Founders can run a real estate firm on heroics for a while. At some point, the business needs a system.

In this episode of Design Development, Leslie Cohen, Founder and Principal of Ops Alchemy, talks about strengthening operations, reducing founder dependence, and preparing a business for growth and leadership transitions.

Leslie shares how she approached becoming the first COO at Samuels & Associates: establishing a cadence around the operating budget, listening to people throughout the organization, and clarifying decision ownership among partners. She also explains how she diagnoses operational challenges today and helps teams implement improvements.

In this episode

• Recognizing when a real estate firm has outgrown the way it operates.
• Giving operations dedicated attention as the company grows.
• Defining roles and decision ownership before assessing whether people are in the right seats.
• Understanding the communication problems created when founders bypass management.
• Aligning operational improvements with the founder’s goals and succession plans.
• Starting with the most important pain points and documenting workflows, including tenant introduction through lease execution.
• Using standard operating procedures to support onboarding, training, and consistent execution.
• Connecting operational improvements to financial results and sharing the operating company’s financial picture with the team.
• Building quality management through defined processes and standards while preserving independent judgment.
• Documenting processes before introducing automation or AI.

About Leslie Cohen

Leslie Cohen is the Founder and Principal of Ops Alchemy, a consulting firm that helps growth-stage companies scale by aligning people, process and profit. Its approach: “We focus on the business so you can focus in the business.”

With more than 30 years of experience in real estate, Leslie brings an operator’s perspective, having built her career from developer to Chief Operating Officer. She partners with founders and leadership teams to transform organizations in a growth mode or period of transition, creating operational clarity, systems and structure.

Before launching Ops Alchemy, Leslie served as COO for Davis and COO for Samuels & Associates, where she executed firm-wide strategy. Known for translating vision into execution, she has led organizations through periods of growth and change while strengthening culture and driving financial performance.

A respected industry leader, Leslie has served as President of CREW Boston and NAIOP MA. Her numerous honors include Bisnow Power Women in Commercial Real Estate, BBJ Women Who Mean Business, Globe Street Women of Influence, the CREW Boston Leadership Award and BBJ 40 Under 40.

Leslie has a BSCE from Tufts University and an MBA from Babson College. She resides in Brookline, Massachusetts, with her husband and two children.

Connect with Leslie

• Ops Alchemy
• Leslie Cohen on LinkedIn

Resources mentioned

• EOS and the Accountability Chart
• The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham
• Walker Webcast
• Adam Grant’s podcasts

Thanks for being part of the Design Development community.

New episodes drop every Wednesday, featuring leaders across real estate, design, and construction.

The goal is simple: learn from how great people think, lead, make decisions, navigate setbacks, and create opportunity.

There is no single path to success.
Careers are not linear.
The lessons are in the story.

Subscribe so you don’t miss the next conversation.

Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram & YouTube

Find out more at https://h-o.engineering/podcasts/

Let’s go.

What if the most valuable thing a window cleaner brings down from the side of a building isn’t clean glass — but information?

Matt Pierce started his career pounding the pavement, walking into restaurants, car dealerships, and storefronts selling recurring window cleaning. Today, he leads PIERCE Property Services, a roughly 120-person company providing maintenance, waterproofing, restoration, roofing, and broader building-envelope services.

The leap between those two businesses wasn’t part of some perfectly executed strategic plan.

It started with listening.

A crew member once pointed out that if they were already standing on the ladder cleaning windows, they only had to climb a couple more steps to clean the gutters.

That simple observation became a much bigger philosophy:

If the customer already trusts you with one problem, what other problems are you uniquely positioned to solve?

Eventually, Matt recognized an even larger opportunity. His crews weren't simply servicing buildings. They were repeatedly seeing parts of the asset that owners, property managers, and even consultants rarely see.

So PIERCE began documenting what they found.

That eventually became LIFECYCLE360 — technology designed to capture, locate, and track building-envelope conditions so owners can better understand what is happening to their assets and plan maintenance and capital expenditures before small problems become major restoration projects.

Today, Matt says the company has captured roughly 250,000 images that are helping power the next AI-backed iteration of the platform.

And he isn’t stopping there.

Matt also launched Building Envelope Group, exploring whether the systems, technology, training, and operating model developed at PIERCE can help established contractors in other markets evolve their businesses — without requiring those owners to sell to private equity or abandon the brands they've spent decades building.

In this episode, Matt and Rens dig into:

• How storefront window cleaning became the foundation for a building-envelope company.
• The employee observation that helped reshape how Matt thought about expanding services.
• Why recurring maintenance creates an unusually valuable relationship with building owners.
• The original problem that led PIERCE to develop LIFECYCLE360.
• How 250,000+ field images are being used to build its next AI-backed iteration.
• Why deferred maintenance can become dramatically more expensive as buildings age.
• Matt's philosophy of “listening to the whispers of the business.”
• Why his strength as a delegator can also become a weakness.
• Using data to separate great-looking opportunities from businesses that actually produce healthy margins.
• Why Matt created Building Envelope Group instead of simply planting PIERCE offices across the country.
• The tension between private-equity consolidation and independent, family-owned contractors.
• How Matt thinks about growth after surpassing milestones he once thought might never be possible.
• The role faith, family, reflection, and intentionality play in keeping ambition from consuming everything else.
• Why Matt says he wants to “fight for these days” while his kids are still at home.

The business lesson underneath the episode is bigger than building envelopes:

Pay attention to the advantages hiding inside the business you already have.

Sometimes the next business isn't a completely new idea.

It's sitting two steps higher on the ladder.

Thanks for being part of the Design Development community.

New episodes drop every Wednesday, featuring leaders across real estate, design, and construction.

The goal is simple: learn from how great people think, lead, make decisions, navigate setbacks, and create opportunity.

There is no single path to success.
Careers are not linear.
The lessons are in the story.

Subscribe so you don’t miss the next conversation.

Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram & YouTube

Find out more at https://h-o.engineering/podcasts/

Let’s go.

Most business owners go through a pivotal moment—their first real look behind the curtain at how buyers value companies. For Rens Hayes, that moment came when he went through a sale and due diligence process for his father’s structural steel business. What he learned from that experience completely changed how he approached building and scaling his own company, H&O Structural Engineering.

In this episode of Independence by Design™, Rens and host, Ryan Tansom, break down how he engineered his business for value creation, using Ken Sanginario’s Engineer’s Value Opportunity Profile (VOP) as his roadmap. Instead of scaling haphazardly, Rens built his company by systematically improving the eight functional areas that drive business valuation—the same areas buyers care about most.

Rens and his partner have taken a deliberate approach to aligning cash flow, valuation timelines, and growth goals, ensuring that every dollar reinvested moves them closer to financial independence. Whether you are preparing for an eventual exit or simply want to build a business that works for you instead of the other way around, this conversation is packed with insights that will change the way you think about scaling, hiring executives, and managing risk.

Rens Hayes is a structural engineer and entrepreneur who transformed H&O Structural Engineering by applying enterprise value principles to modernize the traditional engineering industry. After experiencing due diligence firsthand, he shifted from operator to owner mindset, implementing Ken Sanginario's Value Opportunity Profile to align business growth with long-term value creation. Hayes helps real estate developers maximize returns through strategic design and cost-efficient engineering, while sharing insights on scaling, capital allocation, and executive hiring—expertise valuable for business owners seeking to build wealth-generating enterprises rather than just larger companies.

Resources:

Website: H&O Structural Engineering

LinkedIn: Rens Hayes

Podcast: The H&O Podcast

Sound Bites:

"Scaling a business isn’t just about revenue—it’s about building an asset buyers actually want." – Rens Hayes

"The biggest mistake founders make? Hiring executives before they know what success looks like." – Ryan Tansom

"If you don’t know how to allocate capital inside your own business, you’re just hoping for growth—not engineering it." – Rens Hayes

"There’s a difference between working in the business and working on the business. The sooner you figure that out, the sooner you get your time back." – Ryan Tansom

Thanks for being part of the Design Development community.

New episodes drop every Wednesday, featuring leaders across real estate, design, and construction.

The goal is simple: learn from how great people think, lead, make decisions, navigate setbacks, and create opportunity.

There is no single path to success.
Careers are not linear.
The lessons are in the story.

Subscribe so you don’t miss the next conversation.

Follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram & YouTube

Find out more at https://h-o.engineering/podcasts/

Let’s go.