305. Elevating Furniture Procurement for Coworking Spaces with Lance Amato
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TRANSCRIPTION
305. Elevating Furniture Procurement for Coworking Spaces with Lance Amato
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,"
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. Thank you for joining me. If you are new to the podcast, we're so happy to have you here. We are in the early three hundreds,"
00:00:58,"so you have your work cut out for you if you're gonna binge listen some of our episodes. I am also the C e O of Everything Coworking. I help operators launch and operate successful Coworking spaces. And this is what this podcast is all about. And today we are talking about a topic that can be quite challenging if you're launching a Coworking space. It is about furniture procurement."
00:01:23,"Furniture is tricky. It is a huge part of the Startup budget. It has to be attractive, it has to be comfortable. We'd like it to be sustainable and sometimes that can be a hard bar to achieve. So I had been referred to today's guest, Lance through a friend of mine who's obsessed with Coworking and used to work for Gensler and has a lot of big design background."
00:01:50,"And she said, Hey, you know, there's a bunch of ex WeWork guys who are working on this new company. I think you should check it out. It's really interesting. So I did, and then I kind of got distracted and Lance had to poke me a couple times and we finally reconnected at Juicy. But I had reached out to him before Juicy because I run the Coworking Startup School."
00:02:11,"So I work with operators all the time who are buying furniture, and I always encourage them to look for gently used commercial furniture. And there's a ton of it out there right now. Even folks in smaller markets are finding great furniture. If you're willing to travel to the closest big city you can find gently used commercial furniture that is still in great shape,"
00:02:36,"has a lot of life left in it, it's much higher quality than you might get if you budgeted for brand new and you're saving it from going into the landfill, which is super, super important. So there's a lot of reasons why Lance's team created Canoa Supply. Sustainability is one of them. Ease of design. It's not just a place where you can find secondhand furniture."
00:02:59,"Lance articulates it much more clearly than I do. So don't think of your kind of super unsexy local furniture liquidator. We have a bunch of those in the Bay Area. Check out their website. It is a marketplace, but it's also a platform for design. It can simplify design work for a design team. It can help them source. They have a curated marketplace full of designers."
00:03:24,"Some of it is used furniture and some of it's new furniture that falls into their criteria for, you know, being sustainably produced. So he shares the story, he tells the story much better than I do. But given that furniture is such an important aspect of creating a physical space and helping us to design what we want people to accomplish in our space,"
00:03:47,"right? If we want people to collaborate, furniture plays a big role in in that the settings that we create, the vibe we create. If we wanna host event space, then that requires different furniture. So furniture plays a big role in terms of making our space functional and also giving it the feel that we want people to experience when they come. So I think this is an important episode."
00:04:09,"Lance is awesome. He's really interesting, has a great background. He did a lot of WeWork locations. He's an architect by training and obviously has a big why behind what he's creating. So before I turn you over to Lance, I wanna make sure you know I am Giovanni's co-host for the Flex Uncensored podcast. If you're not listening to that yet, we are hosting a webinar on June 9th."
00:04:31,"Three things, landlords and operators should know before they start negotiating. A creative deal structure for a Coworking space. Creative deals, non-traditional deals, management agreements, joint ventures, lots of terms for what's happening out there. More popular than ever post pandemic. And because then everything that's happening in the office economy today. So landlords are being approached by big operators and presented with opportunities and they're researching cuz they wanna know what their options are and they wanna understand,"
00:05:03,"you know, what makes sense for them. Do they wanna partner with a public company? Would they prefer to partner with a local operator? How do those agreements work? What do those relationships look like? So we are gonna talk about the big three things we think both operators and landlords should know before they start negotiating these deals. So join us on June 9th."
00:05:24,"You can register for your spot at Everything Coworking dot com slash flex. We'll see you there. I am here with Lance Amato, who is the head of sales at Canoa. He's also a registered architect and a former WeWork employee. Lance, thanks for joining me today. Oh, Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I should have asked you,"
00:05:46,"did I get all those pronunciations correct? You got almost everything correct. I actually was a consultant for WeWork. I never actually worked at WeWork. Oh, Interesting. Yeah, They have tried to hire me a couple times over the course my tenure there, but never actually took the job. How long did you work with them? Since 2013. Okay."
00:06:06,"Yeah, a long Time. Yeah. They were a small, small group. They had six locations. Wow. And they were planning for massive expansion at that point. Yeah, it was. It was an incredible kind of rollercoaster ride. I got on a plane and flew across the United States almost every single week. Multi-city locations too. It was, it was really exciting."
00:06:25,"I learned a ton about how to build and design nationally that the various pieces of the various cities we have across the United States and it was a great experience overall. I grew with that group. It was wonderful. Wait, are you gonna do anything with that? You've sort of like diverged, which we'll talk about in a minute, but I Yeah, I feel like there's a whole lot of design expertise living in your brain."
00:06:49,"Is it just gonna stay there? No. Okay. Hopefully not. I certainly am an advisor to a couple of of colleagues out there. Okay. And I would say that I lent my expertise to a couple of things that we did here at canoa, which has been great. Cool. Okay. Tell us about canoa. That's what we're here to talk about."
00:07:08,"Canoa. I can't do a 32nd, 32nd elevator pitch, but I'd love to try. Okay. In effect is a marketplace tool. It's a free to subscribe, free to access digital tool structured in such a way that you'd have in comparative residential marketplaces like a West Elm or a CB two. But it's constructed and configured for commercial furnishings. Not only workplace,"
00:07:34,"but commercial furnishings. It could be hospitality, it could be a variety of degrees of retail, things of that nature. You go online, you go through a catalog of goods, you click to add to cart and you buy it as you would for your own house, furnishing your own house. The unique and interesting spin because of the story I'll get into is that we encourage every subscriber to propose and list their own furniture,"
00:08:02,"furnitures and furniture furnishings and furniture to be sold on resell as well. So similar to a Facebook marketplace, you can list your assets for a second life, a second sale, and find another home anywhere else in the United States. Okay. Yeah, that was probably a minute, but not bad. It was close. Yeah, it was close. Yeah,"
00:08:22,"Totally. Okay. So yes, tell us the origin story. What was the problem? What was the opportunity? Why did Canoa come to be and when did it start? Well, I'd say it started in 1900 when we started making furniture. No, it actually, it's, I would say several of us through the experience of designing, specifying, or curing,"
00:08:46,"installing, building, learned a lot of hard ways of, of what it took to get to that. The aspect of creating an environment, you know, curating images, presenting it, then getting prices to learn it's too expensive or too long to then go back to the drawing board to then represent it, to then do it over again, to then actually buy it."
00:09:07,"It was just a very lengthy process and it just transferred so many hands in that capacity. Like once it's installed, you don't know what you have after day one. It just kinda sits there. Your record of your product listing, it resides in a PDF on someone's computer somewhere or on a Google sheet, which is where most of these things predominantly sit."
00:09:26,"So in effect, when people are, have to either move or reinvent their real estate, they don't have a record of what they have. And inevitably the stuff that actually sits there that exists in that space is discarded trashed, or it's to the very last moment, people have to decide what they have to do. We learned this lesson the hard way while,"
00:09:46,"and the whole team here planning for the WeWork expansion, but also the fact it's commonplace in the architectural interior design community. We design for day one, but what happens after day one, our industry usually results going all the way back and starting over again at day one. And how many spaces have you, I or anyone else listened to this walkthrough that's already fully furnished,"
00:10:07,"has been sitting, collecting dust for one month, one year, and inevitably it just goes to trash again. So that kind of burden, that weight fell on many shoulders across the team here. And we all kind of had our trigger moments. I had one of my experiences when I learned about the wastefulness of, of I'd say the construction industry of how we build and demolish things so quickly."
00:10:29,"And you know, from others it we're seeing the products they specified sitting on the streets in Los Angeles. It was, we all kind of came to this point through various experiences, but coming together really we wanted to do something a little bit different and really try to provide value across the whole commercial sector. The interesting thing in this whole thing here is that we live in,"
00:10:51,"predominantly live in big cities, right? And we're so used to a certain means and methods of buying things. So here in New York you go through a certain process of specification to design to then outsourcing to get someone to buy it, then getting installed. But that doesn't happen everywhere. People buy online across the United States. And predominantly the things you can buy online,"
00:11:15,"not always, but many a times the things you buy online, the material that's made that the resourcefulness, we call it fast furniture a lot of times it does tend to fall apart quite often, but that's the only availability that many of these people have. So that's the only resource they can go to. So we kind of found a couple of those challenges and tied 'em together into this more circular economy based digital marketplace is what we have."
00:11:39,"Okay. I love it. Did you officially start pre pandemic? Unofficially, lots of conversations happened, but I'd say the company like really kicked off June 1st, 2020. That's when everyone kind of said, Hey, this is happening. Let's go June 1st, 2020 if you, okay. The history straight was during covid. Yeah. So it was, it was, I would say people always tend to say it's either the bravest of the stupidest thing you can do to kick this off."
00:12:09,"But I would say great startups always start in time to challenge. And that it did. We, we invested a whole, whole bunch of time, many, many months doing research and studies understanding what people were, were thinking where their head was at during, during this, this whole time. And, and one of my kind of core responsibilities was research and study for customers what they were doing,"
00:12:34,"what they had for records, what they were planning to do. And, and many people didn't know what to do at that time. They still don't, to be honest. But one consistent factor was that no one knew what they had. And if no one knows, if you don't know what you have, what's gonna happen when you have to apply and reinvent yourself."
00:12:53,"And that, that question just resided and and reacted on it. Yeah. Super interesting. In the pandemic, I mean obviously you've been thinking about this problem for a long time and then the pandemic happened and since then there's so much commercial office furniture. Yep. Or I, I say office and I know you're, you go beyond the office, I'll probably skew towards office cuz that's what I know."
00:13:15,"But has, it's become such an intense problem because there's so much supply. It has been, yeah. Yeah. It's been an interesting conversation almost on a daily basis of many large organization workplace teams trying to evaluate truly what we're gonna do with real estate. Many portfolios are consolidating and they struggle to find sustainable solutions to offload a lot of the products they bought,"
00:13:42,"not only a year prior to Covid being triggered, right. But then I see the excitement of this audience. I see the excitement of Coworking and the applications of what this could be to activate ground floor retail or taking over, I'd say empty spaces or subleases, things like that. And the one thing that got to me, and actually that got me to you literally June 1st, 2020,"
00:14:07,"was the anticipation of what this model of Coworking could be as a solution for part of this real estate problem that we have. And through this excitement of expansion, especially now, how are they buying stuff and what are they doing? I mean, the speed and pace that that comes to having to build and act so fast in these markets. And also in the fact the price points that are very tight with wallets."
00:14:32,"What are they doing? Are they going with these long-term processes of design to buy to solution? Probably not. They need to activate their spaces as quickly as possible to encourage community to then get more users and people to their space. So it's been an interesting kind of dynamic of seeing these organizations who have the supply of, of product. And then there's a demand side of it as well,"
00:14:57,"both for pre-owned as well as new product as well. It's been really interesting. Okay. So tell me, give me a, you know, a use case for a co-working space operator. What are they doing on your site? Okay, So there's a lot of different capabilities that could be done on our platform, but the simplest put, what we want to do and bring to is we want operators as well as their design teams to design on a platform,"
00:15:22,"to use our tools to be able to budget and source and specify their entire environment in such a level of detail that they know literally the day that they're designing it, how much they're gonna be spending and when it's gonna get there. And then doing, so you're kind of circumventing the very long term, I wouldn't say hassle, but the, the tenuous time of it takes to getting like presentations,"
00:15:47,"images to list, to go out there to get it curated and priced to come back, no too expensive. And then waiting the lead times, et cetera, et cetera. We want to provide all those data points and we can literally, the day you're designing it and then procure it, proceed buy and then installed. And then when you're done with it,"
00:16:04,"as it happens a lot in this case, list it to sell to another customer who may buy it. I tend to ramble on these things a little bit too much, but I will say it has been proven and we have done already a case where a Coworking operator had designed a beautiful space. That space was vacated. We sold half their assets to other co-working operators across the United States."
00:16:28,"And they have value in that because they're getting some money back. In that case, I want to interrupt you for a minute. With a special offer, if you are an operator that is getting ready to launch or your space is less than a year old and less than 200 members, office r and d is piloting a program called Flex Startup program, which allows you to save 50% on your first year with office r and d Flex to help you grow your Coworking space."
00:16:59,"As many of you know, I run programs that help operators launch. I run mastermind programs for operators that are in business and a Community Manager program. And we have lots of members that love using r and d office r and d. It's kind of an all-in-one platform that has fantastic analytics, meeting room management, lots of integrations, all the things as I like to say."
00:17:25,"So it's a fan favorite of the Everything Coworking program members. So I'm excited that you get a chance to kind of get started with it at a discounted rate. So 50% off of your first year, you can learn more about the offer and sign up for a demo by going to Everything Coworking dot com slash O R N d, that's Everything Coworking dot com slash O R N d."
00:17:52,"We'll also throw that link in the show notes. So if you open your podcast app, you can grab the link right there. Yeah. We don't want them to go out of business if that's what happened. Right, Right, right, right, right. But when it does, okay, so I'm looking at your site and you have, wait,"
00:18:09,"what do you call them? Environments? We have collections, we have kits, Yeah. So like if I go on here, ready to use templates, small lounge before, am I picking that template and then plugging in actual products that you have in your marketplace? No, that's a good question. So it's an neither or case we wanna empower anyone that's able to come on the platform to be in effect a designer we have pre-existing."
00:18:33,"Is that possible? It certainly could be. Okay. I mean, you design your own, your own house. I'm sure you've curated and bought your chair. I'll tell you, I don't design my own house. Okay. Well, not A designer. I would say that if you're buying a task chair or even even a chair for yourself, you're doing some,"
00:18:49,"I can figure Out my own nice Steelcase chair with the custom color for the seat. There you go. I'm proud of that. But about it, We, we want to provide the tools for anyone to be a designer of some capacity. We, we fully know that there are people that have degree of experience when it comes to that. We have prepopulated kits for that type of of approach."
00:19:10,"Some people have difficulty just kind of assorting having the assortments of like a, a rug compared to a sofa, to a side table, things like that. So to, to help kind of ease that burden, that concern, we have these preset hits. That does not mean that design teams who are encouraged to, to bring their own brand. Right."
00:19:29,"Their own kind of custom environments that help encourage community. Yep. They can also come to our site, upload their specs, and we assist with that as well. Yeah. Okay. We do have some guidelines though, in terms of our mission when it comes down to that we don't promote either knockoffs because we would never sell knockoffs on our, our our resell process."
00:19:52,"And generally we don't like to dabble in products or help with that. That will fall apart very quickly. Usually very economic name, brand residential type stuff. We don't like to do that because we wouldn't really propose that on our own platform. Yep. Got it. Okay. Like IKEA is Ike, does IKEA fall on that? You said That word?"
00:20:12,"I'm not gonna name brand. Okay. So, so, but if you kind of get my drift there, but Yes, well, I think it's helpful to the audience because, you know, just in thinking about the trade-offs, I mean, you know, to your point, commercial furniture, you know, I, so I had my Coworking space in Palo Alto for seven years and then it closed in June of 2020."
00:20:32,"So same, my lease was expiring, so it was going to close anyway, but the commercial furniture was still like, almost like day one. I mean, it was really intact. Right. You know, you did a good job at, you know, clean, you know, cleaning the chairs and, and all that good stuff every, every so often,"
00:20:49,"but it lasts. So, but at the I Yes. I don't wanna talk about where all the furniture went, the story you're trying to avoid in doing it. So, okay. So somebody who understands what they wanna create out of the space and the types of settings they wanna create can go in here, do their design piece together, the space and plug in product."
00:21:11,"Yeah. In corporate. Okay. We're Trying our best to support the designer and meet them to a point where we're not trying to reinvent their entire workflow, but trying, trying to promote and accelerate that as well. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. No, you know, I help operators start spaces, which is why I'd reached out with you again. So we have to give a shout out to our mutual friend,"
00:21:28,"Brittany Whitley, who Yes. Had told me at the very beginning. She's like, there's these ex WeWork guys doing some very interesting things. You have to meet them. And she sent me their, your stuff and then, then I circled back to it because I help, you know, and operators, new operators are always trying to figure out this whole process."
00:21:44,"Exactly. How do you furnish the space? How do you know what you want? How do you in the lead time, right? And how do I know if an office is gonna be set for one person or four people? And then if I, if, you know, how do I manage that demand with the ability to get furniture? And it's a complicated process to your point."
00:22:00,"It's, yeah. And then some folks wanna, so I'm a, I I, it's super interesting. I'm a big fan. I think most Coworking spaces should have a professional designer involved because I think this is a personal bias. I think the bar is quite high today for experience. I agree with you. Yeah. So I think if I have a very nice home office,"
00:22:20,"which was designed on, there's two of them, Modsy. Okay. Do you know about modsy? I do. Yeah. I mean, they went outta business. I was like devastated. Super interesting. So they picked the paint colors and they give you, I mean, it's not the same and it's, but they Right, they, they let you literally buy what's in the design,"
00:22:41,"like point click and the cart and order the room, right. Because I kind of know what I want, but I can't get the colors right and all the things. Right. And then I used Haven Leaf for a couple of other rooms after, after Mazi went under and they don't do commercial, but, but Right. It's a nice way to get involved in the design process and make it's pretty efficient."
00:22:58,"I mean, they would design and say same thing. It's probably sort of like a, I don't know, I love the kit of parts idea because I do think there are settings that just make a lot of sense in a more typical Coworking space and sort of that's what you're kind of providing. Okay. And then the environmental piece. So let's talk about,"
00:23:15,"you know, sort of the circular economy. So you're, we talked about this a little bit at Juicy, so it can be really expensive to move furniture around, but the value proposition is partly that you can buy really great furniture that's stylish and durable and the shipping costs may be, or the cost of paying you still may get a better deal even when you're paying for shipping to move it around,"
00:23:40,"right? Yeah. Right. Absolutely. One of the interesting things we, we see from buyers on platform is they're certainly like drawn by the very discounted price of this, these, you know, designer products. Yeah. The shipping always has to be included. And I always pre-warn people that that shipping is traditionally something that, that is higher than, than normal because it traditionally is not flat packed and it's not coming in in kind of a concise truckload."
00:24:05,"But I will say that every single time, it still is a better value than shipping something new and waiting that long to get it. It's a time. And also I'd say a value, I have been looking for this type of solution for a while and there are a couple of like smaller, like kind of more local people doing this here and there."
00:24:23,"And for my Palo Alto space, we did do, we added offices at some point and I got everything secondhand from one of the kind of local sites. And same thing, the shipping was like, ouch. But I got fantastic product, almost brand new, you know, that was, yeah, I don't know what the tur like Right. Circulated at the time."
00:24:41,"It got like, liquidators is sort of the traditional Sure, yeah. Right. Like platform. But going into those places is like yucky. It's like a yucky experience and it's not well merchandised and you can't see it in context. So your platform is really kind of just really modernizing that. Like what do you do with furniture? How do you see it?"
00:24:59,"You know, you're creating, I mean, I haven't looked at the actual product inventory on here. I will say you're definitely born into your point here and one of the biggest challenges, and there, there's certainly other people doing this type of approach and we encourage every colleague and company doing this. We, we feel more of a partnership and alignment to promote this than necessarily a competition against it."
00:25:19,"But I'll say based Sort of, Yeah, the mission part of it is what drove us to do what we're doing. I will say that people have been doing this for a very long time, to your point, to have people go and see like a dusty warehouse photo or an installed photo of when it was done before, you know, six months ago."
00:25:39,"It's, it's not curated to such a degree that's, it's enticing for a designer or an end user wanted to get it. Like, so you know, you're sending, hey, there's this chair and here's a, a terrible photo of it and I got it site when I was walking through. Do you want it? And you're like, I don't really know to model in such a way where it's structured and actually even like built in these kits pre-owned and a balanced of sustainable new products into something that is,"
00:26:03,"is unique. It's curated, it's designed for your type of style. That's what we're going for. We're kind of blending it together into one. So typically a new space will, right. Either they have a, an in-house, not very many people have an in-house design teams, a few right. The bigger brands. But as you know, this is outside of WeWork."
00:26:23,"This is a hugely fragmented business. Yes, yes. Industry. Yeah. I mean, lots and lots of independent locally. So, you know, the typical approach is to go work with a furniture dealer. So compare, compare to a furniture dealer in terms of like, what am I accomplishing with your platform versus what I would do with a traditional furniture dealer."
00:26:45,"I love it. Excellent question. So I have so many colleagues and friends that are furniture dealers, and when I started doing this, they can me go, what are you doing? Why, what are you, what are you doing? What are you doing? And I I I'm gonna make a t-shirt pretty soon and, and I gonna say friend,"
00:27:00,"not foe. Like I have to walk in and say friend net foe. And even your questioning, why are you friend net foe here? Here's the reality of it, is that we proposition here, we're, we're an order based organization. You come online, you buy in a marketplace. This is a marketplace function. We are not a service-based business,"
00:27:16,"which means we're not going to arrive at your site on your weekly meeting and attend those things. Dealerships do. And by the way, we work with dealers to provide that, that degree. There are things you find in a marketplace that we can provide exclusively. I ideally are, are inventory and it's in support of dealerships that help service that for the project orders and projects."
00:27:39,"Two very different things. Mm. So when it comes to the big ones, the multi-million dollar jobs, you're gonna want someone there on site. And that's when we call up our partners across the United States and say, this is we, they want a service. This is what we're gonna do. This is what we can provide, this is what you can provide."
00:27:55,"Let's provide that service together. Alternatively, sometimes you just want to get a flip of a conference room like it Quick. Exactly. Right. You're like, I don't want to, I can't go through this six month process. I just want a conference room. You're gonna buy that. And to reality, like, and I'm, I'm not gonna put my words in their mouth,"
00:28:13,"they that, that's a very small project for a service-based organization. Right. So this is like this balance between the two. And we are tending to find our partners that are dealers utilize the technology of the kits and the pre-owned for the smaller orders because the resources it takes to make that, the manual process, it just takes too long. Way too long to do."
00:28:36,"Yeah. So, right. Yeah. I always do the friend nafo scenario and people tend to laugh, which is No, I mean that's kind of what I was go is like, is this, yeah, is it like directly competitive and it's not necessarily, and or, and it may be that right. Some right order. I love those sort of order versus project to some extent,"
00:28:55,"right? Yeah. Like, like my use case. Yeah. Yeah. We put in a bunch of new offices and I just wanted, I knew what I wanted. It was very clear and it needed to sort of match what I already had and I just wanted to make it happen. And quickly we did a, and same thing, we did a conference room like the me,"
00:29:09,"you know, media setup. Okay. So delivery look like, you know, speaking of service, does this come on a pallet and I have to carry it into the office? Or is there, yeah, what does that look like? So we have to have the capabilities to do delivery and installation just because we promote the acquisition and relocation from one point to the next of pre-owned,"
00:29:29,"right? So we have across the United States third party installers that we work with. In addition to that, we also have our own group of site represent representation from canoa that manages the install. So you can come online, you can put to cart, if it's small order, you can just do a drop ship right to the doorstep or the loading dock or whatever is necessary."
00:29:51,"If it's a bigger order and you feel uncomfortable doing it, we do provide delivery and install. Okay. 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 scene secrets to opening a Coworking space. If you're working on opening a Coworking space,"
00:30:14,"I wanna 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, you can register at Everything Coworking dot com slash masterclass. If you already have a Coworking space, I wanna 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."
00:30:46,"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 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."
00:31:15,"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 Manager can work through any challenges that they're having or opportunities get ideas from other Community managers, build their own peer network. We also have a private Slack group for the group. So if you're interested in learning more,"
00:31:40,"you can go to Everything Coworking dot com slash Community. Manager, you still remember when I opened my Palo Alto space, I ordered popin filing cabinets. Yeah. And I don't know if I didn't think about it or what, but they just showed up and like the driver couldn't bring them inside. So yeah, pallets of them and I one, but,"
00:32:06,"and filing cabinets are so awkward. Oh, I know. Like, Did I have a dolly? I can't, like there was some like real problem. I was so tired I had to take a nap in the conference room. Like there was nobody, I can't think if there, there must've been no members. I went into the conference room, closed the door,"
00:32:22,"and slept on the floor. I couldn't drive home. I was so tired with think that's popping filing. I'm sure you're not alone too. I'm sure everyone has proudly experienced that once or twice Those memories of, okay. So, and does sort of the reverse happen if I have furniture that I wanna sell on the marketplace, what does that look like?"
00:32:43,"We have a fairly standard upload process. We give you just a template to upload, take a photo of, of the actual product, fill out a couple of points of information. There's usually like four or five points we ask for and more specifically ensure the condition of the product because it is at a pre-owned, it then goes through our system for some qualification to verify all information's correct."
00:33:07,"It fulfills certain guidelines that we need. I e you know, knockoff, like I was mentioned before, that residential grade, it doesn't hit those points. It then gets uploaded. You set a price and then gets uploaded and on our marketplace. Okay. So what is the typical sort of like, I don't know, percentage of original value? I,"
00:33:27,"I can't remember what I Was, that's a good question. Recently, I think it was Kane. Wilmot was talking about like furniture is what one of those things that has a is can be really expensive and then commercial furniture drops to like zero once you take possession of it because you, it's there's like right, no way to reuse it or resell it,"
00:33:47,"which you're trying to combat. But what does, what that value ideally look like on your plate? Oh, oh boy. I don't give You the hard Questions. No, no, no. I mean I know the answer but I technically cannot say it. Oh, okay. Right. Or else I can't set the price on it, but I'll say at this Word word an answer for me."
00:34:04,"However you, or how, how do you guys think about that problem or You know, I will say we've had people that have listed the sale of products at nearly face value because it is a classic and I would say that's a great deal. But I would also say that those tend not to move because there's so much competition out there that again, I've had people that have listed it,"
00:34:27,"you know, dirt cheap that have moved substantially fast because that's the price and you're getting a deal out of it. Yeah. If you are willing to list stuff for sale, I will say that something is better than nothing. And the other alternative plan B is getting nothing for it. So, and Putting it in. Yeah. Which is, I'm sure that's one of the pain points."
00:34:46,"Like so painful to just think about all that furniture, you know, I mean you can try a liquidator or, but will a liquidator even I, I don't know, there's gotta be some Liquidators, donation sensors. Yeah. Yeah. There's so many things here. It's, it's wild. Yeah. Yeah. So part of it is, is really not necessarily that you're trying to recoup,"
00:35:04,"you did mention you had a Coworking space operator like resell furniture and go to other Coworking spaces. Some of it is like, let's recoup up some value maybe, but also like, let's put it to good use in the environment. Yeah. Can you just, I mean, talk a little bit more explicitly about the environmental benefits of the, of the model?"
00:35:24,"Oh, that's an excellent question. So the purpose of of, by the way, and in terms of our new brands as well, this is a very critical point. We do have very strict guidelines of the new brands we tend to sell. There's a measurement that is passed around a lot in terms of a, like, we call it embodied carbon of materials."
00:35:43,"Both in like construction based buildings as well as interior environments in the interior world and even the furnishings world, that measurement gets a little cloudy. It gets difficult to measure. We have great metrics on what it takes to build a building and embodied carbon. It gets less structured when you're dealing with interior furnishings. But it's kind of ironic because the interiors of this buildings flip more predominantly than the actual building itself."
00:36:11,"You build a building in 50 years. Yeah. You flip a space 5, 7, 10 year leases. Yeah. So, you know, it's like you, you may feel good about that building, but if you build the entire inside unsustainably, it's, what's the point of it again? So, you know, it's one of those things. That being said, the embodied carbon can be measured in a variety of different ways in the interior environment."
00:36:30,"Many manufacturers have what we call cradle to gate. It means they have the tracking of what it takes to, to take all the raw materials out of the world, fabricate it and get to their loading dock. We have another measurement there that goes, Hey, I'm gonna tell you how much embodied carbon it's gonna take to get it from your loading dock to that space."
00:36:48,"Which is all great tools. We actually have requirements on our platform to measure those things. But the success of what it means to do pre-owned and resell things already exist in the world. So you're setting it to nearly zero. Yeah, from new to nearly zero. Try to get my, my hands on the screen here that you know, you're not taking raw material and you're not spending all time fabrication and things like that."
00:37:16,"You're not extruding anything from the world. It already exists. So why don't you just use it? You're drawing that line of sustainability down to net. Nothing now you still have to travel. The distance is a big thing. Like still it needs to be transported, but there are tons of studies out there and not even anecdotal. There's measurements literally online you can do right now that show you that transports a fraction of the embodied carbon of a product."
00:37:37,"Yeah. Yep. I was thinking about that too. Right. And also like, again, the alternative is landfill and then making something new again. So this is not my list of questions that I sent you, but I'm just curious about mindset. Like you talked about, you know, some of the things that you and your team were seeing and you know,"
00:37:58,"why you started the business. It is like just this ingrained idea. I mean I wonder if co-working space operators are a little bit diff like if I, you know, have a business and it's successful and I'm, you know, building a new office space, does anybody do that? I mean people will keep doing that, right? Right. Yeah."
00:38:16,"I have this mindset that it must be new. Like I must, you know like Yeah. Is that shifting? Is that part of your mission? Like to change how people think about starting from scratch? I mean just like building out, I mean I'd curious too, what you think about sort of all the flexible building materials like drywall and you know,"
00:38:41,"the idea that you rip out office space every five to seven years is also, you must have seen that like hundreds of times, right? And I'm sure that start like was the whole thing was just weighing on you like there's so much waste. But how do you make that mindset shift? Like I feel like the initial driver is budget. If I'm opening an office and I'm like,"
00:39:02,"well I don't wanna buy new furniture, like stuff off of, you know, Facebook marketplace, but you're trying to sell really high-end brands. Some of them, you know, I just looked at your brand list and some of that may be new product, you know, versus Yeah. How do you, what does that look like? Will, do you think there will be sort of a collective shift to,"
00:39:21,"we don't have to start from scratch, like in general Coworking space operators and like commercial furniture in general? I would say that's a loaded question all, lemme get, lemme get into this one. I'm, I'm gonna break off the hard materials cause I have my own opinion. So we can go down a rabbit hole, but I'll, I'll talk about that in a second."
00:39:39,"I will say collectively, whether you're doing the solo or whether you have a team behind it creatively people feel the urge to construct and vision and idea from scratch. I've learned that through 20 years of the, the interior architecture world, there's a value provided from wanting to construct an idea from nothing. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm saying that's a great thing."
00:40:04,"The these ideas like culturally, whether it be, and I'll, I'll throw names out cause I'm not criticizing them. Whether it be WeWork or industrious serendipity or even operators of varying degrees and scale that I've gotten to meet like they're constructing of value from nothing. And that's great. Those things come with physical environments for the most part, especially in the Coworking world,"
00:40:28,"that you need a physical environment to do this. So you're pulling that now. Now the function of pulling those things, the resource people use, it's not books anymore. People don't use books. They use books. When I was younger they used resource libraries of books. They used hard code materials of books. I went to the library and did a very bad job of picking materials."
00:40:48,"My wife's a material designer, she yelled at me like, you know, we actually work together as a whole nother story. But that's gone and no one can disagree with who's listening. Like everyone goes online to do stuff, right? Yeah. So that function of going online for spec and source exists. That's why we exist. Like we're existing here."
00:41:06,"Whether you find it on our site and it does mean new or pre-owned, we're trying to encourage the designer, the specifier, the selector to buy better. It's one of our core values. Buy better waste nothing by the way. So it's one of those things like that's what we want 'em to do. Cuz if they don't do it there, they're gonna go somewhere else and do it and they're gonna do somewhere else and do it now."
00:41:27,"Like the economics of that, outside of providing value and buying better on our site is, yes, you could get it cheaper through our site, you can also get it cheaper through other sites. But Mitch may or may not pro promote sustainable sourcing and selection, but we're trying to really drive that home of, of providing the design tools to buy better and then find it here."
00:41:50,"So you're making like the right environments from scratch for your space. I dunno if that answered your question or not. No, it totally does. And it was getting a little bit to the psychology of, right, like I wanna create, I have a vision and I need to create it, but Right. You help me think, but buy better."
00:42:08,"Like you have the vision and then find the things that fit it and maybe there's a better solution than I keep just going to the circular, like not new. Although I love the fact that you have, you've curated new that fits the buy better approach. Yeah. I'm, you know, extra fascinated by the, the circular. Like how do we reuse?"
00:42:25,"Yeah. Yeah. So that makes a lot of sense. You're creating a place where maybe even to sort of help them think that way cuz you have the tools that they can use and so when they're thinking about the buying decision, it's like, oh, I can buy these things, it's better. Yeah, That's exactly what we try to do. We just by happenstance happen to promote this ability of this like second life cycle and,"
00:42:49,"and I'm like, it's humbling to be able to do that now and define success in that. I get most excited when we take it from one point to the next. It's one of the most exciting things of like my day just because it sounds weird, but like literally moving a task to a phone booth from one point to the next. It gets me,"
00:43:07,"like it gets me up in the morning and I know people are gonna kill me at my company, but like, I literally wear every product in that reow, the pre-owned portion exists in the United States cuz I know everything about it. It's like my favorite thing. However, that being said, it doesn't answer for everything. Sometimes you do have to buy new stuff."
00:43:27,"But that being said, where we are and what our, our platform provides is we're providing a more sustainable solution for that new as well. Yeah. Across the board. Totally. Yeah. I have to say from a personal preference, and I wonder if this is true of a lot of co-working, you know, the whole, I'm not gonna be able to think you'll do better with the,"
00:43:47,"with the language. Like feel like you're at home but you're not at home. Like the vibe of a workplace. Like we've sort, we've sort of like graduated from this like we like super corporate environments, you know, that feel corporate and sort of sterile and I think not that all, you know, you could still get lots of corporate furniture that you're reusing,"
00:44:06,"but the ability to sort of mix and match and integrate a little bit, I think plays into that feeling of, you know, I didn't just buy the Pottery Barn catalog kind of look, you know, I've always enjoyed and think highly of people who design spaces that can, you know, integrate a little bit of both and make it feel, you know,"
00:44:27,"feel good and still professional and like a great place to be. It's funny that you mentioned that the big organizations and their scaling processes, remember where we all came from. Yeah. The very first structure of what of our kind of, of our platform was based on scaling protocols like that scaling processes, the kits that actually, while they're now pre-constructed and available as a shop,"
00:44:50,"literally we have kind of pros that the different types of customers and accounts, they have their own standard kits that they roll out over and over and over and over again for their spaces as well. It's one of those things that's interesting having learned specifically when it comes to Coworking this part, you know, there's, there is only so many scaling Coworking companies of that capacity."
00:45:12,"Yeah. And then we just decided let's curate our own solutions for others and then make it more predominant in the marketplace, which is great. It's funny, the same tools are actually being used for big corporations in our platform as well. Well, that's the thing I was just thinking like it's all started to blend more and, and not to everybody, but you know,"
00:45:32,"non Coworking, like regular companies are thinking about how do people wanna work and what types of environments do we wanna provide? Like I'm just looking at your, you know, your lounge settings. Like those are the kind of settings people enjoy Right. When they come to work and we want people to come and collaborate and hang out and, and so not,"
00:45:48,"oh, I love the team collaboration for eight with all the Yeah, I mean the visualization of these is really helpful too. Yeah, I love that. So right settings that are appro like activ, you know, activity-based working and, and that kind of thing. Like what are the appropriate settings? I remember having this conversation with, you know, mark Gilbreth."
00:46:04,"Yes. Yeah. He was talking about this for a long time. Like there's gotta be a kid of parts for Coworking spaces. Like it just makes sense that there are settings to your point that get repeated and not necessarily at the WeWork level of we buy, you know, 1 million of the same task chair, but like Right. The certain settings that just work."
00:46:23,"If you have a collaborative workspace that, and not every space is the same, but it totally makes sense, but that someone would wanna make it their own and sort of maybe start from a template and then customize it and plug in, you know, different seating or different shelving or whatever that is. Yeah. Super interesting. Okay. What am I not asking that I,"
00:46:42,"that you wanna tell us about? What are you asking? Tell us about? That's a good question. I think you're asking a ton of questions right now. Where are we going and what's the future hold for Canoa? Yeah. So kind of driving that home and then the, the creation portion, the mention mention to you that the tools to create en environments,"
00:47:01,"but, but providing a home for people to work at, that's kind of where we're shifting our mindset towards. There's a lot of tools that people use to create and design spaces. You can, you know, talk about Pinterest, we can talk about cad, we can talk about a whole bunch of, of things of that nature. What we're trying to do is,"
00:47:17,"is try to be that resource that that in effect could blend a lot of those ideas into one kind of trying to draw more interest in there. So we're trying to build out more design tools for mood settings, mood boards, Plugins for other technologies that are predominantly used by teams to plan spaces, things of that nature that could further entice this thought of that,"
00:47:43,"hey, we are a marketplace but we're here Not to completely disrupt your workflow, but to add and power to your workflow. That's one thing that's definitely a huge feature that we're kind of building out and moving forward towards for the next six months. The other aspect of this, and something that's that's hugely important is refinement of our inventory capabilities and tools. You can list something on our platform actually every customer has an inventory of what they've bought and sold on our platform as well."
00:48:10,"We want to encourage and promote that more and more. So inventory can be shifted between locations simply, you can literally with a click of a button request movement from one point to the next from locational location. That's the thing we're, we're strongly promoting. And then lastly, we're a marketplace, but we'd love to empower organizations to in effect be their own marketplaces as well."
00:48:33,"There are companies that are built out to be the turnkey solutions for landlords or let's, we're going to construct your environments and, and, and they're gonna hate for me to say in this, but in effect like it's the turnkey office in one all-in-one solution in box. I didn't say that so you said it, but I think I actually use that term,"
00:48:54,"but it's okay. It's your PR team. No One killed me. No one killed me, but Tell 'em it's all my fault. Yeah, No, I'll say that there, there's many viable solutions out there and the reason for that is that property owners, landowners, they need that type of capability and they find some success there. So to empower them,"
00:49:15,"I don't necessarily say, I don't say that with any sort of contempt, I think to back to the sort of kid of parts, like it's a simple, elegant way to provide a solution. Yeah. So we've, we've already kinda started doing this where we overlay our marketplace layer and tool and even design tool into their capabilities to lessen how much technology and how long it takes as well."
00:49:36,"Like the office in a box is great if it truly is an office in a box. If you go back to the traditional way, you're not necessarily selling the turnkey solution that you offered before. So that's what we're kind of spinning to right now. We're actually, you know, still a fairly young company. We're three years old in 14 days. Yeah."
00:49:54,"Part of that was a global pandemic, so Yeah. Not count. No, it's, it's been a really exciting time and honestly if we had started, I will tell you something funny and I might, I don't think I'm gonna killed for this, but if we had started before the pandemic, we probably would not have been where we are today. I think we've learned what we need to do to get this going because we started at probably the hardest time to build space."
00:50:20,"So, yeah. Yeah. I don't think anybody should kill you for that. Okay. So do you offer design services or have partners who do that? Like what if I'm like, yeah, I love the, or is the platform really meant to be self-service? So that's an important thing. Again, the friend I comparison right now, if you're buying a chair or two,"
00:50:42,"you're probably not gonna need that degree of curation for it. Right. I'll go find my, Yep. It's one of those like, it's like, you know, WebMD, like you're gonna look up, oh I have a headache and you know, it's, but I mean, I mean if you, if you're like literally, you know, shot in the arm,"
00:50:56,"you're not gonna Oh, WebMD, you're not gonna WebMD or shot. So like there's degrees of professionalism and service that's required when it comes down to building out interior spaces, finishes, furnishings, even even type of planning scenarios. We do have partners, we call them design affiliates. Okay. That we, we link people up to do, we don't do design services towards for in that degree."
00:51:15,"So you would, right, so if I said, Hey, I don't have a designer, I love your platform, I'm gonna do some of it myself, but I have kind of a bigger project, but I want them to platform cause I really like the values and Yeah. And you would say, oh, let me connect you with one of our design affiliates."
00:51:30,"Okay. I like it. Yeah. Okay, so we have a couple minutes left. Tell me, tell me a fun fact about you. So many fun facts about Lance. Couple little note facts that people are quite surprised after. The fact is that I was an amateur video game player when I was a kid and did the whole, you ever see the Wizard?"
00:51:49,"No. Okay. Well people that do Google it, Javit Center, Nintendo Competition Championships, Like win prize money, you Could, I didn't win it though, but I got pretty far down the line with it. That was a lot of fun and a little known fact, which people are, tend to be surprised about as well is my father paid professional basketball and actually more Taller than I thought you would be."
00:52:11,"My father is way, much way, way, way taller. So actually I'll tell you this, when you're 12 years old and you take a free throw shot and fail at it about 20 times the disappointment of your professional basketball player's father, you see that face. You never, you never lose that. Oh no Therapy. Oh man, No, I'll never forget that one that was on the,"
00:52:34,"the schoolyard card and missed all those free throws and he realized my son has, has literal no skill in basketball. You're not a basketball player. Yeah, I am not a basketball player, but Okay. What I do like that you sounds like pretty intensely played a lot of video games when you were a kid and turned out into a productive human being."
00:52:51,"So for all of us with kids on the screen a lot, there's still hope, There's still help. My daughter is into Minecraft right now. She's seven. I end up playing Minecraft with her just because, you know I'm architect. Right. Hopefully it pans out, but it it, it's a, it's, the video games nowadays definitely change a lot from when I was a kid."
00:53:11,"I'll put it that way. What's your philosophy on managing screen time for your daughter? Oh, it's definitely, it's weekends for video games for us, we can't do that when it comes down to tv. We definitely moderate that. Yeah. Cause kids nowadays tend to have very, very short attention spans. Does she watch t TV on the TV or Do you On the tv?"
00:53:32,"Yeah, on Actual, like, because you want her to, or that's like, yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I have a question for you. Oh, no, no, it's good. I, I, so, you know, I think I, I pinged you in June when I, I got 2020. Have you been stock 20 For that long?"
00:53:50,"I've been stocking you for that long. No fact. Audience, I had to tackle her at an event. It's What are you up to? What's next for you? Oh, geez. Wow. What a big question. Yeah, yeah. You know, I think, I think constantly about, you know, the industry is really, it's so new."
00:54:11,"Coworking is not the concept of shared office space that's been around for decades. But the, you know, I think the pandemic has just changed a l a lot of things, which sounds like a very simplistic thing to say, but how do people think about the office? How do they think about the environment they wanna work in? I think we're just at the very beginning of figuring that out and figuring out what the customer wants,"
00:54:35,"right. And what we will create to solve for that. So I'm constantly sort of worried about the business model and how to make that work for people. So, you know, I run the Coworking, Startup School, so I help people launch new spaces. And so in that context, I'm constantly thinking about like, okay, how do I support that process?"
00:54:56,"You know, in a sort of like shifting an evolving environment. And that's one of the reasons I'm super interested in what you do, because I have a lot of people who are buying furniture for the first time and, you know, looking for support for that, which is I think why I reached back out to you and then proceeded to ignore your emails again."
00:55:13,"I am my, And then I texted you in Chicago, Thank goodness. Thank goodness I show up to events. Yeah. So, so I think really thinking about that and you know, the landlord's problem and what does that marketplace look like? I mean, I'm sure for you guys like that at scale is a big opportunity for those of us serving the industry."
00:55:31,"But how do we support them? How do you sort of do it in a way that is, produces good outcomes for everybody, right? I think, yeah, creating viable solutions for, you know, unused assets and then yeah, really supporting operators. I think the model is hard. WeWork is obviously, it's not a simple model. I was having a conversation with somebody yesterday."
00:55:56,"It's like, look, people, it's a, it's a solution. There's a solution that people need. There's demand for third spaces, you know, of a lot of different kinds. But the business model, I think is still really in flux and the interplay between, you know, real estate and the user experience and how you make it profitable. So,"
00:56:16,"I'm not answering your question very clearly, but those are the problems I'm trying to solve, like help people with. So I think That may shift, but It might, I will say this, you know, in few minutes we have left. The one thing I definitely, it's a concise message across the board, and I talk to, to people every single day,"
00:56:36,"tons of people that there's a degree, the degree of hospitality when it comes to activation of real estate. It, it truly is here to say whether it is functionally as a working environment, functionally as an entertainment environment, functionally as a, as a sleeping and like residence environment. The activation of space requires a degree of like, diversity in the building."
00:57:00,"And it's interesting to see, I'd say I, I'm gonna say still like it's a well cemented, but now growing community of workplace hospitality. But now there's like buds of like to telling hospitality that's more flexible and events, hospitality, that's starting to take shape more and more and more. And, and those types of degrees. And, and to hear these,"
00:57:22,"these, these communities and these, these operators of these hospitality type environments really like structure their conversations beyond like, I have an idea. It's, it's business model conversations. It's like functionally talking about it. And, and as, as people start to dabble and experiment more and more, the building, which was like the shell of just like consistent floor,"
00:57:40,"floor, floor, that's a sound effect. A floor, floor, floor of just work stations is now turning into this like, dynamic space. It's, where I'm seeing it is, is what's the appetite or the owner to experiment and, you know, are they willing or are we willing to have enough application to, to keep us a building relevant?"
00:58:00,"Like it's, it's a very tricky spot. I also feel like big organizations still are trying to figure stuff out. A hundred percent. That's, yeah. There's a lot of still to come. Yeah. Yeah. So to presume it's gonna be, they're gonna evaporate their entire portfolio. It's probably a little too aggressive. I, I think that there's still this blend of experimentation,"
00:58:23,"which is why I like the fact of promoting reuse. And honestly, it's something we're not gonna get into in this call, but I like the fact of promoting modularity when it comes to construction when we do it. That's where I'm thought, Yeah. Which is, yeah. I, I hinted at that in terms of, right. The, the build out."
00:58:40,"How do you prevent that from all the waste and inefficient? There's hundreds of things. I did a huge research and, and thesis on it during Covid, cuz we had time. Something that I can't tackle on this call, it'll probably take 20 minutes. But I will say I've learned a ton of what it takes to, what it means to demolish a space and what we could do to promote some sustainability and maintenance for our build."
00:59:02,"Yep. Yeah. And again, I think that, yeah. We'll, we could do a, a separate, well we should cover your thesis on a separate call. Okay. I'm gonna wrap this up. Thank you for, for doing this. Thank you for Yeah. Appreciate it. Exactly. Me as you see it. I'm so glad we,"
00:59:17,"we connected. Okay. So I'm gonna put website, all the good things. Any specific website, best place for people to learn more about the platform. I'll send you a website, also send you like a signup link as well. Cool. Okay, great. Yeah. So I want folks to come check out the platform and, and learn more."
00:59:34,"And I'm glad we got to do this and thanks for making the time. I Appreciate it. 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,"
00:59:58,"head over to Everything Coworking dot com. We'll see you next week."
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