Steve Samuels

I'm Ren Saiz, and this is Design Development.

Today, I'm joined by Leslie Cohen, founder of OpsAlchemy, and former COO of two prominent developers, Samuels & Associates and the Davis Companies.

Leslie now works with real estate founders as a fractional COO, helping them build the operational structure to support their next stage of growth.

In this conversation, we explore how to recognize when a company has outgrown its operations, clarify who owns decisions, and build processes that make execution more consistent.

And so I think it grows organically starting from kind of the founders and the partners and what their skill set bring to the table.

and then identifying, and I've seen more and more companies, you see a number of more COOs within real estate companies, you know, kind of the entrepreneurial real estate developers, more now than you've seen, you know, in the last decade.

I think when I became COO at Samuels in 2015, we were one of the few development companies at the time that had a COO.

Again, I think those responsibilities were usually distributed across a partnership.

And, uh, and, and Charlie and, uh, some unsung heroes also.

A great friend, the guy that really brought me into that West Coast way of thinking was a guy named Steve Samuels.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's not spoken about that much, but go, go...

When we're done, go research his records and some clips of Steve Samuels.

He was the guy that really sort of hipped me into Watson and Little Charlie and Fats.

Fats I'd been a little bit aware of.