382. The Federal Government Embraces Flex: Mark Gilbreath Explains What It Means for Coworking
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TRANSCRIPTION
382. The Federal Government Embraces Flex: Mark Gilbreath Explains What It Means for Coworking
00:00:00,"Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast, where every week I keep you updated on the latest trends and how to's 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. Gio and I are here with some breaking news from Mark Gilbreath, CEO of LiquidSpace. Mark, I think you're, you're definitely a repeat on the podcast, if not a three peat. Maybe just a repeat. Maybe just a repeat. Will there be like a maroon jacket when I get to five? Yes. With some sort of crest on it? Definitely. If I get to five. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think this is three."
00:01:09,"Yeah. Okay. Okay, great. I'm so pleased. Well, we're pleased. Well, I think. So is that three including your podcast or three in? I don't think it's three on just Flex Uncensored. I think he's been on Flex Uncensored, everything coworking and this is three. And yeah, it's, I mean this has got to be more than three if we're counting both. Oh, maybe I, maybe I have. I think you might."
00:01:36,"The blazer coming? Yeah, 100%. Okay. Well, I love having you on the podcast because you always have something exciting to share, some innovation or insight or today some news that's pretty exciting for the industry and we may not reap, you know, mass benefits right away, but it's one of those. You and I were even texting the other day and you said, well, it's, you know, often one step forward, two steps back, but this is a big step forward, I think."
00:02:04,"So I'd love for you to share the news and tell us, you know, what your outlook is and what you think it means for the industry. Yeah, I think it's like a big bird sized canary in the coal mine. So let's, like, let's, let's picture that, you know, big bird, seven foot tall, giant yellow like Macy's parade balloon size, big old Sesame street canary in the coal mine."
00:02:25,"So, so yeah, the, the, the largest enterprise in the world, the federal government and its real estate division, which is run by the gsa. The General Services Administration has just done another bold thing and, and it's in sort of a sequence of the little steps they've been taking. But it, it's in some ways a culmination of a few things that have been bubbling in the flex world for the last four plus years."
00:02:57,"And, but, but about three weeks ago they issued an RFP request for proposal for what they titled Enterprise Wide Marketplace. And in the scope of work for this request for proposal, they described that they were looking for two things in particular. They wanted a vendor that could provide a proven marketplace platform that could accommodate. This is where the novelty is, that could accommodate both the government's own real estate, so the, of which they've got 380 million square feet owned and leased."
00:03:34,"So they wanted to be able to put some portion of that property that they already have as their office space onto the marketplace to be discoverable, shareable, bookable. And they wanted to interleave with that, as they would call it, the commercial coworking world, which we have some history with. And so I guess I'd call that. I think it's bold. I also think it's a canary in the coal mine in the sense that it's an indication of a larger change that's happening, albeit not a bad one."
00:04:06,"I mean, carrying the coal mine is like, lets you know when you're running out of oxygen. But, but rather, I'd say this is a positive canary and it reflects, I think, the broader trend that we're seeing more and more examples of amongst larger organizations. You know, we've talked about T Mobile and Airbnb and Allstate Insurance and, and, and there's a long list of others, but organizations that have looked to reconsider their workplace as, as more than just leased offices, but a combination of leased office and flex."
00:04:35,"And most large organizations now, including the gsa, are aggressively pursuing a downsizing of that traditional portion and then titrating in or factoring in or weaving in more and more use of flexible office in various forms, ranging from space purely on demand, booking a day pass or a meeting room to flex hubs and combinations of that. And so it's really exciting to see the GSA jump on that bandwagon as well."
00:05:05,"And, and I think for, we can talk about what the implications are for, for, you know, the flex uncensored and then the GWA and the CO working sort of community. But it's, it's net. Net. We think it's quite positive. I can elaborate, but I'll, I'll take a breath. Yeah, Gio and I usually fight about who's going to jump in. I'll Jump in first then. Mark, you mentioned they're listing."
00:05:27,"I mean 300. They probably won't listen. It's all 380 million square feet is my guess. So some portion of that. Is that atypical for enterprise users on your platform like the Allstates, the T Mobiles are they usually like managing access to their own real estate separately but using LiquidSpace for on demand needs and incremental office space. Yeah, that's the most natural and the most typical thing. Allstate sought out a platform, T Mobile sought out a platform to give them access to space on demand and dedicated as an, as an a, as an ad to the portfolio they currently had."
00:06:06,"But what we're starting to see more and more of and, and what the GSA in particular is keen on as well is gosh, how, how might I give my employees or our, our customer. GSA's customer is the employees of the Department of Labor and the Department of Transportation and the USDA and the, and the hud. And like those employees, how might we give them a marketplace styled interface that would let them search, find and book space that on a given day might be a federal location and on another day might be car workplaces or moose it or, or you name it, one platform that does that does both those things interleaved."
00:06:45,"And where in further to that one platform where they could put you know, controls and policies in place that might allow them to you know, regulate who's allowed to see what spaces and use what spaces and who can spend how much and so on. And so we are fortunate to have built a platform that has those sort of foundational capabilities and we're delighted that we've been chosen to play an important role in them proving out this concept."
00:07:16,"And so what does that ultimately look like? Because I saw something today, I guess Upflex announced that they were chosen too or kind of what is many people were chosen. What's the process? Yeah, all that fun stuff. I Yesterday this time we received the, the. The definitive award that were that we have been given an award to be a pilot partner for a pilot that will run as long as 12 months."
00:07:44,"Geo and a pilot where the. And I'll loop back to the second part of your. Your comment and question. But a pilot where GSA is looking to validate as fast as they can generate data as fast as they can. That sort of two things are working and are true actually maybe three things I might say. Number one, that federal agencies that have excess space that they're willing to share with other agencies are able to do so in a."
00:08:11,"In a relatively efficient way. So I'm, I'm the Department of Energy and I've got an extra 50,000 square feet in Loveland, Colorado, and I'd like to make that available because we're not using it. And if we can recover some of that cost, great. And then the Department of Transportation, so thing two that agencies that need space can easily find it amongst other agencies and tap into it, whether that's by the hour or by the day or by the month or longer."
00:08:37,"So they wanted to validate that ability to create more efficiency within government by sharing. That's a key thing because historically government worked in a siloed fashion. And you know, the first big innovative thought behind GSA's vision on this was how might we use marketplace technology to create more sharing and as such, more efficiency inside of government, make more use of less space, something we've been championing for a long time and something that's woven into the very ethos of a flexible office space or a coworking space."
00:09:09,"It's shared. The community is a part of a shared experience. I'm interrupting for a second. Are you working on starting a coworking space? I often emphasize how important the planning stage is. You've heard me say most unrecoverable issues happen well before you open your doors, and they are related to the size of your space, your real estate deal, and a few other things. If you think you are going to pick your favorite coworking space and reverse engineer what you think you see happening in there and then pick your own paint colors and your favorite furniture, you are in for a surprise."
00:09:53,"This business is really about making the right fundamental decisions that align with your individual personal and financial goals. So we want to help you avoid the mistakes that a lot of operators make in planning and launching that can really set you back in terms of time and finances. So we have got your back. We have created a free training to help you really get behind the three key decisions that we think are the most critical for you to get right when you're designing your coworking business."
00:10:30,"The model, not the colors, the model. And these insights come from years of operating, designing the model for two different locations, and then my work with hundreds of operators as they work on their businesses. So grab your spot in our training class. You can watch it anytime. It's totally on demand. And start your coworking journey with confidence and the right strategies in place. You can grab that training at everything coworking.com"
00:11:02,"forward/masterclass the other thing that they want to validate was the ability for them to reach more easily into commercial coworking space when and if they need space in places that they have or need more capacity than they have in a given market. You guys may have seen in recent headlines, a lot of them in government, about how the GSA is pursuing very aggressive goals now in terms of downsizing the federal portfolio, literally they're going to cut it in half which, which for a 380 million square foot portfolio, that's a lot of, of space that they're intending to terminate leases on and, or buildings that are intending to sell."
00:11:45,"So as they shrink that lease footprint, like T Mobile did and like Allstate did, and the expectation, and I'd say the hope and the aspiration for us and the Flex community is that as they shrink that footprint and seek more efficiency and seek more engagement and employees back in offices perhaps of their choosing rather than places they're mandated to go, that the rebalancing that will occur over time will, as it has with commercial enterprises, end up with more Flex space being used significantly more."
00:12:19,"Gio, you, you mentioned another announcement. I saw it too on LinkedIn this afternoon that Uplex made mention of being chosen. I reached out to gsa. I, I, I heard as well a little bit more about that and I think I, and I don't know all the details and you could reach out to, you know, Christoph or someone on the, on the Upflex team. I'm sure they'll be delighted to talk about it, but I understand that they had partnered with at least one or two other entities to, to put some proposal forward."
00:12:46,"And I don't know the entity, I don't know the identity of all those entities, but I do know I had heard from GSA that they were contemplating multiple awards and it's, it's clear now that they've done at least two. I think it, I think it is just two. I think that this other entity, in fact its name was uhc. I think they and Upflex have been assigned a given city to do a certain test on and we'll be doing some other things that I'm not yet at liberty to share the specific details on, but it'll be slightly different."
00:13:17,"So, so, but I think it, I think as it relates to our, our universe, I think, I think it's going to be those two entities that are being tasked with doing complementary but slightly different things from a, from a validation standpoint, as part of GSA's overall desire to prove out these concepts. And Mark, the gsa, you've had an agreement with the gsa. I think we were chatting about this because I was just thinking, wow, you know, 12 weeks is a really quick, you know, process for the government."
00:13:46,"But there, there was some plans to make this available. Was it utilized at all or to. Yeah, so this is the, this is like the third or the fourth step in a series of actions that I think are all sort of combining in this current moment. In 2000, early 2000, before the pandemic, in fact, very early 2000 GSA issued. Actually, I think it was December 2020, you mean?"
00:14:09,"Yeah, okay, December of 2019. Okay. Yeah. Two months before the pandemic hit, GSA issued an RFP for a program that they called FCS Flexible Coworking Services. And that was for them their very first motion or attempt at setting up a procurement vehicle, a contracting structure and a set of pre contracted vendors with which the GSA on behalf of agencies could procure coworking space when and if needed as an alternative to traditional leasing."
00:14:44,"And so it, it created a contracting flow and an RFP process and, and protocols around pricing and so on. And we, along with, so LiquidSpace, along with DeskPass, we work expansive in the yard. Those five entities, three coworking brands and two digital platforms were awarded contracts under that FCS program. So the RFP went out at the end of 2019. It actually didn't get issued until 2021 due to pandemic delays and it was put out with a, an estimated spend level of $50 million."
00:15:17,"And it has not achieved that yet for I think a number of reasons, some structural and inertia based and even policy and even, even Congress was sort of a complicating factor in terms of getting in the way of this change. But, but, but that program, which, Jamie, you know who that you, you've met the person that authored that, Chuck Hardy, who's the chief workplace officer at gsa, who you had the opportunity to spend a little time with along with us."
00:15:46,"It was his inspiration. And so consider that step one, that was government trying to get familiar with coworking and all that it could offer and start to create a lane or a pathway through which it could become of service to government. That was step one. Last year another relevant thing happened. The GSA internally began on a path that culminated in them creating six internal private coworking locations across government where they tapped into existing space that they had that was underutilized or unutilized."
00:16:20,"And they created a shared environment and made it available to federal personnel. And so this was another experiment for them trying to wrap their hands around what the operational requirements would be of running a space and providing hospitality and, and also try to validate whether that might be a means of serving federal needs and using space more efficiently. Then more recently, about eight weeks ago, six or eight weeks ago, the GSA somewhat quietly issued a press release and mentioned a new program that they had announced within government called Space Match."
00:17:01,"And the press release which you can find listed online if you Google it or on the SAM.gov website, but space Match as they described it in the press release was a program to try to, GSA would try to assist agencies, federal customers with either sharing or tapping into space. So sort of again, going at this opportunity, how might we leverage the federal portfolio more efficiently? And Space Match, I would, I would sort of describe as a, a marketplace motion in principle, but it was one where they basically said, hey, if anybody's got space that they'd be willing to share, you know, you know, contact us here."
00:17:40,"Hey, if anybody needs space, we might have some that we could direct you to contact here. So email based matchmaking? Absolutely, yeah. And you know, and GSA had a, I'm speaking on their behalf, but I may get some of this wrong but, but I think their intent was clear and admirable. Hey, we, we might be an agent to, to help drive some efficiency. What then happened three weeks ago really draws on all three of those elements."
00:18:07,"When they published this RFP and said, listen, we want a digital platform that can be an enterprise marketplace that can integrate internal space, whether it's an internal coworking space or a whole floor or a whole building that is able to be shared and also can let people search and access that space and also bring in the coworking space that we've had as a side purchasing program."
00:18:29,"Bring it all together. It gets, you know, where I, and I think the sum of all of those parts brought together in frankly a proven technology based sort of modality, a marketplace. And you know, we've been doing this for 15 years. I think, I think it has the absolute opportunity to be a, you know, one plus one plus one equals ten type hit. Whereas those individual pieces by themselves, they learn little things."
00:18:58,"But I think, I think I know from, you know, conversations with the officials at GSA that drove this that they want this to be a hit. They think it's going to be a hit. And looping back to your question, Geo, the purpose of this pilot period is for them to demonstrate and validate with data that it's working, that people will list space, people will find space, coworking space can be booked as well."
00:19:20,"And so for, you know, for our, for our sort of shared audience, you and us here at LiquidSpace and back to the canary in the coal mine sort of positive spin. Another big enterprise is jumping onto the bandwagon and trying to figure it out. Yeah, and they want to figure it out. They want to consume more flex, they want to be able to find it, they want to be able to use it, they want to be able to bring it into their mix."
00:19:43,"They want to use less inefficient space, they want to use more efficient and well located space. This is, you know, they've got the vision now. And now, you know, we, the collective, we, you know, our thousands of venue partners and our team and the others that we're working with, you know, our job is to help them down that path and, you know, and if they, if and when they stumble, you know, pick them back up and you know, and stay focused on sort of the true north vision that they have, which is a much more efficient workplace and one that also better serves the, the federal employees that, that are being asked to come back to the office more often."
00:20:19,"Juicy North America, a coworking conference is coming up April 7th through 10th in Boston. It's at the Track and New Balance. It's a great venue, but even better than the venue. The content and the people and the conversations and the connections and the insights and the perspective nothing replaces taking a couple days out from your business, getting out of town and really immersing yourself into the business that you're in or working on, being in that you love and getting to do tours and just connect with people that you've seen on Zoom but never seen in person."
00:20:57,"I might be one of those people. I'm definitely going to be there. I haven't missed one in 10 years. And I would love to see you there. We have a special discount code for you. Thank you to the Juicy team. It is in the show notes. So grab the show notes on your phone or on the website and the URL to get all the details and register is in the same spot."
00:21:18,"I'd love to see you there. So Mark, you and I had kind of chatted a little bit about. This is probably not the immediate opening of the floodgates with, you know, government employees running into the front door of the nearest coworking space on Monday morning. That may be a few steps down the road. The exciting kind of macro behavior is, is the right Sizing of the portfolio, the embracing of flexibility and you know, I would bet, I don't know this for a fact, but I would bet sort of the voting of with the feet down the road like."
00:21:52,"But for now probably the government space will get some sort of priority on the platform in coworking space will be a little bit secondary, but that may shift over time and I would guess, you know, maybe the coworking spaces are nicer than the government office space. And so is there kind of a shakeout of like you know, people voting on their feet and choosing when they're able to, you know, something closer to home or you know, well appointed and serviced and."
00:22:23,"Well the new, yeah, the, one of the new high ranking officials within the GSA world is the, the new commissioner of the Public Building Service, a gentleman named Michael Peters. So I think he's two months new in the job. But the PBS or the Public Building Service is the, is the organization within GSA that, that owns and operates the federal portfolio. So they're the ones that execute leasing and, and, and also own and maintain buildings."
00:22:49,"And, and Mr. Peters is new to that job but one of the things he quickly learned or inherited, one of the challenges to overcome that inherited is that by all estimation that federal portfolio was larger than it needed to be. But also one of the liabilities or the, one of the debts that had accumulated is a lot of those federal assets had deferred maintenance, had substantial amounts of deferred maintenance, you know, to the extent prize."
00:23:20,"Yeah, go ahead, Joe. I was just saying, surprised that it's got deferred maintenance. And so you know, in some cases, you know, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that would be necessary to bring these properties back up to kind of compliance or usability. And Michael Peters, in an announcement that he made early in his tenure, I think about a month ago, he put up, there was a, there was coverage of an announcement that he made internally to GSA where he spoke about listen, we're going to cut by 50% the portfolio and we're gonna, and then we're gonna, you know, we're gonna acquire and evolve toward newer, nicer, contemporary, exciting space."
00:23:59,"We want to uplevel. And so I think the opportunity for the flex world is to be part of that up leveling. And I think our, our duty is to help further GSA's education on all of the virtues of using flexible office, whether it's a, a hub for 300 employees on a two year agreement or whether it's, you know, dropping into a space on the Go for a day."
00:24:23,"You know, and we know that those use cases are, are prevalent now. They're proven. And so but even for the most progressive of organizations that's, there's, there's some new behavior in that, there's a new mindset you got to bring on. And, and so I think this pilot and the, and the activities that follow will be about them getting used to and comfortable and confident and frankly excited about the outcome because we've seen, we know what the outcome can look like, like extraordinary cost reductions."
00:24:51,"I mean T Mobile and AT and T in Allstate both have declared publicly how they've, their ROI has been to the tune of 70 or 80%. So, so there's. So for a government that's looking for cost savings right now, this is going to be I think really attractive. But it also repeatedly shows higher engagement and sentiment and enthusiasm amongst the employees that are given that option as well."
00:25:17,"And in a, in a world where like return to office seems to be having its sort of like second moment, I think we've got the opportunity for it to be returned to many offices, not returned to the office we left behind. It looks like shit, you know, five years. Well and this is you know, not necessarily a benefit to coworking but I'm thinking, you know, the government employees are probably largely commuting to D.C."
00:25:40,"you know, to the major cities. I would guess the return to office mandate, you know, government workers may not necessarily live very close to the office. So quality of life, good for the environment, lower emissions, productivity. Like lots of arguments being made for kind of right sizing and right locating those offices. And, and while when you and I had a brief chat yesterday, I sort of cautioned and said hey listen, let's not, let's not whip everybody up into a fraud."
00:26:08,"This tidal wave of demand. That said, I was having a conversation with the GSA official just this morning about one particular agency that's waiting to jump in on this new program that, and I won't name them but they've, they need space for one or two people in 300 locations. So how do you solve for that with traditional leasing? You don't. Yeah, so I think I, I think it's quite likely we're going to find an abundance of use cases that are more naturally suited for, for flexible office coworking and flex in all of its forms as a complement to a traditional portfolio within the government that's going to become more efficient and right sized and refreshed."
00:26:54,"And I hope we find that know next month. Yeah when we launch. I hope that the hope it's a flood. That'd be great because I know that our, our partners are ready to fulfill that and that'll be exciting. Mark, while I have you I could just sort of vividly picture the you know one of the charts that you showed at the GWA conference in Phoenix which really demonstrated like on demand is the demand sort of post Covid and that that's really sort of the hockey stick growth."
00:27:23,"Is that, is that still the case? On demand is still growing very nicely. We're starting to see and it's very welcomed affirming in a growth in and team spaces dedicated space hub hub space without question that's that's coming back and if you'll allow me a little product plug one of the requirements in the GSA rfp. So I mean I described at length the marketplace aspect. I neglected to talk about the other piece that was in the RFP scope of work which was AI August Augmented Portfolio Management tools to help I'm paraphrasing to you know, to help government analyze its portfolio."
00:28:04,"And it just so happens we have a new solution out called Portfolio Manager AI and it is a tool that is was inspired by the vast amount of data that we have in our marketplace of two types. We've got cost data from the thousands of partners around the world. So we've got a very good, if not the best point of view and data driven point of view on what's a four person meeting room in Minneapolis cost on a Thursday or what's a 50 person team space in the East Village in New York cost for 12 months."
00:28:39,"We have a data driven answer to those types of questions. We also have undeniably the largest transactional behavioral data set because we're the first and the oldest platform with the largest network base and the largest customer base. We've had the most transactions. And so that behavioral data is exclusive. You know Jamie, if you were the vice president of corporate real estate at Coca Cola and you said Mark, you know, I'm intrigued about Flex, but I, you know, I really need to understand what I should expect if we leaned into a program like this where Coca Cola we're big, you know, and you know, if we put a thousand people in, you know, what would, what would, what could we expect?"
00:29:18,"Well, we could tell you what you should expect, what you could reasonably expect in terms of adoption and engagement, the types of spaces people would book, the frequency with which they'd book and we know the cost data as well. So we have a new solution out now that is designed to leverage those unique data sets that we have and provide dynamic and AI enhanced scenario modeling that can allow you to model a existing leased location and consider what various flex scenarios might look like cost wise."
00:29:51,"Or model an existing flex scenario like the use of on demand space and consider whether a hub is needed. So so that tool, which is a part of why GSA chose us for the piece that we'll be helping them validate, is also now helping fuel our ability to help larger enterprises in particular make smart decisions around dedicated spaces, team spaces, the big juicier locations that that frankly have been sort of in a in a winter for the last four Yep hey there."
00:30:25,"I'm jumping in again. This time I'm speaking to those of you that are either getting ready to hire a community manager or or who have a community manager and you would like to support their training and development. We know how challenging it can be for coworking space operators to create their own training and development material to support their community managers. And this is so important in terms of onboarding new community managers and supporting the growth of your existing community managers."
00:30:59,"And we're getting towards the end of the year. What a great holiday gift, end of year gift to give to your community manager. So the platform is really around a couple of things. One is access to a community of like minded folks. We have a very active slack group with really wonderful questions that are posed every single day and we find that's one of the biggest values we have community managers from all over the world."
00:31:28,"And this is an excellent group of community managers that have invested time and effort into getting better at that role. And they are the kind of folks that you want your community manager to be by and hanging out with and they know their stuff or sometimes they don't and they ask questions and we help them out. So I'm in the group, we have coaches that are in the group to support them."
00:31:50,"So we love when they ask questions for things they need help with because the other aspect of the program is really around helping them get resources they need to make their jobs easier and to learn things that they can use in their role to be better at their job. So we provide some done for you resources like Google business posts, detailed event ideas, et cetera that they can just kind of grab and go and use."
00:32:18,"And we also provide monthly resources that add to our training library so they can do our certification and then we have a lot of electives that help them kind of get better at all the things that that go with the role so the our community managers wear a lot of hats. So we break our content into industry knowledge for new community managers, Community building operations, sales and marketing and leadership."
00:32:47,"So the leadership bucket is great for our more advanced community managers. We also virtual office and digital mail training and coffee training for anybody who needs to know how to use commercial coffee brewers. So we have some of the. I'm just going to give you kind of a sampling of content that we have. So in our community building modules we have Hosting your first member events Building community with budget friendly events, Member event swipe files Our sales and marketing modules we have tour training."
00:33:22,"We have the training on the full coworking sales funnel so they understand what that looks like. We have social media planning frameworks, we have. What else do we have? Three simple steps to an Effective Marketing Newsletter. These are just some of our samples. Ooh. These are some of our best utilized topics. Demystifying the process of letting your coworking members use your address for their Google business listing."
00:33:48,"How to close a tour operations modules, how to set up automations, how to do a new member onboarding audit simple ways to use AI to boost your productivity. We have over 40 courses in the program, so we cover kind of higher level topics and then we also cover things that are timely like the CMRA updates, Google business updates, etc. So we get together monthly to do official training and we also host a best practice sharing call which is one of the fan favorites of the group and the Slack group."
00:34:25,"So if you have any questions at all about the program, don't hesitate to reach out. You can learn more and register at everything coworking.com forward/community manager. Now back to our episode. Curious what you guys are seeing and hearing from your vast reach. Anything does that resonate? Does that recovery of dedicated. Are you seeing that at all as well? Yeah. So the interesting part is like today we had a webinar today with Michelle Panarondo with pon and so we had a chance to talk about her confidential company A as we called it on the webinar."
00:35:07,"And there, you know, several hundred locations across the US that they they had to put in. But at the same time, I don't know if you saw but there was a webinar earlier today that had the heads of enterprise or occupier services for jll, cbre, Cushman and the fourth large, another one of the other big ones. And it was so interesting because that was the cop. That was the conversation around Enterprise and their commitment and overall future growth of Flex."
00:35:48,"Right. And so Part of the reason I say that is there's opportunities with your AI platform for enterprise, just same way as the government's looking at it. But anyone to evaluate what their portfolio is and what their needs are. And so you know, Jamie Hadari, one of his points was like look, if there's an enterprise that had 70 locations across the country or across the globe, sorry, their focus should be on the top, you know, 10 to 20 locations."
00:36:22,"Right. And building. And those are the bigger ones, the hubs. Right. And building culture there and let the coworking slash flex operators focus on the, the remainder of the portfolio and building culture within. That's just going to continue to be really interesting how that, how that plays out. Yeah, I agree. I need to find that webinar link if it was recorded. Oh yes. For context it means it was, it was an Ask me anything sponsored hosted by the GWA for GWA members."
00:36:52,"Is that correct, Giovanni? No, there was another webinar that, that was. Oh, the Jamie Hodari one. Sorry, yes, two webinars. I'll forward you to you right now. But it was called Industry Insights. Reflections of the Past Envisioning the Future. And like I said it had. Let's see if it shows me who the name because you're going to probably know some of these names. Oh no, it doesn't have everyone's name on it."
00:37:21,"But yeah, super interesting just to hear from real estate service providers of that size. Right. We all know the cbre industrious investment and then you know, they're Jamie's new role over there. So I think we're just going to continue to see more and more of this. Yeah, no doubt. I agree. Mark, I'm curious, I'm sort of circling back to the GSA process because the, the AI conversation like got me thinking."
00:37:51,"I mean this is a real journey there on it. It's a big experiment. We hope and we hope they learn and, and they'll have lots of findings that they could input into the model to help them make decisions about where to go and what to do. But also it's a really big project for them. Have they told you like how they're going to support this internally? Like sort of change management efforts and you know, communicating to people who can actually use this."
00:38:18,"Will it be sort of mandated or any, any insights into how the rollout will look? A good number of insights. We're now contracted. We're, we're. There's a lot of conversations unfolding as we speak and I think some of the, some of the Questions you've asked about will become public in, you know, short order or we'll be able to talk about what. What I can say now is they are moving at an extraordinary pace for government or for enterprise, for that matter."
00:38:47,"They are highly motivated, and there's real urgency and need for them to stand up some of these capabilities that we've been talking about here this, this half hour, because they're. They have already begun the downsizing of portfolio. They've already begun the rollout of mandates for people to come back. They're already encountering hotspot situations. And so, you know, they're hoping that these pilot experiments are the blueprint for the future and they don't have the luxury of waiting."
00:39:18,"And so we'll be launching what I've described to you in, like, four weeks, which is exciting, but insane. Yeah, right. The good news is it's happening and really fast. The bad news is it's happening and really fast. Yeah, I don't think it's going to give us a lot of heartburn in terms of readiness because the platform's real, it's scale proven. But for, for gsa, it's going to be a big swing."
00:39:43,"And. Yeah. So there's a lot of personnel that are on the team and excited about it. Good. But right to your point, I mean, that means it's really happening. Their little kind of very small incremental moves in the past are now going to be a bigger, bigger leap. Yeah, that's the, that's what, that's the outcome they want. Yeah. Good. Cool. Okay. Any. Anything else you'd share about this that we haven't asked about, that we should have, I guess, to the, to the thousands of partners of ours across North America know more relatively soon about the potential or likely sort of hot spots, hot regions of need."
00:40:27,"But to be sure, you know, your presence in our marketplace, your listings, their completeness, the depth of them, it's. It's useful. It's. It's more important now than ever. So want to get a jump on the game and, you know, add that new location that you hadn't yet listed or add those five other meeting rooms you hadn't shown before, or get those team suites back up. I think, you know, it's not a bad time for some spring cleaning and, and setting yourself up for success."
00:40:55,"And of course, anybody can reach out to me directly. You know, Mark at LiquidSpace, if they've got specific questions about what it might mean to them. As a, as an operator, I'm happy to share as much as I can at the moment. Awesome. I love it. Gio, any parting words? No, I'm just excited to hear more about as it comes out, as it plays out for you and Upflex and just everything in general."
00:41:20,"I think it's, you know, just today there's been so much momentum moving forward on, on, you know, the, the industry just as news keep coming out the webinars and just so much positive stuff. And so I'm excited to continue to hear that and participate in that. Thanks, pal. Love it. And Mark will look forward to seeing your team in Boston next, almost next week, week and a half, couple of weeks."
00:41:47,"Yeah. I'm crossing my fingers that I might make it there, so I'll give the both of you a hug. Totally looking forward to it. Well, thanks for hopping on and sharing the good news and it's always exciting to get the insights on some forward, forward motion in the industry. So thanks for making the time, Mark. My great pleasure. Cheers. 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."
00:42:17,"If you'd like to learn more about our education and coaching programs, head over to Everything coworking. Com. We'll see you next week."
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