"I thought I had a pretty good handle on JLL, but that was until about four weeks ago when I arrived. Since then I have sort of been on a firehose of a journey to truly understanding the capabilities, and it is amazing."
So says Matt Dawson, famously a World Cup winner with the England rugby union team, the veteran of three British and Irish Lions tours and a team captain on A Question of Sport, as he reflects on his new challenge at global brokerage giant JLL.
JLL announced two weeks ago that Dawson had been recruited as executive director, strategic clients. The broker said he will develop and execute account strategies for its portfolio of high-value clients, build C-suite level relationships and identify cross-selling opportunities in its service portfolio across Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
He will provide strategic insights on market dynamics and client feedback. Dawson will join the EMEA work dynamics board and report directly to Sue Asprey Price.
As the scrum-half for England's victorious 2003 Rugby World Cup team, he famously decided to take an extra darting run to ensure England had better field position for Jonny Wilkinson to convert the dramatic winning drop goal. Dawson clearly has pedigree as a high achiever in sport, but he is keen to point out his long-term successes and experience in business and property too. He, in fact, always had his eye on his post-rugby career in business.
"When I started playing, rugby union was still not professional. I was an amateur rugby player at Northampton in the early 90s and so necessarily I was working as well – I was in a security company, I was selling advertising in newspapers. I then became a teacher because the guy I was living with saw a position in a nearby school. I was teaching sport generally and maths and geography. And then in 1995 it all went professional."
As Dawson explains, that meant a number of top-level rugby players stepped back from careers in real estate, always a popular home for those in the sport, one example being Rob Andrew who had been at DTZ. "I left teaching and joined Northampton as a professional; it was just always the knowledge that I would have to have a job."
A lot of that was down to Dawson's parents. "My parents were very proactive in telling me that I was going to be retiring in my early 30s, and saying what are you going to do, you know, which at the time as a kid, you're batting it off and saying 'yeah, whatever, I'm enjoying playing rugby'. But they were quite rightly looking after me and making me very aware of what I needed to do next."
Dawson's rugby career – of which more later – was nothing short of stellar. A regular starter at number nine for the great Sir Clive Woodward England team that for a period ruled rugby, Dawson also starred for the British Lions, Northampton Saints and Wasps. After he retired in 2006, Dawson built his CV as a familiar face on British television, notably as one of the captains for Question of Sport on BBC One but also on reality TV, winning Masterchef and taking part in Strictly Come Dancing in 2006. He remains a sought-after rugby commentator.
"I was very thankful to have a job at the BBC, doing Question of Sport, and I still enjoy work in the media world mostly on the radio, mostly on 5 Live," muses Dawson. "But you know the perception from a lot of people is they think I do that for a living. I'm very happy for people to think that, it's absolutely fine, but my real passion and what I have really been spending time on for the last 16 years, has been in the corporate world. It has not been as high profile as the TV and media work but I have been working in [facilities management] and real estate."
The long-running roles Dawson is referring to are his work as a health ambassador for Sodexo, a global food and facilities provider, which he joined in 2010, and his work for the managed office and flexible workplace broker Instant from 2014, as director for business development.
"So after I retired in 2006 I did do some reality television work and I tend to get my teeth stuck into things and I quite liked it. I had a couple of years doing that and it was really sort of a bit carefree but I was trying to plan and build for what I wanted to do in the long term. I got introduced to a guy called Philip Jansen in 2010, who was CEO of Sodexo at the time. He asked me to join as their ambassador and I agreed, but I wanted to be in a little bit more than just an ambassador role and so he agreed for me to have visibility of how the Board worked at Sodexo.
"I started to realise that maybe one of my strongest skill sets in the corporate world was that ability to bridge between the companies that I was working for with their clients and enable relationships to grow in different directions. And I was able to be a conduit back to the boardroom because I was meeting our staff, our teams, but also meeting the senior clients and their teams and their staff."
Opening doors
Clearly, Dawson’s position as an elite rugby professional and a pivotal part of one of England's most storied sporting teams helps to open doors and generate interest, something he will happily admit.
"There are occasions when, yes, it may be on little flyers and posters that I am coming to the site and going to have a chat, whether it's about leadership or mental health or food. And also from the board members of the clients that I am visiting there is an interest and a curiosity as to the companies that I work for. It's exactly the same here at JLL. What makes JLL different to everybody else? What can they deliver? How can they deliver it? And why are you associated with it? The values that I've had from my sporting past and that I'm known for - how does that relate?"
Dawson says there is an element of trust involved. "I've been part of great teams and it's been very high profile on a world-class stage. I would like to think that that reputation is reflected with the people that I've continued to work with. I always have been very particular with those companies that I want to work with; it needs to be a good fit for me, as much as it is a good fit for them. I worked with Sodexo for 16 years, and I worked with Instant for 12 years. It's about building those long-term relationships and developing and bringing value. But I want to bring value to JLL as much as I want to bring value to myself and as much as I want to bring value to the clients."
Dawson joined Instant, the group IWG bought in 2022 via a £320 million merger, after fellow England rugby international Tim Rodber, the chief executive, introduced himself.
"Basically, because of the way that Instant was set up around working as a brokerage for serviced offices, for it to exponentially grow and grow at a pace that Tim would have wanted, he quite rightly felt that it needed to have more to offer. It needed a more managed services portfolio feel. And that naturally needed larger clients and needed a conversation with key decision-makers within those large companies."
Dawson said Instant was increasingly focused not only on helping finding space for serviced office groups, but on helping create bespoke products for occupiers, particularly infrastructure firms such as Network Rail and TfL. Here Instant became a pioneer for managed offices.
"The idea came out of serviced office brokerage and really was, can we do that in a managed environment? At Instant it ended up being roughly 85% of the business focused on the managed route. But that's not an easy conversation to have with a CFO or global head of real estate as it is around changing the way that they would procure flexible space – bearing in mind this was pre-Covid."
As such, Dawson describes his role as helping Instant be more strategic. "The conversation needed to be much more of a business conversation as opposed to a transactional conversation. And so I was asked to go in and help enable Instant have more strategic conversations with those larger clients."
It was here that Dawson really became aware of JLL, not least because Instant was home to senior recruits from JLL such as John Duckworth, who joined as managing director in 2016.
"With a managed opportunity and a managed service opportunity, then you are still going to use agents along the way and so Instant was building relationships with agents including JLL. The role involved working with their clients to still have flexible space, I think one of the good examples of that was Amazon in Haifa in Israel. They were building the main HQ but that was going to be in a couple of years or so and they needed a stand up to occupy in six weeks, but it had to be of Amazon quality. That agreement was born out of good relationships with JLL."
Covid adversity
And then Covid came and dramatically changed attitudes to workspace.
"Covid was obviously strange times, but from a workspace point of view I had spent the best part of six-and-a-half years speaking to senior executives about, what are they doing with their flexible real estate? And a vast majority of the time, that was a pretty tough conversation to have, to be perfectly honest. The focus is on their traditional stock estate and the flexible side was very much pushed down. But it was Instant that was constantly trying to research and prove how viable and valuable having a percentage of your real estate flexible could be. Still, you're sort of selling the dream with some of those conversations."
Dawson says the entire flexible workspace market was initially hit with a major downturn when lockdowns began and that in itself forged important relationships. "IWG and WeWork were enormous suppliers to Instant. When Covid came along there was a forced need for a complete reorganisation of space, that question of where are you going to work from? For a while there was no one going in and serviced offices just plummeted. It was tough."
Very quickly, though, the market began to recover, in part, Dawson says, thanks to large government contracts.
"There were a lot of serviced offices; a lot of occupiers were coming direct because they realised that they needed alternatives. And that was maybe more local serviced offices, multipurposing sports stadia or other space that could be turned into workspace so people didn't necessarily have to travel to work. It sort of put flexible working on the map."
IWG's 2022 acquisition of Instant was, Dawson suggests, forged in the shared experiences of the pandemic. He says: "I'm guessing that relationship goes back to that time where there is adversity and you both come through it. There's a bond there."
Dawson had an equity stake in Instant and after the merger took some time out to reflect on what was next for him in business.
"It's a little like when you retire from professional sport. You take time to think what do you want to get into next?" The period saw him set up his own consultancy and work for other firms such as FedEx.
"I set up a consultancy so other companies could benefit from the proven track record of helping introducing companies to prospects and potential clients. And then I felt within my working life, that there was an opportunity to be a little bit more day-to-day laser-focused, rather than juggling lots of different balls. And that's when the initial conversations came around with JLL."
Dawson describes this as natural, having been working in the real estate industry.
"You get to know a few people in the industry and then I started having some conversations with Sue Asprey Price."
Asprey Price herself is a former rugby union international, coming fourth with Canada in 1998's Rugby World Cup.
"We generally spoke about what I've done previously, where the strengths of JLL are and where it sees opportunity. But fundamentally, the common theme was JLL pride themselves on their collaboration with their clients and understanding their clients and bringing a real strength and depth in the relationships that that they have built over the years with their clients. They have amazing clients and I've actually now met quite a few of them last week at a peer-to-peer function. I started to talk to Sue about what I've done previously with Sodexo and Instant. The point was to understand business strategy in conversations with the key decision makers and from here enable them to understand where JLL can help them, and that can be away from the obvious transaction or the lease advisory or the FM work. The question is what else can we help with to bring value?"
Dawson says he is able to have those conversations and then introduce clients to parts of the JLL team that maybe they haven't met before.
"I'll lay good money that most Boards will have a very similar list of priorities. Month to month, they know they need to understand these priorities to help grow their business over a period of time." Dawson describes these areas as: "Sustainability, cost optimisation, the workforce plan, AI and the general tech play. They are all business critical and JLL can help with them all."
So what lessons can he bring from his time as an elite sportsman and being part of a high-achieving team?
"Lessons from sport can be transferred. It's a bit like those games that are tough – that you just win or just lose and that you bounce back from. There's always something a bit more satisfactory about those."
Lessons from rugby
Questioned about his famously decisive moment ahead of Jonny Wilkinson's drop goal to beat Australia in the 2003 World Cup final, Dawson downplays his efforts while lauding the supremely well-coached team and the strength of the individuals around him.
"I wouldn't call the moment the ball was tossed back to Wilko as something out of adversity. That was predictable. I think that's why we were so dangerous is that it could have come from anywhere. And the opposition always knew that. They didn't necessarily know how to deal with, you know, Martin Johnson or Lawrence Dallaglio smashing it around the fringes, so they've got to be physical.
"Or is it me trying to be cheeky and nick through a gap? They couldn't mark all options and it was just I suppose down to us to make sure that we picked the right one in order to get a little bit closer. But I mean Jonny, he can put it over from anywhere really, and you know the closer we can get to the posts the more the probability he will gets higher – getting towards 100%."
Dawson says as a young player in sports he, of course, made loads of mistakes. "That does teach you good lessons about how to be as a person for your professional career–- the basics of being a good human. And they are lessons about honesty and integrity and taking on criticism as well as praise to embrace that to be a better person. I look at the JLL company values and it chimes with me – teamwork, ethics and excellence. The ethics in particular. It's about energy and vibrance in a collaborative way. I’ve never been so excited to be up at 5:30am for work as the last few weeks."
Dawson will be jetting out to Australia in a few weeks time to catch some of the British Lions tour, and he is cautiously confident.
"The Lions will win, I think, but I am glad I did not go out at the start saying they will win all three games. There is always the chance of injuries as it is a long tour and the Aussies will be well up for it. But the Lions against the Pumas in the first game already looked very dangerous in attack and the scrum went very well. So that is promising."