Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)
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skills at creating shareholder value, and the sense of personal challenge was overwhelming. "Most people thought Mills would go bankrupt, then everyone knew Sunrise was going to fail," he said. "Now every- one says retail and malls are dead. They're not dying — they just need to reinvent themselves." Six months after taking the Wash- ington Prime reins, Ordan acquired Glimcher Realty Trust — which owns two dozen enclosed regional malls, open-air centers and fashion outlets — for $4.3 billion. Given the merg- er's 119 properties and roughly 68 million square feet of leasable space, the deal set industry-insider tongues to wagging for both its potential and the speed at which it was completed. Perhaps Ordan's mastery of re- creation should be no surprise. With a half-dozen career experiences under his belt to date, Ordan looks like the epitome of re-creation. He began his retail career in the trenches, as a stock boy at Harvey Electronics, in New York City. And in keeping with a time- honored tradition of generations of ambitious, overeager, adventure-spir- ited boys, Ordan laid the foundations of that career through a bit of inno- cent prevarication: "I was 14, but I lied and told them I was 16," he recalled. Ordan loved working in retail but was not content to climb his way up the management ladder the normal way. So at age 20, armed with a bach- elor's degree in philosophy from Vassar College and a healthy dose of plain-old chutzpah, Ordan per- suaded the owners of Harvey Elec- tronics to hire him as director of op- erations. "I knew the business pretty well at that point," Ordan said. "I said, I'd be better at the job than any- one else, but they'd only have to pay me what they'd pay anyone out of college, which was pretty much noth- ing. But if after six months, they felt I'd done a good job, they'd pay me what an industry veteran was mak- ing." Management consented, with the agreement that Ordan could be fired at any time. In the end, they promoted him instead. "I worked all the time," Ordan recalled. "Years later a salesman told me that if you love something, you'll make money at it. And I loved retail. I poured my- self into the job." Ordan left that business to pursue an MBA at Harvard Business School. While there he received a recruit- ment letter from Goldman Sachs. He nearly threw the letter away. "I didn't know who Goldman Sachs was," he said. "I went to the career center and asked: 'What does Goldman Sachs do?' They thought I was such an idiot." Goldman Sachs hired him as a sum- mer associate, and after graduating he worked at the firm for five years. H e s t i l l h a d t h a t r e t a i l b u g , though, so he left Goldman Sachs in 1990 to launch his own business. Goldman Sachs thought well enough of Ordan to give him an office from which to work, and later the firm be- came one of the largest investors in his first venture: Fresh Fields, a string of 25 high-end natural-foods stores that got sold to Whole Foods for $150 million in 1996. Colleagues hail Ordan for his pre- scient vision, but he claims his real gift is observation. "I went up to New- ton [Mass.] one day [to Bread & Cir- cus, an upscale supermarket chain] and saw that the store was packed in the middle of the day," he said. He says he thought that was curious. "I went around to other supermarkets, and they were all empty." He realized he was witnessing the beginning of a market trend and was convinced he could take that high-end, specialized food concept and run it better. "Other companies were devoted to food principles but weren't running the company like a business," he said. "Fresh Fields applied supermarket principles to the natural-foods mar- ket." The chain came to be among the fastest-growing supermarket compa- nies ever. After the chain was sold to Whole Foods, Ordan dipped his feet in a few other ventures — starting and later selling a health care brokerage firm and an organic-foods chain. In the mid-2000s the Mills board came calling; the company was buried under debt and faced an SEC investi- gation over an accounting issue. The board members turned to Ordan. "They knew I had a background in re- tail and wanted someone who under- stood the governance of turnaround and retail." He agreed to help. "I knew they had great assets and great people," he said. "Their problems had to do with their balance sheets." Ev- eryone, including investors and pres- ent and future tenants, believed that Mills was going under. "I had to make sure people weren't giving up," Or- dan said. "I had to convince the ten- ants and the bankers we weren't going under." Ordan succeeded, prompting a bidding war between Toronto-based Brookfield Asset Management and Simon, with Farallon Capital, for the properties, which Simon acquired. Ordan says coolheadedness and 54 S C T / F e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5 Six months after taking the reins at Washington Prime, Ordan acquired Glimcher Realty Trust, which owns two dozen regional malls, for $4.3 billion.