Michael Jacoby has always had a penchant for winners. But winning, to him, has very little to do with who actually comes out victorious in a game, and everything to do with how the game is played. “Losers in the conventional sense could be winners in my eyes,” he explains. “Taking risks sometimes means failing, and to me, that’s not a bad thing. To me, winning is all about being positive.” With this philosophy, Michael tends to gravitate toward people much like himself—people with an insatiable drive, a fighting spirit, and a winning attitude.
Having also cultivated the belief that people are able to achieve much greater things together than they can on their own, Michael has always been drawn to the idea of finding common ground with others. Even as a young boy growing up in the inner city of Philadelphia in a row house, cohesion and team-orientation were hallmarks of his approach to life. “There were 75 kids on my block, and at any given time, I could walk outside and there would be ten kids to play with,” he reminisces. “It was fantastic. And I came to feel that, when people come together to build something bigger than themselves, one and one can combine to equal four.”
Michael’s teambuilding skills were further honed by team sports and summer camp. To all who knew him, he was a carefree kid doing what kids do best, but beneath it all, he was laying invaluable groundwork for success later in life. Michael is now the co-founder and CEO of Broad Street Ventures, LLC, a commercial real estate firm in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area that buys and develops commercial assets, as well as its fully-owned subsidiary, Broad Street Realty, LLC, a firm specializing in property management and commercial brokerage. And it’s his ability to unite people in win-win situations, forming genuine bonds and teambuilding to achieve results, that has brought his entrepreneurial ventures to success.
Broad Street Ventures, LLC was founded by Michael in 2002 with his partner, Thomas Yockey, and has since distinguished itself as a D.C. metropolitan area market leader in the purchase and development of commercial assets, including shopping centers, office buildings, warehouses, and condominiums. Six years later, in 2008, Michael started a brokerage firm, Broad Street Realty, LLC. This subsidiary represents businesses, helping them find their space or solve a real estate dilemma.
“Managing equity is part and parcel of what we do. Commercial real estate is competitive, and we try to pursue vertical growth by finding niches,” Michael states. “Our physical footprint is now growing beyond the D.C. area as we take on the management of assets from Philadelphia to Richmond, and we just opened an office in Denver, Colorado. We’ve had real success with value-oriented necessity retail, or shopping centers in densely populated areas, and have bought nine shopping centers in the past two years.” What started as a group of four people has now turned into a team of over 50 employees—a true testament to Michael’s determination to build a successful business amidst the worst economic climate this country has seen since the Great Depression.
Professionally and personally, Michael loves to help people, and that instinct remains at the heart of the company’s mission today. Indeed, the cornerstone of Broad Street Ventures’s mission is helping people achieve the results they want. “Universities often get donations in real estate, and there was a case where a university got a farm but had no use for it,” says Michael. “So we explained their options and helped them make the best decision possible.”
Michael’s father, a high school football coach and summer camp director, taught him that leading the team to a win equals a win for everyone on the team, and this kind of positive and cooperative mentality has served as a catalyst for his own prosperous career. His favorite memories as a kid all included being part of something wonderful and successful, whether that was a sports team or a classroom. Raised in inner city Philadelphia, Michael didn’t want for much and was most content playing sports with his buddies. “I practically grew up in the locker room,” he explains. “And I spent every summer at my Dad’s summer camp in the mountains of Pennsylvania, which was like an extended locker room.”
Both his mother and father were academics with multiple advanced degrees, earning respectable livings in the field of education. His mother was an inner city school principal and moonlit as a college professor, while his father was a college professor, educational administrator, high-school football coach, and summer camp director. He was also the leader of several Jewish organizations, and eventually became the deputy superintendent of the Philadelphia school district. Michael inherited his father’s commanding presence and his mother’s tendency to speak her mind. “I’ve had to tone down my outspokenness a bit in business in order to be more diplomatic,” he laughs.
Michael played several sports during his adolescent years, his favorite being football, where he played center. True to form, he was known as the person who called the huddle and as the commander of the line. Required to be efficient in this position is the desire to take responsibility and ownership, which came rather naturally to Michael, laying the groundwork for what was to come as an entrepreneur.
Michael also spent his younger years waiting tables, parking cars, and working construction. In his freshman year of high school, his football coach and mentor saw great potential in him but knew he needed some direction. His coach sat him down one day for a pep talk and spoke to him about dedication and commitment. “That was a notable turning point for me because I realized that I didn’t just want to be well-liked,” he remembers. “I also wanted to be a good man.” The change did not occur overnight, but little by little, Michael went from an average kid to being very serious about his commitment to excellence.
For college, Michael attended Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia and graduated with a degree in biology. He spent summers at the beach, where he made decent cash working in restaurants—enough to secure payment of his fraternity dues and car fees for the upcoming school year. Upon graduating, he received a half dozen job offers and ended up taking one at a hotel in Washington, D.C. He started as a trainee and then became the nighttime controller, where he was responsible for accounting in the business operations. Michael wasn’t too fond of the graveyard shift from 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM, but he succeeded in negotiating a 35 percent pay raise. After four months, Michael went to the General Manager and bluntly asked what his career trajectory might be. The GM replied that it took him 10 to 15 years to get where he was, so Michael quit the next day knowing he did not want to follow that track.
Just barely 22 years old, he landed his next job at Merrill Lynch Realty in residential sales and enrolled in night school to obtain his real estate license. Through networking and hustling, he quickly became Rookie of the Year at Merrill Lynch. Not long after that, he met the woman who would become his first wife, and her father was in commercial real estate leasing. “He hired me and handed me a phone, phone book, pen, and piece of paper, and said to make it so,” Michael recalls of his future father-in-law. Michael was heavily self-taught in sales tactics by that time, having read everything on the subject he could get his hands on. He connected with top internet technology people via networking, and his efforts won him a blue-chip client. “This client had an internet company and taught me about entrepreneurship at it’s grittiest level—how to bootstrap a company, how to make a big pitch at a high level, and how to sharpen my pencil on financial models. He’s one of my best friends today,” Michael says.
Michael’s blue-chip customer was the catalyst for jumpstarting his first development company, which he sold in 2001, and Broad Street Ventures came about the following year. He and his partner launched Broad Street with a no-travel policy so that he would get to see his kids, who were 5, 7, and 9 at the time. Michael is now married to a beautiful woman named Nathalie, who has two children, making a family of seven altogether. “She’s the yin to my yang,” he avows. “I operate at a very high energetic level, running at full-speed from 5:00 AM onwards and often having to force myself to slow down. My wife is the perfect opposite of me—calm, quiet, relaxed, peaceful. We balance each other beautifully, and being a father to our children has really made me want to be better in life so I can take better care of them.”
Just as much a family man as he is an entrepreneur, Michael is of German ancestry and stays grounded in his roots. His great-grandfather was executed in the Holocaust and left behind a gold pocket-watch with his initials on it—an heirloom that continues to guide Michael’s efforts today. “What it means to me, is that I should never stand for allowing anybody to feel the way my family felt back then,” Michael describes. “I don’t judge any book by its cover. I give everyone a chance. The watch is a reminder of where I came from, and of my duty to never stand for injustice.”
In leadership, Michael surrounds himself with people who share a common strain of honesty and true dedication to their work. “I’m very focused on making sure I have the right people on the bus,” he points out. Above all, he honors respect and communication and emphasizes these things as critical in developing a strong team at work. “Sure, I want to be profitable, but the focus of my day is on making the people I’m working with feel successful and reach their potential,” Michael says. “If a team member is having a family issue and we’re in the middle of a big project, I tell them to go take care of their family. The project and customer can wait, and if the customer can’t wait for something like that, maybe we’re not the right fit for them.” This inclination to put his people first stems from those earliest days playing with neighborhood friends and on sports team, and is part of what makes him the extraordinary leader he is today.
Michael’s altruistic stewardship of others’ needs extends beyond the scope of his business and into the charitable endeavors he prioritizes. “I believe in being an involved member of society, and that human beings have a duty to participate and be aware of the world they’re living in,” he affirms. With this in mind, he served as the Chair of Fundraising for the first annual 5K run for Columbia Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired (CLB), a D.C.-based organization. Visual impairment is a major problem for war veterans, and Michael proudly supports the local CLB in their efforts to not only raise money, but to find employment for veterans as well.
In advising young people entering the working world today, Michael highlights the significance of bringing passion into whatever they do. “If you don’t care, no one else will,” he counsels. “And don’t be afraid to break the rules. To develop a unique and effective leadership style, one must make their own rules, to a certain degree.”
If Michael’s success is built on the foundation of teambuilding skills he laid as a child, each brick of his success is a different relationship he’s fostered, and the mortar between those bricks is communication—not the impersonal communication of the social media age, but the old-school methodology of simply picking up the phone. “It’s hard to build deep, meaningful relationships with human beings via tweet, text, and email. Those are great tools, but an email has no emotion,” he conveys. “Pick up the phone, go for coffee, or go to lunch with someone. Face-to-face communication is undervalued and underestimated in this day and age of technology, but it’s a tried-and-true method for genuine connection, for which there is no replacement.”
Michael’s relationships and life philosophy are also fortified by the concepts as simple as the Golden Rule, which he’s reminded of each day by his great-grandfather’s watch. “It’s important to me to treat each person the way I’d want to be treated,” he remarks, proving that a simple and principled way of being brings much happiness and success. “I’m also a firm believer in the idea that life is a marathon and not a sprint, and I consider it an ongoing learning experience to discern when to slow down and when to pick up the pace.” As a competitive triathlete who has completed several half Ironman triathlons, he lives this idea both figuratively and literally. “It’s as true now as it always has been,” he affirms. “You’re only as good as the guy next to you, and it’s as much about the process and performance as it is about the end result. So if you can make that other person better, you’re all the better for it, and if you play the game with integrity and heart, it’s a win no matter what.”
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