How Michael Glimcher didn't let the recession bury his family real estate trust

Michael Glimcher, Chairman & CEO, Glimcher Realty Trust

Michael Glimcher had a lot to worry about in March 2009. The stock price for shares in Glimcher Realty Trust (NYSE: GRT) was hovering right around $1. The company had a massive pile of debt, and confidence in the real estate industry was slipping with every new foreclosure.
“We’re a capital-intensive business,” says Glimcher, the 552-employee company’s chairman and CEO. “When the banks were shut down and they didn’t want to lend money out and they just wanted to be paid back, it put us in the most precarious position that we’ve ever been in as a company in our 50-year history.”
Glimcher really needed to raise some cash and get rid of this debt that was strangling his business. But where was he going to find the money to get it done?
“How are you going to come up with $200 million?” Glimcher says.
This money wasn’t going to come from patrons at the malls and shopping centers that Glimcher managed. The economy had hit them hard, too. So he told his people not to spend time worrying about things over which they had no control.
“I basically told everyone here at the company, ‘If you want to pontificate about what’s going to happen to the overall economy and what’s going on in the outside world, you can do that all you want when you’re at home,’” Glimcher says. “But during the workday, if we can’t affect it, we’re not talking about it. It’s not an option.’
“We can control what our operating expenses are. We can control the morale within our organization. We can control how safe and clean our malls are and make sure they are great environments that people want to shop in. So there are a lot of things we can control.”
Glimcher felt that setting aside these uncontrollable factors would allow his team to get laser-focused on what could be done to get the $308 million company turned around.