Jeff Vertun 4:36
Awesome. So good question. And it’s the start where I think most people can get hold up. And I think the mistake a lot of companies make is they treat it like going to look for an apartment and they go, they want to start looking at space. They want to look at real estate, they want to know what it costs. They want to know what’s the coolest space to go to and they go there and they waste a lot of time. They waste a lot of energy and then I have no real data driven way of evaluating is that a right decision? And so I’m I’m big on and I think I’ve had a successful careers because I challenge executives from the very start to really hone in on and I work with them on being very clear on what our what our goals are, what how are we going to use this impact is what is important about this right COVID or non COVID. And the things you’re going to talk about that’s important about your space with COVID certainly have shifted, and we can talk more about that. But you have to start with thinking about your people thinking about your space, and how you guys are going to use that space in a way to me so much more than four walls and if there’s a keg in the fridge or not, right. Which is important, of course, yeah. But it’s important to be like that. And I think something that we found interesting is in the last few years, you know, I guess before a few years ago, it was CEOs CFOs CEOs were the ones at the table. They were making them decisions. And we saw a big shift. And we were really big on chief people officers getting involved in the head. Yeah, yeah. Think about your CFO making a real estate decision that all the people are involved in. And there was a disconnect. Right. But we were doing a lot of events with cheap people, officers that had so much perspective on what, what their people really needed. And now more than ever, the big conversation around going back to the office, when how, why Who? It’s a people conversation, those, you know, teams are really struggling. Okay.
Greg Toroosian 6:37
Yeah. And I mean, that’s a great point. And just just to dive into that a little bit more, you mentioned the events that you do. So that’s separately a company thing that you guys, did you hold your own like roundtables or dinners and stuff.
Jeff Vertun 6:49
Yeah. My team, as I mentioned, it’s an autonomous Yeah, my company but we work with so many executives that you know, Chief people officers that are saying, Hey, I’m planning a special For my 500 person company yes I think this this and that’s important but what else is going on? And then so let’s I’d love to meet with other like minded chief people officers as we’ve just set up casual fun dinners. That’s right. And people you know, conversations with from everything from what are your maternity leave, you know, what, while you’re handing health care to how, you know, how are your people using the space and why and creating a community, you know, that was really what’s important. We work with executives, we want every company to do well, and our company does well. So connect a lot of those people to each other.
Greg Toroosian 7:36
Amazing. So I mean, hear what you’re saying and the conversations that they should be having, when they’re planning this is about the culture as well really, what space Do you need, who’s going to be there? How are you going to use it in the fridge, things like that, but really the environment that you want to create for your employees and which team members do they want to have here or frankly, need here? You know, Because does sales need to be in the same office as your software engineering team? You know, do you need a HQ that’s full on campus and mandatory that everyone’s going to be there? Or are you going to have satellite offices or remote employees or whatever? How would those conversations kind of get formed? Or what are people’s perspectives when you actually bring that to the table? If they hear
Jeff Vertun 8:23
about it? It’s a good question and it differs by the company but it’s taking a hard look at Okay, this is what our projections sort of look like: how many people, what departments do you start with? Your people right? What does that look like? Okay, what do these people need? I got an engineering team that’s going from 20 to 40. They need a dark cave-like environment. They can’t be anywhere near salespeople. Starting to think those elements right because it’s a lot like having one big open space when you need quiet and loud people versus having some elements of silence Information is very important. And even knowing that from the front end will steer you away from so many spaces that you would have wasted time on.
Greg Toroosian 9:08
So it fosters creativity for our data teams. And yeah, know for sure
Jeff Vertun 9:13
depends on the company. So we build a strategic document from the start and we start to build these are the things that are important to you. These are the things that we’re going to wait for. And now we get stakeholder buy off from the start on all Yes, you start you don’t have someone coming in after six weeks of effort saying Why didn’t you do this? or Why?
Greg Toroosian 9:32
Yeah, it’s interesting that you also say that the chief people officer and heads of HR are being involved now because I can see it. And when I think back to companies, like clients I’ve even had or companies I’ve worked at before. And I think like how did they ever make these decisions? And you can see, that was very much found by a lead or someone who, and no fault of their own just right, didn’t know what they didn’t know. And they’re like, Oh, this space will be great. But when you think about and you have someone in the people team there, they’ll continue Well, you know, legal and HR needs space that can be away from people to have confidential conversations freely, right, or their own designated room meeting room or phone booths to have confidential conversations or one on ones or exit interviews, that is away from the general population for that very reason, right, or software engineering needs. x or, you know, we can’t have people on a tour of the office campus seeing IP everywhere. So we need that separate, right? So these are really key decisions to make if you’re going to be investing in campus, or if you’re going to be investing, you know, office space for the next three years. You want to have these conversations and also these planning conversations ahead of time.
Jeff Vertun 10:45
Right. And to add to that there’s a certain element of having that data that matters when you’re making any sort of change decision. Yes, when you’re a smaller team, if you’re still 20 people or so it might not matter as much, but as you become larger, these decisions have all these impacts to your effectiveness as an organization. I mean, Take, for example, take location, right? You’ve been in Santa Monica, California near the beach, because it’s cool. But all of a sudden, you need more space, it’s more expensive. Where do you go? Right? Yeah. To tell your employees we’re moving to downtown or moving to Culver City is one thing. But if you can’t we have technologies where we plot certain locations on a map with all of your employees, if codes right and we calculate your commute times, right, for every location, depending on time of day, they’re going to be showing up to the office so that when you go, Hey, yes, we’re moving to Culver City. And yes, that made the commute worse for 20% of you, but 80% it actually improved it and here’s the data to back it up. It helps with a lot of the change decision. The same thing with some of the other parts of it. There’s sort of tools and technologies of why your layout is a certain way, why you’re moving to a certain type of space. Why are certain functions in the office and not? I think the other piece that’s interesting is, is, especially in this coded time, which teams need to be in the office, right? And that have a lot of sales or, or customer service or certain functions that maybe don’t need to be in the office right now. And you have all these labor demographics and analysis across the country that if you say, hey, we’ve got 20 customer service agents need to hire that are really good at food delivery, or whatever it is, we can run that and say, You know what, there are four other markets in the US that have a big oversupply, and that affects job title. And it’s a better job in that market and the cost of living is lower, you can save a big percentage of dollars hiring someone who’s better at that job well, and so thinking about it, even to that level, is has been something we’ve been working towards, but as he accelerated during this period, as well. Yeah,
Greg Toroosian 12:58
that’s great. So Let me ask you where do you find that your clients tend to work with you on decisions like that? Is that like a real ground level kind of planning discussion? Or is that you’ll find companies that are already like 200 people or so that may be hitting their Series B, or C, round of funding, and they’re saying, Hey, we want to be a bit more strategic. How can we save costs, but also invest in our space?
Jeff Vertun 13:26
Yeah, I’d say it, it’s, the bigger you are, the more impactful the decision making is right, the more because it’s harder to get the bigger you get, the harder it is to change. Yeah. But I would advise I mean, earlier stage guys just raising that series A that or I don’t know what 12 months from now looks like. There’s absolutely a stretch strategy around that. Right? Absolutely. You’re like a stretch, you need flexibility. You need low cost, flexibility, and your team is the core team that’s going to go You know what, I don’t care if it’s not The coolest office in the world I’d rather save those dollars invested in the business because I’m believing in it and so I, you know what, we don’t need to be on Abbot Kinney and Venice and pay that because I can attract and retain the right talent for this next phase this way. So, I think the strategy has to be well defined for you to make a smart decision.
Greg Toroosian 14:22
Have you seen that change over the last few years because you know, I’ve been in LA in Southern California for seven years now. And you know, when I first came over, and silicon Beach was like, the thing or like, you know, getting a lot more buzz, you know, silicon beach first and all this good stuff, but they were talking you know, Santa Monica, Venice, then it shifted or towards play of this, you know, even further down Manhattan Beach, etc. But have you seen a shift with companies shying away now from the Santa Monica and Venice spaces because of Ren and Reduce space availability, or even like, you know, companies I’d speak to before we’re like, you know, we can’t have parking in Santa Monica, for example. And that’s obviously a big issue in LA or if we want to have people in the office past a certain hour, there was like, tax implications or extra fees they had to pay or something crazy. So have you seen people now shy away from those, quote unquote, desirable areas where they can somewhat or think they can attract more talent to obscure places?
Jeff Vertun 15:34
Yeah, I think yeah, this is yes. And there’s a bunch of factors behind that. It depends on the company. I think at an early stage. Your space is so small that the dot is right, like rent per foot doesn’t matter that much going between Santa Monica and Culver City. As you start to scale, that price per foot Delta starts becoming more meaningful to you. I think as you start to scale your talents Can’t you know the top executives maybe you can afford to live west side and that’s good but you’re scaling you’re gonna, you’re being a little more central not only helps with cost but it helps you attract from a larger pool of talent I think we’ve seen as silicon beach for lack of a better term as expanded, you know, and what’s beautiful about tech in LA is its its its media, its economy, you know, it’s, everything is now right. Netflix is a tech company and they’re all over Hollywood, right? There’s a lot in downtown there’s a lot you know, Warner Music is an arts district. So yeah, all of a sudden, there’s more, you know, forces pulling you as well. So in Santa Monica and get to a meeting at Netflix in Hollywood can take you when there’s
Unknown Speaker 16:52
done the drive.
Jeff Vertun 16:56
Yeah, I think i think it’s uh, but you know, you have to look at the title profile of talent you’re looking to hire. But I think that you don’t know, at the beginning of the art ecosystem and tech here, you sort of felt like I got to be on the promise not to, you know, walk around and bump into VCs and just be a part of it because it was so new, but I don’t think that you need to be
Greg Toroosian 17:20
changed. Yeah, that’s great. That’s great to know. So, obviously, the clients that you’re working with are completely across the board. And like you mentioned, even ones with warehouses, this direct to consumer, I’m assuming kind of companies, how are you seeing so far the impact of COVID on one company that is just office space, or their HQ or satellite offices, wherever and then companies that have both warehouse and offices? What have you seen so far, and what do you kind of predict is going to happen?
Jeff Vertun 17:55
Sure, absolutely. And you know, my just The mic we specialize I’m really good at helping executives think through their business plan on real estate. We’ve gotten really good at office and warehouse because so much direct to consumer e commerce and that relates to third party logistics companies. And how people are getting stuff all over the place and how the Amazon effect started shifting in the last 510 years of all this has changed so much that we’ve, we’ve had to get really good at it. So there’s similarities and differences. How is it impacting the office side? When COVID first hit? The first month or two was all about how do we do and how do we get rent relief? Right? We’re not allowed to use our space. These are conversations still happening? Why am I paying all this money for rent? What are my rights? What are my legal obligations? It’s a longer conversation than we it’s a whole there’s a lot you can do and it depends on the group. Great answer I’ll give but that’s a big conversation is just how do we think about paying your rent, as more and more clients are thinking about maybe extending stay at home, a conversation, we’re having a lot of this, how do you think about that? And how do you monetize that real estate in the interim? Because there are ways you can do it. So. So that’s a big part of the conversation. As part of that. The other big thing with COVID right now is, is what does reentry look like? What’s cool about working at CBRE is we’re so when we’re fortune 150, were such a big, so much bigger than any other company that I get data from every company, all the biggest companies in Asia that are rehab reopen, and what what, what’s working and what’s not, and we’re interesting, all these best practices to figure out how what companies should be thinking about, you know, I’m seeing how big landlords are thinking about opening big office towers right, where it’s gonna look like TSA for a little bit where you show up, you got to get them lined and for people for an elevator and it might take you half an hour to get up to the grid. The floor and I have all this cool like, this is what they think they provide. We have based on lease negotiation, there’s stuff that we think landlords should provide more of. So the conversation around Hey, landlord, you need to make sure your HVC is up to a certain cleanliness standard. How do you deal with the parking lot? So a lot of things like simple things that are complicated. And then talking about how you look at your space plan. So we’re doing a lot of looking at your floor plan and saying, based on a social distance plan, how many people can you fit Where? Where are your trouble areas, coffee bars, the restaurant? How are we going to approach those? How do we get with the appropriate people around it? And so it’s a big conversation around what can we do with the space that we have, and then talking about based on that, it’s going to be a gradual reentry, which are the teams that go into it. So we’re very, very busy helping companies. Think through that. I think the overall advice is not to make any long term decisions right now. And as a real estate broker, I know it doesn’t sound like a long term guy. And I think you need to pause for a second. I think what people don’t know about the real estate market, I found is that the stock market doesn’t go up and down, you know, because, you know, somebody tweeted something, right. Historically in the last two recessions, it can take anywhere from six to like 15 quarters for the real estate market to go down. And there’s a lot of factors as to why that is, but it does take time for companies to default on leases or more suddenly space to come back to the market and that all drives pricing down. So from a clarity on what your team needs to do. perspective as well as an expectation of the market pricing to go down and more opportunities to come up. Now is a great time. To be thoughtful and prepared and think about how do I just use the space I have now? And what do I need to be thinking about for the future when there’s opportunities that are about to come up for me, you know?
Unknown Speaker 22:11
Yeah, very good. Very good. Point.
Greg Toroosian 22:16
Yeah, that’s a, it’s, it’s interesting, you know, it gives, there’s a lot to think about right now from all perspectives. And whether you have already invested in real estate you have, like you said, you’re paying rent or you’ve even, you know, long term invested in property as a company and how you’re going to repurpose it or, you know, make it more employee friendly and safe. And then for the handful of startups that have just come into healthy parts of their investment rounds, you know, what they’re going to do, because a lot of them had it in their plans for HQ, and real estate or team building. And what are you going to do now because a lot of companies that were as we’ve seen They’re all going remote first, which is great. I mean, I’m a big supporter of remote employees for I mean, not 100% everyone is remote. I do believe that in person interaction is important. I do believe that having some sort of communal office space and cultural hub is important. And I’ve never worked for a company that’s 100% remote, I wouldn’t know. But having worked from home and remote capabilities and options is huge for talent. Opening up the talent pool for you, first and foremost, are also attracting different types of talent. And even in a place like Southern California where your office could be downtown. But now if you are downtown, you’re offering people work from home two days a week, people may be willing to make a drive from Orange County three days a week for a job, right? And now you know, I’ve hired a bunch of people that we’ve done that for so it’s so important. That you really, really have to think about your strategy and your offering as a company, for your culture, for your team building and for your success, frankly, because Gone are the days. Again, depending on what type of company you are or what stage you are by offering, hey, start work at 10am and surf beforehand in Santa Monica. And then we have beers at three is going to appeal to certain demographic and certain, you know, people at some point in their career, but all of these other things for people who have families or people who are frankly, a lot more senior in their career is super important. I can’t stress it enough. And I’ve had a lot of these conversations and sometimes felt like banging my head against the wall to get through. But what’s your perspective on that? You know, what have you seen?
Jeff Vertun 24:54
It’s a great question. And, of course, it depends on the company. I think The virtual workforce has been something that we’ve been talking to people about for a while already right this is it’s just being accelerated this conversation now and it’s being proved that certain groups are capable of it. I think there’s absolutely a demographic difference. I think the younger demographic kids in their 20s and stuff, love working from home and whatever. Everybody with the kids you know, 40s and 50s can’t wait to get out and can I don’t want to be especially deal black live an eight week old she’s not in school yet but I mean, there’s there’s a lot of like at home stuff you get pulled into and not so I think you need to really understand what your people want and also what what work is okay. I mean, I think I’m a very peaceful person. I believe in community. I believe that a zoom conference call is very different from an in person meeting. Yeah, I think there’s a lot that can be done that’s going to be saved. People don’t need to travel for certain things, people don’t need To be in person for certain things, and a lot of those wasted meetings that everyone you know hates are going to be going away. But I think like, if you think about a lot of if we’re talking about tech companies, especially this open plan and everyone collaborating and together, yes, it’s a cheaper way of doing it to cram everyone in. But the thought process is ideas flowing is people are able to like understand what’s going on for my sales team to be right next to my marketing team to know what’s coming down the pipe, so we can and go, Hey, I’m getting a lot of this feedback. Can you ship that about the money? And there’s something about that and there’s something about an energy I mean, that you feel means that I don’t believe in the death of an office. You know, I don’t believe that case. I think the function of your office is shifting for sure.
Greg Toroosian 26:53
It’s true, you know, you hit a number of great points then probably going backwards here. Each one but yes, no.
Unknown Speaker 27:05
We’re just free flowing, it’s fine.
Greg Toroosian 27:08
But yes, those removing the barriers of you know, these people are in that office building or in that room and we can’t hear what’s going on. It’s so important because when you are a fast moving startup and when things are ever changing, or you are going in a direction that may be different to what you were last week, having access and just being aware of different teams in the company is so important. And then also is transparency, right when fast moving startups are going and you’re not having regular company updates all the time. People like to be aware of everything. And then when there is that shift, and that change, and you know, you go from one building to three buildings, people start feeling a certain way about Oh, people are being shady or now we don’t know what’s going on with the company. And it’s a cultural shift at the end of the day because the speed of your progress and the speed of projects or changes does Stop, but because you’re bigger now and things spread out a little bit more, and I experienced this myself like with one company that I worked with when we went from one building to like four or five in the same space, but people like oh, I never hear what’s going on anymore. I say well because you’re not in the engineering building now.
Unknown Speaker 28:17
Now we’re in the people you know
Jeff Vertun 28:20
that so we spent a lot of time it’s your workplace strategy it’s there’s a whole it’s something that we preach and i think it’s it’s a lot of what we’re talking about. And a big poll, a big survey of a bunch of companies, a bunch of employees that companies have all these different office amenities. The company started offering everything. Bring your dog to work or one came. Child Care, yoga studios, all the snacks coffee, you can want you name it, admit you’ve heard all the different things. Oh, yeah, the number one by far that most boys care about food. snacks and Buddha’s next 100% and it’s not just because it’s free you get a free bag of chips and an apple and a coffee right that’s a few dollars. It’s going to that kitchen. That coffee and bump. I know it in my office too. I love going to grab my coffee because I’m a coffee addict for sure. But you see people you’ve never met, you have a quick breather moment, a human moment in your day that’s in front of a screen all day.
Unknown Speaker 29:27
So anyone it was
Jeff Vertun 29:29
surprising actually, that I’m all for the financial incentives, what kids childcare, long maternity leaves, all that stuff dwarfed in comparison to food and snacks. And you have a very interesting, free bag of chips. Right? It’s more.
Greg Toroosian 29:46
Yeah, it’s very interesting and it is a great point. You know, one of the things that you mentioned about knowing what your employees won and building your strategy around that is key because you know, those people who are earlier in their career may want to work from home for certain reasons, and some people later on in the career may not. I was, you know, my wife and I are very different. She’s always only ever worked from home. She’s only ever worked remotely, she’s in sales. And she was like, I have no idea how people work in an office, I can’t get anything done. It’s too distracting. There’s too many people that want to talk to you. I like to focus and do my thing. And then you know, have flexibility to do whatever else I want in the day. I’m completely the opposite. It’s been such a shift for me to work remotely or on my own or from home or whatever. Because I’m very much obviously part of people functions and have been in the office in front of people in person meetings in conversations dealing with confidential stuff. And I feel so much more productive and involved and like you have a pulse on things and culturally relevant right when you’re in an office because you don’t get that like you can still do these zoom meetings and everything like that, which don’t get me wrong. I am a big big I Because I mentioned for remote working, but there’s the human element that you still I believe, need some sort of portion of, but getting rid of unnecessary travel or getting rid of, you know, mandatory in the office, nine to five, five days a week or whatever is such a huge benefit of even having the option because having COVID as as crappy as it has been for so many reasons. Having it fast track people and companies into this remote capability that had it on like their, their map of Oh, we’re going to get to a point where we’re going to, you know, put slack at the forefront of our business and do everything via zoom or Hangouts and stuff like that. Now they’ve just been thrown into it. And they can see that, hey, our employees are productive and things like that. So it’s a real option now for new employees. And it’s going to change the game it already has, and it’s going To more so,
Unknown Speaker 32:02
yeah, definitely. Yeah.
Greg Toroosian 32:05
A question about things that you see companies do. Maybe there is something that they regularly do in terms of missteps, anything that you can advise our listeners on whether they’re thinking about investing in new real estate or changing their current real estate? Is there anything that you see like, hey, definitely avoid doing this. People do it time and time again, they don’t listen to my advice, or we don’t get to them in time. And it’s either costly or takes a lot to undo anything like that.
Jeff Vertun 32:39
Yeah, it’s a good question. And it could go depending on there’s so many different types of organizations and processes that it could go different ways. And what I mean by that is, I’m working with one major movie studio production company right now, and we’re working on a big lot of construction and a lot of building studios, and there’s a lot of pitfalls that can come with it. construction project. And there’s a lot of pitfalls that can come with just your strategic process. And I think that sort of points me to probably the first answer is you should work with one advisor, you should have an advisor, you should let them help you control the process to protect your time. As an executive, your time is so valuable and continues to rise if you try and run the process and pretend you’re the expert. If you try to play like, let me just reach out to a bunch of people, get a bunch of spaces, and figure it out. It’s just seeing it spend so much time that hurts you. And then you go to the market and you’ve got multiple people that have been talking about you in the market. You don’t have a negotiation strategy of the landlords in the market know that you’re sort of this, this floppy tenant all over the place, and they don’t use it because they know the sophisticated tenants know how valuable having one strategic process and one strategic voice in the market can be to help you really evaluate And that’s from an external negotiation standpoint and effectiveness but it’s from an internal resource allocation protection and just general like efficient approach to your process. And so I think some people aren’t necessarily used to that if they haven’t gone through that work so whether it’s me or somebody else I think that’s the first step is like, just like you would if you were getting new insurance or you were doing a legal issue or you should hire an expert to handle you and the good news about my business to tenant representation is the clients don’t pay me anything too. It’s it’s really crazy thing where it’s like oh, man, Lords pay a commission on the deal. So doesn’t even cost you anything to hire for
Greg Toroosian 34:40
So, so funny. You should say that because it’s the same advice that as an external recruiter, we give clients as well because we’re like, if you’re going to use an a recruiter, try and just use the one make it exclusive or you know, a couple if you really want to do it contingent but shy away from basically going out to market and get All of these different recruiters to speak about your same company in your same role to the same candidate pool because it does them looks unprofessional and gives you a lot of busy work. And then also when it does come down to negotiation or whatever it may be, you don’t really have any leverage and also candidates think that you’re either desperate or will not be serious if everyone’s talking about the same thing. So very similar, very similar in your world.
Jeff Vertun 35:24
Yeah, yeah, I mean, look, both of our jobs are like really being an advisor to help executives be smarter executives on their plate. Why Why would they spend all their time doing your job or doing my job when they’re not going to be able to do it the best way that we be able to and so, like, I like to see myself and as a like an just a external like real estate department for companies right where I’m just part of your company. I know all about your business and
and yeah, I’m just like an employee.
Greg Toroosian 35:59
Yeah. Yeah, you’re incentivized by their success as it is with recruiting, right? If they get what they need from you in terms of the right property and the right deal and everything like that, then you’re gonna be successful and they’re gonna be happy and it’s gonna look good for everyone but it’s they’re not getting it.
Jeff Vertun 36:16
Stories are like, you know, when I was early in my career just trying to figure it out, I would do office hours at different, you know, tech accelerators, you know, amplify LA for two minutes. I’m just trying to help out and trying to say, Hey, you know, early founders, what are the things about this conversation? I think I’m gonna be thinking about what I shouldn’t do. What do I do? And some of my greatest clients to this day that are super successful businesses. Now I started when they were two people, you know, and I’m, and they would, they would say, as well and which is nice to me, but they would say that the strategy along the way of making sure they got to hire the right people that their real estate process was correct. They didn’t overcommit on anything and they retained certain flexibility where they needed it. Help them go there. And I’ve been a part of being a part of that is what really excites me is really partnering with the executives and like making a meaningful impact on their business. I like what I do and, and real estate is this tangible, functional thing that I think both companies and real estate are sort of nothing without the people inside of it at the end of the day, and what that what they do with that. So that’s what I love so much about the business. Great. Great. All right. I’ll touch on a couple of just it seems like I think a lot more of listeners are the office dwellers, I guess. I’ll just share for the few that might have some warehouse components as well. Like I would say that the big thing right now is industrial real estate is the only real real estate class that’s doing well right now. And that’s expected to be the strongest and you can probably make smart assumptions as to why that is but you look at ecommerce sales related to total retail sales, it was still really low percentage shocked people would be surprised but people were still majority were buying stuff it’s in person still. So there’s runway of people that can buy that work buying online that still are you take I’ve got some groups right now that are in the food food delivery business, right that are that are selling food or groceries delivered to your door or whatever it is excellent businesses right now that are only going to have right your grandmother or the older generation that never bought milk and eggs from, you know, online have realized is really freaking easy and cheap and efficient. And we’ve got a lot of there’s a lot of I’d say the industrial real estate business was very, it was hard for dynamic companies because dynamic companies need flexibility. You don’t know what your sales are two years from now. So how can you sign a 10 year lease? The market was so tight and hot that land was requiring 10 year leases and serious investment accounts. Wow, huge disconnect. There has always been some opportunity if you tell me flexibility is super important, there are ways that we can accomplish that there are partners with these third party logistics companies which we work a lot with to help with this you know, stuff comes in from Asia. What do you do with it when it hits the port? Where distribution network does it go to NY and there’s also a big rise in on demand warehousing right now there’s, you know, I work with a company called flow space as an example, who provides like, it’s like we work for warehouse space is sort of your trend for companies that especially in those early days, you don’t want to sign a long term lease, you don’t know what’s what’s coming, especially in this current market. So I’d say right now, understanding what your challenges are, where you may be straining your supply chain, and knowing that there’s opportunity now and that will continue with more flexibility and better pricing. Our big supply chain experts have sort of identified for me Major fundamentals for the future of this asset type. And I’d say it’s, it’s expanding your network resiliency is very important right now. boosting your local inventory, adapting to this new retail landscape that we’re in, and leveraging some new and low cost technologies. And those are things I can talk to more people about if they’re interested. And we can move on from the warehouse but it is very interesting and an industry that’s just going to continue to grow for a lot of businesses right now.
Greg Toroosian 40:32
That’s great. And do you guys help with the technology aspect as well? Like, these are ones that we would recommend or these partners that we use?
Jeff Vertun 40:41
Absolutely, you know, to? Depends on what you’re asking for. But if from a technology of managing different warehouses and what their utilization is, and when we need to do certain things, we have lots of really cool technology we invest more in technology than our leading competitor makes. He bid. We’re just like this massive juggernaut that has a ton of we have. We’re like the only real estate company with a CTO, really like we have.
Greg Toroosian 41:08
Yeah, I think I mentioned on our first initial call, I used to work with CBRE in London and they were a client of mine and yet that tech is why
Jeff Vertun 41:19
I like and like, so like we can, you know, you can visually fly. We can take your floor plan, especially with this new social distance for my retake it and we drop certain things and you can fly through your space. So you can send the video out to your employee base and say, here’s what it’s going to look and feel like on day one. Walking the hand sanitizers there, you got to only walk clockwise through the office, whatever so we’ve got that cool technology. And then as far as like figuring out, you know, hey, we were selling, we sell these clothes online and we need to figure out our net, our supply chain. We provide a full consultancy around how to think about: do you get your own warehouse, do you bring in a third party to run it for you? We run the comparison and negotiation process of picking which 3PL partner works best for you. And if and then we partner with a lot of like, there are some companies that offer like a really cool, like on demand flexible warehouse platform as well. And you got I really like that, depending on the need we can plug into as well.
Greg Toroosian 42:23
That’s really cool. You know, you’ve really opened my eyes to a lot here, and I’m sure to a lot of our listeners as well, because there’s so much that can be daunting as a first time founder, or someone who’s just come into a lot of money and, you know, invested in their company and they’re thinking about how we’re going to use it strategically because founders tend to be either very focused on their product or their sales or their marketing one aspect of it and there’s just so much coming at you and you don’t really want to be taken advantage of so it makes so much sense to partner with someone like you, especially on the real estate side. I think you know, kids. There is not just one person in the business that doesn’t have to be the founder and the CEO doesn’t have to be the CEO. It doesn’t have to be one exec, but having a team, bringing people, your people team, your HR team into the loop, having them Have a seat at the table is key. And then also being open to the advice. And maybe you don’t have it look the way that you thought it was gonna look. Maybe your sales team ends up in New York, maybe, you know, maybe your software engineering team is all remote. Who knows, right? You just don’t have to go in there having all the answers already. But listen to the experts, listen to the advice that people are going to give you and then make your own comparisons before you sign on the dotted line, especially in a time like this. Right? Things are changing.
Jeff Vertun 43:45
Right. And it’s the time that I think again, my advice is most people should pause right. Think about how you manage in the short term. But yeah, I think with any business important decision, you don’t want to be reactionary. You don’t want to go, oh my gosh, we need this in 30 days, because you’re not going to have a good result. It’s just not any decision. So to be thoughtful to bring in partners that can help you be thoughtful and, and understand what you’re dealing with, so that you focus on what you need to do. Couldn’t agree more. Right.
Greg Toroosian 44:18
Great. Okay. Well, we’ve been talking to Jeff Vertun, the first Vice President at CBRE. Jeff, where can people learn more about you and your company?
Jeff Vertun 44:28
They can reach out to me directly on my email address and my cell phone that we can provide, but you have a blog as well www.lacreativere.com where I post relevant content, and we can post some of those links as well but people can reach out to me directly on my email or LinkedIn or or anything. I’m pretty easy to get a hold of.
Greg Toroosian 44:50
Perfect. Alright, Jeff, thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure and hoping we will speak to you soon.
Jeff Vertun 44:56
Appreciate it.
Outro 45:01
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