Troy Evans moved from Philadelphia to Syracuse in 2003 while his wife-to-be was going to law school at Syracuse University.
“I started looking at real estate here versus the Philadelphia market,” he said. “You could buy a condo in Philly for $350,000 or you could buy a lake house up here for 100 grand. So I was sold.”
In Philadelphia, Evans was a computer engineer for Lockheed Martin. In CNY, he worked for a while at Rome Labs and for seven years at SRC, where he led a change management group.
He said he enjoyed his work but “always wanted to do something more entrepreneurial.”
He started working on the side to buy houses, fix them up, and resell them.
Real estate development turned into Evans’ livelihood. He’s involved in several real-estate partnerships and owns 16th Avenue Inc., a management and development company. Two of his better known developments are Isabella Lofts, a North Side project at property that Evans and Steve Case bought from Assumption Church, and Commonspace at 201 E. Jefferson St. in downtown Syracuse.
Evans owns the Commonspace building, formerly known as Century Plaza. He’s put in 21 apartments above the second-floor co-working space. This month, he filed plans with the city to add more apartments and co-working space in adjacent buildings along Warren Street.
Describe Commonspace for me.
We're trying to create a neighborhood in a building, both with a working environment and a living environment.
The upper floors of Commonspace are micro units, around 255 square feet on average, with the features of tiny living – Murphy beds and creative storage places, but your own bathroom and your own kitchen. The rest of the spaces on the upper floors are shared, well-appointed spaces. So there’s a shared chef’s kitchen that everyone who lives there can use, a shared living room, a shared game room, shared rooftop deck, shared library, and then full access to the floor with Syracuse CoWorks, which is the working component of this shared revolution.
In the working environment, you can rent a desk or you can rent an office and get all the benefits of water-cooler talking. You're really paying for the community, for all the activity and life that the building brings.
We try to do an event almost every day – everything from a farm-to-fork dinner where we bring in a local chef to cook for everybody upstairs to whiskey and philosophy on Fridays to yoga on the roof in the summertime. We brought in 1 Million Cups, the entrepreneur program. We’re making the building alive. There are all these opportunities to comfortably connect.
You're not forced to be social all the time, like in a commune or anything. You have your own private space; you can opt in in whatever ratio you like. So you have this opportunity to know your neighbors, know their names, hang out and be social when you want to, but also be private when you want to. I think it’s something that's missing in a lot of apartment development.
We can't take any credit for co-working. The co-working movement is huge. There are hundreds of spaces in Manhattan, and it's taking off worldwide.
What we were one of the first to do is the living environment. Others are coming to the same conclusion – it’s an idea in the air.
What percentage of apartments is rented?
We were full before we opened three years ago, and we've never had an empty day, which is hard to do. If someone were moving out tomorrow, we could fill up the next day.
It’s affordable. We’re in the $900 range now.
One of the coolest things about Commonspace is that it’s the perfect hub for someone new to the area. We do short-term leases. It gives you a landing spot when you’re new to the area, and you get to know people when you’re coming in. We've got people from eight different states and seven different countries right now. It’s a flowing community, but they get to really live like a local quickly because of this instant community that's created.
I like to highlight the power of our mission. Harvard University started a study in the 1930s and ’40s. It’s one of the longest studies of human development ever.
They followed nearly 800 people and they pinged them throughout their life, asking them all sorts of questions – hundreds of points from marital status to job satisfaction. The number one thing the Harvard researchers found to equate to human satisfaction is the quality of relationships in your life. It's a powerful message that I think we lost along our way in our industrial-mind focus. At some level, I think we sacrificed relationships.
We want to help bring that back to light and focus on it in everything we do. Of course, we want to be financially profitable so we can keep going, but I think having that core mission is the driver.
Give me your advice for effective leadership.
Leadership is a weird word that we've romanticized. We put people on pedestals for it.
For me, the number one thing is to help people achieve something. You care about people, and you focus on the individual. It's not this facade that you put up. It's this open, honest, vulnerable approach to whatever you do. Call it leadership, call it being a good dad, call it whatever you want.
To sum it up: Be a good human. Don’t be selfishly driven.
Then, to be effective, add the idea of Karmic debt. You reap what you sow.
To drive home that point: As a leader trying to achieve things, make sure every action you're doing is supporting your values.
Next is understand human emotions. Call it emotional intelligence or whatever, but any effective leader needs it. This isn't anything that I invented, and it’s something I'm still working on. It's where you can put yourself in people's shoes. So if someone's rubbing you the wrong way, getting you angry, look back and say: All right, where did I do that to somebody?
When you can put yourself in other people's heads, there rarely are things that can keep you angry or keep you resentful. Leading is trying to corral people in some form. If you're not jelling, why is it? What are you doing that is contributing to that? Try to keep that thought at the forefront.
A business is not a physical thing. A business is a group of people trying to add value to the world. It's not a product. It's not a slogan.
To have the most successful team, it's trying to create the right energy, trying to create the right personal relationships that can be most productive.
How does a leader create those relationships?
How do you create any relationship?
I wasn’t good at this in my 20s, and I've finally smartened up a little bit. It means stop putting up your facade of whatever title you have been given or whatever lot you've been given in life. Throw that out.
Be open, honest, and vulnerable.
That kind of open and honest dialogue is much easier to have one on one, but even if you're standing in front of 30 people, open up: Here's where we're at as a company. Here’s where we're not doing good. Here's what I'm doing about that.
When you lay everything on the table, when you’re open, honest, vulnerable, you create real relationships, and human connectivity is one of the most powerful forces in the world.
I made us digress. Any other advice for effective leadership?
One other thing: Don't take things personally. When someone does something to you, it's not a reflection of you. When someone is emotionally charged, right or wrong, it’s important to take a position of humility in that.
One more thing I want to touch on is something I learned through IPEC, a coaching program, when I was like 30 years old. It was pretty intense program, but it taught me to focus on and practice intuitive listening.
When you're with somebody 100 percent present, 100 percent focused on that person, it makes that leader more respected. It's like a superpower if you can get it right. You can’t be worried about all this stuff you got to do or your task list. It shows that you care, and you do care because you're there listening and you're there with that person at that moment.
Being on a team, you need to know when to lead and when to follow. Nobody wants a dictatorship. If you're in any sort of official leadership role, it's still important to know when to step back and kind of follow. Somebody told me once that the best leaders are the ones when you can look at a successful group of people and not know who the leaders are.
When you think of an effective leader, what qualities do you see?
Warren Buffet comes to mind, because I see a humble, brilliant guy. He constantly portrays that the more he learns, the less he knows. That's something I definitely found out in my life. I'm a big reader. I'm always trying to figure things out and the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know what the hell's going on. It's something I love about him and I think that's who I'd like to be someday. Not the money side. (Laughter) Just the humble side.
Names aside, what other qualities might you see in good leadership and good leaders?
They live by a bigger mission. It's not money driven. It's not ego driven. It's this bigger purpose of trying to add value to the world. That's a huge one for me and something I respect and love to see in leaders.
People who I look up to locally and afar are, for lack of a better word, present. They're focused on living in the moment and not living for the future. They are not dwelling on the past, which will serve no purpose. All there is a combination of daily habits and daily routines. That's your life. All those little habits and daily things are creating your life, so you might want to pay attention. You might want to be aware of that.
I admire leaders I see doing that. They can chase a dream but enjoy it and be in love with it as they do it. They are enthusiastic about it.
When you see ineffective leaders, the kind of boss nobody wants to work for, what attributes do you see?
It's the opposite. Selfishness. Ego driven. Out for selfish things. The power, the money, the fame or whatever it is. That’s the person that I don't want to work for.
Earlier, you used the word dictatorship.
That’s a big one for me. Part of my old world of introducing change into companies was about empowering employees. To be a good leader, you have to let go of control and follow sometimes. It’s knowing when to step back.
In a dictatorship, that's not usually on a priority list.
How does a leader spark innovation?
No matter what size organization, it comes back to habits, creating time and space to be innovative.
In my life, when I wasn't successful being creative, I was just head down, working, checking off boxes, getting things done, and coming home exhausted. I felt good about it because I got a lot of stuff done.
But I was never taking time or the space to reflect and to think about: Why am I doing this? What are we doing? Is there a better way to look at this? We've been doing this this way for 10 years; is that the right way? If so, why? If not, why? That has always sparked new things for me, new ideas.
What's your advice to think like an entrepreneur?
It takes creation of values first, and then aligning your mission with that as much as you can.
So, who are you? What are you about? And if your work doesn't align with that, change it. That's step one because that will drive you to get whatever it is you're trying to accomplish done.
Then, along the way, I think an entrepreneur has to be excited and comfortable with uncertainty.
Something I've always chased my whole life is freedom. I've always had that as a goal or value, even if the definitions have changed over the years.
But now, I think uncertainty is freedom.
I love change. I love seeking change.
I think that's maybe the one thing that's helped me as an entrepreneur – that love for the uncertainty, the unknown and chasing experiences that are new and unique. I think that's something that I've seen help other entrepreneurs as well deal with the stuff that you would as a business owner.
Uncertainty is freedom. I don't think I've ever heard anybody say anything like that.
I’m sure I stole that from somewhere.
What's your advice for a leader to lead through change?
I've come to realize that change is a basic principle of the universe. There's nothing but change. There’s the old saying: You can never step in the same river twice. In my opinion, everything is constantly changing. It's always on the move.
It is bad to think that things aren't changing – it means you're not aware of the changes all around you. You should always be looking around. What's changing? Should I change something here or there because of that?
Change is the normal operating system of the universe. There's no alternative, so don't be surprised.
Nonetheless, people you might be responsible for leading may resist change and try to stay in their comfort zone. How do you persuade people to change anyway?
It comes back to open dialogue. In positions where I've tried to move needles or whatever, I’ve always to be 100 percent honest people. It's not a scary or fear-based approach to getting that message across.
You see a fear-based message in a lot of organizations: We gotta change, or we're going to die.
I want to act with the positive message behind things and the empowerment behind it. It's communicating what I just said: Things are always changing. It's not a bad thing. What are we going to do to get better? How are we going to have continuous improvement? How are we gonna be the best at providing the value that we want to provide?
Engage in an open, honest, and positive dialogue with everyone around you.
The weekly “CNY Conversation" features Q&A interviews about leadership, success, and innovation. The conversations are condensed and edited. To suggest a leader for a Conversation, contact Stan Linhorst at StanLinhorst@gmail.com. Last week featured Adam Fine, co-founder of Dropcopter, whose paralyzing motorcycle crash sent him on a new career and changed his idea of success.
