Media Information

How it all started...

I was working on an assignment near Manhattan on September 11, 2001.

Travel plans to return to Toronto the next day were put on indefinite hold as a shocked America went into lockdown. The next day, I found myself sitting in a small Connecticut coffee shop surrounded by a number of commuters, who would not be returning to Manhattan for a while. Although offices were closed it was no holiday: a shocked population felt the need to congregate in public places and share their personal experiences of what happened the day before and wonder what the future would hold for them, for us and people everywhere. The theme was uniform: things would never be the same.

These street level discussions with a broad demographic, from the most senior executives to the guys running the mailrooms, would form the basis of a white paper I'd write detailing what I thought the predicted outcome of the attacks would have on usage patterns of real estate, especially in large around-the-clock cities like New York, London and Toronto. One of the central ideas proposed in the paper would be that larger organizations, especially those which needed to be in continuous operation, would move toward a decentralized facilities strategy. When I returned to Toronto, I circulated the white paper to a select group of real estate decision makers. These ideas had legs, it seems, and by year's end, the paper had made its own way to Canada's capital, where policy makers in the Federal Government were discussing some of those predictions and reviewing national real estate policies.

A conference was being organized for mid to senior level real estate policy makers for the Canadian federal government. I was contacted and asked if I would like to present the findings of the paper to the conference. I readily agreed. I knew this would be an opportunity, an exercise in seeing the extent to which my predictions may or may not become reality. The additional research I conducted throughout 2002, however, revealed a much more complicated process and, more importantly, identified the importance of integrating real estate policy into a coordinated corporate policy of business continuity planning. I delivered my findings, and soon realized that my work was attracting the notice of trade journals, internet news portals, as well as the national press.

Gill was founded as an advisory business initially focussed on connecting real estate policy to larger corporate initiatives for business continuity. The company's initial services were based on the premise that as institutional awareness of managing location-based risk increases, organizational decentralization would play a more prominent role. The real estate policy associated with decentralization was not just about bricks, mortar and available space. It addressed technology, management adjustment, labor pool comparisons, cost-benefit analysis of a new set of risk factors, as well as the financial resources required to undertake such a bold initiative.

In the time that has passed since the company was incorporated, our focus has evolved into a more robust concept we now call Workplace Continuity.