After decades working for Germany’s biggest retail developers, Striebich is striking out on his own.
Klaus Striebich began his retail career at the tender age of 4 — distributing catalogs and brochures for supermarkets and mail-order companies around Germany’s Black Forest region. He made the biggest leap of his career only last year, when, at 51, he established his own consultant firm: RaRE Advise (the acronym stands for Retail and Real Estate), based in Besigheim, near Stuttgart.
As a boy, Striebich worked in supermarkets. After graduating from DHBW Mosbach Baden-Württemberg having concentrated on economics and trade, he went to work for a hypermarket company. Several years afterward he was a leasing manager at Hamburg-based shopping center operator ECE Projektmanagement, later becoming a regional director and a managing director there. But after nearly 26 years with ECE, he began to sense that he wanted a change. “I missed a lot in private life,” he said. “[I wanted] a bit more time for myself [and my] family … and to open my mind to something new … to work with people in other companies and industries, and to learn.”
Striebich’s many volunteer roles with ICSC include being chairman of the German Council of Shopping Centers (2006–2008), and he also served on the European Advisory Board (now the European Leadership Committee). He was a founding member of the European Leasing Group, which he headed for six years, and he is a co-founder of RECon Europe. Moreover, he was chairman of the 2014 European Conference and is a lecturer for the ICSC Summer School.
“For me it was absolutely astonishing when I had my first visit to RECon,” he said. “I visited Las Vegas for my very first time, and to learn about this market, to learn about the people and the industry — it was amazing, I have to say.”
“I try to give back the expertise to people, with the hope that they are able to get something out of it — and they give back to me some new ideas as well”
ICSC was instrumental in helping him build his business network internationally, he says. “When I started my international activities, ICSC was the perfect platform to get in touch with the right people to create a new network very fast and easily.”
Striebich says his commitment to service stems from two premises: “The first is, if you want something, you have to give something; the second is that to have the service orientation, it is much easier to do it in a community or together as a team.”
Today he lectures on business in high schools, including summer-school sessions. “I try to give back the expertise to people, with the hope that they are able to get something out of it — and they give back to me some new ideas as well.”
Striebich’s primary message to present and future leaders alike is one and the same: “The best thing is being open-minded and having no borders in mind; this is one of the major things I have to spread into the real estate world: being open and ready for something new that could help our industry to succeed in the future.”
By Ben Johnson
Contributor, Commerce + Communities Today