259. Mark Gilbreath, CEO of Liquidspace a Platform That Enables Anyone to Work From Where It Works
Everything Coworking Featured Resources:
Masterclass: 3 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets to Opening a Coworking Space
Creative Coworking Partnerships: How to negotiate and structure management agreements from the landlord and operator perspective
Resources Mentioned in this Podcast:
TRANSCRIPTION
259. Mark Gilbreath, CEO of Liquidspace a Platform That Enables Anyone to Work From Where It Works
00:00:03 Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast, where every week I keep you updated on the latest trends and how tos in Coworking. I owned and operated coworking spaces for eight years, and then served as the executive director of the global workspace association for five years. And today I work with hundreds of operators and community managers every month, allowing me to bring you thought provoking operator,
00:00:29 case studies and inspirational interviews with industry thought leaders to help you confidently stay on top of what's important and what you can apply to your own role in the Coworking industry. Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast. This is your host. Jamie Russo. My guest today is Mark Gilbreath. He is the CEO of LiquidSpace and he shares some super interesting insights around what the larger end users are thinking about how they're acting,
00:01:03 how they're shopping and how they're using platforms like LiquidSpace. And we actually got into a discussion about the term aggregator. Mark was very kind in bringing up his concern about using that term and LiquidSpace he referred to LiquidSpace as a hybrid workplace management platform. And you'll see, as we dive in why he uses that term and he walks through some of the behaviors of aggregators that may not be in the best interest of operators.
00:01:35 So for those of you thinking about how to broaden your sources of lead generation and wondering if the work that goes into listing on platforms like LiquidSpace is worth it, this is a super important conversation. I see, you know, posts and discussions on LinkedIn and Facebook groups, and some folks saying, you know, they don't want the effort of having to lift on platforms like LiquidSpace.
00:02:02 And I caution you depending on your business goals, it is more important than ever from a practical standpoint, to have access to all the leads in your marketplace that are good leads and relevant leads, not just the small business owners or the freelancers of the entrepreneurs. I think from a really practical standpoint, one of the things that we're seeing is that all of our members are using the space differently and new members are showing up knowing that they're not going to come to the space every day.
00:02:35 So you'll feel your offices and then your flex users are going to want more flexible, more flexibility than ever before. I keep mentioning this podcast with Sarah Travers at work bar, who said, you know, they love the 10 day a month user, and you'll have to listen to that episode over on the flex uncensored podcast. I won't get to go into more details here,
00:02:58 but also, you know, there are conversations in our Facebook group. I kind of butted in on one where someone was talking about putting in an extraordinary number of flex desks. And I was really pushing her to make sure that made sense for her market and for her business model goals. But you need more leads than ever before, because if you're selling fractional access,
00:03:25 those plans are lower priced. And so for a practical standpoint, you need more members in order to make the same amount of money that you might've made before the pandemic, or you need new leads that are augmenting the demand that you had before the pandemic. And where do those come from? Those might come from the individual users who are finding you on Google,
00:03:48 but there's also a huge opportunity across all types of markets today to get leads that are employees of a larger company, or even a mid-sized company who, where the company is introducing them to the option of using a coworking space and not just working at home. And they're enabling their employees to make those decisions through a platform like a LiquidSpace. And there are other platforms that enable similar behavior as well.
00:04:19 So you want to, you know, do some research and understand the model around each of the platforms that may bring you leads and how they work. And if they make sense for your business, test them and then, you know, put the commitment and the time commitment for your team and updating the listings and managing the leads into the ones that are working for you and Mark.
00:04:42 And I can jump into that in our conversation, as he said, you know, they used to focus on sort of the, the football cities, you know, bigger cities. And I used to kind of advise folks, Hey, if you're in a bigger market, you're probably going to have luck with LiquidSpace if you're in a smaller market and maybe not.
00:04:57 And that is really starting to shift. And he shared some examples in our conversation. So even in smaller markets start considering these platforms that are bringing leads to you that may not be searching on their own on Google and can augment, you know, the leads that you need in order to get to the membership base that makes your business profitable, or allows you to expand into a second location,
00:05:22 et cetera. So I think this is a super practical conversation in terms of helping you think about whether you want to list on platforms and also, you know, kind of a cool macro behind the scenes, into how the end users, the bigger end users are making workplace decisions and using platforms like LiquidSpace really quickly back to sort of the practical objection that people will put up in terms of using a platform.
00:05:49 Like LiquidSpace also look at how they operate as they sync with your own calendar. So we used LiquidSpace in Chicago, in Palo Alto for years and years, and got leads, meeting room leads, member long-term membership leads, the meeting room or requests that the calendar, the LiquidSpace calendar was synced to our Google calendar. It was very simple. And so there was no need to crosscheck or,
00:06:15 you know, worry that one was updated. One was not updated. Our inventory was essentially real time on LiquidSpace. It was very simple. They also have a new integration with office R and D. So if you're an Office RnD user, that's an easy setup as well. So if you have any questions about, you know, the platforms or listing,
00:06:35 you know, jump into our Facebook group, join our Everything Coworking academy membership, where we dive into these things in detail. Okay. Before we dive into my conversation with Mark, I do want to give a huge shout out and high-five to our recently certified community managers, Heather Morris, she is at Brix Coworking in Madison, Wisconsin scout Dawson is with venture X.
00:06:58 And I think she's in Houston. Oh, I should have checked that before. I announced it scout. Congratulations. And then Laura Pascal, I am sure I'm not going to say that pronounce this correctly. Maybe<inaudible> dot work in Spain, near Barcelona, check out the website. I just went on to make sure that it was in Spain and there's a lot of eye candy on their website.
00:07:25 So huge congrats to Heather Morris, Laura Pascal, and scout Dawson on doing their Community Manager certification. If you have a Community Manager and you want them to get certified, you can learn more at Everything. Coworking dot com forward slash Community Manager. And now let's jump into my conversation with Mark. So I reached out to Mark Gilbreath and said, mark, there's so much happening on the demand side right now that I would love to have you come on the podcast and give us the updates.
00:07:55 Mark is the CEO of LiquidSpace, which I'll let him put it in his words, but a platform that enables anyone to work from where it works. And I suspect this is, you know, a busier time than ever for LiquidSpace. So Mark and I were just catching up. Mark has a triple the lifetime coming up with his son biking across Italy.
00:08:17 So Mark, thanks for fitting this in before you take off and thanks for joining us. Hey, Jamie, it's great to be back. Hey, Everything Coworking peeps, then a little while. Nice to see y'all and yeah, exciting times personally and professionally. So Marcus sent you kind of a little list of questions, but yeah, I think we should just dive in.
00:08:38 I mean, I would love to have you talk more about, for anyone who doesn't know, who might be listening, but doesn't know what LiquidSpace is. And I will say as the future of work gets more uncertain, the interest in flex gets more certain and our listenership has grown. So there may be folks that haven't heard you on the podcast before,
00:08:57 and I'll link up to our previous episodes in the show notes, but I see, you know, smatterings of conversations and folks trying to figure out, you know, where platforms like LiquidSpace fit in. And I know there's so much happening behind the scenes. I was on a call with Eric and he talked about the Tri-Net example, which I think is a great one that,
00:09:16 you know, I'd love to dive in here today, but yeah. Tell us what is LiquidSpace who do you serve? You know, what's happening on the demand side that's making LiquidSpace more relevant than ever before? Yeah, well, because there are so many folks in the Everything Coworking audience that are amongst the audience are probably relatively newer to this industry that you and Jamie,
00:09:36 you and I have been so committed to for a big chunk of our careers, a little bit of brief history. I'm a guy that after first half of my career in technology decided to get into Coworking. In fact, I was literally running a coworking space in Boise, Idaho in 2008. And it was a tough time to own and operate real estate with global financial crisis.
00:09:57 But I actually was, I was one of you, I was one of us right at our operator in, through a fast and furious couple of years that ended somewhat sadly for that Coworking venture. I got real clarity on a technology opportunity and in 2011, LiquidSpace launched to the world at south by Southwest as the first example of a truly transactional digital marketplace to connect professionals to great spaces,
00:10:21 to work most specifically serviced offices and co-working spaces in 2011, there were, there were more people that more entities that self-identified as serviced offices and Coworking was still still a relatively young term then, but as the years have rolled on, of course, Coworking as, as a label and as a concept of a community driven, you know, flexible space. Now in thousands of locations around the world became really the center point of the flexible office market and the LiquidSpace digital marketplace that launched in 2011 as a mobile app and a website that you could use to search find your book space by the hour or by the day,
00:11:02 you'll laugh at the beginning, it was three locations in San Francisco, Specific workspaces, a next space and rocket space. And one of those no longer agree to those no longer exists, but it began in that humble context. And, and year by year, it grew and expanded on two fronts. It grew geographically to now it's standing as a digital marketplace through which you can discover and evaluate and transact spaces around the world.
00:11:31 It also grew in terms of the scope of the problems that we're trying to solve for. So, you know, at the outset it was, Hey, I'm, I'm a professional or I'm a, I need place for a meeting tomorrow for two hours, or I need a place to work myself next Thursday. That was, that was the use case along the way.
00:11:49 The use cases expanded to not just space by the hour of the day, but space by the month or longer Jamie needs. Jenny wants a membership. She wants to belong at a coworking space for months on end or, or it also might be a professional or a company that is looking for a place for its team to collaborate and call it home. So up through the pre pandemic period,
00:12:13 up through 2019, our marketplace sort of boldly expanded into being spaced by the hour, day, month or by the year and pre pandemic companies, not just individuals but companies and in particular midsize and larger enterprises have become the largest constituency using our platform that was pre pandemic. And then the world changed, you know, the world changed somebody sneezed and Wu Han and,
00:12:36 you know, two months later someone took a plane to Silicon valley and three weeks later, the shelter in place orders, you know, rippled across, you know, Jamie Burlingame in San Francisco in the, the U S as a whole. And of course we've all experienced two years of the world shifting and the perspectives around work and workplace shifting. And on the other side of that now as the,
00:12:57 the new patterns are emerging, that customer that had become one of the largest constituents for our business pre pandemic, the business has now become for us a singular focus like our product, which we can talk about today, if you like, and our go to market strategy as zeroed in on what we are now seeing, and the data is now validating this,
00:13:21 we're now seeing as the largest and fastest growing. And we think for your audience amongst the most lucrative and maybe the most loyal type of customer, which is the now millions of employees for companies of all sizes, who are embracing the idea of hybrid workplace of flexibility and choice in ways that they had never contemplated pre pandemic. So a bit of a long ramble there for you,
00:13:48 but I'll take a breath. Yeah, no, I think it's super helpful. And can you talk about kind of what is going on in that consumer's mind and how are they shopping? There was a little exchange on LinkedIn recently. Somebody said there's a lot of aggregators and too much, and I'm not going to do it. And you know, Jamie Lewis,
00:14:10 who's now at JLL, but wait, she has a new last name. I got that wrong. We'll let, we'll look it up. I know she's our dear Fred. I know. Totally I, yes. And I know I keep forgetting her last name, but anyway, she was at LiquidSpace for years. And she popped in and said, you know,
00:14:29 I'm sure LiquidSpace is seeing this. And JLL is seeing this, like the end user, the enterprise, or even, you know, medium business and users are looking for this solution. And there's a lot of reasons. They really like these platforms and that they're not going to go direct to the operator. So you want that consumer Lawson, Jamie Lawson.
00:14:50 I was looking for moment. So anyway, she said, you know, the, the end user is using those platforms. And so if you want access to them, that's how they're shopping. Can you talk more about that? Absolutely. I mean, look, the world changed like lots of companies, marketing, lots of solutions at various times in history,
00:15:10 sort of want to inject that sort of notion, Hey, the world changed now you need my new widget. Right? Well, the world did change in this pandemic. And in particular with the way work and workplace work fundamentally changed. Not a little bit. It's not like a little bit of a market opened up, but it fundamentally changed. Right?
00:15:29 And in the wake of that era, I think in my humble opinion, some of the key learnings or insights that any coworking operator needs to take on, they may not wish any. You need to understand this. You may not choose to act on it, but you need to understand that companies, employers, whether you're a a hundred person startup company in Burlingame,
00:15:50 California, or whether you're Stripe or a Spotify or a T and T or the U S government companies are challenging their workplace and real estate and HR organizations to be radically more agile. Hey, real estate leader, workplace leader, HR leader. This is the CEO speaking of, of fortune 500 company. You need to deliver workplace experience anywhere in the world,
00:16:18 right? In the past, we asked you to build campuses for us, but we now have, we've been hiring people everywhere for two years and they've been migrating. You got to go figure that out. Now you need to go be agile and be able to deliver great workplace, great collaboration, great culture opportunities to our employees, not in five or 10 more regions where we might put regional offices as was our pace pre pandemic.
00:16:43 But you got to go figure out how you might possibly do that in hundreds or thousands of locations. Thing, one thing too, you gotta do it 10 X faster. You gotta be more responsive old, rural before the world changed, you know, workplace and real estate leaders, you know, small companies and large would think about real estate decisions as a 12 to 36 month kind of process.
00:17:06 Sometimes even longer, you know, big companies would spend five years planning for headquarters. Now these same individuals at these companies are being told. You gotta be, you gotta be radically 10 X, if not a hundred X more responsive, next Tuesday requirement might pop up for an employee in Vilnius Lithuania, or in, in Bali or in bend Oregon. And we need you to resolve it in the moment.
00:17:29 In addition, these same figures are being told that they've got to be more personal. You gotta be more personalized in how you deliver workplace experiences. So, Hey, Hey, we want you to be responsive and personalized to every individual's preferences. And then lastly, as if that wasn't an impossible enough challenge, these same companies or the, at these same companies and the CEOs behind them are saying,
00:17:53 you gotta be radically more efficient. Like we, you know, we see that we have a massive economic opportunity to rationalize the traditional offices that we have accumulated that we've got too much of. And in anything that you do real estate or workplace or HR leader, we want you to also to reap some savings. So we want you to be everywhere. We want you to move faster.
00:18:15 We want you to be massively personalized, and we want you to do it with a smaller budget, none of the systems or the processes or the models that the real estate and HR and workplace leaders would have used to deliver workplace in the past can do any one of those things, you know, building a campus, leasing office space, building it out,
00:18:35 that that can't be the agile everywhere. That is a multi-year process, not a next week process, not personalized it's homogeneous and for the masses. And we know what the expenses of that look like. It's not like the pathway to having a more economically efficient workplace does not consist of continuing to lease office space, that they have no idea what the usage is going to be.
00:18:56 So all those things are true. Now, those are the new challenges and the exciting thing for your audiences. You know, we all, you know, we, you know, we have the flexible office world Coworking, the, the, the, the grand community. We all know that we can run at the rhythm of next week. We all know that a prospect can walk in the front door on a tour,
00:19:18 work that afternoon and sign a monthly membership that night. We delight in that Coming to a meeting for a meeting every Thursday. And that's fine, too. Absolutely. Yep. And we know that we, every one of us individual covering operations as part of a rich tapestry of diverse operators, you know, we United are an extraordinary ecosystem of places from the tiniest of towns,
00:19:42 Kalispell, Montana, to New York city and Shanghai. We, we know that this tapestry is diverse. It's geographically distributed. Oh my fucking God. It's, it's sounds like it's precisely the tapestry of places that need to be discoverable and available to in some efficient way, whatever that might be to this community of companies that have awoken and are being tasked with go faster,
00:20:08 go everywhere, do it more economically and deliver a great community experience. And they've never had the tools to do that. Right. That's never been how they operated or what they delivered. And so they don't have the tools and they need to access a way to deliver that. Indeed. And so, yeah. And you pose the question or you, you,
00:20:26 you referenced the, you know, the, you know, the, the rumblings are the open, open questions that are posed on various forums about like, well, these aggregators, you know what, like what's an aggregator and do I want to be on them? And my God, there's a lot of them calling me and there's a shit ton of work associated.
00:20:38 It seems like it's, you know, or more, not much juice comes out of that if I squeeze on that lemon, like, so should I, right. So I think there, I certainly have a position on some of those questions, but yeah, the world changed and we, the community of great places to work, have this incredible once in a lifetime opportunity to be matched with people that want to work from wherever it works.
00:21:00 So can you zoom in a little bit, maybe the Tri-Net example or another one you think is relevant? What is the use case look like? So how are they, you know, framed up what they're looking for, how does LiquidSpace deliver it? Kind of, what does the workflow look like and how, how do they show up at our doors?
00:21:18 Sure. Yeah. And, and I'll, I'll bring into it a little bit of the new jobs to be done, or the new problems to solve that became quickly apparent to us early in the pandemic. So it was may, June of 2020 seems like a long time ago, but early in the pandemic, when we all were, I think, were hoping it was going to be over by,
00:21:39 by, you know, Memorial day, labor day. We pretty quickly develop the hypothesis that, wow. Even if, even if this pandemic is only three months long or heaven forbid if it's six months long, this is probably gonna drive some pretty profound. It's gonna, it's going to leave some imprint on companies. Number one, we figured that even a three month long work from home experiment was going to condition employees and their managers to realize that they could work in more places effectively than just the office.
00:22:07 We thought that was thing one, the behavior change would lock in. Secondly, we thought it would remind like the pandemic and the economic strain on the economy and on companies would remind most companies of the fact that they spend a lot of money on real estate. Maybe that can, they've been kicking down the road about real estate optimization and portfolio optimization and the possibilities of flexible office and Coworking being a whole lot more economic deserves some with.
00:22:33 So we bought the associates things. And we said, if both of those hypotheses are true, if both those effects happen, then enterprises are going to be even more covetous of your audience, of those great places to work. What will that then require if companies get that burning light bulb moment, which is, oh, wow, there's this thing Coworking that no one told me about.
00:22:53 And it sounds like the solution to my desire is to be more agile and serve great places to work anywhere. And it, oh, well, they, yeah, they're open every day of the week and they'll take tours. I've, I've got to connect to them. And I want to spend a night. Like we reasoned that if that burning light bulb came on that,
00:23:09 and I've got some history, I know you do too, Jamie, you know, working with, and for large enterprises, you know, you, and I know large enterprises and even midsize companies like to do things in efficient ways. They'd like to do things in systematic ways. They like to do things with a measure of oversight and control. They like to learn from what they do.
00:23:28 They like data. We did not think it was going to be realistic. That companies would just after the pandemic closed. Right. We didn't think that they were just going to go and send an email to all the employees and say, okay, you can now go Coworking, good luck, Right. Roam about the world. If you'll let us know how it goes.
00:23:48 I said, there's a postcard. Right. And we also didn't think they would say, Hey, you're able to do that and go check out Google. You might be able to find some coworking spaces there. We didn't think that's how it would play out. And there were lots of reasons to think that they wouldn't go about that way. One example I like to cite is a very analogous sort of situation that existed pre pandemic in terms of how companies dealt with a very similar phenomenon,
00:24:12 travel and learn for companies, you know, they do business travel, right? And in business travel, there are a lot of similarities for us as the Coworking world. You've got a fragmented supply base, you know, hundreds of airlines, thousands of hotel brands, diverse preferences amongst employees. And there's a robust market and ecosystem of platforms and technologies and tools that help companies manage the complexity of the global travel base of providers.
00:24:49 So anywhere that you find a fragmented supplier base that has, or wants to serve an enterprise, you generally find tools and services that have been developed to help connect enterprises efficiently to a fragmented supply base. It sounds a little impersonal, but if we look honestly at the incredibly anyway, the burgeoning flexible office is sort of Coworking. Well, it fits a lot of those.
00:25:18 So it's parallel. So we reasoned well, there's going to be some additional tools that will be needed by companies, or rather we could create some tools that would help bridge that gap that would equip companies with the mechanisms to be able to make the discovery, the evaluation, the transaction of coworking spaces by their employees were structured more regimented. And that for us took the form of a,
00:25:40 an entirely new product that we built and launched about 15 months ago, it's called workplace manager. It's a SAS application, SAS, SAS software as a service. It's an entirely new product software application that we built to compliment our marketplace. That many of your audience members know of LiquidSpace dot com was, and is a marketplace. You can search for space.
00:26:06 You can interact directly with coworking operators and other types of property that have space to share and transactions can happen. Like true transactions can happen. You know, bookings payment contracting online, digital lickety split, true transactions. Workplace manager is a tool that we sell to companies to allow them to plan and execute the policies and the permissions that they want to apply to their employees.
00:26:35 So gaming let's imagine you are an employee at Spotify or at and T or a VM-ware, you're an employee that works. Let's Imagine you're a Spotify. You're a member of the Spotify. Hypothetically let's imagine you work for a music sharing company. Let's, let's, let's be more abstract, right? And your enlightened CEO and C-suite and real estate organization, and an HR organization recognizes that the world changed,
00:26:59 recognizes that they hired you in lake Tahoe, not New York city, right. And you're a great and committed member of the community of employees, but they also recognize that some of the time or much of the time, you may need alternatives to your condo or your ski house to work. There may be moments when you want to come together with colleagues to do collaborative work or just to build Sure when the wifi doesn't work quite as well as you need to do for Maybe there may be days of the week when your partner working in the house is a distraction or the kids home from school,
00:27:33 whatever it might be, that there are moments when place really matters, whether it's for the human activity or for the structural aspects. Right? And so they want to give you the means and the permission to be able to go do that. So workplace manager is a tool that we've now been selling to a growing list of mid-size and very large companies allows them to set up the policies and the permissions to them to decide,
00:27:55 all right, how much can Jamie spend per day and per month? What types of spaces in what geographies is she authorized to transact and even give Jamie the employee, a company branded and personalized front door to that marketplace, right. Permission. And so the company is going to give permission and policies and the means for Jamie to then go forth and work.
00:28:18 Right? So the exciting thing is more and more companies are saying to their employees that scale you may go forth. Right? And part of the, the lubrication to that phenomenon is platforms emerging that can make it safe and managed and trackable for companies to let that happen for them to let go and enable flexibility and choice. So with that, you know,
00:28:43 our, our solution for dynamic startups and large enterprise is the combination, the marriage of workplace manager as a management tool and the marketplace that, that many of your audience members know they work together now. Yeah. I love it. Hey, I just wanted to jump in really quickly before we continue with our discussion. If you're working on opening a co-working space,
00:29:07 I want to invite you to join me for my free masterclass three behind the scenes secrets to opening a coworking space. If you're working on opening a co-working space, I want to share the three decisions that I've seen successful operators make when they're creating their Coworking business. The masterclass is totally free. It's about an hour and includes some Q and a. If you'd like to join me,
00:29:30 you can register at Everything Coworking dot com forward slash masterclass. If you already have a coworking space, I want to make sure you know, about Community Manager, University, Community Manager, university is a training and development platform for community managers. And it can be for owner operators. It has content training resources, templates from day one to general manager. The platform includes many courses that cover the major buckets of the Community Manager role from community management,
00:30:02 operations, sales, and marketing, finance, and leadership. The content is laid out in a graduated learning path. So the Community Manager can identify what content is most relevant to them, depending on their experience and kind of jump in from there. We provide a live brand new training every single month for the Community Manager group. We also host a live Q and a call every single month so that the community managers can work through any challenges that they're having or opportunities get ideas from other community managers build their own peer network.
00:30:37 We also have a private slack group for the group. So if you're interested in learning more, you can go to Everything, Coworking dot com forward slash Community Manager. And it key point it's super simple and has been the case for a long time. But these companies, I mean this, you know, probably why there's a travel department or whatever, you know,
00:30:59 in companies at a certain size, they don't want their 10,000 employees submitting their individual receipts for the coworking space. They found on Google. So they might Google search to find the right location for them that might happen that way, but then they might need to transact through LiquidSpace in order to get that done. And we've heard anecdotally, you know, things like that starting to happen because they just don't have the permission to submit their monthly membership fee or their meeting room receipt or whatever that is because it's too disorganized on the backend for the company.
00:31:32 It all needs to go into one place. So tools like that, are there critical in order to kind of give permission for that individualized choice? Absolutely. And I mentioned Kalispell Montana earlier. So employee, you know, real-world example names hidden, you know, employ from large telecom company who was given permission to access space, wherever it worked for them via the LiquidSpace platform.
00:32:03 You know, it turns out that salesperson has the territory that overlaps the Kalispell Montana region and needed, wanted it and needed a space option there, that signal that need, that we were able to capture from this, you know, telecom salesperson. We were able to carry forward to a fantastic local coworking operator in Kalispell who had not previously been part of our platform.
00:32:30 And we were able to make that union happen in a far more natural and a far more rational way. Hey, there's a client here right now that would love to take advantage of your space periodically, but regularly. And so what I'll cite in that example is the remapping of where workplaces for, for many, many companies is underway and it's, it's a,
00:32:52 it's a Greenfield organic thing, and the signals of need are popping up. And the rewiring of the ecosystem to places that are needed by these exciting companies is happening in real time. And for us, that is driving a wave of expansion and the relationships that we have around the globe now with coworking operators, you know, pre pandemic for us, it was sort of easy for me and us as a company to think about the football cities or the gateway cities.
00:33:21 I was used to it, that's kind of one of the most, I love that Kalispell example because, you know, Mark and Erin who are the owners of that space, went through my startup school and I'm thinking, would I not have told them, like, you know, we have a whole section on, you know, marketing and what you need to do.
00:33:38 And it's possible that you would have said, right, the aggregators function really well in certain markets and sometimes you'll get leads and sometimes you won't, and it feels like there's a shift that is now clear that demand can pop up anywhere and that your platform is servicing that demand. Can I comment on the term aggregator? Totally. Yes. Tell me if I'm yeah,
00:34:03 No, no. It's a, it's a word that's out there in circulation a lot. And some people self-identify as that term, other observers in the market use it to categorize a certain animal. We don't think about ourselves as an aggregate data and wouldn't want to be categorized as one. So let me, let me try to draw a sort of a distinction.
00:34:23 There are a myriad of entities that exist that are simply creating lists of spaces. They're putting those lists of spaces on a website they're using that website and its inherent SEO attraction along with, you know, marketing investments to sort of buy traffic, to create lead capture. In most cases, they're in an anonymous way. I get in front of the operator,
00:34:54 but yes, gotcha. That's a leap in front of the operator to buy the, to buy or sort of corner, you know, the demand signal. And then in various ways, some that are a little bit messy, you know, try to maximize their ability to monetize those leads that they've captured across the supply base. And I think in the worst examples that can include,
00:35:17 try to capture all the demand, build a list, anonymize who all the players are trying to capture all the names, like take away all the names of the entities on the list and try to capture all the signals and then send all of those leads to everybody and exploit the vulnerability that every coworking operator has, which is yeah, we, you, we all want every lead and oh,
00:35:37 by the way, we will pledge you a fee for any lead that you send in. Hey folks, you are being exploited today. There are platforms that are sending Unification of the Google algorithm without the robust backend of tools. And That in that end more specifically as well, there are entities that are sending every lead to every operator. You know, when a customer,
00:36:06 when you go shopping on Amazon or on eBay or on Airbnb or on Expedia as a shopper, as a consumer, like you use these robust tools to search and filter and assess, and then you might, you know, engage. And if you engage to book the Kimpton hotel, you're authorizing that platform to let Kimpton know that you're interested in Kimpton, or if you were on the Amazon store and you click book it on the latest bestseller,
00:36:35 you're expecting to buy that book. There's some stuff going on in the market right now where that consumer, that looked at a list on an aggregator platform and said, oh, that one looks interesting. I'd like to learn more about that. One, unbeknownst to that consumer, that inquiry is being thrown at every operator in that market to guarantee that wherever the heck,
00:36:57 that consumer ends up going, we're going to get the fee. I'll characterize aggregator as platforms that are aggregating information to capture web traffic. So what are we doing or how might I differentiate what we're doing? A couple of couple things. Number one in the marketplace that we first built from day one. And to this day, it has always been agnostic.
00:37:19 It has always been friends' parent. It is always represented in name the identities of the participants. So, you know, enter space the rest of the page, right? Like enter, enter space and serendipity labs and industrious and expansive. And, and the thousands of extraordinary small operators like your brand is vital to you. It's shine. It's like, so on the LiquidSpace marketplace,
00:37:44 somewhat uniquely, like those brands are representative. In addition, when it comes like we have a solid sort of solemn vow to the users of the platform. If market Spotify inquires through the platform at Pacific workspaces in Palo Alto, you know, that inquiry goes there and there alone, We don't get hit with, we don't Send it to Regis down the street or we work up the valley,
00:38:09 like it goes to one place. So how the marketplace works, how a transactional marketplace works is different than an aggregator in our transactional marketplace, transparency, independence, and an intersection. In addition, the other thing that we're doing very differently today as a company, and this goes back to my earlier comment about the workplace management, we've now created, like we're now keenly focused on helping bring this way of mid-size and larger company employees,
00:38:38 how we're introducing them in many cases for the first time to the Coworking world. Right? And so we're not out that user that came to that Kalispell coworking space that user got there because we had done the hard work of building a trusted relationship with a very large telecom company, right. Who had chosen our platform to use it as the tool that they use to enable their employees to go for it.
00:39:00 So we're a hybrid workplace management platform. We're in the service of companies implementing hybrid workplace, Everything, Coworking audience, you are the heart and soul of hybrid workplace. You are now the center of the bullseye. You are the heart and soul of it. The heart and soul of workplace had been the company campus, the heart and soul of it now is all of the places in between it's you?
00:39:27 So, so we are in the service of that. So humbly, you know, don't, don't think of us as aggregators though. You've got some tough questions to answer for yourselves about what in the aggregator category should I play? How should I play? And yeah, for sure. There's some that you should participate with, I think, but, but we're a different beast.
00:39:44 So that was super helpful to think about, you know, how to categorize it and what that term means. And I think helpful to the audience, because I think aggregator is one of those just broad it's like Coworking. Right? Well, so I think there's a lot of language that's getting used right now that maybe over time will get sorted out and,
00:40:04 you know, filtered a little bit so that there's better terminology. So I appreciate that walk through. I think that was super helpful for everyone and to think about also maybe a lens through which to look when they're deciding, okay, there are a lot of options, marketplaces, aggregators platforms. How do I pick the ones that I'm, that are going to be worth my time?
00:40:28 It takes staff time to, you know, we've got to create the listing I'm going to upload. I would strongly suggest that everyone think about these opportunities as marketing opportunities, right? To your point, the Kalispell example, do we know, did that person know about Coworking before the company introduced it? Because the company's using a platform like LiquidSpace like, there's so many things I think we can no longer assume that the end user knows about coworking on their own.
00:40:57 And we'll just find us through Google, which is a very important lead source for other end user types. And I think that's part of what LiquidSpace is doing is bringing, how do we get access to those folks that didn't know it was a solution, but their companies are put, so they're not on Google. Maybe they are in the, maybe they,
00:41:18 you know, they just need to go through the platform in order to transact, or maybe they didn't know it. They never been in one they're intimidated by it. You and I have talked about some of the change management aspects of getting these folks into a space and having a great experience and coming back, and it may be that, you know, a platform like yours is the way they get introduced to it.
00:41:39 And otherwise they would not have. Yeah, absolutely. There's an enormous change management age that we're stepping into within companies where, which is increasingly involving the HR and the people side of the house. Right. All the headlines, like I saw the apple headline. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Well, don't judge me are bad. I mean, that's right.
00:42:05 There's some internal HR change management group. That's like trying to get it right. But you know, stumbling a little bit and it's yeah. I don't envy those roles tend to be employee centric and trying to listen to, you know, leadership. But yeah. And I also think there's been a little bit of a reflex. I think in the past that I've sometimes sensed amongst some,
00:42:31 you know, community driven space operators, which is, oh, this, this, I don't want this enterprise user, like the suit's going to share Somehow This robot is going to show up and they're not, you know, we're about community and the people and the connections, and they can't possibly value that or be about that. And they're going to break our community or put it at risk.
00:42:52 Let's put our human hats back on our hearts back forward. There is a generation of employees now for whom the world just became a lot more open. Like there's a benevolent tyranny that was in place that said, oh, you worked for xyz.com company. You will show up at the headquarters in mountain view, right. Period, full stop. It was well-intentioned.
00:43:18 And no, by the way, they gave you a sushi. Right? But that benevolent tyranny has lost its grip. You know, you mentioned the apple headlines, the LinkedIn moves, and these are just people that want to live a richer life experience. They want to work from where it works. And that might mean the headquarters. Some days the extraordinary coworking space in their neighborhood.
00:43:37 Other days home, much of the time, it's all those places. And they're humans. They appreciate environment. They appreciate people. They love serendipitous encounters. They like to see their colleagues, all these things that are fostered in our proven experiences that are delivered at coworking spaces, that they are no less relevant to this new wave of users that are coming at it with beginner's eyes and have been given permission for the first time.
00:44:04 Many of them never really paid attention to other than like, we work headlines to the whole category of Coworking because they didn't have permission. It was never presented to them or encouraged to them. You know, why would they look into it? Some of them were maybe more curious or adventurous and it dabbled or heard about it for Stan, but for the most part they're coming at with beginner's eyes,
00:44:22 they're noobs. And I would encourage the audience to have an open mind about it. We're seeing it day over day. Now, like the, you know, the excited, happy experiences like, and if you consider the contrast to what they were forced to work in, live under into this benevolent tyranny, in some ways like everyone wants that raving customer,
00:44:43 right? They want that viral word of mouth spread. The contrast between the experience that an enterprise, a newly freed enterprise or SMB employee can have in exercising choice and discovering on their own terms, these great workplaces, arguably it's probably significantly more dramatically better than the next freelancer that might come in. So the virality and word of mouth opportunity, that's spreading amongst company groups that we're seeing like that's gold for that space operator in Montana or in Ogden,
00:45:21 Utah, or in Vilnius Lithuania, like the various places where we're seeing this, this kinetic thing happening. So I'd say like wrapping your heart and soul and love around this community of users welcome the men. Like they're great people. They pay on time, their companies do, and they travel in packs. You know, how great is that right? And they're probably less likely,
00:45:44 I keep talking to operators, we'd have to look at data on this, but to your point about paying on time, you know, the thing that happens in the summer, I was talking to an operator in Tucson. She's like, ah, we just lost a bunch of desks because it's summer and Tucson, you know, the corporate companies may just let those float,
00:46:02 you know, it's just an ongoing membership and, you know, people are in and out. I also think for our practical standpoint, so one thing you mentioned, you know, we're talking about sort of the, the human factor of these folks. We may need to treat them, you know, even more humanly than others because they are new. Right.
00:46:19 So how do we help them feel like not an outsider and how do they belong in something that's totally new to them? Yeah. I mean, it's back to some of the things that we aggressively were preaching back in 2013, which was like, things like that welcome experience that first user or out of box experience the world change there's, it's like suddenly a whole new community of like kindergartners was being welcomed to the school and they need to learn how the hallways work.
00:46:48 And how do you ask permission to go to the bathroom? There's that out-of-box new user benevolent, motherly, let's welcome them in and not presume that they know how it works. Like I think gave me like a playbook for the first user, the enterprise, the new enterprise employee first user experience that probably deserves a little bit of intensity or a reflection on the part of your audience.
00:47:10 Maybe even a course or a chapter in a course, a couple other observations that I can share, perhaps that will maybe be inspiring to the audience as it relates to this new category of customer and, or a little bit of a forecast to some of the behaviors that we're seeing happen. Right? So first off they travel in packs, right? So that first user that you might engage from a given company will likely foretell others from that company.
00:47:40 Now it depends on the size of the market, but, but it's in contrast to landing a valued member that might be a freelancer or a member of a small company, but they come in packs. We're also seeing a very distinct phenomena consistently, which is these newly freed enterprise employees and business users. They're curious like they're traveling and using they're eating off the full menu.
00:48:06 Like there's this example that was just so conspicuous at this large tech company. It was an engineer R and D guy in LA. He worked at a dozen different coworking spaces from downtown LA to Santa Monica, including our great friend, Jerome and others. Right. It was uncanny like he went and ate off the entire menu. So we're seeing a lot of experimentation and probing.
00:48:24 And then we're also seeing a very distinct conversion amongst a meaningful percentage of they shop and use lots of spaces. And then they convert to that membership or they shop at multiple spaces. And then a group of them make a pack decision to put a hub in place. The telecom company that I was citing earlier, that phenomenon happened in, in the salt lake area.
00:48:45 They sampled off of the entire menu like 15 employees did. And then the hub happened. So they travel in packs. There's a big opportunity here. They like to sample their first user experience might be a tentative one. Don't take for granted that they know how it works, show them around, sell them a little bit on the value, make sure they see the nooks and crannies of what it means to be an,
00:49:07 a member of your community. And then recognize that what might start as a, a day next Thursday, or a meeting every other Tuesday, in many, many cases, this converts into, oh, a team joining the community for a monthly agreement that might run for five years. That's a great insight, right? Never taken up an initial lead too lightly.
00:49:29 Any other behind the scenes look at what's going on in the mindset of the end user that, that we need to know about, Oh, I'm at a good many of our clients. I touched on this earlier, but I'll hit it against, this may be a great point to end on the HR community. The people community is mobilizing. It's been startling,
00:49:48 but also encouraging in a lot of cases. In some instances, we've had situations where it was the workplace in real estate organization that made the decision on the platform and they may have had a, a program and an initiative around delivering workplace hybrid workplace experience. And they were thinking about it from the place standpoint. Oh wow. We've, we've gotta be agile and provide spaces anywhere in the world.
00:50:08 And we need a way to do that with some oversight and control, boom. And they're running in their lane low and behold over in the HR side of the company. And a couple of instances completely disconnected. The HR community is thinking about hybrid employee experience and what the policies are that are going to foster a sense of and foster the culture of the company and support the hiring and retention objectives of hiring managers.
00:50:33 And in some cases, those worlds hadn't the United. Now that convergence of those two worlds is happening more and more. But I think we all together need to recognize that there are two really important audiences in the best cases, they'll come to us collectively together, but we need to serve and be responsive to actually I'll, I'll, I'll break it. Three audiences.
00:50:56 There's the employee users. The first knock on the door in many cases will be that first employee that's landing in your space know that she or he or they travel in packs and hope and plan for the expansion. The other community is the company managers behind that employee that set the stage for them to have that privilege. And in that world, at the company level,
00:51:18 at the employer level, there are the workplace and real estate leaders. And then there are the people leaders and, and we are collectively, we're serving them both and they have overlapping, but still December, they have separate. But in some cases, overlapping concerns. HR is thinking about experience. They're thinking about retention of thinking about culture workplace is thinking about sometimes it's,
00:51:39 you know, the tough stuff like, alright, like overall spend and policy and oversight and data insights. But we together the, this industry platforms such as ours, every operator on the planet we're United in the service of, of that audience, the employees, and then the key managers that have their distinct needs. Yeah. It's such an exciting time and obviously it continues to evolve.
00:52:01 So thank you for coming on. And I hope we get to do this again. Quick, parting question. What stuff on your bike trip are you most looking forward to? So I think town called Bolzano for the audience. I'm, I'm a first vacation of this type in three years, I'm flying to Munich with my son tomorrow, and we're going to start a bike tour in the Dolomites and travel south to lake Garda trip of a lifetime for him.
00:52:26 I hope he remembers it for his lifetime. I'm sure trustee will, but there's a little town along the way. It's the second night called Bolzano. And I happen to travel through there in a bike race about 15 years ago. And I remember at the time I made an imprint on me. I remember at the time it was after this, like five-hour stage of this bike race,
00:52:43 and it was all sort of physically shattered, but we were like sitting on a bench and just wa in the town square and watching as the evening rolled in, this is what's so charming about a lot of towns in Europe. There was the octogenarian couple, you know, grandma, grandpa walking hand in hand. And then there was the, there were the young lovers walking in the same square.
00:53:00 And then there were the kids playing. Like, it was the sense that these towns are these vibrant communities. And they're much more connected than what I sometimes feel on this on main street, Palo Alto when I lived there. Right. And so I'm really excited to go back to that specific town with, with my son in tow. And I'm hoping that that charm is still there in a lot of ways it's towns as communities.
00:53:22 And actually, I mean, bringing it full circle, I that's no small part of what that draw of these interesting little places that are vibrant communities is a part of the work that we're all doing together. Right. Because so many of the nooks and crannies of the global fabric or tapestry of great places to work is in little towns like Bolzano, Italy,
00:53:44 or not that they're back bars, but they're places that have been ignored in the past by the office industry, by the way, reworked by the registers. Right. And so it's their time to shine. Yeah. I love it. Well, thank you, Mark, and have an amazing trip. Thanks, Jenny. All the best. Thank you for listening to today's episode.
00:54:03 If you like, what you heard, tell a friend, hit that subscribe button and leave us a rating and review. It makes a huge difference in helping others. Like you find us. If you'd like to learn more about our education and coaching programs, head over to Everything. Coworking dot com. We'll see you next week.
For the full show notes of this episode, click here.
Want to join our coworking conversation in the Everything Coworking Facebook Group? Find us here!
Looking for a specific episode? Go to the episode index here.