Some of the reasons were predictable, starting with “a location where people wanted to be,” says Schertzer, but it went deeper than that. The city had to be a vibrant market, one with a diverse talent pool that Blackstone could tap. This included proximity to good schools, a criterion where Miami scored well with Florida International University, the University of Miami, Miami-Dade College, and nearby Nova Southeastern, not to mention the University of Florida and Florida State University further upstate. “We thought there was an opportunity for us here to recruit out of all these great schools,” says Schertzer.
The presence of huge tech firms in nearby Broward County, like software giant Citrix with 4,600 employees, or KEMET, the electronic components corporation with 3,700 employees mitigated Miami’s lack of present tech talent.
Then there was the closeness to New York, being just a two-and-a-half hour flight away, and in the same time zone – avoiding difficulties inherent in operating a second HQ in some place like California. “People can make it in a day without being disruptive or having to worry about things like being on the West Coast where there is a time difference,” says Schertzer. “When you get into collaboration, it becomes difficult. And we wanted to have real fluidity between these two offices.”
Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
“So now we’re looking for a new office and, if you remember, everybody in the entire world was going to go into quarantine for two weeks. And everybody was going to go remote,” Schertzer says. As CTO of Enterprise Technology at Blackstone, Schertzer had a lot of weight on his shoulders. Overnight, his team had to prepare the entire firm to go fully remote.
“If you think about what my team does, it’s all the stuff on the infrastructure side of the house, things that affect productivity and networking. So, how people will work remotely and how they will collaborate and how they’re going to work from home – that was on my team, working closely with Human Resources, and we had to really strategize in a short period of time to mobilize the firm.” At the same time, Schertzer made the personal jump to Miami. He had purchased a condo in the Edgewater area of the city in 2014, a weekend getaway from New York for family and friends. “Two days before the world was going into quarantine, I said to my wife – we had just been married three months – I said that if we are going to get stuck inside our tiny little apartment in New York, let’s go down to Miami. If we’re gonna get stuck, let’s get stuck there.”
The quarantine was supposed to last for two weeks, but of course, it went on much longer – “and that two-week round-trip ticket turned into ‘I’m never going back,’ which was not the intention when I got on that plane,” says Schertzer. Working from Miami, Schertzer successfully completed the task of migrating Blackstone’s workforce to a remote configuration and was then tasked to lead the effort to establish the new office in Miami. By the fall, he and Fletcher had set up operations in a shared workspace. Today there are 250 employees working out of 2 MiamiCentral, primarily made up of Blackstone’s Technology and Innovations and Finance groups, with plans to continue hiring across both teams.
