"The idea is the easy part. Execution is what matters" - Dan Drogman - Founder Series #5

Dan Drogman is the Founder & CEO at Smart Spaces.

Smart Spaces is a pioneering smart building operating system deployed across 85 million square feet in 26 countries. With a background in technology and graphic design, Dan Drogman initially honed his skills through various tech ventures. In 2009, Dan joined forces with his brother Tom to build a business that would eventually evolve into Smart Spaces. The business was built without the support of an external investor, and has now grown to become the leader in the space that, powered by a 70-person team, is setting a new standard for tenant experience, landlord-occupant communication, actionable data, and sustainability in the built world.

Tune into this session to gain insights into Dan's journey building and growing a profitable tech company, identifying a high-potential market, building a product that responds to customer needs, effective strategies to drive actual change in consumer behaviour, 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

00:00:04 Matthew Maltzoff
 Dan, welcome to another episode of PropTech Talks. How are you doing?
 
 00:00:07 Dan Drogman
 Pretty good. Thanks. Yeah, thanks for having me.
 
 00:00:09 Matthew Maltzoff
 Cool. So for those who don't know who you are, and we're going to talk about who you are, we're going to talk about Smart Spaces. Would you give us a quick intro to yourself?
 
 00:00:21 Dan Drogman
 Yes, certainly. So I'm Dan Drogman. I'm the CEO, Founder of Smart Spaces, a smart building operating system deployed across 85,000,000 square feet in 26 countries. Founded the business with my brother Tom 14 years ago. Can't believe how quickly that's gone. And yeah, I'm really excited to be here today.
 
 00:00:37 Matthew Maltzoff
 Cool. OK, so let's start with your story first. We're going to we're going to look into like you and the the origin of Smart Spaces. We're going to look at sort of the industry today and you know, potential advice for other entrepreneurs. There's a lot to cover, but sort of right from the beginning, I think your story with Tom is really interesting and completely unique as far as I can tell, at least in the built environment. The fact haven't raised funding as well as far as I know. That's right. Yeah. So that's obviously unique. Can you give us a little bit of a insight into that, that whole beginning?
 
 00:01:11 Dan Drogman
 Yeah, certainly. So I think it probably started in the 80s. My dad's got us a personal computer, and the personal computer pretty much was only becoming mainstream back then. There's an Olivetti 286 and yeah, my brother and I had to use MS-DOS to access and manipulate the computer. So we got into programming quite early on and we were always excelled at IT. And I remember being back at high school and I could lock the IT teacher out of the network, change his theme to hot dog theme. Do you remember that red and yellow theme, which is what makes your eyes bleed? We do also naughty things like that. It used to get in a lot of trouble, but I did actually win the respect to the teacher and I just, yeah, got straight A in IT. And yeah, I was already excelling in that sort of in that skill. But funny enough, when I went to nice school, I went into graphic design because it was the .com boom. And web designers were getting paid absolute fortune. And I love design. I love computers. It was actually good for computers. So I thought this is the perfect career. Yeah. So I left school and went straight to ual University of Arts, London. And I studied a graphics course which had a digital element, then managed to get on to a degree, which is one of the very first degrees in interactive media. So actually building complex web applications which had fantastic design, being a design, you know, a engineering university. It was great. And we had so much fun on the crazy stuff and exhibitions we used to put on. Such a geek. I even end up wiring up the UA first Wi-Fi network, so Wi-Fi just come out in the market and I end up installing that on as a side there. And I generally think that contributed towards my grade. They somehow managed to give me. Oh, really? Because I've probably wasted some time doing that and not actually doing my cons work. So yeah, so I left in 2003. So I graduated in 2003 and the .com crash had already happened, you know, and I think Amazon was one of the very few that made it through. And yeah, so salaries went from over 100K for a web designer to 16 K was my first job. And So what I learned pretty quickly is that you've got to provide a lot of value in order to get paid per hire. And so that meant that we end up building some real complex applications at my first job. So it was, it was in commercial property marketing. So we had clients like McKay Securities, which was our landlord before they got acquired by Workspace. And Knight Frank was also another client. Donaldson's was another client. And Knight Frank in particular. We end up building the data rooms similar to Drooms, but back in the day, yeah, for the sale of hotels. And so you'd have these beautiful, well designed like interactive websites with virtual tours, a brochure, all the fantastic photography, but also linked to a data room where you had all the doctors do your due diligence in order to purchase the hotel. And we would track what every single user would do and give that as A to to the asset owner or the the person selling the asset. A dashboard where they could see is actually who's most interested and who's access to know most about files for longest amount of time and they could judge time wasters versus people who have genuinely interest in buying the asset. And they end up being quite successful. And we've done quite a few projects for home sales and we've done similar applications for service offices. And in about 2009 I approached the owners of the company for an equity. I felt that I'd built this department up so it could stand on it's own 2 feet. And in that time I'd hired my brother and actually hired my brother was quite a funny thing because he was the, he done the same similar course to myself UAL as well. But he was working with an electrician part time whilst at university. And he was earning so much money as an electrician, it wasn't really worth him coming in for 16 K to help out on the web development side. And so he resisted it. But then actually at the dinner table at Mum and dad's, we still lived at home at that time. And yeah, we'd have a dinner table conversation. And I'd say, look, you need to join those. You know, it'd be great if you come in and help us out and said, I've had enough of being on the tools. And it just so happened I had some maternity leave cover that was required. So I got him in for this maternity leave cover and I set aside, you know, two weeks worth of work for him to work on. And I gave that work to him. And the next day I've done that, done it. So I checked his work and it one, it was better quality than my work. Two, it was like 10 times as quick. And I pretty much in that moment thought there's a business here I can make, if you can get things complete that quick, we can make a profit because we can quote X for a project and you can deliver it in that time. And so I was really infused and that is at that point where I went to go and go to meet the owners of the company and said, no, I want an equity position because I want, you know, I feel like I'm really grow this and take it to the next level. And they done the best thing they could ever done and said no, otherwise they would still be there now. So it's quite scary. And then Joe, what was like, you know, we were only a small firm based in Covent Garden. Absolutely loved the two owners of the company. I owe them a lot. And they just took it. They said that, Dan, we always knew he was going to do this one day and we don’t want to clip your wings, you know, wish you best of luck. And the eagle is is going to take a couple of clients with us. Really. Yeah. So we continue to do a number of projects for for the clients that transferred over. And that really helped us because we that's mission critical on day one.
 
 00:06:34 Matthew Maltzoff
 That's really cool. I, I was actually listening to a podcast this morning and they said you don't really want to hire entrepreneurs because there's two things that will happen. A, let's say they, they used to run a business and now they're being hired as an employee. A, they're going to constantly negotiate for more salary or for equity because that's what they're kind of used to and they, they feel they really deserve that, which is annoying. Or B, they will get their confidence because they actually are really, really good and they will, they will kind of get their confidence back and they're going to leave and take as much of your business with them as they leave. I unfortunately listened to that kind of fell into that category a little bit. I feel a little bit that guilty, but it's interesting this very typical, I guess pattern there, which is our entrepreneur sort of has something within them and they really want to eventually build something. So it's just a matter of when really, not if.
 
 00:07:24 Dan Drogman
 Yeah. But I think it is. I think it's something around like doing something better, like if you know you can do it better and you have 100% confidence. And we were a mixed agency. We still done print work, we still done video work. And you know, that was all a distraction from our core web development we were doing. So we could see if we just focused on that and not the other things, we'd do better and that. And so knowing that we could do better meant we would transcend and go on to current.
 
 00:07:51 Matthew Maltzoff
 So one thing that a lot of people talk about in the industry now and we're going to get to more like the real estate side, but I think there's just one thing even just around startups and real estate startups and it's around just being profitable, OK? And a lot of people are thinking, you know, you need to invest to grow. You need to invest to grow, which you know, eating into the runway doesn't matter. That whole attitude that that very typical and of course it works, that VC attitude. But I'd imagine you guys probably, you know, you guys had to think about cash flow more because you didn't have that big investment like a VC, you had to build everything yourselves. So what's your take on that? What you know on how being profitable from the beginning, how did that sort of affect your growth of smart spaces to be 70 people today now?
 
 00:08:38 Dan Drogman
 Yeah, certainly. Well, we had to make a lot of sacrifices. Like I certainly lived out of my savings for the first year. And the difference was I suppose when we started, we were coders for hire. So before we come up with smart spaces and so we could price jobs like a construction company where we know what our profit would be. And we're saying, look, this is going to take this amount of hours to do this project. We can make this amount of profit. And we both would be coding at that point for actually our first employee was another software developer to increase that bandwidth. And that's quite an interesting story on it's own because we were actually just across the road from this office, our our original office and we were paying our rent by writing the meeting room booking system and billing system for target space. It was our landlord. And so again, we weren't paying for that space, was getting very, very nice space in the previous 70s summary acts. And we hired our first web developer and Italian guy, Roman guy, and he, yeah, didn't speak a word of English. And it was hilarious. We've done the whole interview with the laptop and he would write code and I would evaluate it, and then he would, like, write a question and would respond. And the worst thing ever was he learned English from men and say he's got the most fucked up Roman stroke Essex accent you've ever heard in your life. And when it comes to seeing, I just say embarrassed and that I can't believe I've done this to you. I've actually recommended that he has some proper English lessons. But so yeah. So anyway, that that's a side point going back to the profitability thing. Yeah. So that's how we've done it. So then once we got enough money to get another employee and we just hired and we, we weren't in a rush because, you know, we're young. We felt like we had loads of time ahead of us. We were quite relaxed. So we just took our time and and when we got really lucky, you know, all of our success has been down to doing a good job and caring. You know, our values are we care and conscientious, we're passionate and enthusiastic and we're personal and respectful. And I think being passionate about code, it means you enjoy it, which means you do a good job and we care. So we are always going to get the product to the place where you need it. And so doing that, we just won some fantastic projects. You know, we built meriotttmeetingrooms.com, which was Marriott's European book is still for conferencing. You've already connect conference for it. You can actually pay online with your card. Bear in mind I built that in 2012 and we built midpoint.com, which was a peer-to-peer foreign exchange, which had a netting algorithm would actually net all the currency matches you have on the platform to find the least liquidity trade and then trade that to close the book and pay everyone out. And it was fantastically complex. And it's quite funny that business, we listed it on the TSX Venture Exchange in Canada and I sat on the board for years and never went to Canada. I've never been to Canada, which is crazy to be a ball correct to never step foot there. But that was quite a funny one because we made this matching engine Mets out all these currencies and we thought we were genius and we thought we'd rewrote the, the banking system. And then when we we worked out that if we do the liquidity trade and go to the bank for £10,000, the amount of like spread they take on that versus and their whole book, it was cheaper just to give them the whole book and not use the netting algorithm. And so we were like, oh shit, yeah, we didn't think this through. And obviously we were just too naive programmers and finance wasn't our background. We were actually way more cultural than real estate. And I suppose at that point we're losing our minds. We built a recruitment platform, which was really cool. And we built 2 huge watch e-commerce websites. One of them still Live Today, the other got required by the famous current 24 company. And so we, but we weren't losing our minds. We, I think we didn't have that late 20s, early 30s stamina. It got to the point where we were trying to meet deadlines and my brother and I were sneaking under the desk, then getting up and programming again. The quality of the work was suffering. And at the same time, you know, I, I think I started not to enjoy it anymore. And I could say my brother wasn't, my brother was on the brink and I would have breakdown. And so we really had to have a think about all the things we've built. We've built so much. We've built is e-commerce. We've built the peer-to-peer foreign exchange. We've built meriottmeetingrooms.com, we've built some chartered surveying software. And we looked at all of the products and tried to work out which one we enjoyed the most and that was most passionate for and which one had the biggest market. And we've just built this product called Smart Rewards for shopping centres, which gamified shopping centres where if you go to the cold zone, so maybe the third floor, a shopping centre that doesn't get the footfall, has a cheaper rent, would give you extra points. And it was like witchcraft at that point. And the smartphone had become just the phone and grannies were using this in the shopping centres to go and get their points and go and get free discounts and so on. We also had an OCR feature in there so they could get receipts and yeah, take a photograph and they'll get a point for every pound. And they actually started forging extra zeros on the end of the receipts and mail system picked this up and we took it to the cost the the client and they wouldn't let them get the points. It's brilliant because they couldn't spend them in the centre. And we're getting the money back. So let's, let's continue. And we built that and all about office clients because we're still doing the metering bookings and the billing systems for offices. They were like, we want this for offices. Like we want to be able to have that two way communication channel with every person that uses our office. So it was like, well, yeah, we could certainly adapt it. And we adapted it for a business park called Croxley Park. It's a Columbia Threadneedle and I remember going into the sales pitch and the marketing team were there and they were struggling to get budget for the next like phase of the marketing. And I come up with the app and I told them it was actually how much it was cost. They went done and when we come out, the marketing guy when you passed and he goes, I've been trying to get money out of them for ages for my next phase of marketing. You turn up and get this fee to do this app. And I was like, yeah, it's great, isn't it? And we built the app and I'm really proud, you know, it's still alive today. And what's that? Eight years, something like that. And yeah, yeah, so, so really cool. And then the next client was GPE. We deployed the exact same platform, but not a campus led one dedicated to a building. Funny enough, we built the first one for 240 Blackfriars and had it all there working ready to go. And we're really excited to launch this. And we've pretty much made our minds up at that point. This is what we're going to do. This is what I was most excited about. And GPE sold 240 and we said, oh, can we get intro to the new owners? And we're like, no, we want to hold this back for ourselves. And I did totally respect that because they made the investment. They just meant we were delayed. And then we done it again for 55 Wells St and they sold that. We're like ultimately let us launch it. And then finally, suddenly we launched it at 160 Old Street and the Hickman and the Hickman achieved the world's first platinum smart score rating, which is great. And then again, really proud to continue to develop a GPE Workplace app, which has just gone to the next level. The feedback, we got feedback on the app the other day from a tenant saying life changing. So yeah, very have to.
 
 00:15:32 Matthew Maltzoff
 And so really interesting that that transition from, I guess you're like almost like a tech agency or a tech consultant. Yeah. And I guess having so many shiny objects and you just have to pick what is the best one that we can actually scale. So if I think you have to definitely make the right choice.
 
 00:15:48 Dan Drogman
 Yeah, that definitely. And it comes down to things like, so our purpose of smart spaces is optimising environments for people and planet. So the purpose is far greater than others. And I think, you know, everyone's looking to make a difference, especially when it comes to sustainability, but also enjoy life and have things at a fingertip that are available for the smartphone, Airpods you watch and so on. And so we love that. We love the fact that it affects the physical environment. We're merging digital and physical. And I think that helps us attract software developers because they love that they're working with IoT and the things they do in the digital world affect the physical world. And but then the really good thing is the market size. You know, the market size, the number of properties far outweigh the number of chartered surveyor firms that we could sell our software to the banks. The whole SX thing rigged anyway. So we're struggling to make money that way. So we we certainly chose the right product. Have a look back.
 
 00:16:41 Matthew Maltzoff
 Amazing. So I guess looking at the industry today, few funny dynamic components to it seems like a lot of commercial landlords are that's, you know, basically they're struggling a little bit. The occupancy is a bit down, The interest rates are high. They want to make a margin. There's not too many other ways to now get around it other than, you know, I guess technology is a serious way to stay competitive. It seems the industry is much more nuanced today than it was 10 years ago. What would be, I suppose, your advice to executives who still want to stay competitive because some are doing really well and some are, you know, not struggling is the right word. But some are, you know, really considering how to make this business that worked 10, 20 years ago, how to still make it work today. Of course, there's new regulations as well. What would be your advice to an executive today?
 
 00:17:35 Dan Drogman
 Yeah, yeah, certainly. Well, I think, you know, the pandemic accelerated something that was going to happen anyway. You know, Fridays we're already at only 30% occupancy in a lot of the buildings we were working on. We're now seeing actually globally on our platform that the UK starting to leave the drive with a return to the office with a rather more superior occupancy than the US And actually Monday now has got critical mass, which is fantastic. But really what it is, it's, you know, technology is also automated a lot of processes in big banks and in law firms. So they don't need the headcount that needed previously. So big million square foot offices like HSBC at Canary Warf, yeah, that's not required anymore. So the requirements are smaller. But most importantly, you know, back in the day you'd do a 15 year lease and just throw them the keys and come see me. When your lease renewal comes up. You need to be far more customer focused. And that's what really helped building merit meeting room is because we knew how hotel had to operate to provide unrivalled customer service and we were just bringing that to the to the landlord. And so by deploying a platform like Smart Spaces, we create a two way connection with every single individual that uses the building. Previously the only person to talk to the landlord was the person paying the bill. Or like the head of HR maybe, or head of facilities, or the head of the office manager. Quite a terse person to work with anyway. So they never really got the real feedback. Now you've got a feedback loop with every single individual in the building. You can truly see how your asset performs. You can get instant occupancy analysis, then you can be proactive. If you start seeing that one of your units that has terrible occupancy, why don't you approach them and see if they want to break them? At least you can repurpose a space and give it to someone who really wants it. Conversely, someone's over using the space. They're 160% utilisation. Need some more space? Moving to another building and actually Leyland's like GPE have been fantastic in managing to move large tenants building to building and using the app without managed to have mobile access in their old premises, move over to their new premises with no downtime. So I think that's that's the key. It's customer service and you're just running a much more service led business where you need to because you're customer.
 
 00:19:41 Matthew Maltzoff
 It's really interesting because real estate before, so maybe unfair to say it was an easy business, but it wasn't one where you really had to be close with your customer. You know, you just you build it, you're done. And now they're sort of feeling what a lot of other business models feel where you have to focus on your customer. And I think that's what, you know, businesses expect what people expect and it makes complete sense now on solutions like smart spaces sort of give people that standard of living that you expect in like 21st century. And that's how the occupiers and the landlords can actually have that communication makes things pretty cool. So the other I guess thing that a lot of. Landlords are now considerate off and I know you know Labour gone into into power, which means ESG regulations are potentially going to be stronger than the the Conservative counterpart. That's just the UK everywhere around Europe, everywhere around the world by the day more ESG conscious than the day before. What can be done, I guess, to even increase the value of these assets just from tax perspective, a energy efficiency perspective? How should that problem be approached?
 
 00:20:51 Dan Drogman
 Yes, the multitude of ways. I think you know soon when you sell an asset, you're going to have to provide the occupancy data as well. It's not just going to be how long these leases lasted and when the renewal dates are, they're definitely going to be looking at the occupancy as well because they know that some of them still might break that lease and you might just fit on the on the rent, for instance. And so I think having that data is paramount. I think from a sustainability angle, the best success we've had most recently is in benchmarking. And we've benchmarked building to building before, but it's been a bit naughty and tails that the Clark might have selected a really weak building to be benchmarked against to make them look great in the marketing. But more recently on the tenant side, you know, comparing 10B to 10A, not necessarily saying who it is, but saying a floor of the same size in the same building as you has this energy profile and you have this energy profile and these are the elements you need to change in order to improve it. And that makes people change because they do feel slightly ashamed. And also if you put pounds and pence against that, they can see how much their peers are paying for energy in the same building could be hugely impactful with completely seen behaviour change until the two floors are operating in line with the best law. And if it comes to things like neighbours ratings, that's the only way you're going to sustain a good rating.
 
 00:22:08 Matthew Maltzoff
 I'd imagine that works really well with students. Might be completely wrong, but I don't imagine as a student, there's almost like it feels like a gamification of you, You know, you're looking at how your room is doing. The students. Are there more, you know, sustainably conscious than ever before. Yeah, I know Smart spaces isn't necessarily moving into previous spaces. Yeah, watch it. But do you think that was that maybe what you were thinking about when you were talking about it or is it more offices?
 
 00:22:37 Dan Drogman
 No, certainly offices. So we're only deployed across office and large mixed-use schemes at the moment. So some of our schemes have an element of residential, office, retail, but we haven't done any dedicated residential or dedicated student accommodation yet. But yeah, watch this space. But yeah, it certainly would work for both. And you know, the way you reward people might be slightly different. Obviously in the office they're paying for their own energy. So it's a direct saving on their costs for students. If that's bundled up within the the rent, it'll be like a cash back scheme. You know, it could even be a free peak. So I'd imagine you could do a whole host of things.
 
 00:23:12 Matthew Maltzoff
 So the last question is more, you know, we talked about a little bit of advice to executives, you know, things that they're concerned about and how to get around. I thought that also the idea of even just comparing to your neighbour, sort of using human psychology to get like a big result. And that's genius. But now also for the entrepreneur side, the, you know, the startup founders, maybe they're getting the first million in revenue a year, maybe they're scaling to 10 million in revenue a year. What makes some of these businesses scale really quickly and become really successful? And other businesses, they never really seem to just get off the ground. They're sort of treading water. What So I'm really, really curious what actually you can make a business, you know, grow quickly and just become successful from from your perspective?
 
 00:24:02 Dan Drogman
 Yeah, yeah, certainly. Well, for us it's all about the customer and the product. That's how we do it. It's known as magic or secret. It's all making the best product and just listening to the customer and deliver it. But for others, you know great tactics are taking investment from some of these already in the industry. So if you take investment from other big property management companies like JLL, CBRE and they can open their contact book and database to you and give you an intro, that's huge. And so that's going to give you really rapid growth. So I think those two certainly work. And then I think there are some clever, you know, I always love the the channel, the BIM. Yeah. And like how they've managed to grow that to the number of followings. It blows my mind. It's great. It's giving us great content. But you could leverage social media in that way. We're always trying to think at Smart Spaces how we can come up with something similar. It's very difficult of B2B brand, but I think it can be cracked. And we we are trying to invest in that space to leverage that. But yeah, I think and and also thought leadership, you know, giving back and giving the some of your secrets away can help because then people get trust and know you can do the job and deliver.
 
 00:25:09 Matthew Maltzoff
 I think 1 quite subtle but really serious sign for this, you know, think of context, which at PropTech Connect, we've spoken to over 1000 founders to who should be speaking on stage and for sponsorships and or to loads of executives as well. And there's, I was thinking there's like a clear difference between the successful, successful ones but not successful ones. And the successful ones have almost this abundant proactive, just generating outward force. It's so hard to like, it's subtle, but it's so clear. And you know, some are more charming than that. It's not like charm, or it's not like brains, or it's not like looks. Clearly it's a.
 
 00:25:50 Dan Drogman
 Challenged in all those area.
 
 00:25:53 Matthew Maltzoff
 But it seems that some have this almost like outward generating force and you know, they don't mind getting on stage and sharing the secrets. They're just giving the information. They're not even insecure about it versus those. How many times do you hear like, so I've got this great idea, but it's like, mate, I'm not going to steal your idea. You know what I mean? You know, or when you're sort of just know within yourself, you're just providing just, I guess like providing, you know, and just adding value. I think that's from what I found, but it's a question I've always found really interesting.
 
 00:26:26 Dan Drogman
 Yeah, I think it's all about execution. Like the, the thing that sort of upsets me is like how I can have someone come to me with an idea for a feature and they feel that just by sharing their idea, they should have like an equity stake in Smart Spaces. And you know, and I'm like, that is the easy bit is the idea. And yeah, and certainly it's, it's the execution. But what we do like separate to that is when customers come to us and go look Dan, we've got this problem, how do we solve it? We think we can automate this process. And actually it's one of the new things we've just built on our platform, which is all buildings have cycle amenity and cycle amenity can be like 10% of your lettable space. A lot of times that kind of scale, it doesn't get used to that extent. And that's cost you a lot of money to create that kind of space. And so we've developed a solution. We looked at many solutions and we've got some hybrid solutions as well. We looked at, you know, monitoring the bike spaces and scooter spaces with CCTV and you could see how many bikes are there and what your occupancy ratios are. And you could use that data to go back to planners to say, look, we need less or in some buildings sweat the asset harder and some more legacy buildings. We also, we looked at pressure switches on the on the stands themselves and then the racks. Actually where we ended up, we've got a new solution borrowing from the retail industry on RFID tags. So Unicode will take every item of clothing and they know the inventory across the shop. They also never stole a jumper and so on. And so we thought, well, we like that because CCTV and the pressure switches don't know whose bike it is and they don't know which tenant or occupier it is. And you'll have somewhere, you know, some very wealthy individuals that might work for a law firm who bring their bike in and commutes everyday and then one day decide to go home and just leave the bike in the basement. And over time, that's keeping up space. And so we developed a solution with tags where we placed the tags on bikes and we tracked the tags around the building. And so we know exactly where your bike is. We can show you exactly how many spaces there are and we can tell you if your bike's left the building or entered the building. And there are clients that are looking to maybe avoid having to fit out as much space in the future, can avoid that through this, the sharing this data and sharing this data with the planners, but also the legacy buildings where they haven't got enough cycle aminity, they can get rid of those bikes that have just been sitting there for five. And some of our landlord clients are very generous. They'll make you store up to five bikes, but at least they know those bikes belong to someone who's paying them a rent. It's not just some old junk someone left there. And we've also applied that to the lockers as well. So we give you full analytic. So that sweaty gym kit that's been left there for a long time and it's no longer an issue. But what's really nice is we're not also we're rewarding the people that do use it every day. So if you use this everyday or four days minimum, we'll give you a dedicated locker in our app. And so, you know, you can leave your stuff there as long as you like because you're using the building all the time. You're a VIP if you only use it ad hoc, you know, once a month, you've got two weeks to use that locker, and after two weeks we'll send you a notification and if you don't unlock it, we'll clear the locker out. And so, yeah, I think it's a really nice way to sweat the asset. And the way that come around was through client coming to us explaining the issue. And us looking at going off and trying the whole variety of solutions and coming up with the one we thought was best suited.
 
 00:29:48 Matthew Maltzoff
 I mean, you guys are there's there's client focus and then there's literally building solutions. But yeah, I mean that that is pretty cool and it it's unbelievable. I think a lot of asset owners today probably still don't know how much they can get out of an asset. So there's probably so much hidden value that you know, in just looking at a few things, improving the space, getting a few percentage points out on multiple assets, you don't realise how much is actually on the table. And so so they come to you and ask, can can we build?
 
 00:30:17 Dan Drogman
 Yeah, well, it's just all been sitting and residing on PCs in the facilities manager's office in a stored in an engineering format, which is hardly digestible for the average property manager, asset manager. And by lifting and shifting this into the cloud, processing and normalising it, putting it into an insightful dashboard, the the value's tremendous.
 
 00:30:36 Matthew Maltzoff
 Fantastic. I think that's about it. All we had time for thank you very much for doing the podcast and looking for seeing you in September.
 
 00:30:43 Dan Drogman
 No, thank you. Thanks for having me. And yeah, really excited for Prop Tech Connect. So if you haven't bought your ticket, make sure you buy one. It'll be worth it, trust me. Thanks.