How many CEOs can say they’ve been with their company for 50 years, and rose to their position from a mailroom job?
How many more can say they did that while treating their employees well and inspiring strong loyalties while driving industry-leading innovations over their career despite the ups and downs of the business cycle?
That’s the bar that Tim Warren Jr., the former CEO of Banker & Tradesman parent company The Warren Group, has set.
This week, in honor of his leadership and contributions to the company and the local real estate industry, we’re honoring Warren as his golden anniversary year at The Warren Group comes to a close.
As you’ll read in Heather Beasley Doyle’s profile of him in this week’s issue, the change he set in motion at this company was nothing short of revolutionary.
The Warren Group, through its newspapers, had been a reliable supplier of real estate transaction information for over 100 years by the time Warren took over as company president. In an age before it was easy to look up a deed or a foreclosure on your local registry of deeds’ website, Banker & Tradesman was one of the few ways to access this information without having to spend days traveling around the state. When it debuted in the early 1870s, B&T and other papers like it were, for their time, revolutionary.
But the vast quantities of information that were reported in Banker & Tradesman’s pages before the mid-1980s remained just that: information, discrete and unconnected tidbits that only someone with a powerful memory and a lot of spare time could track and convert into something more.
Warren, with his mathematics training, was able to grasp that this information, if digitized, could instead become connected together into reliable data, an accessible window into the true state of real estate markets around New England that could help everyone from ordinary homebuyers and sellers to the biggest companies free themselves from the shackles of anecdote and impression.
It’s easy to take this sea change for granted when data suffuses our modern world – a good chunk of it still provided by The Warren Group – but imagine what life would be like if you had to grope around the housing market armed with only fragmentary information based on how many transactions your company was involved with.
But alongside this technical and business triumph, it’s worth also noting Warren was able to do it while commanding significant loyalty from his employees. The phrase “family” gets used far too loosely by today’s business leaders to describe their companies, but many Warren Group employees will tell you it’s in no way an inapt description of their workplace. Could Warren have achieved the results he has without building this company culture and backing it with investments into his workforce? We doubt it.
Tim Warren Jr., we salute you.
Letters to the editor of 350 words or less responding to this editorial or other topics may be submitted via email at editorial@thewarrengroup.com with the subject line “Letter to the Editor.” Submission is not a guarantee of publication.
