YOUNG MAN AT THE HELM
Neal Carlson Co, the young man behind Parkmall, is a mechanical engineer by profession. The youngest of Carlos Co’s four children, he was asked to work with the family project during its construction because of his engineering background. When the mall opened in 2008, he was the natural choice for managing it as he was the one who knew where everything was.
It has been four years since the management of Parkmall came into his lap. Those years, Neal describes as “a slow process, a learning process for me when I started. I literally grew up here, learned more about myself here, I learned my limitations, I learned to interact with people.” And these days he deals with about 170 company employees and 250 clients with businesses within the mall and its grounds. And for these clients, he says, his role “is to make sure the clients earn. It is a daily reminder to us to do that role for them.”
Reading, he reveals, has helped him in his process of becoming a mall manager. He loves to read books on marketing, on retail marketing and management. And his engineering background comes into play when it comes to statistics, to return of investment, to surveys “based on engineering principles of something predictable.”
These days, Neal finds that he enjoys “managing the mall a lot— from managing people to meeting clients, proposing certain ideas to the board which is my family.” He has with him a group of talented people, helping him to manage the mall and to come up with new ideas and concepts for the mall, like making the mall pet-friendly. It is a mall where it is okay for you to bring your pet with you, an idea that arose because people could be seen having their pets with them walking in the mall grounds.
Neal remarks that malling is a relatively new concept for the Co family whose family business has been Cebu Overseas Hardware and Cebu Home Builders which are into retail. He himself also has a retail store in the mall, Kidsville, which is all about toys and stuff for kids. The difficulty during the first years of Parkmall, he says, was how to bring people into the shopping center. Now that it has a steady customer base, he, with his management team, is strengthening the park concept of the mall. There are more trees inside, some areas have grass carpeting. The strategically located park benches are augmented by rocking chairs to better relax the customers who may feel tired and weary after exploring the outlets within and outside the main mall premises. There are various weekend activities appropriate for the season and a harpist plays within the mall in the late afternoons.
This year has been auspicious for Neal Carlson Co. It’s not just that he has successfully managed Parkmall in the last four years—this year he turned 30, and he got married to the former Sharisse Suzette Chua. It would seem from the sparkle in his eyes that a new phase in his life has just begun.