Track Record

A corporate real estate operations business was built from the ground up inside the Americas arm of a global workplace services provider and scaled into a market leader. It launched with roughly $100 million in revenue and 20 accounts seeded by the parent company, and required an operating model that could absorb growth without losing delivery discipline.

The work was building that model: procurement, health and safety, business development, and operations capability constructed to scale, then codified into repeatable playbooks for procurement, lease administration, and operations. That experience is the foundation of the operating approach Fulcrum uses today.

Four previously separate businesses were operating as a patchwork: facilities management, property management, project management, advisory and transactions, lease administration, and engineering, each with its own conventions. The mandate was to integrate them into a single operating platform without disrupting client service during the transition.

The work spanned the integration itself, national expansion through new brokerage teams across multiple major markets, and multiple strategic acquisitions in facility and project management. It also included sourcing and implementing the company's first procurement platform — the operating infrastructure needed for the combined business to scale well beyond its size at the time.

An owner-side mandate with cradle-to-grave ownership of a regional bank holding company's real estate portfolio: 900-plus corporate and retail banking offices, and a 100-person team spanning facility management, critical facilities, transaction management, lease administration, space planning, project management, site selection, construction, and sustainability. The function reported into the bank's senior leadership team with direct and frequent CEO interaction, and carried both the operating expense base and the annual capital program.

On the operating side, the work was a full repositioning of the function rather than a cost exercise. The portfolio's cost position was benchmarked against publicly reported regional bank peers to establish where the bank actually stood. The occupancy expense base was then rebid in sequence from the largest categories down — janitorial, landscape, snow removal, then HVAC — restructuring vendor and contractor procurement across the enterprise. The team was redesigned around the resulting operating model, and a corporate real estate performance dashboard was built to monitor and hold the outcomes rather than report them after the fact.

On the capital side, the defining problem was volume rather than complexity. A 700-store branch network required rebranding and renovation while approximately 150 new branches were developed and opened in the same window, against a $30 million annual construction capital program spanning ground-up development and building improvements. That was delivered by standardizing on a repeatable branch prototype and executing it under a master general contractor agreement, which converted a fragmented, market-by-market bidding problem into a predictable production program with consistent design, pricing, and delivery terms. Headquarters lease transactions across five markets, totaling roughly 450,000 square feet, ran alongside it.