276. The COO of Pacific Workplaces Shares His 20 Years of Experience on How to Grow a Team
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TRANSCRIPTION
276. The COO of Pacific Workplaces Shares His 20 Years of Experience on How to Grow a Team
00:00:02 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 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.
00:00:44 Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast. This is your host, Jamie Russo. Thanks for tuning in today. So a couple things before we dive in. One, I've gotten a bunch of comments about the most recent episode before this. Three things you should do before the end of the year. And one of those things is make sure you have an annual increase in place.
00:01:07 And my academy members are going to get some language to use for their agreements. So plug and play. If you're thinking about that and even thinking about the academy, it might be time to jump in. You can learn more about that at Everything Coworking dot com slash academy. I also want to give a shout-out to our most recently certified community, sorry,
00:01:34 Coworking Community Managers. I've always served tongue-tied on that I love alliterations, but Precious Martin at Pursuit Coworking in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Bri McMillan at Burbity Workplaces in Workspaces, sorry, in Spokane, Washington. Congrats to both of you for completing your certification. I am super excited about an upcoming training that we have. So I, every month we do a live training for our community managers.
00:02:04 Sometimes I do them and sometimes I find really good experts, either from within the industry or not to come in and deliver on a specific topic. So couple months ago we did some sales training on giving a tour and we had one of the nominees for this year's Community Manager of the year that the GWA does. He did some sales training for our group and he was amazing.
00:02:32 Thank you, Adam Zino. And this month we, next week we are doing a training on how to handle challenging members. So members who maybe are not getting the etiquette of working in a Coworking space. Members who aren't paying on time and constantly require reminders. Sarah Relu, Oh gosh. Sarah is going to join us and deliver that training. She has a background in commercial real estate and doing training for Compass,
00:03:09 but also has, has an organizational, I think it's organizational psychology degree from Columbia. Anyway, she's fantastic. She totally gets it. She works out of a Coworking space. It has saved her in her as she's gone out on her own and she's gonna deliver that training and I'm super excited about it. So that it will be November 3rd, I think it's November 3rd,
00:03:31 first Wednesday of the month. So if you wanna jump in on that, then register for the program before then. Everything Coworking dot com slash community managers. Okay. Today's guest is the COO at Pacific Workplaces Pacific has, let's see, I think we've talked about this on the episode. I'm gonna call it 17 or 18 locations. Originally, very Bay area-focused in their portfolio,
00:03:59 but they have recently expanded to Las Vegas and Phoenix. So there's so many things I could talk to Scott about. So Scott and I met at a juicy conference back in the day, must have been 2012. So that was a long time ago. I was fairly new to Coworking but had my space in Chicago and we ended up partnering on the location that I did in Palo Alto.
00:04:24 Pacific Workplaces was upstairs. So super interesting arrangement and I learned a ton from their organization. They have been running shared workspaces for 20 years. And for those of you who think this just started, it did not. And Scott and Laron and Becky and they just, Tracy Wilson was on their pack team cloud team now. It's super, just really an outstanding leadership team.
00:04:51 I'm sure they're Keith, I'm sure there are other folks that I'm leaving out. But an incredible team, incredible experience. They just really know how to do things, but they're also constantly evolving. So they are doing new locations, they're super smart about the way they run their business in general. Laron is super big visionary, an amazing negotiator. Same with Scott.
00:05:14 They just, they do great deals and I would love to talk to him about the deals that they're doing. Scott was on a panel at the GWA conference on deal structure, but really today I wanted to talk to him about team. One of the things that keeps coming up in our academy on our monthly calls is, you know, expanding and just that tension around growing your team when the cash flow is,
00:05:39 you know, fairly there, but you're trying to grow and you're trying to get to a second location and sort of, you know, how do you grow that location team but also, you know, to support new locations, but also the leadership team, like handling marketing and how do you do that? Do you do it internally, do it externally.
00:05:56 So I knew Scott would have some great perspective on that. So we kinda dive a little all over the board, but we get to the team topic and it's just a great conversation with Scott. He's super smart and super transparent. He was also the GW Pres GWA president when I took on the executive director role. So he was the president for two years,
00:06:16 I think, but was involved in the board for a long time and it's just like a really committed, helpful member of the industry. So thank you Scott, for everything that you do for the organization. And I know you guys are gonna enjoy this conversation. So without further ado, let's dive in. I have to capture your enthusiasm for the the day event.
00:06:37 No, the, the Psal was such a fun event. We held it out at Garre Winery in Livermore. I'm in the beautiful wine country there, and not the Napa, but it's, it's the one that's one valley down. And you know, we had our presentation in the morning where we informed everybody in the company what was going on and sort of our vision and our accomplishments.
00:06:53 And the theme was painting the future and the, the concept around that was leaving Covid behind and let's paint a new picture. Let's, Okay, I love that. I love that theme. Wait, did you come up with that theme or did the Pinot Painter people come up with that? The first step was to pick the activity and the location. And then as we did that,
00:07:14 then the MGA group got together and said, Hey, what do we wanna do? And Paint the Future was one of the, you know, brainstorms that came probably, I don't remember exactly whose idea it was, but I think it was probably a combination of Laton marketing team. And so from then there we went outta selection. So we, we chose a,
00:07:32 a beach sunset scene with, I think if you viewed it, why you really could view it as a sunrise. Right. The sun is rising. So I like it. Totally like it. So super, super fun. But didn't, I thought maybe that was your view of the future, like retiring to a beach somewhere. Oh, well that always is though.
00:07:47 I mean, it was my, it was my year so I got to pick the, you know, I had the final say on the picture, so Of course. Absolutely. You know, as I always tell people goes with the gold chains and the olive complexion. Right. I belonged exactly. I belong somewhere on a beach somewhere. Totally fortunately to spend time doing that throughout the year and all that.
00:08:04 How you been? I'm good. I know we, I feel like I got to hang out. I mean a little bit like a walk back from karaoke with you at the, you Know what though, in the context of a conference, that's serendipitous moment. If that's what we get, that's what we get. Right. And that was super fun.
00:08:21 That was such a fun night. Totally. And the walk back was just, you know, part of that captured time with friends and you know, no heavy itinerary on it. And It was all good. Thank goodness somebody thought it was time to leave and that there should be a group walk back to the hotel at that point. You know, a couple of years of experience teaches us that being the last one out really Is never a good plan.
00:08:45 It's just never, It's too much fun to feel good all day than it is to stay out all night. So there's a blend. Yeah, there's balance called experience. Okay. Speaking of experience, Scott, you just hit 20 years, is that right? Did I see that on your LinkedIn or are you at 19? Right around 20 I think.
00:09:03 Right Around 20. I know. Okay. And I related to that, I was like, when was the last time Scott was on the podcast? I always think it's been more recent than it has. Do you know what year it was? Did you also look at this or do you just know it? I don't know it, but I'm gonna assume it was pre Covid and it was early on in your podcast.
00:09:21 I was one of the, I was one of the original ones. I think you Were one of the original ones. And I like was sure I'd had you on since it was 2015. Oh wow. Right. That's almost, that's almost embarrassing for both of us. Exactly. That's what I thought. I was like, you're kidding me. Cuz I had this huge list of questions and I was like,
00:09:38 did we talk about this last time? No, we did not. So yeah, we need to have you on more often. Congrats on the podcast and just all the training courses and the, just everything, your whole following of people that, that consult with you and, and you give advice to and just tip of the cap. I mean, super fun.
00:09:55 I've known you all these years and, but I was being partner in other ventures and now watching this from the sidelines is super special. Well, I feel like right back at you because you guys are also often running, I mean like 20 years and then, and now these might be the most exciting yet to come. That's Funny. I look, I look,
00:10:14 I look forward to kind of sharing that with you and, and, and just going back and forth on what we see out there. I know. Okay. Well For exciting times, right? I feel like We come from the most challenging time ever to some of the most optimistic and and exciting times. So I mean, so much has changed since 15.
00:10:31 You were number 11 and we're on this, I think our numbers a little off are draft mode in the two seventies. So, hey, no, well, and I wasn't weekly super consistent at the beginning. A couple years ago I was like, we're weekly, we're, we're gonna no like, you know, rain, snow, hail or whatever the,
00:10:52 the post office motto is, we're posting every week. Okay. So since it's been so long, I was like, everybody's gonna know who Scott is because he was just done. No. Okay, I'll start. You fill in the blanks. Hey, we'll be right back. I just wanna share a couple of opportunities from our show sponsors. As a Coworking space owner,
00:11:23 you are always looking to provide more resources and programming for your members, right? How about access to financial education and even investment opportunities? Well Newman is the number one community for freelancers and founders looking to grow their businesses. So Newman and Coworking spaces go together like peanut butter and jelly. We found that over 75% of our community already work in or are seeking out a Coworking space.
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00:12:30 Coworking. We will include that link in the show notes for anybody who's walking around and doesn't have time to write it down. You can find it in the show notes for this episode at Everything Coworking dot com. Puma financing the Future of work. The amount of opportunity in the Coworking industry is absolutely mind blowing. It's projected to grow by 13 billion in the next five years.
00:12:58 Just staggering numbers now you've probably seen Success Magazine. It's hugely popular and focuses on professional development, personal development and business coaching while they're branching out with their own franchised Coworking business called Success Space. It's actually a brilliant franchise model with three revenue streams recurring and on-demand revenue from Coworking memberships, a full service cafe and success certified business coaching for small business owners to executives.
00:13:34 To learn more about this exciting new Coworking business opportunity, check it out@successcowork.space, that's success cowork.space. We will link that up in the show notes as well. So you and Lauren have been doing this for a long time and I can't remember your origin story so you have to like briefly cuz we have so much to get into. Mentioned how you got started,
00:13:59 but when you guys got started it was executive suites and nobody thought this model existed. Anybody in it today thinks we just got started. You guys have been doing this for a long time and run an incredible company that's still growing, so that's why I can't wait to hear, you know, what's next. So you did this for a long time. You saw Coworking coming,
00:14:20 you were the president of the Global Workspace Association when I first got involved. So leadership roles in the industry, always looking at kind of what's next, which I'm excited to hear about, made it through covid. I'm sure we could do lots and lots of debriefs about how you guys manage that because I think you have an incredible leadership team. We need to get you guys out on stages more often.
00:14:43 You also were on a panel at the recent GWA conference in Frisco. Yeah. So you guys have been doing this for a long time. How many locations now? 19. We're gonna go 2020 towards the end of the year. We're gonna, we're opening up Midtown Phoenix as we get into the new year. So That's starting Phoenix. So you've been very strict Bay Area for a long time.
00:15:06 Baker like the Bakersfield? Yeah, mostly NorCal, Sacramento. We've got a good footprint down in Sacramento. Renos doing quite well and survived actually one of our better performers during Covid, given the influx of people coming from California into the Reno Basin. Right. That was a good performer. Went down into Vegas. That's up and running. We're gonna go into Midtown Phoenix candidly would just,
00:15:31 we're looking to expand with landlords that understand us and understand the concept. And you know, one of the things we'll get into in a little bit is sort of, you know, the most exciting part of, of what we see moving forward is our supplier side and, and the willingness of, you know, when I say suppliers, for anyone that knows sort of at a macroeconomic level,
00:15:50 it's our landlords and their mindset knowledge and understanding both as we went into Covid and now the great thing coming outta Covid, we could talk for hours on the bad things and I prefer just to turn the page, is the disruption in the workforce and the, the power shift to the consumerization and the employee being able to say when and where. And there's a tug of war going on right now.
00:16:15 We know that there's the large tech companies that really want everybody back in and all the employees said no. And so we find a tug of war and we're gonna go through recession from what I think most people can understand. We're probably already in one. There's layoffs at certain companies, there's hiring at other companies gonna go through a period of time, six months,
00:16:33 12 months, you know, maybe the next couple of years where that tug of war will continue. But I think ultimately the employee wins because by the employee winning, everybody will win in the long run. Right? The quality of life is important as we evolve into a, you know, we're well matured into an information society and we wanna work hard and then we wanna play hard.
00:16:50 And sometimes logistics gets in the way of that. And so, you know, we don't wanna always be stuck in Silicon Valley or downtown San Francisco or downtown Manhattan. We wanna be out closer to where we're gonna go recreate or be with our family and more affordable. For some people it's an economic, they just simply get a much better quality life by getting out of the big cities.
00:17:08 I think they'll be an arbitrage on that in some of the cities I know in San Francisco housing still really, really expensive. But my belief is that office space is gonna become a lot more affordable in the next 12 to 36 months as we learned at gwa. With all the lesions expiring in the next 12 to 20 months across the the nation, really they'll be,
00:17:27 they'll be an inflection point there where they're gonna have to start lowering prices and to get people back in and refill the cities. So, yeah. I'm curious, you know what your sentiment is on So Vegas, you're downtown? Yeah, we're downtown. Yeah. And Phoenix Midtown, you Mentioned Midtown, not downtown. Midtown, yeah. Okay. Competitors and competitors in the area are full,
00:17:47 doing well and did, did well during Covid. So it's a midtown Phoenix pulls from all the greater Phoenix suburbs into the downtown and midtown area for people to come to a centralized place to do business. And we will be the best product in a very good location with a very good landlord partner right there in the heart of it. It's gonna be a brand new buildout,
00:18:08 which I think that's one of the, the real exciting things is when we are finding the right supplier who's willing to, to write the crooked check for the tenant improvements I in in, in parts of our world where, you know, going between 120 a square foot now, which still is cheaper than some corporate buildouts, but a lot more expensive than Yep.
00:18:29 You know, just back space. But it's all glass, it's all l e d lighting, it's open space and privates. It's more smaller private offices, but not tiny boxes that we, we have some single private little small ones, but you know, still that two person, some threes much less team rooms. That's not our, that's not our bread and butter.
00:18:46 Yep. Industrious can have that in other, other suppliers. WeWork can, can do those probably better than we can, Better than we're willing to. We're not willing to take the risk on those. They're great when they're leased at high margins and then really A lot of really bad when they're not. Yeah. Yeah. So That's, that's not really what we're gonna cater to a little bit more.
00:19:04 Our open space is becoming more creative with, with respect to it just can completely go from a work area to an event area. A lot of, a lot of operators have done that in the past. Were getting better at it. Our Vegas is, is just a gem. I mean that design came out great and we're extrapolating that design into Phoenix.
00:19:20 We did a little bit of it in Jay Street, downtown Sacramento. But the, the build, you know, you have to kind of also live with the building that you're given. That footprints in the event space is good, but not quite as good as say Vegas and Phoenix will be. So, but that's, you know, all electronic locks,
00:19:34 all new lighting, bright and finish. Everything's new. And I think that the consumer, as you come outta Covid and you know, for many parts of the country, they're well outta covid for other parts of the country. They feel like they're just coming out of it. And that's a societal thing as to how Covid was, was handled by different parts of the country and different parts of the world for that clean,
00:19:53 new and nice is going to be attractive, right? So as we turn over some of our older portfolio in our older buildings and leases expire and we can either redo them or move substantially similar stay in the market but get new space. It's no different than we, when we go to a hotel, you know, we want clean, we want nice.
00:20:09 If you, if you think about one more piece of the co I guess we're gonna talk, it's gonna happen, Right? You get right. Can't, we'll try to leave it behind, but, But think about this, right? Are you bummed that when you go to a restaurant now that the table and chairs in the bar area is typically wiped down on a very regular basis and that the restrooms are cleaner and that just generally functioning in society and shared spaces is just cleaner.
00:20:33 It's like it'll it should have always been that way. Yep. But hey, so what we take that as a positive and let's continue those habits. And so it's the same with our spaces. People want nice new clean, fresh, bright. Totally. They wanna feel energized. They don't don't, they wanna get out of that bedroom, they wanna get out of that claustrophobic feeling and away we go.
00:20:52 So, but that's been positive for you because you know, when you're in a location like Palo Alto for decade, how long were you in Palo Alto? We were there I wanna say 15 years. And the buildout was at least 10 to 15 before we were there. It was like, you know, by the end of the end of the life cycle when the lease finally ended and it got Reed.
00:21:11 Yeah. But you can't get a landlord to write to help you with ti. Right? You have, I mean it's so Challenging. It's a, it's really not every landlord's going to be for us or for Flex. Right. I think is, you know, your other podcast partner geo and no, you know, some landlords are flex excited and flex willing.
00:21:28 Yeah. And they can see the longer term coupon that they can clip and they can ride the, the ups and downs as creative management contracts, participating leases, retail approach to leases in a in a commercial office. I think those guys are gonna win. But it all comes down to what their investors and capital structure is and willingness and risk tolerance and all that.
00:21:48 You know, every, every asset has got a different set of circumstances. But yes, in Palo Alto was a mom and pop and moms and pops typically don't wanna write the hundred square foot, you know, without it being collateralized to, you know, 80 bucks. They don't wanna take any risk. Even if they've had you for 15 years, they're still really nervous to to do that.
00:22:08 And so that back street building got sold and, and we did close down that location. But by the way, you know, in the heart of Palo Alto, a phenomenal location it took. Right? Would you guys like ran, you know, amazingly even without the bright clean new. So, but it's probably fun for you to now be, you know,
00:22:25 it's easier to find the landlords that are flex friendly. You know, it Really, it really is. And, and and I think, you know, when you and I are kicking around some ideas about, you know, things we could catch up on, what am I most excited about as we move forward from here, you know, whether it's the next five years or 20 years,
00:22:40 it's two things and they really kind of come, they work together. The two things are the suppliers, the willingness of new and existing landlords that, that we've got relationships with. And that other operators have relationships, whether you're a single operator at two locations or 80 locations. As one of our friends has their willingness to understand that flex is a part of the future.
00:23:03 That it's been good to 'em in the past. Yes. It's not perfect. We do, this is the economic 1 0 1 for everybody. We buy long and we sell short the way that knows economics knows you buy long and it goes up, it's good, it stays flat, not bad, it goes down. And when it goes way down, you know,
00:23:23 you can't service a hundred dollars a square foot lease if the prevailing under market goes to 65. It's just very, very difficult. Maybe you can, but at the end of the day, those things become difficult. So that is where the lease structures are changing. Partnerships are entering, participating leases with minimum performances are coming in, profit sharings are coming in.
00:23:44 No two deals are identical. But there are some substantial similarities because underwriting still requires a lease in many cases. And so you find ways to structure creatively that gives the landlord what he needs for his lender or his finance partners. And then you give them something that enables you to ride the ups and downs. And really in the long term, if you think about the investment that goes into our spaces and how we can ebb and flow a little bit,
00:24:08 they're un they're buying the building to, to underwrite and be part of that underlying real estate risk. They like the location, they like the block, they like the building, they like the long term potential. Well now they gotta get tenants that, you know, ride that with them. But if they're buying long and they're expecting their building to appreciate them,
00:24:23 they should be willing to do that. And many are. And the flip side, the other thing I really am super excited about moving forward is, is the reason that what I just mentioned is happening on the supplier side is cause the demand curve changed very long ago. When you go to a cocktail party, you do what, Right, right. I know a lot of years It's a virtual office,
00:24:47 right? Right Now it's, it's like, oh yeah, that's what Scott does. That's, that's what his company does and it's totally different. So, and that is because of the, I think a few things. One is the disruption of people wanting to work more flexibly and we have to acknowledge that Regis was the first to do it on a broad marketing basis and we work for good or for bad.
00:25:08 I think at the end of the day we'll find out that it was mostly for good with respect to the broad branding of flex and outsourcing office space and workplaces and services. Lauren has patented trademark those brands and the willingness of companies to embrace it and now with employees demanding it, that's it. That's, it's all came together. And so that's what we're most excited about is setting up these newer,
00:25:33 nicer facilities as we, you know, refresh our existing portfolio and add to it and supply this moving forward. Super exciting. So what was the trigger to move out of Northern California? Or not move out of, but in addition to expand into other markets and will you look to do multiple locations or are you okay with one in a market We'd prefer to cluster?
00:25:55 We always have. And so it's really a case of getting into the market, getting established and getting going. Human resources, our friends over at Google, you know, a lead for San Francisco's often a lead for San, excuse me, for those of you that know the San Francisco Bay, it's a lead for San Mateo. It's a lead from Walnut Creek.
00:26:10 They just happened to go to the San Francisco landing page and then realized, oh, our employee lives out in the suburbs. It's no different than in Vegas. It's gonna be no different in Phoenix. It's like, oh I really wanted to be in Scottsdale or I really wanted be in Tempe or you know, I didn't, you know, so anyway,
00:26:24 so eventually we'll wanna, we'll wanna expand those, we'll do those on a case by case. So two reasons we went into those external markets. One is a landlord partner that believes in us and made the negotiation a win-win came to us and said we want flex in our space. We'd like you to be the operator, you know, and worked out a deal.
00:26:41 And the other is, in this current window, the economics in some markets outside of the San Francisco Bay area simply pencil better the, the asking rates in some markets here in our, in our, you know, backyard haven't quite matched up with a ramp up reality. Yeah. And I think, and I think that's where we'll have to see if it,
00:27:04 if that reality check the pressure on that reality check is tenant improvement costs. But if a landlord can do it at a x rent in other markets, the landlords can do it in this market at x rents it just, you know, that's just gonna be, they're gonna have to readjust. There's gonna be some readjustment for those of you that have, you know,
00:27:21 401ks or outside investments in real estate. There's a little bit of overvaluation in some, some space Flight to quality. Yes. But you can't have 5 million square feet of vacant suddenly space in direct space in a major market and not expecting at some point the next thing that breaks and you know who's gonna make is the lenders. Right. So you, speaking of Flight to quality,
00:27:43 you're mostly in Class A buildings? Yeah, all of our new stuff's class A but we don't go out and race out. We don't wanna be, I don't wanna speak for what we don't wanna do. Cause really it comes down to the deal and the partnership and the risk. We don't race out to be in trophy buildings. Right. I'm really good with an A building,
00:28:00 I'm good with an A building and a minus building, you know, b plus you gotta be careful depending upon what the whole economics of the situation, the actual location and things like that. You're gonna have a Flight to quality when you have high vacancy rates as typical. So no, I mean it's, we definitely wanna be in a buildings, in nice buildings And then typical floor plan,
00:28:21 what are you looking at as you expand? You know, we've done as small as 10, which we don't love, but we'll we'll do those and those become more doable in this day and age. Cuz the drive in virtual office and meeting rooms, that's, you know, meeting rooms are coming back pretty big. I think, you know, out here in the,
00:28:36 in the Bay area, we're probably one of the last to fully recover on the meeting rooms side because of the change in in population and usage and things like that. But that's coming back. But virtual office, you know, now 31% of our revenue stream you can run out of a slightly smaller footprint and and make the economics work really well. So for those out there that might listen to this in the future that your virtual office business is,
00:28:59 is not something, you know, I knows. Interesting. I know We can do a Years and years and I know you have done some and there's some people out there. My partner Keith would be a better one to talk to about that. Okay. I'm gonna have to hit Keith up when he's not hiking around Hawaii or wherever he's Yeah. Or he did the Yosemite,
00:29:15 he did the John Muir trail this summer. Yeah, Unbeliev was out there. I think he was out there for 17 days or 18 days. Or maybe again Keith, if you hear this, if you're there for 20, I'm not trying to short change it. Yeah, It was a walkabout in my opinion. And I was like, what? You know,
00:29:30 if the door opens, I'm camping. Right? If I'm, that's, that's for all my friends know. That's Scott's of of camping. Right. Anyway, he did the real deal. So really I think 12 to 14,000, 15,000 feet. I mean that's really, Ok. So you're not gonna 20 yet? No, and I don't think we will because in most markets that we operate in,
00:29:54 the rent becomes a much higher risk when you go to 20, if I can keep a nine, you know, 15,000, 90% full, I'm good. Whereas if I keep a 20,000 foot 85% full or 80% full, I'm probably chasing my tail and doing a lot of turnover. I know in other markets I have, I have some good friends down in Texas and 20 is their standard.
00:30:11 That's great. But it works when you're paying 25 bucks or 30 bucks for square foot for space, the numbers just work there. Whereas they don't work when you're paying 40, 50, 60 bucks a foot. Well at least in our opinion, in our risk tolerance, right? We're a risk averse company. We consider ourselves an operator and we consider ourselves a good operator.
00:30:29 But we really are also, you know, risk averse and we always have been. I think that's why Lauren and I have been successful in leading our, our company together is that as in my risk tolerance and that extrapolates into how we handle, Cause we do have outside money. You're well aware that we've raised two rounds of capital over our history. One of which was in 19 by the way.
00:30:51 And Scott are raising money. You can expect something really weird to happen. Our first one was in Going into 20. So the good news about the 19 capital raise is we'd only placed about 25% of it prior to Covid. And we just obviously had the privilege and pleasure to slam on the brakes and just take a time out for a year and let 2020 unfold and we capital on the sidelines.
00:31:14 And it was a great feeling to be, to know that we were able to preserve that investor money and capitalize when the opportunities come into us. Now we're getting some great, some great opportunities. So we as a company did take in outside capital, it's not massive relative to some fun rounds that you read about, but for us it's in our comfort zone.
00:31:32 It's in our risk zone, in our wheelhouse of what we like to do. Yeah, I love the conversation, which is part of what you were having on stage at the conference is you have to do deals that line up with where you wanna put the risk. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the guys at Kiln who are doing those huge build outs and they raise the money to pay for the build out,
00:31:52 but they will do kind of the below market lease to get through that. It's an Interesting, Yeah, they put in their own tis, We don't spend a dollar on tis. It's really not. It's not. It's for, I mean, you know, if we spend one, it's, you know, the dollar that Scott goes over when he manages a 10 square foot budget and he goes tos And I hear about it from my and my board because there's no it,
00:32:14 there's no return on that. It's just great. Some faucets and some that had to in it's, Hey, I just wanted to jump in really quickly before we continue with our discussion. If you're working on opening a Coworking space, I wanna 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 Coworking space,
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00:34:10 Okay. So I think you said, you know, you run a pretty good company, raise some capital. I think you run a great company, you've been successful, you made it through covid and also you have a great team and a great culture and you've maintained that. I'm sure there have been some ups and downs through the years. You've been doing that for a long time.
00:34:28 So I feel like, like I said, we have to pick some other topics to do more episodes on, but I wanna talk about kind of your team and as you're growing, what does it look like? Let's start with the location level. How do you staff your location level? And then I wanna take it up a notch. I think there are a lot of operators out there,
00:34:45 I know there are, who are struggling with this. You know, how do I grow and scale? What does that look like and how do I manage that, you know, financially? So I would just love to hear a little bit about what your structure looks like and then maybe take a step back to the early days and how did you manage to,
00:35:05 you know, make the trade off? Cause you mentioned being risk averse and that this business is paying mortgages and you know, you guys are all in right? So yeah, talk about that a little bit. So the staffing structure is beginning at the center level because our portfolio has some centers with slightly different physical size and by extension number of people, number of virtual plans.
00:35:29 We staff according to the needs of the specific location, we do have a small handful of locations running with one person locally with an area manager above them that will fill in in the event of sickness. And we have rovers in, you know, in the Bay area, we have rovers in Sacramento, so we have some part-time people that can go fill in.
00:35:47 But typically there's a community coordinator and a Community Manager on site. And then the real busy locations will have a third person either full-time or part-time, depending upon the needs. And sometimes that third person's entire responsibility is to sort mail, believe it or not, good old fashioned mail, mail sorting, mail stuffing, mail forwarding, mail scanning, all of the different plans that we offer.
00:36:10 You know, whether it's electronic through sphere mail, which is becomes super, super popular and will continue to boom. So the community coordinator then, you know, kind of, you know, runs the front reception meeting rooms and does that along with the Community Manager and the Community. Manager works with the area manager, the managing partner on sales, staff management,
00:36:30 and doing all of the other things that aren't getting done by the others. So it's a tier there. And as I mentioned to you earlier when we were talking is clustering is important to us because of staffing, Can't haves without a cluster. Walnut Creek. Walnut Creek and go Oakland, San Francisco And they know all the operating procedures and they know how to greet members and yeah,
00:36:52 Yeah, we use Yard RQ everywhere, which is one of our most amazing trusted partners that have, we've been with them. I was gonna say right When those of you there in the industry that know Victor and Dale, Dale sold out and Victor's still with Yardi and was of the principles there, but no up and the Yardi, I was for everyone,
00:37:15 especially those of on end user side because we do have the same systems and processes in every location. You know, subtle differences, of course everything takes on a local flare. I think that's kind of also who we are creating a culture is that somebody might have a localized idea and they do it and they implement it and then, and then the area manager will get wind of it and the area,
00:37:36 or actually our partners and managing directors, managing partner has some equity. Managing director doesn't have equity at this time. So we have a couple of those as as our structure has evolved over the years, then they have their own group, right? And so they share best practices and we have a real sharing culture. I mean, you know, our core values,
00:37:54 we care, right? We care about everybody, we care about our employees and our partners and our vendors and our customers. But the team itself creates a culture of sharing and collaboration that it's like, hey, I've got a, a holiday flyer that we're gonna be closed on Thursday and Friday of Thanksgiving if you want use mine and just put your location or whatever your little subtle twist is.
00:38:16 Location, we'll close it, some will close it one, but we have some standardizations and they, so you don't have to reinvent it 20 times. And it doesn't come from the centralized corporate I, it's done more at the ground level, right? Some of that stuff. What is to go further? Yeah, go up a level and You go further with how we're structured and this evolved,
00:38:35 this didn't happen overnight. We have a separate finance team, we have a separate marketing team. So the marketing team has a certain number of dedicated staff that run our website. They run our pay per click. They work with our, any outsource partners on, you know, things they don't do. Like I think they set up the trust pilot, they work with Yelp,
00:38:54 they work Google and they work with Google and they work with Google and they still work with Google. Anyway, that's pretty much, pretty much the lifeblood of this industry for those of you that are aware of that. And that's fortunately an area that doesn't come across my desk very often. So I'm pretty excited about that. We have a dedicated IT team.
00:39:12 We have two dedicated IT people. One primarily focuses on high level, which is pelt in our IT Director. And I think everybody listening that's like their dream state to have an in-house IT guy who can just do all the things. And then there's a guy that is his assistant but really specializes on the voice side. For those of you that know or don't know,
00:39:34 CloudVO is our sister company and there's, it's a very fun intensive operation over there. And so he specializes in running that telecom solution along with the outsourced partners that they provide phone answering to that are not even the Pacific portfolio as well as the entire Pacific portfolio. So they're very busy up there. It's mostly headquartered in Sacramento, but given or even a little more decentralized that now we've got,
00:39:57 we've got totally remote technology and people can work from their homes and do that, but we still bring a small team in on a daily basis as best we can. It's a little bit better for management, but we found that we had to adjust, right? There were people that you could find human that was willing to do, wasn't willing to during covid.
00:40:13 That was obvious as covid has started to part us in its past form, we've been flexible with some continuing to do that. The labor markets are tight, everyone knows that. And so you've gotta pick your battles obviously on site in the centers. We need staff, right? Gotta have, that's What we do. Create hosp. The other thing that you and I are kicking around is what's the same or what's changed or something about looking back where's,
00:40:38 Well what's changed is hospitality. Back in the day people were just looking for a private little room to get out and yeah, it was fun to talk about the football game at the water cooler and that actually really was the water cooler back in the day with the five gallon bottle in it. I'm gonna date myself with eight track tapes and, but you know,
00:40:55 people really, I think, and especially now and moving forward, they really are re reengaging in the social side. There's some folks that have let that part of their life maybe struggle a little more or suffer a little more than, I don't wanna say, than they should have. It's just, you know, it happened and we provide some awesome, I mean we're providing events.
00:41:14 I I houses, you know, in the Walnut Creek location and they are doing 'em almost every other week. Something some bigger, some smaller. But I think it's interesting cuz I had even told my manager, Are we doing too many of these? I was gonna say, when does, when does the CFO jump in and wonder? She goes, you know what,
00:41:29 even if five people come and the next time 20 people come, those five people, it makes their day, makes their week and they look forward to it and they come and we can't time how often we're gonna have a lot of people in or a few people in because there's still this tremendous amount of flexibility and fluidity Yeah. Amongst the workforce as to when they're coming to the office and when it,
00:41:50 it's not Tuesday, Wednesdays and Thursdays are busy, it's really still hit and miss and it's not every day is busy or every day is slow and some locations busier than others and just like any portfolio or anything. So, you know, she said no, she said we're gonna keep doing it and, and they, you know, the good news about doing that,
00:42:07 they reuse things, right? They don't, it's not, and they don't cater in a bunch of, you know, they're really smart about how they, they drive the, the events with food and beverage and, and make sure things are resealable and obviously some things are perishable and bought for this specific event, but they try and gauge kind of what they'll need.
00:42:25 You shoulda come sooner And your annual football pool. Absolutely. Which can be done virtually. These things, I know these things go into an archive, but I lost last night's Thursday night football game. So frustrated, chose the, I always choose, you know, I almost always choose the home team on Thursdays, right? So short week on the road for the road team Sunday and they've only got three days.
00:42:48 And the Washington, it was an absolutely awful game. The NFL really needs to do better on Thursday nights. We could go down that rabbit hole and people would be like, I thought this was a flex like chat. And they're talking about Football, football and Football. Go 49ers check That. Okay, so marketing, finance, it, anything organization.
00:43:07 Yeah. So they sit on top and support the entire portfolio and in some cases, you know, they, they work remotely, they work, you know, they'll come into the staff and things like that. It obviously comes in a little bit more than marketing does onto the staff and, or excuse me, into the locations. But we, we evolved here.
00:43:22 And so I think you wanted me to sort of say, you know, for those that are struggling to figure out how to staff, when we first started Lauren was finance and you know, we had an accountant and you know, he ran the books and you, we got a bookkeeper how you didn't do books, he was too valuable as we were,
00:43:37 you know, getting a Startup going. So we had a bookkeeper and then we had a full-time bookkeeper, Mark the great mark. So who did marketing in the early days? Lauren. Okay. Lauren was the original keyword guru that put the Excel spreadsheets together with the keywords and figured all that out. So Lauren ran the finance early and the marketing early.
00:43:55 He still does. I run the finance more day to day now and month to month. And you know, we have weekly calls where he's in and he sees his reports and, and certainly as I always say, and I'm sure he'll listen to this, you know, I started have my annual audit in the first quarter of the year when we're doing tax returns.
00:44:10 And he goes sort of checks my work as sort of like, you know, he doesn't, he doesn't not look at it throughout the year. Don't get me wrong, you know, for those of you out there it's not that case. But he's allowed that to be something that I'm more responsible for. So I've got it, HR and finance that are IT and HR are really under me.
00:44:26 And then finance we share. But really I run day to day and he runs it. He's the official CFO of the, the company and both by education and by experience and knowledge, you know, that should be his role. So, and then as the ceo, he oversees marketing and then he oversees, you know, strategy, right? And he does most of the landlord negotiations he's in charge of because he's just an incredible negotiator.
00:44:47 He's an incredible visionary. And his background is being in the asset managers shoes, working for corporate America at Sun Microsystems and hp. When he ran real estate, he understood what things looked at from a or from a purely financial and non-emotional manner, what makes sense and what doesn't. And that's what drives deals. You know, some people, you know,
00:45:06 take your emotion out of a deal, put it on the table, it's a math problem that's driven by risk. It reward your ability, you know, what can you lose, what can you put in, what are you willing to put in and what are you willing to put in and never see again? That's called risk. And SO'S really good at that.
00:45:23 He drives that works obviously on ours. Presentations and and stuff like that to, well That's It. We evolve you I asked got this business desk. And that's the honest truth. That's how you know what goes on in your business is sometimes you start there And suddenly tell me about the thought process because you two are fiscally responsible and you refer to yourself as risk averse when you were on the edge of like,
00:45:53 when you're thinking about, okay, we, we need to add a marketing person or we need to add the IT person. Like are you, you know, so far into that pain that you can't take it anymore and there's budget for it? Or are you like getting a little out over your skis to make that higher and, and hope it's the right decision?
00:46:11 That's a good question, but I think that I, I answer that there has to be a budget. It has to, how do we pay for it? That's always part of the question, how do we pay for it? And the temptation in this business at a scale of 20, actually even a scale at five and maybe even three, and I know we're,
00:46:29 we're doing this for ourselves to, to catch up, but we're also sharing our knowledge here. The temptation is to say, well it's only, you know, a hundred dollars a month for each location, Right? Or it's only, yeah. And now we got 20 locations, so now it's only 300 a month to hire a new marketing person. Oh,
00:46:44 that's not that bad. The timeout, you know, be real, real careful about that strategy because it's been in our thinking, but you know, but no, it's like that's not how it works. There has to be a more, you know, we really need to drive, you know, more, more search engine optimization. Okay. You know,
00:47:03 do we have in-house talent that can do it? Yes, but they're spread thin. Okay, what does an outside partner look like? What does a part-time consultant look like? Like that does that as a specialty. Okay, well this is what that costs for this many hours or this much work or whatever. It's, and now really I can speak to this more on the IT side,
00:47:20 Felton used to be our outsourced IT partner, right? He used to work for a company that supported us, right? So right. So that was the, So then came the day when I had to call the owner of that company and say, Hey, I guess need to ask your permission, I'd like to hire felt in fulltime. And it was one,
00:47:40 it happened to be a client, it was one of locations that we had done a lot of work with and they, they understood and it was sort like, like this is a good move for him and then never be able to win-win. But that's it, you know, a lot. We've used a lot of outsource partners and then, you know,
00:47:54 bring in inhouse. And so I think that's the same way our marketing team evolved and the business tells you where the pressure points are, right? That's part of being a leader is understanding where your pressure points are. Your employees will give you feedback or you know, it's like, hey, we're buried. I think one of the things that Lauren and I are really proud of is we're really efficient.
00:48:14 I mean we have three finance people that run 20 locations in our investment company books and our do the cloud stuff. And it's like three and a half and stuff and, and you know, the, it is two people now. Part of that is tools. Part of that is having really, really, really good tools and really, really good processes and you know,
00:48:34 is a process non-emotional process, data driven ceo and he has set up a lot of the tools along the way. He continues to them, he continues to bring us ones. He's much better at that than I am. I'm more, you know, I think I'm a little more gregarious people person on some of our, of our journeys, but we work well together and we each have our strengths and skills,
00:48:55 but is very process driven and, and teaches all of us how to be process driven in our responsibilities. Made me, you know, much better coo understanding how to, otherwise you're just sticking your finger in the damn all the time, right? Is, But I think it's hard to be process driven, especially for the like entrepreneurial, you know, CEO that likes the big picture.
00:49:16 And that's one of the things I think I admire about your team is, you know, you've had some success. It could be tempting to, you know, kind of chase some squirrels or get a little too far out over your skis and you guys are really, really focused on like you 80 20 the heck outta your business, right? Like, you know what you need to focus on,
00:49:37 you put systems in place, you've got your weekly marketing and you, you focus, you really like your virtual office. Like that's big because you just relentlessly focus on growing it. And I think there are so many that that is like one of the things I always share, you know, your website as an example of look at these guys model, do what they do on the outside,
00:49:59 but on the inside you have metrics. You're tracking like everybody's looking at those numbers and trying to grow those numbers. Yeah, there's, We have weekly meetings for the functionals. The, it has a call, the finance has a call, marketing has a call, the area managers and are, you know, managing partners and managing directors. They work with their teams and I don't in that too much unless necessary.
00:50:24 So you let each silo work and then we have a, an extended executive management group meeting once a month and we get together and our Jacob, our from our finance team presents us a report a quarter or a report of a month, not report a quarter, sorry. And we work in occupancy, we work ons, we work on pricing. And when we're in those reports,
00:50:45 it is the time to really focus on any subtle shifts or adjustments and then we leave those with action items, right? We'll come back in four weeks with those action items and, and that's how you evolve pricing. That's how you involve evolve product and that's how you evolve process. It's like we've been doing this at this price, it's taking the demand of,
00:51:05 it's really picking up. And then, and then sometimes Ron will direct a handful of locations to manually track a certain task for a month or a week or whatever. It's, he wants to know and they'll do that and he collects that data and he goes through and he, and I remember there was one time where there was a manager that was complaining about the virtual office stuff and he's like,
00:51:26 Oh, that client's just so annoying and blah, blah, blah. And what we found out was when we had like three annoying clients and we had like 300 that we never even talked to. Right. Never hear from, Yeah, it's Okay. Sorry. The three, three people are yelling and screaming, deal with it. That's called life, right?
00:51:41 That should say baby, that's life. Not everybody's gonna be satisfied a hundred percent of the time, but if 2 97 of 'em are fine and sending you checks and getting services delivered to them, that's a, that's data that takes out the emotion. Yep, totally. Right. So the focus the systems and use that to try to take the emotion out to run the business.
00:52:03 And talk a little bit about, you know, you just mentioned your, so this was your annual, your pack day, which is Yeah. Get offsite and you also do quarterly meetings. Can you just talk like a little bit about how that plays into your culture? Yeah, so I'll start, I'll start with the quarterly and then I'll go up to the crescendo,
00:52:21 which is the pack day annually. So quarterly we get the team together and that's usually the managers, the managing partners and the functionals get together somewhere in, you know, in the region, in person. And we have an agenda and we'll have different topics and those topics will vary and there'll be training. But a lot of it, again, this comes from Lawrence's office,
00:52:43 when we're together, he wants us to collaborate, He wants us to break out into teams, He wants us to take advantage of being together and thinking, not just, not just one way listening, which to be honest, a lot of it now you can do on Zoom when it's just one way top down, talk, talk, talk. So it's a lot of,
00:52:57 that's breakout little, you know, break into groups of three or break into down a, you know, a scenario or something that we do. So those are the quarterly management meetings. And then of course you have lunch and you have social time and you get to see everybody, right? Everybody at the management level gets together and, and bond. And then in the fall,
00:53:14 close the office on Columbus last indigenous, indigenous people day. And we bring everybody together to an event and we fly, you know, Vegas flew in and Reno drives over the hill and everybody gets together. We close the offices. There is no mail that day and we have an event. And this year, as we started off at the top of the podcast,
00:53:35 we were in the Livermore wine country and we had a presentation that Lauren and the whole team put, you know, it's just, I mean it was almost a gig file for this PowerPoint. Super fun. And we share everything we did looking back and we share everything we see moving forward and we celebrate our wins and we celebrate our new locations and we celebrate our people and we celebrate all the,
00:53:56 you know, the things that we've done. And, and really what we do is we also inform, you know, you work in downtown Sacramento and you don't really know what the entire vision of the company is or you don't really get a feel for it. And so we go through the presentation that starts off in the morning around nine 30 and it goes till just before noon.
00:54:13 And you know, when we end by letting everybody know we care, right? That's our core value is we care and we try to not talk it once a year. We try to live it and walk it. And really I think our employees and our culture will tell you whether or not that's been successful. And you've been part of us back in our working together days.
00:54:31 And, and I think you felt it when you were, you were there and I feel pretty good about it, but really it's, it's a, it's a case of if you run into people that work for us, you have to ask them. I don't think I can, I don't think it's coming to my office. Yeah, we ourselves. But you know,
00:54:44 we've had, I think relative to the industry, we've had minimal turnover. We have people stay with us a pretty long time and we've had people return to us and more than one, we have many antidotes. I love that. And we also have, we also have siblings that work for us and we have parents and children that work for us. So I think that speaks pretty highly of,
00:55:03 if you worked in a toxic environment, I don't think you'd bring your kid into it. And if you worked in a toxic environment, I don't think you'd bring your sibling into it unless you didn't like your sibling and you get your kid in there and then you're gonna bail out. But that's not been the case. So, Yeah. Well anyway, it's A huge commitment,
00:55:17 right? It's a huge time commitment for the manage. Yeah, it's huge time and money. It's an investment that we feel pays. Pack day is, is a massive investment in time. The amount of hours that go into the presentation and the preparation and then the capital that it takes to put it on it is so rewarding to have everybody in the room and talking and meeting and you know,
00:55:37 it gets to meet people they haven't seen in marketing especially cuz they don't get out as much. They get to meet everybody. All these people that you've emailed and zoomed with, right there you are. And as we mentioned, we did this, you knows, palette everybody's painting, sitting next to each other, drinking a little bit of wine, having a good time,
00:55:52 just really enjoying and celebrating, you know, the opportunity to be together and be, you know, it's, we make work better and making work better is making work with people and having a serendipity and, and all that. So yeah. And feeling a part of something bigger. One other thing I wanna interject in Yeah. I meant to say earlier that I was just about to say it in that last segment is that you were talking about the investment impact day when we first talked about like Lauren and I and you and I and everything like this.
00:56:21 I gotta tell everybody out there, make the investment to go to the industry conferences, Global Works. I met Lauren at the Global Workspace Association right after nine 11 in September of is when we met. We dated for two years. He moved, he was just getting outta Microsystems. He bought a, a business that housed foreign exchange students in San Francisco.
00:56:46 And so he moved into the San Mateo location, we got to know and we looked at a bunch of deals and we toured around and Wait, did own did you run the San Mateo? Was it your, you ran the first I had a couple locations prior to partnering with, That's What I was trying to remember about your Yeah. Your origin. Yeah,
00:56:59 I was, I was in the business, you know, seven, eight years before that, just through two locations and through.com, honestly. But I don't think I was very genius and it was very economically lucrative to be in flex space and during the dotcom boom, people just would pay almost anything for space. But then we went through the.com pullback and,
00:57:18 and it was time to regroup and create a real business in my opinion. I mean, we had a real business before, but it, it hadn't, it was way out of equilibrium. And that goes back to what I was saying about buying long and selling short while I buying long on 30 bucks a foot. The market A little lucky. Yeah,
00:57:32 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All good. Sometimes he a little lucky, but you know, I've been through the other cycles too. Okay, So what was Laurent doing at the conference? He was evaluating the business. He had already toured us and was tell, you know, had told us he might want an office space. When I went to his home in his basement,
00:57:47 he has office down in his basement in the, in the Bay area, which isn't, not everybody has basements in the Bay Area, but his house was on a hill. So Say, I don't know anyone too much Detail. But anyway, he had a map, he had a map at the San Francisco Bay area on the wall and he had all these dots,
00:58:00 every hq, every Regis, every in. He'd been everywhere. So he had done his research, right? He had gone out and he had gone all the way around to every location to really understand the flex market. And when he was at Sun Microsystems, he had brought, you'd have to ask him exactly what the name of the program was, but basically working in the more remote locations and,
00:58:19 and being able to be flexible. And so he was one of the originators of that. And then it was time, you know, son went through, its, its transition in the oh one and then into the early two thousands. Lauren escaped that and he got tired of, I don't words in his mouth, but my recollection is he was tired of traveling,
00:58:36 missing his kids' soccer games and always being on an airplane. And he wanted to, you know, an entrepreneurial and he wanted to give it a shot. And so having come from running my locations earlier in my career and then going through the.com bust and realizing there were some great opportunities out there to stay in this business, I realized that really to do what I needed to do to make a career of it versus just,
00:59:00 you know, sort of an early, you know, dabbling in it early was I needed somebody with a different skill set and happened to find Lauren who had the opposite skill. Now come to find out, we're two youngest children. So early on we had our little quas And Both took on our way and he was more used to working at nine o'clock at night than I was.
00:59:17 I I was the entrepreneurial, but I wasn't gonna work 20 hours a day, day. Just those of you that know me just know that's part of my personality. So, but we found that balance. We worked through the earlier years and found success and found our formula and, and found our niche and, and the rest is history. It's been an incredible,
00:59:34 incredible journey and I really look forward to, So you Met, just to finish, continue this, make sure we don't leave this out. You met Lauren at the GWA conference and then in 2001 and then I must have met you at Juicy in 2012, Somewhere in there. I was gonna finish up on that. Thought that that's how you and I met.
00:59:52 I mean we would know each other now anyway just due to the industry. But that was, not only did we meet Totally not the same. I mean we would know, we were Standing in the back of the room observing and you just looked at me and walked right up, put your hand out and said I'm Jamie Russo. Well I think Liz was trying to do some sort of yoga session or something like way back in the day and you and I were like,
01:00:12 Yeah, okay, that might have been part of it. But I was in the back of the room going, I dunno if this is totally my cup of tea, but I'm having fun. Anyway. Yeah. Was so serious. Were we in Austin, Texas? That was so fun. No, we were in Kansas City that met you in Kansas City.
01:00:28 Really? I thought it was Kansas City. It might've been. I mean it was my first one I think. Oh, maybe it was, I don't remember. I can never Remember either it was one or it was my first or second one. I don't remember which one. Anyway. No, that's, And then as you remember when you were from Chicago,
01:00:43 you had just moved to the Bay Area. Your husband had a biotech job out there. Yeah. And I knew no one, You might have been the first, Wait A minute, wait a minute, you gotta meet my partners, you gotta meet my, my people. I brought you back and you met Becky and Lauren and next thing we know doing in Space Palo Alto right there with in the same facility.
01:00:59 So that was a great journey and that was a great run. And as we both know, that lease ended right? As Covid was getting going and unfortunately we had to close that down. But in, in some respects, the lease ending was probably a blessing with respect to, you know, what, what that particular market was. It's been a wild ride.
01:01:15 Exactly. Yep. Exactly. So, yeah. Yeah. So I mean both Con, both industry conferences, Juicy and gwa, each of the respective groups, they are different. There are some similarities, but what's the same is the ability to network with people that are trying to learn and share. And then, you know, I've always, you know,
01:01:34 more so lately I've, I've felt like I've give back more than I, you know, but I still get a lot out of it. I still, there's still some incredible relationships and, and so, so much fun. But to think that it equal dollars and cents and, and I talk to some people that just say, Well I just couldn't justify it.
01:01:49 Well if, I mean, there's one thing, if you truly can't afford it, I get, you know, there's priorities in life where the, where the dollars have to go. I get that. But if you reach a point where there, there are some discretionary resources available and you're really contemplating, I can't encourage you enough to go network, learn others.
01:02:04 And these will be people that you'll call and these will be people that you'll potentially partner with. These will be people that will turn you on to other people, whether it's a broker, a landlord, a yeah, a vendor or something that will help you in your business journey. And the other thing, after all these years, I dunno if there's an industry with better people,
01:02:23 I dunno what it's about. Our little, our little space, our little space in this slice of this great world that we all are walking this journey in. But there's something about flex people that they're just cool, They're just really good people, They're super cool and super fun and still super smart and super motivated and all the, you know, all the things you want.
01:02:42 Agreed. Yeah. So, okay, we're gonna end it there. I have to go to another podcast, Scott, we're gonna have to have you back on. I have many other topics to dig into or Keith, This was so fun. I, I think for about a year and a half I just was like in survival mode dealing with the fires at the,
01:02:59 at the house, meaning sort of like in our business. Yeah. And all the energies and zooms with landlords and zooms with employees and zooms with all the different outside sources that we had to consult with as we navigated through that. And now, now, honestly, I just like, I have a little bounce in my step and it's super, super,
01:03:14 It was so great to see everybody, the conference in Texas, the conference. So great to do this with you and would love to, again anytime soon. Certainly let's not go seven years. I mean that's, let's Not embarrass years. Well that's Embarrassing for both of Us. Totally. And because you guys run an incredible shop and you have so much to give.
01:03:32 And so I appreciate, cuz I know even if you have a little bounce in your step and feel like, you know, picking your head up and giving back, you know that that's what you're doing. And, and thank you for sharing your experience, your insight, very much appreciated. You know, if people reach out to you to find me,
01:03:46 you know, you can always turn onto me and I'll share whatever I Can. I'll send them along. Take Care. Thank you for listening to today's episode. 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,
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