“Stop selling the feature functions and sell the so what.” - Joe White - Executive Series #1

Joe White is the Global Technology Solutions and Client Care Lead at Cushman & Wakefield.

If real estate is from Venus and PropTech is from Mars, Joe has made a career “being in the spaceship between the two”. With 15 years of experience in Commercial Real Estate, Joe is passionate about working with clients to digitally transform their strategies and bringing innovation to solve for opportunities and risks in their strategy. Currently, Joe advises Cushman & Wakefield clients as to the appropriate technology platforms that a data, process, capability, and price-optimized CRE department may require.

In this interview, Joe provided invaluable insights into the challenges real estate leaders are facing when digitally transforming their processes, the future of data and AI, advice for PropTech leaders aiming to deploy their technology at scale, and much more. 

Interviews with inspiring Founders, Investors, and Real Estate Executives will be shared weekly on this podcast series - follow the PropTech Talks interview series and stay tuned!

Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-maltzoff/

Transcript

00:00:03 Matthew Maltzoff
 OK, so hello everyone. Welcome to the next edition of PropTech Talks, where we talk with successful PropTech founders, investors and real estate executives about their journeys to where they are today, the nuances of the modern real estate industry and how to capitalise on them. We're here with Joe White, Global Technology Solutions and Client Care Lead at Cushman & Wakefield. Good Morning, Joe. How's it going?
 
 00:00:24 Joe White
 Hey, Matthew. Yeah, very good. Thank you.
 
 00:00:27 Matthew Maltzoff
 Cool. Thanks for being on the podcast today.
 
 00:00:29 Joe White
 No worries, I'm excited to join you. Obviously this is a topic very close to my heart and I'm, you know, living and breathing it, so hopefully I can share some of my views and thoughtful insights.
 
 00:00:39 Matthew Maltzoff
 For sure. So before we jump into the industry at large and problems and solutions that you've been seeing, just more about you. So how did you get to where you are today and what are the sort of things you're working on?
 
 00:00:53 Joe White
 I'm based just outside of London. I've lived in Basingstoke my whole life. At uni I did business IT, which really was to try and help businesses solve problems with tech. And so it really set me up in a, in a good position to do a role that allows me to not just be a tech geek or, or be fully business. It kind of merges the two, the translation, if you will. And so when I was at there, I did a, a placement year. So my third year I, I actually ended up speaking to my mum who was working for an FM company at the time. And she just said to the boss at her company, if you've got anything a placement student can do. And so I actually went and worked at this company called Kier Facilities Management, the big construction firm, but they have a facilities arm and I rolled out a CMMS platform for one of their clients. And so at the time it was, it was concept evolution. So I rolled out a very early format of concept evolution, which was my first foray living well, corporate real estate tech, FM tech stayed at Kier after uni for seven years and then decided that the next stage was probably going to London, the big bad world of London. And I went to work for CBRE. So at CBRE really focused around their FM technology again, more on focused on their their IWMS platform and then supporting the local FM business as well. And then I've been at Cushman now for six years. Before COVID, I was really an EMEA focused role working on technology RFPs for the EMEA business or not tech RFPs, RFPs for the tech element of that. And also making sure that our current clients were being serviced from a tech perspective, bringing innovation, bringing in systems to to solve those business needs. And then during COVID really became a global role with a main focus on working with our global occupier clients through an RFP stage and through, you know, existing client stage to understand what tech they've got today, what tech they would like and what tech they can benefit from and how Cushman can offer a better service with tech. And so, you know, really working with the big occupier clients in that RFP stage, my favourite part of it is talking to the clients, understanding where they are and how we can meet them in that journey and how we can not sell tech. We're, we're not a technology company. We don't try and sell tech. We sell a service which is supported by tech and utilising more of a consultative approach to that to understand where the clients are in their journey and meet them there.
 
 00:03:22 Matthew Maltzoff
 Amazing stuff. What was the biggest surprise going from EMEA to now working globally?
 
 00:03:28 Joe White
 I would say that one, it's not that different in terms of which I was quite surprised that you know, much bigger clients and which for me and my career growth was was much, you know, I really appreciated that. I think that there are different processes, different people, different cultures, but I think the biggest challenge is that you are working globally and therefore you're, you know, 6:00 AM calls of Asia and and calls with America. But we've always been a very global business. And for a company the size we are, we've got quite a robust but niche tech team. And it means that we are truly working globally, which which is great. It just means that there's some odd time zones and my diary time tends to flex depending on what's on in the day and so I can still try and hit the gym between going to Asia calls and then America.
 
 00:04:19 Matthew Maltzoff
 I always wondered because in the sort of entrepreneurial sphere circles this, you know, always talk of how people manage their daily lives and also grow a business, especially in today climate. Are you thinking about all those sorts of things? Is that pivotal to being successful and growing business within Cushman or do you sort of really separate the two?
 
 00:04:42 Joe White
 Yeah, well, I, I would say that Cushman are massively growing the business and and trying to win work. Obviously I am beholden to the business winning work. I have to, you know, support them in that winning process and understand what they need from a tech perspective, you know, I have a team that support that across the globe, but we have peaks and troughs as everyone does. But from a client perspective, they tend to come out to RFP in like April, then in September, then every there's always a client that loves to send an RFP at Christmas. There's from my perspective, I have the manage those peaks and troughs. We're using lots of data now, which is which is lovely to use the data to understand that. So we can plan for the more entrepreneurial side of how do we make sure we get to conferences, make sure we learning what's out there, learning how we can do business better. And so it's just that sometimes we have to drop everything and just work on a climb because that's the most important thing at that point. So that's the kind of the balance of the two, I think from a work life balance. You know, I, I like to but merge it, you know, I do go to London for my job, but you know, I am predominantly at home and I'm quite happy just kind of essentially rolling with the punches of I can go and have an hour or two out and then come back and do some more work. And it just. It works for me, works for my line, works for my work, Even so.
 
 00:06:01 Matthew Maltzoff
 Wonderful stuff. So more jumping into the industry at the moment, seems like we were saying this all year, but now is a very different time to what it was before. As you mentioned, you know, interest rates are, I feels like you can't have a discussion without the two letters A and I making their way into a conversation. Sustainability is seemingly even more on people's minds and that trajectory is on the increase, especially with incoming regulations. Technology is creeping its way into buildings and into businesses bit more and more. We are becoming more and more efficient as time goes on. So what do you make of it all and what would you say is the main problem to solve at the moment from your perspective?
 
 00:06:39 Joe White
 You touched on the words A and I right there at the moment, we're getting a lot of questions, which is like, how are you using AI, right? And you know, quite honestly, most companies have been using AI for a number of years. Have they been using generative AI? You know that there's more of a question of how are you using the new advances in there? Like going back to my career, FM tech, when I started probably not even 10 years ago, it was still just how do you manage your work orders? You know, how do you manage your work orders? How do you manage your planned work? And how do you do some reporting off the back of it? Quite honestly, it was very, you know, mundane tech. Whereas now with the rise in PropTech, it's been, it's an exciting journey and it's really, you know, an exciting ride to be on because there's different things all the time. And from our perspective, it's a tough economy at the moment because as you mentioned, the interest rates are high and clients are maybe a bit more reluctant to move, while while they're not doing so well and so impacting transactions and clients moving from one provider to another. And so we're really trying to use tech to help support from a data perspective, data is really key. And I think maybe has been underestimated slightly over the last however many years. And now that we have a more predominant AI message and AI has, has come massively on the hype curve. Like if you look at the Garner hype curve, it's probably way higher than anything else, right? And you mentioned sustainability, but I think from a hype perspective, AI has to be up there. AI is clearly here to stay and obviously will be. But I do think there may be a little drop in expectations when people start to realise that actually the data side is really quite tough to address if you haven't already. And so having a really strong data strategy and data team. And so for companies like service providers, if, if a client moves from one provider to another, it's then becomes more important that that data is exchanged in a professional manner, in a helpful manner that we can utilise it and then build upon it. In the olden days, perhaps it was more of a, well, here's some assets, you go do what you need to do with it. And I think that that process has made clients say, well, we want to bring our own tech, which again, it's fine if clients want to bring their own tech. But the analogy that I always give on this is if you were going to get your car serviced, you wouldn't tell them to use your tools, right? You wouldn't say, you know, you can service my car, but I want you to use my garage and I want you to use my tools. And if I don't have the right tools, you must change your business processes to adapt to that. And so it's an interesting challenge on both sides because I understand the data piece. And So what we have seen a lot of clients moving down the, the angle of it is having their own data warehouse. And so mandating that any of their service providers that work with them have to feed their data into the data warehouse, which I'm a massive supporter of. I think it's a great way of clients doing it because you get the best of both worlds, right? You can still have your service provider bring in their strategic tech that aligns their business processes. They can still bring innovation. They can still have the data analytics and business intelligence. But it also means that you have getting a regular feed of the data that you can do what you need to do with to manage your business. And so for our clients, it's the balance between owning everything and outsourcing everything. And somewhere in the middle is probably where the sweet spot, the advice we're going to client when we meet them, looping the conversation back around to the start is without that data, there's only so much AI can do. It can do a lot with processes, it can do a lot with helping. You know, Microsoft Co pilot potentially is going to be amazing for how businesses run, but how people can support their clients. I think that's where the data side of it comes in. And you know, really using the data that you've got in your property databases, in your FM databases to help make better decisions with generative AI I think is is where, you know, we can add a lot of value, not just Cushman, but as a industry I think is where we can take it forward.
 
 00:10:55 Matthew Maltzoff
 I mean, it's apparent that there is more motivation to be more data-driven today because on the one hand, you know, you mentioned AI requires data for it to even really be in a talking point. But at the same time, that just makes data so much more valuable, you know, like it was, it was already valuable, it was already worth doing, but now you can supercharge the value of this data with the sort of things that can be done with AI at the moment. You mentioned these data warehouses. So what is the best case scenario for the businesses you work with and how they would implement that strategy?
 
 00:11:26 Joe White
 Well, the the advice that you know that I, I usually will give to my clients and you know, working with we are, you know, even the clients are asking for this now is that you know, if we have usually a service provider like Cushman will come with a strategic set of systems. You know, from a Cushman perspective, we don't attempt to make money from third party solutions. We are very much using the systems to do our business processes and then we feed all of the data from our underlying platforms into a reporting layer, which means that if a client has nothing, they get, you know, the business tangents. It means that we can use the data to make better decisions on their behalf. And then from a perspective of the clients and, and how the clients can use that is we quite often will provide some kind of feed, usually via SFTP or or some kind of integration technology of that data, that the data they need, maybe taking out some proprietary information or market intelligence and feeding that back to them so that they can at least have the data that they can use. If they haven't got the resources, then you know, it doesn't matter because they're going to get it from Cushman. But a lot of these companies want to overlay it with if you take a retail company, you know, we've got all their property information and we've got all their lease information and we've got the High Street information and the footfall information. What we very, we rarely get is the sales information, right. So, you know, we can make all sorts of recommendations around where they should be, what High Street they should be on, what the the GDP for that location is. But unless they share the sales data back then there's a limit to how far that analysis, that advice can go. Because, you know, we can't say, well, you're doing really well there unless you give us a data. And so you know, what we tend to have is clients will either say, yeah, you can have the data or actually, actually it's a different team that manage at the store performance. And So what we want to do is we want to give them the the store lease event detail, you know, your intelligence around the the High Street and the footfall. And then we'll overlay that with our sales data and we'll make the decision. And then we'll tell real estate, no, we want to move to this place, can you go find it or we want to move out and, and get rid of it. And so, so that's quite an interesting dynamic because a lot of our clients have different place, different people that especially in retail because because obviously it's their, you know, it's their bread and butter is being in the right place. And so the real estate is maybe a secondary decision maker in the space, but they need the data to make the sales team or the sales management team need the data to know where to go. And so that's where the crossover, as I said, yeah.
 
 00:14:04 Matthew Maltzoff
 And so and following from a point you made earlier being that a client sort of just sees real estate as how it always was, you get some land and you get some dividends from it and that sort of that's just the process. And now thinking away real estate isn't almost even really sold or really rented. It's just kind of bought because if you have an office in the right place, people just move in and you know, so now how is the the shift in mindset? Are, are occupiers and are your clients more open to technology? Is there resilience? Do they need to be sold in it? We were kind of joking earlier about how a lot of these products might have great products, but the product led CEO might not be great at getting that message across to to their clients. So with all of that in mind, from your perspective, how are clients looking at technology? Are they taking it with an open mind or is there still quite a bit of resistance?
 
 00:14:56 Joe White
 Following on from that product led point, right, if you can show the value and if you can show the return on investment, then most clients are looking at it with an open mind. You know, we very much I, I talked a little bit about the the location strategy and analysis strategy that's kind of on our side. But if you then look at the tech that we are delivering for a client within the client, we will invest obviously as part of winning work, we'll invest an amount. But but for a, for a client to be globally successful in deploying, let's just take digital IFM, you know, from a, you know, analysing the sensor information that all of that data that buildings are generating and then putting a system on top to say, oh, you should go out and do a proactive maintenance on this building because the, the heating sensor is too high on this asset. And we're a bit worried about it. You know, those sort of decisions, they improve our service, but we need the clients to also, you know, invest in the sensor technology or in the, you know, in, in opening their architecture there, you know, the, the security side to say, right, Cushman, yes, we want you to have some of this data. And so as long as we are proving the ROI in the business case, then I absolutely think they are open to it. Obviously there's security challenges too. And some of our clients, some of our biggest clients are banks. And so proving the ROI is, is one side, but I also think proving the security is the other. And, and actually being open to the fact that security process could take some time, right? Because when we're working with clients and we know that, you know, we've got a 90 day transition, but the IT security process could take six months. And so we often to say to them before we contract, let's have a conversation about IT security, let's make sure that the systems that we're deploying and, and it can be a bit of a hindrance for, for PropTech because generally speaking, they probably don't have SoC 2 certification. They're all secure, but maybe not don't have the accreditation. So that might be the the lens of there's a slightly risk averse piece there, but I think there's a way around it. I think you just having a plan for understanding it in great detail, I think is important. No, for the PropTech people. I said to you, Matthew, I just think I joke with, with Ross, who's our global emerging technologies lead, whenever we sit on prop tech demos that the thing that I want to just say to them offline is tell us the So what, right. Just tell us what it does that makes it different from the other sense of technology or the other space and occupancy designer. There's so much PropTech out there that the feature functions don't really work for, for me. Certainly, I don't think they work for a company like Cushman or our competitors. I think if you can prove the value and the So what that is where you can get into these relationships because it just, it changes the conversation. If you start with that lead with I'm going to save you X amount of money, OK, Tell me how, right? And I'm going to improve the way you do FM services and, and even bringing the business along for the ride, right? It's always good selling to a tech person who understands that you've built it on Microsoft Azure and it's done this way and it can you can customise it here. But if I'm trying to sell that to the business, they want to see, well, why am I doing this? You know, why am I bothering? Or if I want to say it to a client, it's like, well, tell me how I can use it to save money, generally speaking, but also to improve employee experience, to improve my sustainability goals. All of those kind of key points. I think it's just what is the So what? And that's sometimes I'm sure there's unicorns out there in the PropTech companies, but sometimes that's just my feedback to them is stop selling the feature functions and sell the So what?

 00:18:39 Matthew Maltzoff
 I mean, it's that is sort of the the winning sales formula and it was a webinar we did where we were joking. We said real estate is from Venus and prop tech is from Mars because it was as though they were just speaking different languages. I think you've completely nailed it. I mean, it's, it's the, it's just that I.
 
 00:18:57 Joe White
 I try and be on the spaceship between the two, right? So that's that's how I've made my career.
 
 00:19:02 Matthew Maltzoff
 But sure. And it's, and it, it comes down to that understanding or understanding of what is it the other person wants. I think, I mean, I'm just thinking in our own, in our own business, there's no way we would ever sell a booth saying that it, it looks nice. Yeah.
 
 00:19:15 Joe White
 Yeah.
 
 00:19:16 Matthew Maltzoff
 It's like the point is, you know, we can get them customers. So no, it's a really interesting point there. And you know, comparing this to other industries in shortech, fintech, whatever. And in each industry people were saying we're really behind. So my background, I was doing conferences in insurance and everybody in insurance said we are so behind investment banking as we are so behind. Fintech is so ahead of us and now it's just so funny hearing it again and we're saying PropTech is so behind, we are so behind. And it really I think it just comes down to the problems that are being solved, identifying from the solver now that there are cases around sustainability, we do need to be more efficient with buildings for a number of reasons. OpEx needs to get cheaper. It's difficult to put CapEx into things right now. So it's having that understanding. It's crucial now, really, really exciting, Joe. So the last component of the talk is what's next, both in the case of the industry and how you see your role within Cushman working alongside that.
 
 00:20:17 Joe White
 I really do think, I hate to use buzzword bingo myself, but I do think that generative AI is, it's only kind of just started and people are just getting to know it. But I do think it's going to revolutionise the way that we do business. I think one of the things you said around PropTech being behind essentially, I think one of the reasons for that is because there's a lot of antiquated processes in PropTech and that and even to the point where you know, nothing that me from a service provider can solve. If you look at a lease, right, how many hands does the lease have to touch before it gets signed? And how many times does it get scanned for a computer, right? So clients say to us, can you give us an AI lease reading solution? Well, we absolutely can. But unless the lease is not in a paper bag and something under someone's desk has been scanned, you know how many times it's not going to do the accuracy of having people check it, right? You can help with the accuracy, but it can't revolutionise it. And so, you know, a few years ago we all talked about blockchain and actually, you know, blockchain could play a massive part in this if people embrace it. If people don't embrace it, it will probably continue in the current trajectory. And so I think for PropTech, it's making sure that the processes that we have had for many years can be changed. And you know, all of the examples you just gave suggest that the other industries have changed some of those. And so I think, you know, there is hope for corporate real estate and, and changing those. I think we'll see more companies come out with data, like better data strategies and realising the value of the data because it's not I, I would just, you know, I don't think that people are treated with the value that it needs at the moment. And, and you know, that will become vitally important from the CEO level down to an engineer's level, right? If an engineer isn't capturing, if I go back to FM just because that's where I naturally go, if an engineer isn't capturing the asset that the reactive ticket is raised against, then you're not going to be able to predict the future of that asset because you haven't got all the detail. And so start, you know, building a ground up process from there to the top. I think it's vitally important from a Cushman & Wakefield point of view. We've just released our AI strategy, which is called AI Plus. And so it's AI plus people, partners and it basically it's not looking to use AI for AI’s sake. It's trying to say how do we change our processes to add AI? It's just, it's more around saying large language models are great and we can use them to improve the business that we do. We can probably put them on some of our existing technology like I talked about the data and BI layer to add an extra thing for the clients to be able to analyse that data. And so, you know, from a Cushman perspective, I, I think it's a really great strategy around, like I said, adding AI to existing processes and people to do a better service for our clients. And that's really where we're focusing into the next year. So I'm excited for the future. And I think, you know, there's a lot of exciting tech out there. I think the last thing that I went on is employee experience as well. People keep talking about getting employees back to the office and it's getting quite honestly getting a tiny bit boring because if people want to go to the office, they will. If you need them to go in, they will. You know, why aren't we looking at providing a seamless experience from the minute they leave? Like hybrid working has been here forever and is here to stay. And so let's work on providing a seamless experience from the minute they leave their door through to getting into the office, making sure the tech is working throughout. My biggest bugbear, which I don't think, you know, Cushman can't control, is the train, right? I can't, you know, I can work. I, I'm an hour on the train. I didn't put previously when I before COVID, but I don't get any signal. I don't get any phone signal. And there's no quiet spaces where I can go and take a phone call and, you know, I'm usually stood up. And so it's kind of like, it's one of those things that's like, how do you create as a culture, as a community? How do we get a seamless experience for everyone doing a blending of their homeworking there, going to the gym, going on the train, through to when they get into the office, getting into the office and just that full process. That would be an ideal for anyone and I think it would encourage people to go to the office a bit more. But I do think we need to change the record slightly on how do we get people back to the office. It's like, well, there's elements you can do, but people do what they want to do at the end of the day.
 
 00:25:00 Matthew Maltzoff
 Yeah, for sure. I mean, and there's seems to be a shift in attitude around work on the whole. I mean, and what you were mentioning on how an organisation might need to restructure to be able to stay on top of things like AI. You think about things like law firms when you think of consultants, when you think of companies that traditionally would put 50 hour project, hundreds of hour projects into a task and then get built for it. The the question they might be thinking is do we need to render our employees useless or?
 
 00:25:30 Joe White
 You know, can we do more work?
 
 00:25:32 Matthew Maltzoff
 And that, that that's the really, that's the other thing. I mean, I guess you got to ask yourself, what kind of company are you, if you found a method to make $100,000 an hour, do you say I only need to work one hour a month? Or do you say, well now I need to work 24 hours a day for sure, you know so.
 
 00:25:46 Joe White
 Yeah, and it's a it's a good and especially in peers in my what not just corporate real estate, but in like you say in lawyers and etcetera, most of the work that that we do is hourly only the consulting side or the you know, the legal side is is hourly rates. And so if AI, I can do it in one hour and what used to be 10 hours, do you still charge the 10 hours? And I think as you know, as you just said, we changed the, if you can change the, the thinking around that and say, well, actually, yes, it used to take 10 hours, but now I'm going to go to a, a price per unit or price per output.
 
 00:26:22 Matthew Maltzoff
 It's going back to the So what, So what, don't.
 
 00:26:25 Joe White
 Tell me it's good and, and it should improve practises as well because I'm sure like, you know, Cushman obviously don't do this. I'm sure when you buy a house and you have to go to a solicitor and they give you a quote for 20 hours and they spend 17, I'm sure they're going to find a three hours somewhere, right. But if you go to an outcome base, you're happy to pay what you, you know, what you want to get out of that. I want my house, you know, I want to buy a house. And so, you know, that's the outcome doesn't matter how long it takes, to a certain degree you're, you're paying for that.
 
 00:26:53 Matthew Maltzoff
 Outcome exactly. And you obviously the the argument is it's actually just more valuable because it's faster.
 
 00:26:59 Joe White
 Yeah.
 
 00:27:00 Matthew Maltzoff
 Joe, this was a really exciting and insightful discussion. Appreciate it. You making it very digestible for a Muggle such as myself, but really insightful as well. Always a pleasure to speak with you. Yeah. Thank you for the talk.
 
 00:27:13 Joe White
 Thank you for having me on, it's been great.
 
 00:27:16 Matthew Maltzoff
 Awesome stuff.