Brittany Bragg, 31, COO, Crown Acquisitions
Growing up in a family manufacturing business in Fort Lauderdale, Brittany learned from her grandfather some principles that have always stayed with her. She used to go to work with him and her father and heard him say many times that whether it was a good or bad deal, they owned their building so they could control their own destiny.
One day, he asked what color he should repaint it, and she couldn't decide between light blue and dark blue. He painted it both, and afterward explained that while you won’t always make the right decision, you need to make one and stick with it, and those colors it remained for many years.
Brittany went to Emory to play soccer because it was "better than moving to the Northeast for a Florida girl."
She’d always loved problem solving and took a job at Bain & Co in Atlanta doing strategy consulting. Her first client, at age 21, was an international retailer in the midst of a massive turnaround. To her amazement, even though the company had tens of thousands of locations, real estate was at the bottom of its priorities. Yet she found it fascinating.
That, combined with the fact that she hated making slides for a living, led her to take a job with Acadia in White Plains. That got her into acquisitions and dispositions, and it's where she met the Chera family behind Crown Acquisitions.
A couple years later, she headed to Stanford for an MBA, working with Vornado during the summer. Over drinks at the Four Seasons on 57th, asking Haim Chera for career advice, he teased her, “It might be okay for us to have a girl in the family.” Friends told her she would be insane to join a family business, that she'd never break through, but she remained impressed with them. Everyone's a great partner when things are going well, but she saw them tested in a bad economy and says they not only were in a class of their own in terms of execution but always chose to do the right thing.
Prior to business school, she went backpacking from Beijing to Bangkok for two months, up in the mountains for weeks at a time with no Internet and the economy collapsing back in the States.
She says she started out with the Cheras not having a clue what she'd be doing, but they reassured her she'd figure it out; she pitched in on everything and learned how they viewed the business.
The first deal she worked on for Crown was the acquisition of the retail condo at the St. Regis from Starwood for $117M, which sold last year for $380M to Richemont. She's been working on everything from modeling to structuring to raising debt and equity. She loves the variety of her job, from negotiating leases to arranging tax structures, working on deals from concept to closing, and above all working with people.
Normally, this time of the year, she'd be skiing Tahoe or Whistler, but she broke her pelvis giving birth to her son nine months ago. It's just a temporary setback, and she looks forward to hiking again in the Hudson Valley or taking 10-mile walks in the city with her husband. Meantime, she loves to read (currently re-reading a favorite O. Henry collection, an early print edition that was a gift from her sister) and spend time with her family, including meeting up with her "three little sisters" in their home cities of DC, Miami, and Philly.
