384. Smart Access, Smarter Revenue: How Elumo Is Revolutionizing Meeting Room Access with James Shannon & Kurt Patrick
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Masterclass: 3 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets to Opening a Coworking Space
TRANSCRIPTION
384. Smart Access, Smarter Revenue: How Elumo Is Revolutionizing Meeting Room Access with James Shannon & Kurt Patrick
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. I am here with Kurt and James from essensys, Kurt Patrick, who is a senior Business Development executive at essensys and frequent cohost on the Flex Uncensored podcast. So Kurt, glad you're you're over here on this podcast and we have the Chief Product and Technology Officer for essensys, James Shannon. Thank you both for joining us. I feel like there are a lot of very sexy technology innovations happening in the industry."
00:01:17,"It's a really fun time and this is one of them. You guys just launched a new product called Elumo and we're going to go through a couple of use cases and what it is and how it works. I feel like we could put one of these on everything. It's the, it's a great little product. You had it at GCUC last week, so we got to see a demo."
00:01:34,"A lot of excitement around it. So. Well, I'm going to stop talking and let you guys share what the genesis you know of it was, what problem it solves, the opportunities that you see. And if you're a YouTube watcher, we're going to cut in a video of it so you can see what it looks like in action. We're extremely excited about it. Jamie and I like you feel like we can put it on every single meeting room and let's just put on every door in America and see how it goes."
00:02:01,"Exactly. As much as everyone in a essensys wants it to be their idea, it's really the man sat right next to you, at least in my screen, that came up with it several years ago and it was actually almost to the day. His first day at essensys was at GCCUC in Denver in 2019. Oh, that's crazy. Wow. Memorable for a litany of reasons. And if you want to hear that story, please feel free to shoot me an email."
00:02:26,"I'll set a meeting with you and tell you about it. But yeah. James Shannon, the man, the myth, the legend. Can you tell us about Elumo and how it came to Be, yeah, sure. I mean, you know, it was a few years back, we came out of Pandemic, we obviously took the catalyst to hybrid and the acceleration of the growth of Flex. Yeah, I mean, I started to notice a real pain point amongst our customers across operators and, and that was people were having to choose meeting rooms and any bookable space in general has become more in demand and more valuable in every single space we frequent."
00:03:01,"Right. And we were starting to see this pain point where either people wanted to social distance or they wanted to get quiet space or for whatever reason, people were just staying in these collaboration spaces, not necessarily collaborating, but on their own or that everyone just trying to find their own space. And so we started to see this pain point where people are either having to choose between experience and putting booking systems on shareable space or revenue by protecting them with access control, sacrificing experience."
00:03:29,"So you either have a choice of people squatting in rooms or the frustration of not being able to get into an empty room. And so we saw this more and more as we went around our customers and around operators all around the world. And so we started to think about, this is a great problem to solve. Everyone at all. Our customers were also asking us, how do we get people back into the office?"
00:03:46,"And we're saying they'll create collaboration spaces. But then it says, yeah, but the more we build, the more pods we put in, the more people sit in them and squatting them. And it gets hard to democratize that experience. Yep, they're expensive to build. You're paying rent on that space. In fact, somebody at GCUC said last week to me, you know, we keep on putting in more and more pods and they're just, they're just always full."
00:04:06,"Yeah, we're not insatiable. Insatiable demand for a place to make a phone call. Yeah, that's right. And yet when we look at the numbers, we're seeing 80, 90% occupancy or, but then 15%, 20% use of credits or monetization of those spaces, which at the end of the day has to pay for them. So it was definitely a pain point around usability and experience, a pain point around revenue."
00:04:30,"And in this day and age, everyone's looking for that extra revenue line to not only shore up any business, but also create a great experience. And so, you know, I had a lot of experience in access control previously, also a strong sort of background in mobile applications and integrations between physical and digital. And so we came up with the concept of Elumo and you know, for Me, the greatest products are always a result of convergence."
00:04:51,"So take the iPhone as an example. You know, combine a digital camera with a music player and a phone and all of a sudden it's not just about having it in one device, it's about creating that seamless experience. And so that was the sort of the, I guess the, the inspiration for Elumo was how can we get rid of the expensive iPad that shows all the multi tenant details that no one wants to share all the details of our meetings with everyone."
00:05:14,"Right, so get rid of the expensive iPad, let's have seamless access and booking. Democratize the booking experience and stop the squatting and secure the revenue. And that's where we came up with a very simple product. If you know how to pay for sandwich or use the Metro, then you know how to use a Luma. That's how it was born. And Jamie, if you recall back to 2019, you're trying to the concept of having an automated lock, having something tied to bookings and having integration with the platforms that are out there."
00:05:42,"The most common question I was getting at the time was do you integrate with any access control solutions? And so James's entry into the business was at a perfect time because the common issue is that yes, I've booked the resource, but now how do I get into it? Do I have to wait 13, 25, 50, 60 every time you're making that, that request? It's not instant. And as you will have seen last week on the demos that we were doing live in Boston, those bookings are instantaneous."
00:06:11,"Yeah. To your point, like okay, well I booked, you know, well I have a call right now, but then the next like the booking starts at, you know, right noon or you know, whatever the hell the calendar system works versus like tap and pay or I have to spend the time to get into the app or the, you know, webinar. That's what we didn't want to do. We didn't want to solve one problem which is make sure all the pre bookings are linked to access control through integration."
00:06:36,"But then create a different frustration which was that I'm on a call, I need to jump in this empty room. Yeah. But I haven't got time to get the app out, find the building, the floor, the room, make the booking, make credit. I just want to get in now. So conscious that we didn't want to solve one problem and create another and so we had to solve both problems."
00:06:51,"And yes, this sub half second experience is all about just getting the tech out of the way, or as we like to say. No, we, we do implement access control, but it's not to keep bad people out, it's to let, it's to let productive people in. The legacy access industry is all about security and we're about, we're about getting people in, letting the revenue flow and getting tech out of the way of the experience."
00:07:13,"Yeah, okay, can you walk through just for people who haven't seen it yet, like how it works and you know, connect the tap and pay technology and. Yeah, absolutely. So you'll see in the video, which I'm sure you'll cut in that, you know, the reader is a, is a, as a standard NFC reader that you might, might experience with any other access control. But we've created it in a circular form factor that has a 24 segment LED."
00:07:37,"So every LED represents two minutes. So when I see an empty room, I see a white ring which shows me the next rolling 60 minutes of availability. I see that, that rolling, that white ring, which means it's free for an hour and I can literally, I want to get an empty room. I tap it with my smartphone, it automatically pulls the pass out of my Apple wallet and opens the door in under half a second."
00:07:57,"It then lights up for a quarter showing me that I booked the next 15 minutes. And I command, I get a push notification saying, oh, you use tap for book. Feel free to use the space for the next 15 minutes. And then you have a choice, you can tap that push notification to extend that or about five minutes till the end of your meeting. You'll get a little buzz with the option to extend or prompt you to leave to let the next person come in."
00:08:17,"So it's all about kind of letting people in, instantaneously nudging people out to avoid the awkward multi tenant moment where you're in my room and I need to get you out. So we're also trying to solve that as well. But equally, if I booked in advance, I can just look down a corridor and see, you know, look, look for, look for a partial white ring if I just need to jump in for calls."
00:08:37,"But if I booked a room, I can see that orange, that orange ring showing that room's booked and it will only let in the person who's got access to that meeting. So similarly, if I tapped a book and got in a room, I could go into that meeting, add Curt, an attendee, and now he could walk up and get into that room, but no one else would be able to allow into that room."
00:08:54,"So it's highly dynamic. In terms of who's got access and when they get access. If you add Kurt, are you adding him through his phone number? So I just look him up in the, in the member directory. So, so in my case, you know we're using our white label app equally. That could be any tenant experience app that's integrated with it could be through a native integration which I'm sure we'll cover later."
00:09:15,"But yeah, whatever booking experience is at the front end of that, the ability to just add attendee and select them and if they've already got a credential in their Apple Wallet they'll be able to access that too. Other wallets are available so Google Wallet is also supported. But yeah, it's all about leveraging the Wallet Pass. You don't even have to have the token. It's, it's instantaneous and obviously if you're Apple Watch user you can use your watch."
00:09:40,"So it leverages all the, all the fun of Apple Wallet. Even if your phone's out of juice, the phone will still open the door for you because it still in the low. Yeah, this was pretty, I mean Apple 2019, I don't feel like Apple Pay was such a thing. This was. That's right. So part of the reason it's taken a few years is, is, is, is we were kind of part of Apple's journey to Apple Access."
00:10:03,"So you know, in the last year or so obviously Apple Apple Wallet for opening doors has become a thing but that they can ask been a journey to with them to get to this point. And unlike a lot of sort of, you know, traditional access control companies and traditional landlords enabling sort of employee badge with wallet as it's called, we were coming in this from a very different direction which is all about multi tenant access, dynamic access."
00:10:26,"And so you know we worked really closely with Apple over a sort of two year period to make sure the experience was great. All the right information was on the passes and they certified the whole end to end solution right from our back end to our front end, the mobile app in between the passes, the readers. So everything's been certified by Apple and obviously supports Google Wallet as well."
00:10:46,"I'm sorry, I just feel like this is going to be the next big thing and it came out of coworking well there's certainly a million use cases. I mean we've really focused strongly on the meeting, the shared meeting use case. Yeah but yeah, your imagination can go wild on spaces. People were saying why wouldn't you just put these pods in coffee shops and just use Apple Pay, they would all be full the whole time, revenue stream."
00:11:09,"So. Yeah. Or airports or you name it. Like, I'm think. I mean, I'm even thinking, you know, I don't even be to a German airport, but they have these, these glass smoking pods. I mean, you can literally think of anything that you could, you could book and pay for. Totally. Yep. Yeah. The wellness rooms, the. I mean, anything. Wellness rooms. Yeah, yeah, it's. It's totally brilliant. And they're so user."
00:11:31,"They're just like total, like, like, like B2C design. Right. Like you don't, you know, it's not. It just feels so easy and simple. Okay, so they're, they're space management platform agnostic. Right. Because operators listening are thinking, well, what if I use Deskworks or Office R and D or. So it doesn't matter, you can install one. How do you. So Kurt, you did something fancy with a 3D printer for GCUC?"
00:11:59,"Yeah. So it took him all weekend. To me all weekend it was, you know, the machine's actually still cooling down. It was quite a. So what happened was, and I gotta give Lizzy some credit here, she said, yeah, I have a brilliant idea. Could you and room. Room.com yeah. Partner together to demonstrate Illuma live at GCUC? I think it'd be an amazing partnership. Immediately I said yes. And then it became, hey, James, how do we figure this out to make this work?"
00:12:30,"Fortunately, biz dev guy says yes, runs to the C3PO and says, that's right, that's right. So we only had a few weeks to turn this around and we're trying to figure out how to actually deploy it. And got James on a scoping call. He identified that the existing meeting room bracket could be repurposed to hold the Elumo reader, which was, you know, ace, because we didn't have to drill any additional holes."
00:12:57,"And it actually looked incredible. Which we'll also put a link into the show, notes to this. And by working with Justin on their product team, the technical advisor, we identified a couple different solutions. And like hell, I mean, James and I, through Monday night were there setting it all up. Sure enough, as soon as we plugged in the Elumo controller, it came on like that and worked the entire show flawlessly."
00:13:23,"Yeah, we must have done over a hundred demos of it while in show and some, some people were really pulling on the. The handle, like pretty hard break in. Yeah, I kind of just kind of stood back. I didn't like, stop. I'm like, let's just see what happens. And no, One broke it. Wow. No one? Yeah, it was pretty impressive. But it was a really, really cool use case of obviously taking something that's very familiar to the community."
00:13:48,"Everyone has those meeting room booths and taking a new look at, a new look at it and a new approach at it. And in fact, you know, one of the multinational operators who has hundreds of these said, could we deploy this on ours? And we're actually confident in being able to say yes, yes, we can repurpose. I'm interrupting for a second. Are you working on starting a coworking space?"
00:14:12,"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."
00:14:45,"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."
00:15:23,"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"
00:15:54,"forward/masterclass. Well, how does the retrofit work? Yeah, how, how or you know, 3D print. Well, I mean that was a one off. But I mean, for instance, I mean every Luma comes with a flush mount, a surface mount and a glass mount. So you can drill holes. If it's your phone booth, just drill the holes for three different services use cases. But yeah, in our case it was very simple to prototype something completely custom which you could put on five things or you could produce 500 of them."
00:16:20,"I mean it's very simple. So I think that's kind of what we've tried to do is make Elumo kind of a Swiss Army Knife of tech, really. I mean even the hub, which is the kind of the brain that normally sits up in the ceiling somewhere that controls the log, even that is designed to do a multitude of different things. So not only open the door, but also act as a sensor gateway."
00:16:39,"So for instance, it supports an industry standard sensor technology called Enoce. And you can deploy these peel and stick ambient powered sensors to detect occupancy, room temperature, CO2 levels. So we'll get to the point very soon with software updates where if the booking, if no one's a no show for the booking, we can detect that in the room and automatically cancel the booking and free up that empty space."
00:17:02,"So again, we're not creating another frustration because there's a no show, we're freeing up the room and potentially you can double bill that room. Similarly, if the room gets too hot or too stuffy, we can quarantine it, put a red ring on and alert the community manager. So again, not just feeding sensor data and letting someone else figure out what to do with it, but actually creating these autonomous spaces that start to all by themselves improve the member experience."
00:17:27,"So yeah, we really tried to design a product that's not just come out of the access industry, but one that's designed to go multi tenant experience. Yeah, right. And to your point, the meeting room growth, I mean for anybody who's listening, who's not in one of those markets, but I mean in general, across the board, it's meeting room revenue that has popped out of the pandemic. I think we all hoped it would be, you know, all the enterprise users rolling in and booking, you know, booking everybody solid, you know, 100% occupancy, which is, is, you know, starting to slowly happen."
00:17:56,"But I mean, I spent a lot of time advising new operators and I was on a call yesterday with Charlie from the Mullen and he was remarking about how quite unexpectedly they've had this enormous surge. And I was looking at, I don't know if the deck or their website, the number of phone rooms they include, because somewhat surprisingly, they have more of a blend in terms of product mix."
00:18:18,"And I think this is one big opportunity that I love about this. It's so expensive to build private offices, but so many people are on zoom on, you know, client calls, whatever. I'm one of those people. You guys probably are too. It's very hard to join a coworking space that, where you can't get an office or can't, you know, you don't want to pay, nobody's paying for it."
00:18:36,"And so you don't want to do that. You're stuck at home. But if the operator provides enough phone rooms, then it becomes really usable, especially with the experience that you're creating within a Elumo. And from a business model perspective, if the operator can monetize those, because that's the next big problem. Right. They take up space, they're expensive to build because they're soundproof. You know, all the things like the rooms are, you know, really is a really nice product."
00:18:59,"And there are others. The other opportunity is, is because it's all software controlled, you don't necessarily have to decide in advance or for any fixed time which are bookable spaces and which offices. Right. So you put a Luma on all your spaces. If you have an empty couple of offices in between licenses or in between leases, you just flip the toggle and the platform to say, make those bookable and all of a sudden you're captured, you're dynamically capturing meeting revenue from those offices which are empty for a couple of months."
00:19:27,"So you're only making the experience highly dynamic, but you're allowing, you're allowing the revenue capture model to be highly dynamic based on what space is available at any given time. Yeah. So yes. So how does it interface with credit systems? Right. So we have credits built into the system. So you know, when you, when you set up a Lumo in the platform, you configure at any given time which spaces are occupiable versus bookable."
00:19:50,"So that's kind of like offices versus meeting rooms. Yeah. And obviously it can be different classes of bookable space. And then you configure the platform whether you want to take cash with booking cash and account credits. Do you allow overages? Do you not? And so you configure a space, you know, and you can have different pricing for home and away users, a different pricing for tap to book versus extendable bookings."
00:20:09,"And so we try to make it as configurable as possible to allow each operator to differentiate and fine tune it to their business model and their use case. But then at the same time we did, we have, we're not getting involved in invoicing because everyone's already got a way to build. So the idea is the end of the month we can push those charges into whatever platform they're already using to build their members that way and just fit as an additional line item or discredits."
00:20:32,"They can just build the overage or reset the overage, depending on how they like to handle it. So we're deliberately sitting in the middle between whatever platform they're using in the front end and they're billing platform the back ends. We're doing the smart stuff in the middle to make it really fast and easy to use. But we're not trying to displace a well established booking system. A well established invoicing system."
00:20:51,"Exactly. And fortunately all of the systems that are out there today can ingest flat files which is what we would send. Right. So you'd be able to export from the essensys platform and the Elumo platform specifically into the booking system of record. So really we've built a product that can be deployed across the entirety of the market and it's a la carte. So for anybody listening, you don't have to be using any other Essences products."
00:21:18,"This could be it. Yep. Yeah. And we, you know, one of the things we've done with the product is we want to see this on as many meeting rooms as possible. And part of the reason we designed and manufactured it ourselves is we also really wanted to, you know, reduce the cost of putting booking and access on a meeting room by a factor of 10. Totally. I. I know when Kurt if you want pricing."
00:21:40,"But we'll put Kurt's info in the. I mean you could give a range or whatever you're comfortable with. We'll put Kurt's info in the. In the show notes. But I was working with an operator in. In Brooklyn and he, he came over to Kurt and got a demo because he was local. But he was like, yeah, we want to put that on like everything because so many people do want some sort of door access on a lot of doors."
00:22:00,"But it's really. Can be really cost prohibitive. 100 y that is to do the legacy access equipment that requires all these cable runs and everything. So we've designed Elumo to just plug into any Cat 5 cable that's already in the ceiling and power everything including the lock and the reader and the hub, all from that one cable. So we've really tried to simplify not only from an installation perspective but just from the hardware you need."
00:22:20,"You just power it from Switch. But similarly. Yeah. The commercial model is. Yeah. A couple of bucks a user a month. That's kind of it. I mean it's very, very low entry. Very simple. Simple to, you know, it's consumption based. So we're not charging the door but not, you know, it's purely, you know. Yeah. Which. Which makes it easy to grow with the space, grow with the business, grow with the number of sites in the portfolio."
00:22:41,"But Kurt, you sent a kind of a some math on a use case and I loved it because it included, you know, squatters and just challenges that operators tend to have. Operators and community managers because it's the worst as a community manager to like have to deal with the squatter. It's not a good experience for the member or the community manager. You know, to your point, like the nudge of beep beep, do you want to extend or would you like to leave versus having a human intervention?"
00:23:10,"Kurt, do you want to walk through your the math on that just to get a thinking? Yeah, totally. And it's just some quick math. Assuming four meeting rooms and charging an average rate of about 50 bucks per hour and we're assuming, albeit the pie in the sky is a 60% utilization. Right. We're going to go ahead and put in some, you know, 10% squatted loss. That's $4,400 per month."
00:23:35,"No shows about 7% but three grand and let's say unauthorized use or people just using it when they're not supposed to, that's $2,200. So your loss factor on that is over 9,000 per month. Hey there, 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."
00:24:06,"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. 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."
00:24:38,"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. 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."
00:25:13,"So I'm in the group. We have coaches that are in the group to support them. 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."
00:25:44,"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."
00:26:13,"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, we have the training on the full coworking sales funnel so they understand what that looks like."
00:26:54,"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. 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."
00:27:26,"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. So if you have any questions at all about the program, don't hesitate to reach out."
00:27:57,"You can learn more and Register@everyTHING coworking.com forward/community manager. Now back to our episode. So in what should be your highest profit center, we're talking about incremental, you know, investment to capture significant upside. I think we had a conversation last week and it was about a 2% increase in bookings, pays for everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This should be. This should be ROI in days. Yeah, it should be Rasenberg."
00:28:31,"Yeah. And we See this right? Like Flex Space AI officer and D's new growth hub Illuma. Like the data is starting to be there that like, yes, you turn this on and just a better user experience. In the technology interface, conversions go through the roof. I think sometimes just like in this B2B, it's kind of a B2B setting, but we just forget that those B2C behaviors like, follow, like nobody likes a bad interface at checkout."
00:29:04,"And you will lose people. They don't just tolerate it. I mean sometimes they do, but you know, you will lose people. And just the, you know, the behavior that you just described, everyone can relate to that. And yours is based on. Your numbers are based on four meeting rooms that are 50 bucks an hour. And some may have, you know, larger rooms, smaller rooms, I mean, but yeah, still it doesn't take a lot."
00:29:26,"It adds up really. That's what I thought with your little numbers, like the little percentages here and there. It's just like that loss factor can add up really quickly. And, and the other important thing is, you know, in this industry margins are like, we're looking for margins on services like on the meeting rooms, on you know, things like mail. It's like you got your off, you get your anchor, you know, revenue."
00:29:48,"But the other line items are really important. So it's a, it's a lever. We don't have that many levers in this industry, you know, and office pricing value. Right. It's just sitting there, just capture it. Yeah. And I think even today I was having a conversation with a, a large operator who just, he's, you know, just feeling like, oh, there's, there's a lot of pressure on pricing in some markets it's competitive."
00:30:12,"So you know, maybe your offices are not creating the output that you were hoping for. There's a lot of meeting room demand. And those users tend to not be that price sensitive because may, you know, maybe they're enterprise and maybe they're members who are. But that's where you capture the loss factor. So it's like you get the sort of top end of, you know, making it a really great user experience."
00:30:32,"And it could be things like monetizing phone rooms for day pass users. Like if you're in markets where you have day pass users, you probably never had a way. So, you know. No. Well, actually I'd be curious because you guys see so many operators and how they kind of think about the philosophy around our meeting rooms and phone booths. Like free. Should they be include? Like, I don't know if you, you know, council operators on this."
00:31:01,"But I would love to hear how you think about it. I think the, on the practical side, from a pro forma perspective, it's hard to just say, oh, it's an all inclusive experience, you get all the phone room use you need, et cetera. How do you think about that and how do you think this technology will play into it? James? Yeah, I think we see credits as a very common solution to that."
00:31:25,"Again, to try and democratize it so people don't overuse. Overuse. But I guess one of the problems traditionally with that is that people just don't use the credit. So we're in a building in London where everyone has credits, but. But no one's booking anything because everyone just sits in the rooms. So it's kind of a meaningless construct. So, you know, I think what we're going to see as you roll these out is credits becomes probably the norm."
00:31:46,"But then suddenly, you know, yes, you get a certain amount of usage but then you start to drive the overages. Yeah. And that then becomes a revenue stream. And similarly, if I, if I can't get a place in this building, can I? Easily, if I can, if experience is so easy that I could literally go to the space next door or the one or the one down the street and there's neither an alliance or there's another space in the portfolio that my operator."
00:32:06,"If that's, if that experience is seamless, then I'm just going to go there tomorrow or then the next day or whatever. So I think, I think as we start to see the watermark rise in terms of expectation of the user experience and seamless booking and access, I think people will go where the experience is best and where it's easiest to get access to the space they need. But yeah, I think, to answer your question, credits seems to be a really popular one across the operators I talk to that the challenge until now has been no one ever goes into overage."
00:32:34,"Yeah. Because no, it's not enforced. It's impossible to enforce it. So to the point where, you know, I've seen, you know, permissions around use of credits only given to a few people in an occupier or a tenant. But, but all the members are using the rooms, so it's kind of pointless. Right. So Jamie, for the prevention. So the inverse to ROI is also experience. So experience cuts both ways."
00:32:54,"So because it's easy to use the resource doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good thing for the, for the whole. So you can make it A scenario where you can tap to book and the first 15, 20 minutes are free and then the person is nudged to pay for it after the fact. So you're getting the best of both worlds. You can, you can pop into the phone booth, not worry about being nickeled and dime."
00:33:13,"But also fair use becomes police and it becomes something that you can track. And then from that, from that you can then go to your landlord partner and say, look, we're doing amazing this. Obviously revenues are ticking up. I need your support to build out or need to go out, buy more rooms. Yeah. Then all of a sudden you have the data to back up your argument and all of a sudden your partnerships become stronger because they have more sunlight on what's actually occurring in the space."
00:33:41,"That kind of sorcery behind the scenes. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. I mean, I kind of love these, you know, the 15 minutes for a quick phone call. But if you want to sit in here and take your, you know, full hour zoom call, then pay for it. And I don't think the users care. I mean there's just such a practicality level of, you know, how the business model works."
00:34:02,"And if you're, if you're an infrequent user, if you don't have an office, your revenue contribution to the space is not very high. Right. And so you're not that attractive to the right to the owner. And yet like everybody, like that's an important segment because you don't require, you know, physical, a physical build out that's really expensive to do up front. So I think there's, you know, there's, maybe we'll see a shift there around expectation."
00:34:26,"Like phone booths are not just, you know, completely, you know, use as much a buffet, you use as much as you can when you come in, but they're there. And that's, you know, what a lot of us need is. We just need access. Happy to pay for the call and then it'll pay for the phone rooms. And to your point, then you can match supply with demand and create a great experience."
00:34:48,"And that's a deliberate decision that we only showed a rolling hour was that we were founding with these traditional tablet solutions as people were looking for the phone booths that hadn't been books today. And this just. Okay, that's my office for the day. Just sit here, right? Yeah. And someone will have to be brave enough to tell me to move. That's right. Which is super awkward for everyone."
00:35:10,"Yeah, exactly. So just showing the rolling out immediately means. Okay, I don't know if this is dutme. It's just that it's like, it's much harder. It's much. That behavior becomes a big kind of psychological factor in behavior around shared space. Yeah. So we try to encourage the destiny of behavior through the sort of design and usability. So Jamie, what we're really trying to do is build a better world."
00:35:30,"That's what this is about. Yeah, yeah. Elevating everyone's consciousness. You're going to break at the song, Kurt. That's exactly right. I mean, I love it. You mentioned the coffee shop example. I had a group who went through our startup school and they're in Waltham, Mass. So I got to go out and visit and they have, yep, full coffee shop in the front and then coworking in the back."
00:35:55,"And we were talking about that. I said, oh, I just, you know, saw this Elumo product. It'd be amazing. And also maybe a way to draw people into the coworking space so that they know it's there. Like signage, like, hey, you can tap and pay to use our phone booth because they had a phone booth, but it's all hidden in the back. So you know, and again, it's just like even if just creating these little streams of revenue, but it's totally affordable technology that you just add on to something you have already."
00:36:21,"Or it's a way to pay for the phone booth because you could. Yeah, yeah. And I guess, I guess that's also where wallet comes into it because you know, traditionally with plastic cards, it didn't really work well for these kind of short lived digital journeys, you know, and also community managers, people would lose them, borrow them, steal them, you know. Yeah. And no one, no one lets a smartphone out of their site."
00:36:40,"It's easy to deliver a temporary digital pass over the air. So it kind of enables this whole experience really. And that, that's why it was such an important ingredient. Because specific to those examples, the ability, ability just to deliver a temporary pass to someone through some sort of micropayment and then unlock access was a huge part of it because we can't continue printing plastic cards and using them."
00:37:01,"These kind of short use cases. Totally Right. Removing microplastics, Jamie. Making the world better. That's exactly what we're doing. Exactly. Yep. A healthier world. And then, and then something that James talked about a little bit earlier with the Illumina mobile app, that comes as part of the solution for, you know, purple pennies more. What you're now able to do is you can have those conversations with Landlords to activate the rest of the space as well."
00:37:25,"We're seeing a dip in tenant, tenant engagement apps. Somebody told me that tenant engagement apps that do not have a mobile pass as a component of that experience are not renewing. Whereas. Because why is anybody going into it? Like there's that habit doesn't get created. But if you needed for the door access. Yeah, interesting. Exactly. And then, and then as a part of that making, making the meeting rooms of the asset available via said mobile app now will increase bookings and with proper policing and with the need to have, well, the, the lack of needing someone to man that space, all of a sudden the conversation gets expedited and more and more landlords can get on board and we can open up more and more of these spaces."
00:38:07,"So there, there is a bit of a snowball effect that this is unlocked. This is, you know, kind of a minor thing. But when you mentioned just sort of like, you know, uncaptured use of meeting rooms even after hours. I know this always used to be a big conversation like, well, how do you, you know, do you set the expectation that members should be booking after hours? I mean, James, to your point, like maybe they're not booking really at all, but maybe they are if there's, you know, not enough meeting rooms and they have to."
00:38:34,"But then after hours it's a free for all, you know, manager leaves at 5, people are just walking in and out of meeting rooms. And again that's another place where just even if you're capturing that, you know, on the margin. Yeah. And I can even imagine a lot, you know, now we live in a dynamic book and access experience in a world where you have dynamic pricing. So maybe these, these collaboration spaces, a lower number of credits or lower price or on evenings than they are Thursdays during business hours."
00:39:01,"So because it's all software controlled and dynamic, it's very easy to create those kind of that surge pricing, you know, so busy times versus quiet times and so on. So you get into a world where you really can fine tune the revenue to demand whilst maintaining consistent experience. Yeah. Okay, so this is a little bit tactical, but if I'm already using Office R and D and the white labeled meeting room app, how does Elumo in the interface fit in?"
00:39:27,"So, great question. So we have a, we have an out of the box native officer ID integration coming in very shortly. So that will, that should literally be a login configure. Map my location to my Elumo sites and you're off to the races. We've Also got some other partners already already done some integration of the front end. And really anyone who has any kind of platform, all we really need to do is push the bookings back and forth."
00:39:51,"So that's how we kind of developed the R&D1. It's kind of as a showcase for how well that can work, but it's pretty straightforward for anyone to do the same. But yeah, we got several partners also working on them on their own to make it an easy journey for their own customers. So yeah, I think we'll see pretty quickly a bunch of native integrations that just. Yeah, straight out, straight out of the box."
00:40:09,"Just, just log into a Elumo, connect the two platforms and we just start pushing bookies back and forth. Yeah, I mean to your point, it's better for everyone. Office R and D wants profitable operators and if that means, you know, Elumo is the ticket to that, great. Yeah, yeah. And we live in a world where none of us wants to build, none of us can build the best platform end to end for everything from lead capture, through operations, through access, through bookings, through billing, through invoicing, through ar."
00:40:36,"You know those days are over for more sophisticated operators actually want to use best of breed. And so we squarely target doing the best job of dynamic booking and access experience and then play nicely with the platforms that are already well established. No one wants to rip and replace a front end experience that members are already used to. Nobody wants to rip and replace billing system that's already in place, it's just too heavy a lift."
00:40:59,"So just being able to slot in there and just elevate that part of the experience, capture that latent revenue that's there to be captured whilst just continuing the existing experience members. And then does the data like utilization data live like becomes with sort of the admin? That's right. So logging into our portal you can immediately see the, you know, in our intelligence engine, see how the brims are being utilized, who's using tap to book versus pre booking."
00:41:26,"So you really start to get insight into behavior of how these spaces are being used. Start to optimize number of attendees versus capacity of rooms, hours of day. You start to see the heat map of when spaces are busiest. Maybe that then informs dynamic pricing. So yeah, you start to get this real insight and of course then eventually you can layer the sensor data on top of that as well to potentially detect how many no shows, how many auto cancellations."
00:41:50,"Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff and intelligence we can surface. So again, rather than just putting an access kind of card on the door which kind of tells you kind of someone opened it. Yep. Having the bookings and bookings and access and dynamic access intelligence all in one place allows us to put all those jigsaw pieces together. Kurt, I think you might be right. It might be totally life changing."
00:42:12,"I think the data is so interesting because these especially these days with meeting room demand being so much, it's like would you have. The meeting rooms are the right size, do they have the right number of seats? Like all of those things. Things. Or are they. Or do you have underutilized spaces? Like I, you know, I know this is. It's challenging to find the right balance of amenities like the wellness room."
00:42:33,"Okay, well is it used 5% of the time and people get like emotionally attached to these rooms. Okay, well if you have data, guess what. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Multi purpose the room. Right. I mean I'm all for the. Well, you know, there are certain things you're not going to compromise on. The mother's room stays or whatever. But. Yeah, but I see people getting kind of emotionally tied to other things that just are really underutilized and they just need the data to show that."
00:43:00,"Yeah, I mean, yeah, this discussion I was having a GCUC. It may have been with Charlie actually about I keep buying more pods and they keep filling up. It's like, okay, these are expensive, right. But if the data telling me I need them and like paying for themselves, I'm going to add more. Right, right, right. Like they either they correlate with open, you know, open Flex memberships or you can monetize them for people who are dropping in for a day pass."
00:43:23,"Maybe it's not included and. Yeah, yeah, totally. I love that. Okay. Anything that I haven't asked that you want to share? Well, I think it's worthwhile highlighting the fact that Elumo is obviously augmenting what we've been talking about for the past few years around insights and intelligence across WI FI and WI FI experience and how we're really uncovering another layer of that data so you can further operate."
00:43:50,"But we're still solving for everything on the network authentication side of things when it comes to a WI FI experience. So if you think about what the workflow can be if you're on an Office R and D, adding that user once they're getting notified of being added to the network and now it's layering on how they get into the space as well. So it's those little things that I think it's worth highlighting."
00:44:12,"Wait and so just to clarify, this is not external door access, it's internal door access? Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. Definitely focusing on solving the internal shareable, shared bookable spaces. Pain point. Yeah, absolutely. And that's often a question we get actually is do I have to take out my existing access control perimeter? No, absolutely not. It can sit in parallel. It doesn't have to displace it at all. Yep, got it."
00:44:36,"Cool. And I think, you know, to your point, Kurt, you know that seamless experience is not just about seamless booking access, it's about seamlessly onboarding the user to both digital and physical environments. So. So when they add a member top of R and D, they not only get their WI Fi credential, but they also get their Apple Wallet pass. So it's not only seamless day to day use the space, but actually seamless onboarding, which again, the community manager and the overall experience of the space is kind of what we're all about."
00:45:03,"Yes. The never ending onboarding checklist that you have to force people through if it's just done. Yeah. And then they just learn how to use it. And I also love that like the visuals of people like you learn quickly. Like, oh, that's how, you know, it's just so. Yeah. Again, one of the key design aims was if we see a laminated A4 sheet of paper next to something next to a Elumo showing how to use it, we fail."
00:45:27,"It's not a V, it could just be tab. Oh, okay. That's how it works. And that's all you need to know. Yeah, I love it. Awesome. Well, thanks for sharing. I mean, thanks for being innovative because our industry, you know, needs. It needs to continue to level up and the meeting room space is, is an area that's ripe for opportunity. So hopefully we'll live up. You'll live up to Kurt's dream of, of changing the world."
00:45:54,"Yeah. So, okay, I'll put Kurt's info in the show notes, Kurt, if anybody's interested, reach out, you'll walk them through how it works. It's really approachable, totally accessible, really, to any operator. So it's a, it's a great product. Anything else? Oh, that was great. Just, you know, thank you again for having us, Jamie, as always. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Keep us posted. We'll have to do this again when we have some more data and use cases to share."
00:46:19,"We'd love to have you back. Thanks for making the time, guys. Okay, thanks. 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. 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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