Question: Tell us about your company.
Answer: I work For Rock Ventures, an umbrella entity formed to provide operational coordination, guidance, and integration of Dan Gilbert’s portfolio of companies, investments and real estate. People are often more familiar with Quicken Loans, which is one of the family companies.
Question: Describe what you do for your organization.
Answer: I am part of Rock Venture’s Detroit team. Basically, we try to fix downtown Detroit. We focus on anything from cool events downtown, to security, to improving downtown’s first floor retail. I have two main projects: holiday programming and place-making. Holiday programming entails working with fellow teammates and the wonderful people at the Downtown Detroit Partnership on creating a great sense of place downtown for the holidays. This includes holiday lighting all around downtown (my personal favorite) to organizing street performers to helping organize a broomball league in Campus Martius. My other project is public space place-making. Seven key downtown stakeholders are trying to activate some of Downtown’s struggling public spaces and I am on a team responsible to get community input for what people want to see (we have had several workshops) and then create a strategy for how will implement these improvements. We are going to start with short-term, lighter, quicker, cheaper improvements this spring!
Question: What makes working for your company unique?
Answer: I think what makes Rock Ventures (and its family of companies) so unique, is that it does everything it can to allow you to succeed. You have access to a computer with any software you may need, you can call ‘the guy’ to take care of any pesky technology issues, and there are snacks readily available if you get hungry. Basically, the company’s senior leadership is saying “We’ll take care of all the little stuff and you just focus on the task at hand”.
Question: Why do you enjoy working in downtown Detroit?
Answer: It’s great being downtown because all the action is down here. One day I heard Bob Dylan was in town, so I left my office real quick to buy a ticket at the Fox Theater and went right back to work. Another time I was working and decided I wanted to go to a Tigers game. I looked on www.stubhub.com, bought my friends and myself tickets and just walked to the stadium. One of these days I’ll get restless at work and decide to go ice skate for a half hour across the street at Campus Martius park and then get back to my desk. Where else in this region can you do these things?
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Contributed by Fellow Vadim Avshalumov