Fort Worth Business CEO

Winter 2015

Volume 1 N

o. 3Freem

an Heads W

est / Robert Earley: JPS Health System

s Farmer / K

eeping Gods Books

THE GENTLEMAN FARMER

ROBERT EARLEY CULTIVATES CULTURE AT JPS HEALTH SYSTEMS

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KILLER DESKSSTAYING HEALTHY

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WINTER 2015 $5

ROBBIE BRIGGSOFBRIGGSFREEMAN

KEEPING GODS BOOKSMINISTERS OFTEN LEARN BUSINESS ON THE JOB

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Copyright 2015 Fort Worth Business and Fort Worth Business CEO. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

R O B B I E B R I G G SR O B B I E B R I G G S

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Copyright 2015 Fort Worth Business and Fort Worth Business CEO. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

50 FORT WORTH BUSINESS CEO Winter 2015

I looked at what our market was doing and I realized that the only people buying expensive homes in Dallas mostly were wealthy Mexicans coming up for safe haven, some Chinese, some Europeans, but very few locals, Briggs said. The locals, like turtles, had just withdrawn into their shells on the sidelines. So it occurred to me that nobody even though were the oldest firm in Dallas and one of the most respected in Monterrey, Mexico, would know who I was, Briggs said.

Thats when he realized that in Dallas and Fort Worth, the market is national and international as well as local. What he needed was a national and international presence, and the route to that was affiliation with an organization that already had that identity. What better organization than perhaps one of the best-known and oldest high-end names in the modern world Sothebys?

Sothebys International Realty Affiliates was founded in 1976 as a subsidiary of Realogy Holdings Corp., which entered into a long-term strategic alliance in 2004 with the venerable British Sothebys auction house, established in 1744.

So Briggs struck a deal with Sothebys International, opening the potential for collaboration and marketing with other affiliates around the United States and the world. He announced the affiliation in December 2010. But it also set up a future confrontation that would be among the most miserable experiences of Briggs life.

JOINING THE BUSINESSBriggs father, opened Ben R. Briggs Real Estate, in 1960,

but Robbie Briggs wasnt really interested in following him. He wanted to be an architect, and he went to Tulane University to earn a masters degree in the field. Tulane is where he met his wife of 39 years, Nancy. He graduated in 1977 and married that same year. Briggs went to work with a firm that did a lot of work for Dallas developer Trammel Crow.

But I had a wife and a baby, and I was making $10,000 a year. I was looking around the office and the guys who had been there for 10 years were making $30,000 a year. They didnt

tell me that in architecture school, Briggs said. If I had been as passionate as a passionate artist, I would have stuck with it. I love architecture, but I didnt eat, drink and sleep it, so I couldnt justify being a starving architect.

He already had a real estate license, so he joined his fathers agency in 1979, thinking hed do that while he figured out what else to do. I had no intention of being in residential real estate, he says. I kind of kid that in those days they were nice ladies, a few men, and they sat there and waited for the phone to ring. That was just sort of the MO.

He brought in new ideas that werent particularly welcomed by the other agents. Unlike the ones who were sitting there, I had a wife and a kid to support, so Im making phone calls,

and Im going out, and I get a pager. And then, of course, the cell phone came along and I was one of the first to get that. I talked my dad into buying a fax machine, Briggs said.

RAINMAKINGBy the time I was in my early 30s, I really

wanted to see the company grow, and I knew that even if I got a listing on my own, everybody in the office thought my daddy had given it to me. He never gave me anything, Briggs said. But that led to what would be a significant decision.

I chose not to list myself. I chose to build the agents up, market the company I loved marketing and just be a rainmaker. And I would refer the business to our agents, Briggs said. I could end up with the best agents working for me because they knew they were going to be taken care of.

He says he spends his days, all day long, thinking about how to grow the business and how to grow the agents instead of how to get listings. Thats their job. My job is to provide them the tools and the marketing and the rainmaking on a bigger scale, he said.

He took over operation of the agency in 1983 around the time of what the Federal Reserve now says was then the worst economic downturn in the United States since the Great Depression. Recessions move across the United States in waves, hitting some areas earlier than others. Recovery was already

While Robbie Briggs was fighting to avoid layoffs at his upscale boutique

Dallas real estate company during the economic meltdown in 1988,

he had an epiphany. His agency mostly sold real estate in the Park Cities

and around Preston Hollow, but not much was selling, particularly to

local residents.

51FORT WORTH BUSINESS CEO

under way elsewhere when it hit Texas about 1985. Downturns in the market are part of life, but that doesnt

mean they are pleasant. Still, Briggs believes that they always signal an opportunity to make money in the future if you can survive them.

Every downturn that Ive ever gone through I hate em, hate em but Ive always come out on the other side better. So I dont like em, but I know that theyre a positive thing, theyre a correction in the market, and well get through it, he said. And five to 10 years later, the values are skyrocketing.

In 1993, Briggs merged with a firm owned by Charles Freeman. At the time I had probably 40 agents and he had 20 and we grew it to about 130 agents. We were certainly one of the three top luxury brokers in Dallas, Briggs said.

HEARING A CALLIn 2005, Briggs Freeman was doing well with Freeman

managing the day-to-day operations and Briggs playing rainmaker. Life was about as good as it could be. It was then that Briggs did something unusual some might say crazy.

I really felt a calling to move to China and do ministry for three years, Briggs said.

China? It started with his son, Ben, who had gone to China while he was at Wake Forest University and loved it. Hes very good with languages. He already had a kind of a mission heart, Briggs said. Ben was working for EDS in London with no opportunity to move back to China.

So Ben Briggs called David Gowdey, one of the owners at Barrington Gifts, which makes leather products for the corporate trade, saying that he knew Barrington made the products in China, wondering whether there was an opportunity for him there. Barringtons management had been to a conference staged by Business as Missions, a faith-

based organization that promotes making a difference in the world through business. They told Ben that they didnt feel very good about the China operation.

We feel like we should have our own factory so that we can treat our people fairly, make a difference in the community, and if you want to go over and open up a factory for us, well hire you, Briggs said they told his son. So at age 25, with a computer science degree, knowing nothing about factories, he agreed to go over there and open up a factory. They didnt even know where.

Doug Birdsall, then head of Asian Access, an organization that trained pastors to work in China and Japan, took Ben with him to China and introduced him to Bill Job, owner of Meixia Handicraft Co., who started a glass factory in Xiamen, China, in 1987 to make collectibles. Xiamen (pronounced shah-muhn) is a port city on Chinas southeast coast, across the strait from Taiwan. That was in 2004.

Job took Ben Briggs in and mentored him. Job and his wife, Kitty, had spare space in their own factory. They had started an orphanage in Xiamen, and the woman running it had formerly run a 500-person leather factory. They offered to let her manage the new factory. Well, shes married to him now, Briggs said. Thats my sons wife and shes the mother of his three kids. Her name is Jenny.

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Nancy and Robbie Briggs at the Great Wall of China.

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LIFE-CHANGING TRIPBirdsall met with Robbie Briggs for lunch in Dallas the

same year Ben went to China and offered to take him to Asia to see what Asian Access was doing. They went first to Mongolia and then on to China. Im not a crier, but I cried a bunch, because we were meeting people who had spent 25 years in prison because of their faith, Briggs said. One man walked away from the Communist Party and his worldwide advertising firm to become a Christian pastor after the June 4, 1989, massacre in Beijings Tiananmen Square.

I immediately came home and said, Nancy, that was the most life-changing trip Ive ever taken. Id like to take our family and maybe another family and our current Sunday School teacher and go back and do the same thing. And we did that summer, Briggs said. Thats when Ben, now living in China, told him he wanted to get married. I said, Well, weve got a Sunday School teacher who is a pastor, your familys here, why dont we go ahead and do it? He said, Believe it or not, I asked her, and she said she wants to pray about it for six months. So we had to go back a third time.

Just before that third trip, Briggs began to feel that he was being called to sell his house in Dallas and move to Beijing. I dont even know what Im going to do, but I had to come to that decision that maybe Im walking away from Briggs Freeman.

When he discussed it with his wife, Nancy asked whether they could pray about it. And she goes, You know, Abraham and Sarah were called to a different country, but they took their business with them. They took their sheep and their cattle with them. At that point, I really was sure that I wasnt leaving the business. I didnt know how it was going to work. I thought it was very, very risky, me leaving.

He offered to buy out partner Charles Freeman because Im putting this company at risk and you shouldnt have to bear the risk. But Freeman declined although he would take the buyout later. So he ran it, and ran it well for the three years I was gone.

Religious laws are complicated in China, so Briggs did not go as a missionary. My visa was that I was researching business, looking for opportunities, which gave you multiple-entry visas, he said.

LITTLE STEPSSo, by 2005, Briggs had pursued his calling and was in

China. They were busy years. Briggs had been chairman of the board for a small Christian school in Dallas, and he was elected to the same position at the International School in Beijing. He became involved with a program for street kids and helped with the teenage boys and with the start of a vocational program. Another effort was working with the children of migrant workers in Beijing that started as an after-school program and morphed into a program for the whole family and another startup vocational school. And he was involved in church, teaching Sunday School.

You have government-approved churches, you have underground churches that are illegal and you have foreign passport churches, so if you have a passport, you can go to one of these foreign passport churches, Briggs said. The beauty of that was that meant that there were no denominations. They were just all there together. I loved it.

That played a role in church membership when he returned. He and his wife had been members of a mainstream Protestant church before they left. But when he returned he found it hard to attend a church made up of primarily one socioeconomic and ethnic group.

We began attending a downtown Dallas non-denominational church that is very mixed ethnically and economically, Reunion Church of Dallas, he said.

Volunteerism is a particularly American trait, and the international church Briggs attended in China opened the door to recruiting volunteers from different nations for his projects.

A Sunday School class about how to be a good husband and father was not particularly popular with the men. The Europeans were like, No. Thats too touchy feely. Were not doing that. And the Chinese were like, No. Father rules. You dont have to be nice. You dont have to be caring. Well, the next year, the wives of the foreigners were watching the husbands of the Americans change and the marriages were getting better,

and the wives of all these Chinese and all these Europeans were going, You are taking that class, he said.

I didnt do anything big. But there were lots of little things, Briggs said.

For Briggs, his time in China

In September 2013, the Briggs family hosted the wedding of Avery Briggs to Derek Reed in Martins-ville, Maine.

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was a blessing. Id come back [to Dallas] four times a year, and I felt like I was the luckiest man in the whole world, Briggs said. I would lead this very meaningful life and come home and be in meetings with Lucy Billingsley, Trammel Crows daughter, about high-rise buildings and I was just like, Who gets to do this?

GO HOMEBut as strong as the call to go to China was, it was followed

three years later by a call to return home. I felt so blessed, but I felt just as called to come home and I

knew it by July of 2008. I was literally kicking and screaming. I was like, Lord, I really dont want to. I like what Im doing here. Every day I wake up and I feel like Im doing something meaningful and Ive never been this energized. But I knew it was time to go home. For me, it [the decision to leave] was way bigger than going. In September, he called the office in Dallas and said hed be home in December.

In October 2008, everything crashed and Lehman Brothers went in the tank [Lehman filed for bankruptcy Sept. 15, 2008] and I started getting phone calls from Charles about, well, this just happened and that just happened and we need to lay these people off and duh, duh, duh. And I was like, OK, Charles. Calm down. And I came home, Briggs said.

I get back, and it was really just hanging on. The first day I was going to work, I was telling the Lord, How am I to go encourage these people? I dont want to be here. I just sense Him saying, Well, can you encourage them today? Briggs said.

I pull my pants on and I go to work and I dont see the end of this forest. This is worse than 1985, but well put our pants on and well make it through one day at a time. And thats what we did. We didnt fire anybody. I did ask people to take a 5 percent pay cut, and we got through it. And like I said, every time Ive gone through one of these downturns, weve come out better, Briggs said.

ENTER SOTHEBYSBriggs announced the affiliation with Sothebys and that

he had become the sole owner of the firm in December 2010. Sothebys opened opportunities that he had foreseen, such as the ability to be involved in the farm and ranch real estate business from Dallas-Fort Worth south to Houston, with ties to similar operations in California and Colorado.

Briggs had discussed the possibility of a Fort Worth franchise with Sothebys early in their relationship but didnt feel that the time was right. He says he believes that the two markets are markedly different, although perhaps not as different as he thinks.

Under his agreement with Sothebys, he opened additional offices in Dallas and offices in Southlake and Arlington. Jamie Adams came aboard early in Arlington, and John Zimmerman joined technically under the Southlake office. Briggs opened a Dallas Uptown office across from the Crescent Hotel, down from the Mansion and around the corner from the Ritz so all the people coming to Dallas would see the Sothebys sign and, sure enough, that worked. They might come to Dallas and look at my two competitors names and not know who they are, but

they knew who Sothebys was.At the time, Briggs Freeman was increasing its

presence in the ranching land division. Within a couple of months, we had about $75 million worth of ranches west of Fort Worth [listed], Briggs said.

Briggs decided it was time to revisit the Fort Worth franchise, but says that Sothebys was coy in those discussions.

ON THE BEACHNancy Briggs family owns property in Maine and it was

while on a trip there that Robbie Briggs got a phone call he cant forget.

I get to Maine, Aug. 1 of 2012, and I get a phone call from one of my agents saying, Did you know that you have a federal lawsuit from Sothebys? I said, What? That began that little journey. Ive never sued anybody in my entire life. Ive hardly been sued, Briggs said. His agents in Dallas were wondering why they were paying a 6 percent commission to a company that was suing their broker.

The suit was complicated, but in essence it revolved around the definition of the word office. Was Zimmermans working out of his home a violation of Briggs franchise? Sothebys thought it was. While he was dealing with that suit, Williams Trew and Sothebys announced a franchise agreement, shutting the door to Briggs desire to expand into the Fort Worth market. Later, Williams Trew would also sue Briggs Freeman.

While he was in Maine, he started talking to another man who owned doc-in-a-box franchises along the Washington state coast but was getting out of the business because the franchiser was suing him. The man referred Briggs to a leading franchise attorney in Milwaukee. So on my beach, in Port Clyde, Maine, I get the name of this powerful attorney, Briggs said.

Ultimately, he would buy the Fort Worth franchise from Williams Trew, and Williams Trew would sell to Dallas Realtor Ebby Halliday. But two years of stress took its toll, and not only in legal fees.

Look at me, Briggs said. I gained about 50 pounds. Other people starve themselves under stress; I eat under stress. But thats in the past as far as hes concerned, and its time to move on.

Robbie Briggs and agents from Briggs Freeman Sothebys International Realtys Ranch and Land divi-sion traveled to Dubai for business develop-ment opportunities.

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FORMING RELATIONSHIPSBriggs is active in Sothebys network. When

Beijing Sothebys opened, I went to the opening, he said. When Dubai Sothebys opened, I went to the opening. We hosted the New Delhi office in Dallas. I take 40 or 50 brokers to the conference. I meet three times a year with the top 10 brokers of Sothebys to talk about best practices and how we can improve our company. I meet three times a year with the top 40 worldwide about deals, the construction of deals, and how were going to market this building to your clients.

Hes also formed relationships with major Sothebys ranch brokers such as Bill Fandel from Telluride Sothebys and Suzanne Perkins from Sothebys International Realty in Santa Barbara.

Its fair to say that Briggs latest move in Fort Worth shocked the real estate market when three local agencies jointed Briggs Freeman Sothebys International Realty Brants Realtors, Mira Vista Realtors and Bloom Real Estate Group.

Briggs is well aware that Fort Worth and Dallas are different kinds of cities. He says that Fort Worth has a unique identity in the same way

that New Orleans and Miami have identities. I like that authentic identity of who Fort Worth is, Briggs said. And yet, its much more complex than you immediately think of. These are some of the most sophisticated people in the world, and the ones that Ive met have been some of the most entrepreneurial in the world and yet you can just sense that they have roots in hard-working

American cowboy culture, and thats a good thing.

And he gets the community involvement thing. I am philanthropic, and I am Chamber-centric, Briggs said. Hes visible in Fort Worth, is a member of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, and recently traveled with Mayor Betsy Price, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlins and Dallas Fort Worth International Airport CEO Sean Donohue to Germany and England promoting the area.

I know the two areas are very different, but I know that outside of our area we are known as DFW, and when a corporation

moves here, theyre looking at the whole Metroplex. Theyre not just looking at one or the other, Briggs said.

Hes banking on it.Robert Francis is editor of Fort Worth Business.rfrancis@bizpress.netPaul K. Harral is editor of Fort Worth Business CEO.pharral@bizpress.net

BRIGGS FREEMAN SOTHEBYS INTERNATIONAL REALTY

By The Numbers

1960: Established as Ben R. Briggs Real Estate

1993: Merger with Charles Freeman Realtors

2010: Joined Sothebys International Realty network

2012: Launched Southlake office and achieved 220 percent increase in sales in one year

2014: Opened Lakewood office and grew sales volume by 300 percent in the first year

2015: Joined with Brants Realtors, Mira Vista Realtors and Bloom Real Estate Group to open three Fort Worth offices

400: Real Estate agents5: Ranking by sales volume in

700-member Sothebys International Realty network

$735M Price of largest listing, the W.T. Waggoner Ranch

10: Offices Cultural District, Mira Vista, Ranch and Land West, Southlake, The Ballpark, Uptown, Lakewood, Lovers Lane, Ranch and Land East, Plano

Source: Briggs Freeman

WAS ZIMMERMANS

WORKING OUT OF HIS HOME

A VIOLATION OF BRIGGS FRANCHISE?

SOTHEBYS THOUGHT IT WAS.

Agent Jamie Adams gave Robbie Briggs a pair of customized boots to welcome him to the Arlington and Southlake offices.

John Zimmerman (left) and Robbie Briggs. Zimmerman was the first agent to introduce the brand to Fort Worth.

Robbie and Ben Briggs in Dubai. Ben still lives in China but is now executive vice president of the China Initiative for Briggs Freeman.

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