"It was the hardest business day of my life," Cawley tells GlobeSt.com of the action taken Wednesday. "It was a right-sizing for the economy more than anything else." Still, it didn't come without lots of decision wrestling, he says. The development group's upper-level hierarchy is not changing, but the rapid-growth pace of 30% to 40% for the last decade is over.
In the past decade, the development company has been responsible for building more than three million sf of premier office product in Dallas-Fort Worth and the West Coast. Cawley-Wilcox will be doing less building, as is everyone. Cawley says he doesn't expect that to change for a couple years. A one-time hoped-for rebound kept the job-cutting decision from occurring earlier in the downturn. The economic facts are such that the time had come to make the decision. "It was just a prudent business move," he lamented.
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