Family Reunion

Family Reunion

ENTREPRENEURS by Jean Gruss | Lee-Collier Editor

The running joke in the D'Jamoos family is that the three children moved to Naples to keep their dad from spending their inheritance.

Betsy, Andy and Jennifer D'Jamoos all led separate and successful lives before their father, Joe D'Jamoos, started calling on them a few years ago to help him grow his Naples-based development company. Each child brought special skills to the business that complemented Joe's entrepreneurial instincts.

Typically, children start in the family business from a young age and grow along with it. Joe D'Jamoos did it another way: He let his children go their own way after college, but he recruited them back after they gained experience in the workforce.

The D'Jamoos Group is currently developing or planning nearly 3 million square feet of offices, shops and homes in Southwest Florida. That's enough space to cover more than 50 football fields. The family keeps its business finances private.

Time to retire

A successful Boston entrepreneur, Joe D'Jamoos (a surname of Syrian origin pronounced dee-dzhay-muss) built and sold several businesses, including an industrial adhesives company and a building-materials supplier that eventually became one of the largest in New England.

The children had always been part of their father's businesses growing up but wanted to pursue their own careers. He didn't stand in their way. "One by one they left me," he says, chuckling. "I was left all alone."

As the real estate downturn hit the country in the mid-1980s, D'Jamoos sold the building-materials company and retired to Naples in 1989. Retirement was short-lived, and a bored D'Jamoos bought a Tampa firm that specialized in helping companies sell their wares in military post exchanges. "I never really retired," he says. "I just took a little time off."

At the time, D'Jamoos says Naples was still a sleepy town with few business opportunities. But in the mid-1990s he sensed change coming. He sold the Tampa military exchange business in 1995 and spent two years scouting deals in Naples.

With his background in the building-supply business, D'Jamoos always had an interest in real estate. His first opportunity came when he acquired a two-acre parcel near the Pelican Landing residential development in Naples. He built a 30,000-square-foot building with financing from First National Bank of Florida and successfully leased it.

At the time, D'Jamoos thought he would dabble in real estate to stay busy. "I was in my own world," D'Jamoos recalls. "I used the buildings as income."

By the late 1990s, the real estate market was starting to take off in Naples, and D'Jamoos began building more shopping centers and office buildings. Sometimes investors bought buildings before he finished them, such as one he developed at Pine Ridge Road and Collier Boulevard in Naples.

D'Jamoos' business got a big boost when giant homebuilder WCI Communities asked him to build two 30,000-square-foot office buildings in Bonita Springs. He later sold the buildings to German investors.

In 1998, D'Jamoos became a founding director on the board of Old Florida Bank, which gave him insights on the best ways to obtain financing. "That helped me understand how a bank works," D'Jamoos says.

As each project got bigger, the syndicate of banks that D'Jamoos had to turn to for financing grew also. The company now does business with a half-dozen banks, including Orion Bank, Fifth Third Bank, Key Bank and BB&T. Financing has never been difficult. "They know we're real players," D'Jamoos says. "We don't waste peoples' time."

By 2001, D'Jamoos was planning to build Vanderbilt Galleria, an upscale development on Vanderbilt Beach Road in Naples consisting of 15 buildings totaling 200,000 square feet. By then, D'Jamoos had 1 million square feet under development or planned. That's when he realized the business had become bigger than he ever expected. He needed to recruit his children.

Migrating south

While their father was busy "retiring" in Florida, the D'Jamoos children were building their own careers.

Betsy D'Jamoos, 45, became second in command at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources' Office of Management and Budget in Washington D.C. She helped oversee a $380 billion budget and 60,000 employees.

Andy D'Jamoos, 42, was the southeast regional manager for Zoll Medical, a manufacturer of defibrillators and cardiac resuscitation devices, and later became a vice president of sales and marketing for a professional human-resource organization in Atlanta.

Jennifer D'Jamoos, 36, was a senior account manager with a Boston company that relocated corporate executives around the world. Before that, she was a real estate paralegal specializing in title searches and contract closings.

Watching his children's accomplishments, Joe D'Jamoos knew each could bring valuable skills to the family business. So he started by recruiting Betsy, whose political appointment at the Department of Health and Human Services was coming to an end. She agreed to become the chief operating officer of the company.

At the time, D'Jamoos was working out of two construction trailers at the site of an office project on Vanderbilt Beach Road that would eventually become the company's headquarters. One of Betsy D'Jamoos' first tasks was decorating and perfuming the portable toilet located in front of the trailers.

"We weren't doing it for the money," she says, laughing. "The business grew on me, and I knew I could use what I had."

Joe D'Jamoos then urged son Andy D'Jamoos to join the company. With his background in sales and marketing, he could improve that part of the business. At the time, Andy D'Jamoos had a second child on the way, and it was time to settle down and cut back on travel, so he joined Betsy and Joe in 2002.

By then, the pressure was mounting on younger sister Jennifer D'Jamoos. With her background as a real estate paralegal, Joe figured she would be good at shepherding contracts through the countless legal hoops that developers have to jump through.

Betsy D'Jamoos persuaded her sister to move to Naples, telling her: "You'll be protecting your inheritance, it'll be fun, and I need you."

Line of command

The D'Jamoos children quickly brought their skills to bear on the company. Under Betsy D'Jamoos' leadership, for example, the company established a clear management structure. "When I first got here I heard employees ask Joe if they could go buy paper towels," she recalls.

She shifted the structure of the company from one centered on patriarch Joe D'Jamoos to one that was more team-based so incidents such as the paper-towel request wouldn't happen again. She also drew clear lines of command, so that employees knew exactly to whom they were supposed to report.

Betsy D'Jamoos made sure The D'Jamoos Group could accommodate the rapid growth the family planned by hiring more people and investing in technology for departments such as accounting. With the corporate structure in place, the company's development projects grew from 1 million square feet in 2001 to 3 million square feet today.

Now, the development side of the business is growing more rapidly than the construction arm. The family recently decided to focus on the development side of the business and will liquidate the construction arm. "It was a very tough family business decision," Betsy D'Jamoos says. D'Jamoos partner Terry Jerulle will start his own construction company later this year, she says. Some of the employees will move with Jerulle, and some will stay with D'Jamoos.

Meanwhile, the price of land has skyrocketed to the point that it has forced the company to include more residential and retail elements to their commercial projects. Such "mixed-use" projects that combine offices, shops and condos increase the density on a piece of land.

The success of the company is tied to land prices and identifying opportunities before others, says Joe D'Jamoos. "In real estate, you make money when you buy, not when you sell," he says. "That was tough for us in 2004 and 2005."

Now, as the market cools off, many investors have left the market and that will present new opportunities. The D'Jamooses say they're not tied to Naples or Fort Myers. "There are opportunities in Tampa that we've looked at," says Betsy D'Jamoos, declining to elaborate.

"We have the capacity to do it anywhere in the country," she adds. "It has to be the right deal."

Can you say no to Joe?

That's the first question Betsy D'Jamoos asks prospective employees during a job interview. Joe D'Jamoos is the founder and patriarch of The D'Jamoos Group, a Naples-based development company.

"That's a very important question," says Joe's daughter, Betsy D'Jamoos. "It's easy to say yes to a family member, but it's very difficult to say no."

Honesty among employees and family owners is a necessity for the success of a family-owned business, she says. Honesty creates a good system of checks and balances between family and non-family employees, she says. The D'Jamooses actively recruit employees who are open-minded and optimistic problem solvers.

Here are some other tips from D'Jamoos about how to run a successful family business:

•Establish a clear chain of command: The family should designate the person who makes important decisions so that there's no confusion among non-family employees.

•Create a vision and establish goals: The D'Jamoos family hired a public-relations consultant to help them do that with non-family employees. "That gives the employees and the family the framework to make decisions," says Betsy D'Jamoos.

•Communicate effectively: When the family fails to communicate decisions it makes about a certain project, it can leave non-family employees wondering what's going on. Families should take time to consult among themselves, so that there's no miscommunication with employees. Once the family has made a decision, everyone should stick with it.

•Develop a thick skin: It's easy to share emotions with the family members who work with you and that adds to the usual stress of the workplace. Watch carefully what you say and do.