know how their tasks
and their goals and objectives roll up to the
grand strategy.
Learn from your mistakes. You can’t punish
honest mistakes. I hear stories of people
getting fired for having a project not come
in on time.
We’re diligent about the things we do.
We’re not going to have poor performance
continue, but when you have key people
working hard on something and just
because it doesn’t come in exactly as promised, that doesn’t mean those people are
useless.
There are a lot of things we’ve done in the
past where I didn’t know how it was going
to come out. If it didn’t come out the way I
wanted, it didn’t mean the people who
were working on it were bad. Maybe it was
a bad plan.
To some degree when mistakes are made, that’s learning. If you lose people or fire
somebody after that’s gone on, you’ve just
gotten rid of a lot of experience. Typically,
the people who have been through the
toughest assignments — and a lot of
assignments that didn’t work out all that
well — were way better the next time, and
the next time they were better than that,
and after 10 or 15 years, they’re some of the
best people I have. Guess what? They don’t
make mistakes anymore at all.
People need to be able to know that they
can come and give you bad news.
Otherwise, they’re going to hide it from
you. If you’re punishing mistakes and
you’re not being honest with people or
you’re treating them inconsistently, the
whole thing decays, and there is no way
you can have a successful business at all,
ever.
Make successful hiring a priority. When you
start to get big and you have to fill positions
and you’re growing, people tend to take
hiring for granted. ‘I need a developer, I
need this position, hurry up and get me
some resumes.’
It’s easy for me to say because I don’t do
much hiring myself, but I hate hearing that,
because every single person you hire is
absolute gold. They represent you, and
they will make or break you over time.
We’ve all seen examples where a string of
bad hires can kill a company, regardless of
where it is in the company. On the other
hand, a string of good hires can turn a company from being an average company to
being a phenomenal company.
I tell my managers that constantly, and
we interview each other’s candidates and
talk very critically about how an individual
is going to fit in and what they are going to
do to help us. What do they know that we
don’t know? What can they teach us? What
do they bring to the party?
That helps us be very careful about the
chemistry and the fit as opposed to just trying to fill a position with a body.
HOW TO REACH: First American CoreLogic LLC, (800) 345-7334 or www.firstamres.com, www.corelogic.com
