Varian on bigger stage leading family business

Real Estate Weekly, Sept 26, 2007 by Danielle Wolffe

The day a young Mark Varian first stepped off the road where he traveled as an actor with resident theatre companies and onto a construction site with his family's business, John Gallin and Son, (where he scored a gig as a timekeeper), he understood that his role had shifted.

Yet acting, like construction seems to coarse through Varian's blood. Thirty years later, from Varian's new vantage point as president of Gallin & Son, Varian still draws parallels between the summer stock stages of his past and the staging areas of construction sites in New York City.

"Oddly enough, there are a lot of similarities. Projects are finite. They begin and end and then you move on. When you first walk onto a job, the team, the players often don't know each other and they have to interact with each other and figure out a rhythm to work together so the show can go on," Varian said. "And as the show goes on, of course, we know that anything can happen on a construction site."

The culture of his family's business allowed him to work alongside other players throughout most of his career. Rather than trying to upstage each other, Varian joined half-brothers and cousins and uncles and performed a plethora of roles in the business. From timekeeping he went on to work as a laborer doing everything from "sweeping floors to tearing down ceilings to poring concrete."

Though while growing up Varian admittedly never heard much about the 120-year-old family interior build-out construction bsuiness, once he started working with the rest of the Gallin clan he felt right at home.

"I like working in this company because there is a kindship not only in the fact that it is my families company, but because I appreciate the culture of a family business. The company is a family of families. It is something that kind of grows on you. At the end of the day the purpose of us being here making a living for ourselves as well as for the 50 other families that are relying on us for their lifestyle goes hand in hand," he said.

All the family roles shifted as the culture of the industry shifted. When Varian first stepped on the scene in the early 1980s, construction was booming and there was more high-end work for companies like Conde Nast. Later that decade things started to slow down and they had to change their techniques.

"Around 1987, that was when the balloon popped. The economy took a turn for the worse and many of our old valued clients took the opportunity to leave their businesses. We had to go out and sell, to bring the Gallin story to those who were not familiar with it, to develop new relationships and new clients. We never thought that would happen," Varian said.

The expertise the firm had developed in the field allowed them to weather that storm while many other operations shut down. Their skills have enabled them to thrive during the current construction frenzy as well. "The biggest change in the company over the past five to ten years has been that instead of just being one performer on the project we are now stage managers, we are called in before the drawings are done. We bring our knowledge to the process and in that way we save clients time and money. In this way we are a valuable asset to our client," he said. One project that put this skill to the test was the build out of Columbia University's school of journalism in 2006, in just nine months.

"On that project the clients said to us okay, we are not sure we are going to have the funding, we don't have any drawings, people are currently occupying some of the floors and we think maybe we want to fit the third and fourth floors but we are not quite sure yet and we need it done by August. Do you think you can do it," Varian said. "And of course we said, sure."

The project was completed in record time, though Varian admits that back then they were uncertain whether it would work. Now they are a lot more confident managing risks. "We know now okay, so all of the drawings arent done but the floor is going to need to be leveled so we can do that first. And maybe we know we can do the air conditioning systems or put in the steel. We are able to take the bull by the horns and really work for our clients," he said.

Another project Varian is particularly proud of is the building of a massive bank vault inside a subcellar of one of the banks in the World Trade Center that would be "able to withstand the collapse of the World Trade Center." Varian remembers marveling at the engineering of the project--the several layers of lathe mesh that had to be set so that anyone who tried to drill through the concrete couldn't reach the safe, the light and vibration and sound sensors that had to be programmed into the vault. Shortly after 9/11 Gallin and Son were alerted to the fact that the safe did indeed withstand the collapse.

"That was one of the more memorable projects I did. I was impressed with our work while the vault was being created, and of course, even more impressed after the collapse when we learned that the vault did what it was supposed to do," he said.