Leisa:  Hello, I’m Leisa Holland Nelson and welcome to another edition of Women Mean Business, where we’re going to take you up close and personal with extraordinary women doing extraordinary things.  My guest today is Erica Henning, the Vice President for Portfolio Management at Lionstone Investments.  Erica, welcome to Women Mean Business.

Erica:  Thank you Leisa, I’m delighted to be here today.

Leisa:  I’m so glad that you are here and I want to hear all about what you do.

Erica:  Sure.  In essence I lead teams so that we can solve complex business problems together.  I’m also future-oriented and always fascinated and intrigued by what could be and I energize my teams around vision of the future and also make sure their voices are heard.  In essence I’d say I’m a strategic leader that has the ability to move projects forward and essentially get things done.

I lead also a number of nonprofit organizations and professional groups such as ULI – the Urban Land Institute – and CREW, or Commercial Real Estate Women, and also Girls, Inc., I’m on the board of that nonprofit here in Houston.  And essentially I just want to make a positive impact, both to my profession and my community.  For the past several years I’ve worked for Lionstone Investments and we’re a real estate private equity firm based here in Houston.  And my work has essentially been at the intersection of operations and real estate investment in order to drive value and generate profitability for our investors and our firm.

Leisa:  Give me an example of one of those challenges.

Erica:  So a great example would be a project we’re working on which is a large entitlement project and along the way our team had lost the vision.  And if you don’t have a clear vision it’s really hard to create value and execute a strategy, in particular your investment strategy.  And so what I did was refocus the team on a vision that we could execute and that was valuable and have been going forward along that path and essentially righted the ship.

Leisa:  Are your clients a secret or who is a typical client of Lionstone?

Erica:  So Lionstone invests on behalf of large institutional investors as well as high net worth individuals and with the funds that I’m involved with it is primarily high net worth individuals.

Leisa:  So you’ve got a broad range of individuals that you are working with, a broad range of team members you’re leading and you’re involved in the community.

Erica:  Yes.

Leisa:  Thank you very much for everything you’re doing.

Erica:  It’s my pleasure, it’s fun.

Leisa:  I’m glad that you’re here.  There you have it, another extraordinary woman doing extraordinary things.  I’m Leisa Holland Nelson, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Astoundz, your one search, one click, one company resource for all things interactive, especially optimized websites.  You can find me at Astoundz.com or follow me on Twitter @LHNelson.  We’ll be back again next week with another edition of Women Mean Business.