Confounded
A high energy podcast with its own video channel featuring interviews with amazing people who have overcome adversity and life’s challenges to be successful in unique and wonderful ways.
Confounded
Revolutionizing the Workplace: Cloudbooking's Journey from Hospitality to High-Tech Corporate Booking Systems
Step into the future of work with us as Gerry Brennan, CEO and founder of Cloudbooking, unveils how a simple hospitality orders system sprouted into a pioneering cloud-based solution for corporate booking systems. Imagine a world where managing workspace usage is as smooth as the cloud services we've come to rely on, a vision Gerry turned into a corporate revolution.
Throughout our chat, we navigate the twists and turns of Cloudbooking's history, from its early struggles to its rebirth in 2011, and how it's helping companies tackle the overflow of meeting room bookings with innovative tech and a user-centric approach.
Join us for a deep dive into the complexities of optimising office spaces in the concrete jungle of London, where real estate prices are as high as the city's iconic skyscrapers. We'll share how Jerry's brainchild employs RFID tags, sensors, and the humble yet resurgent QR codes to balance tracking desk usage with respecting privacy. This conversation is a treasure trove for those seeking to understand how technology can seamlessly integrate into our professional lives, streamline our daily routines, and even navigate through the trials of a pandemic.
From the cultural shifts in work-life balance to the innovative strategies companies are adopting to foster employee well-being and sustain productivity, Jerry gives us a peek at Cloudbooking's expansion plans. Whether dialling in from your home office or tuning in from your local café-turned-workspace, this episode is an enlightening exploration of the modern work environment and the technology reshaping it.
Welcome to Confident TV. This week, I'm delighted to be joined by Jerry Brennan, who is the CEO, founder and 100% owner of Cloudbookingcom. Welcome, Jerry, Thanks for asking. Good to see you, and you and you're going through some exciting times. I think that maybe we should start off with. What is Cloudbooking? Where did it?
Speaker 3:start, wow, okay. So the company's been around a long time. As you know, you and I have talked a lot about this business over the years, but we started almost 20 years ago something like that and essentially what I my background was trying to have electronics back then and what I wanted to do was get into a business like that we wouldn't have, we wouldn't only ever be as good as our last sale Now. So I went out to companies and said what kind of processes do you have in your business that involve lots of people and don't work? But we could try and look at it and everybody said, oh, book in a main room, no, it's disaster.
Speaker 3:So I'm thinking, well, let's, let's go with that. So I then kind of came up with the idea of building a system to to kind of put the onus on the user. And the original part that we built for the Bank of Scotland up in Jester was a solution that was to manage the ordering of hospitality for meetings. And the first point we got kind of owed. I think they owed a million pounds to their, their caterers.
Speaker 2:You know it's amazing.
Speaker 3:It's crazy, because they they they would bring down to the catering office. You know there'd be a person who barely knew how to use a computer, who was trying to enter this data into an Excel spreadsheet, you know, in in I don't know what that was Windows 95. And they go, of course, said that yeah, 11, you know, and make it up. So the data was entered twice. You know the cost centers were all wrong and there was no audit trials. So it was a disaster. So we just flipped it around and set to the users right. You know, come up with this tool. We said if you don't put the correct cost center in the matches with the cost center that we've got for you, you can't place the order. And the problem disappeared overnight. So it's saving the fortune.
Speaker 2:So this is quite interesting. So obviously some of us haven't worked in big companies or haven't for at least 20 years, and I'd imagine maybe a few of my listeners all 100 of them will not have worked in big companies because obviously there's a lot more smaller companies now and there's the startup thing where this would be like expected. So I think there's it's probably worth a little bit just explaining the scale of the problem in these big organizations, especially go back to pre what I would call modern tech.
Speaker 3:It was.
Speaker 3:It was. It was an interesting time, you know, because obviously we were talking about this, this new fangled thing. That was what flights years old, called the internet. Yeah, why would I want to use that? So back then there was no such thing as SAS.
Speaker 3:You know, cloud computing and we were, I guess, one of the first companies to do it and we were always cloud based and it really I think it was called cloud right. Well, it was called something else actually about that. It was called just our services. For some reason back in the day, we are largest client. To give you some idea of the scale of the store, our largest client is an international bank and for that client, we process around 100,000 bookings per month. Wow, just for them, just for them. Just for rooms as well, like rooms and hospitality and main. So you know, it's, it's, it's amazing.
Speaker 3:So companies didn't function without, without a kind of decent booking engine. So we sold the company in 2011. And and I actually had an ambition to try and create something slightly different to what we've been doing, kind of all, for all that time, and I created a kind of a person of bookingcom for me in rooms called cloud. Yeah, I ended up actually getting the original company back. You know, the software was really old but I could kind of still had about five clients left. And the interesting thing was with with the original on the old company is that, as I say, we'd acquired this cloud base, we we'd rolled our system out to to their, to their sites in such a way that it was kind of customized for each location. So the only person that really didn't know what was was making this, so it's quite a handy position.
Speaker 2:Nice lock-in feature there it changed. Just ask me, yeah.
Speaker 3:You know I mean, what do you do? Either I could send them a template Word doc and say fill that in and I'll build you siteful, yeah. And then what we did, which was to kind of interview every location and say what's unique about this building, what? What do we need to do for you to make it work really well? So it is a lock-in and no doubt about it, but it but it also meant that we created a system that actually worked really well on the site network and are not a valuable lesson from that. But what I also found is when, when our biggest flight kind of merged with another big bank in 2008, what, what we found is that they and all our other clients were also spending tons of money on external meeting rooms with hotels and Rageous Santas and things like that. So I kind of wanted to try and marry those two things together. So I created cloudbooking really in 2012 as a as a means of managing that overspill.
Speaker 2:So this is just to be clear. This is I am big corporate. I have obviously floors of meeting rooms because I do or did, I will come. We'll come on to the future of of how it works in a bit. So I have a score of meeting rooms per location, whatever. They're always full because you know people having lots of meetings and then people are going out and I guess what you're seeing is where a smaller company might just go meet a Starbucks, they can't do that because it's a bank, whatever. So they're then going to a deal with Rageous and saying we want four of these meeting rooms today and obviously, as we all know, short term meeting room rental is not cheap.
Speaker 3:It was. It was a weird situation because what actually was happening is the meeting room. The meeting rooms were just really badly used. Okay, every cloud we've ever had have the same issues, where people will book the room they like while all the room they shouldn't use. Yeah, human nature. You know the book for the meeting for three hours, just in case you know, because the people are often unsure how long a meeting we're going for. That's all fine and that's what. Accepted behaviors, yeah. But the average, the interesting stat for me, the one that really stuck out more than anything. So the average occupancy of all the rooms we managed was about 50% of their capacity. Now, if you've got a room, for six.
Speaker 3:I think average is three or four. That's fine when you have rooms at 20, you know 25 or more. First of all, there aren't many of them, and if they're then badly used, if their average occupancy is 12 or 10, you know, then it's a knock on effect. That means the large groups that often would be kind of project teams, yeah, would have to meet consistently, you know, and they can't. You can't have the project to ordinate assigned to the project director. Oh sorry, I can't get a meeting room.
Speaker 2:They're not sure how is this my problem this week at Starbucks, next week at Regis and if we're lucky we'll be in our own office consistency.
Speaker 3:And what companies like Regis and hotels potentially offer is a consistent meeting room experience, you know, in the same place every week. Okay, so what we did is when I kind of took control of the business in 2013,. So I kind of then became the sole owner and I started again. You know, effectively I started to rebuild the platform from scratch, based on all these things that we learned over the years.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So what we've tried to do is work alongside other technologies, so kind of take an agnostic view of it to say we work with whoever we kind of think is the best or whoever the client already got, and by that I mean companies that manufacture sensors. Yeah, so a sensor would be something that either sits on the ceiling or under the desk and monitors the activity of that space or, in the case of a ceiling sensor, a bunch of spaces or a meeting room beneath it.
Speaker 2:It's a quick question Are you the first person to actually identify that these meeting rooms were still above the use lines? Had Emily actually done this before?
Speaker 3:I think we probably covered it with the first actual booking engine and I think, yeah, we were the first people to start advocating the use of sensor technology to actually show clients how it's waived Because it's expensive, right?
Speaker 2:If you've got a thousand square feet of even a small room in London, I don't know what the price is for the old cliche trash can per square foot thing, but you are spending thousands across your property portfolio. Yeah, never mind the money you then spend in Regis, right.
Speaker 3:That's exactly the point. If you're spending all this money on real estate with rings and desks a desk being, I want to say 5,000 pounds per year per desk then they soon get that control. It really does so. For one client it was a really interesting project. Actually, it was a local authority in London and the challenge I got from them was I don't want a product, I don't want a system to book things. I need something to listen to what I'm saying and help me build a solution that requires no effort from all the users, because my logic's always been unless you have to interact with a service like ours, the more realistic and effective the data is that comes out of it. Because it's driven by behavior, the people will try and avoid using a new system. Right, I know guys up where I live who work at Rolls Royce and Toyota and the only bit of SAP they know how to use properly is the bit where they submit their expenses.
Speaker 2:So, it gets them paid right. I think that is pretty common across all companies, Absolutely.
Speaker 3:And everything else is an alphanumeric character, wherever they get away with it. So what we did is we put just as an experiment put RFID tags on the base of laptops of the users in the pilot, and RFID readers under the desks next to sensors. So all the person had to do to book a room or a desk was to sit down with a laptop. And then we would go oh, this is Alistair, right, so Alistair's SAP desk lawn, that's actually Jerry's desk. And we'd say to you, alistair, the laptop desk is busy, but there's a couple of your colleagues upstairs, you know, sat on a desk 25 and 26, or we could just move to desk three. If that's okay, will you go? I'll sit, sit, put your laptop back on that desk.
Speaker 3:So what we also do is monitor the space. So if it's not used for a period of time, like, whatever the client tells us, 30 minutes, we can say honestly just look for it. You've been away from that desk for a while. Have you finished? If you don't answer after another 15 minutes, we'd free that space up for other people to use.
Speaker 2:That's the end of the long lunch, then you could right yeah.
Speaker 3:Leave Jack it. Let's assume that what he'll say to me. What if I just took my laptop down and go to the top? You've got a job where you can do that, right, good You're on you, well done. Isn't that a life goal? Yeah, the reality is the sensor would say there's a laptop here, because our sensors also pick up objects, not just a thing. They'll say there's three bags in this room or something like that. Wow.
Speaker 2:So the people are a bit, do you not worry? That's a big brother, does that not have? There was that guy in the BBC yesterday he was taking screenshots of his staff. He was slated and linked in yesterday. You can't have, everyone hates him for it. You can sort of empathise. He's got control freak. He's got no control. Do you know, does any? He's really pushed back from these big clients, from the staff going hold on a minute. You know, I've actually brought my gym bag into the room. That feels a bit.
Speaker 3:Well, no, the bag. The sensor sort of did have bags without it being me and Renn. So if big, oh OK, and they were in Renn went to lunch for two hours and then came, yeah, the system. You wouldn't pick up a bag at a hot desk. Ok, there's no value in that.
Speaker 3:But you know it's an interesting question, right, because there was an experience some years ago in one of the major newspapers where the owners of the paper decided to put sensors under the desk for all the seating positions of the journalists and not tell them Now. So you can imagine the rebellion that occurred when somebody dropped their cigarette or something. Yeah, some of the desk and saw it. So it's all about communication, right, because these things aren't about tracking what people are doing. You know. It doesn't say when you entered and left the building or anything. It just says this space is vacant or bored, it's busy. And if people, if they find what they have to do now, what else to check staff in and out? Yeah, you can use things like QR codes. You may have QR codes scanned and built into the app. Each desk would have a QR code with the number of the desk on it. They just scan it.
Speaker 2:This is the return of the QR code. I had this conversation oh, it must be. It must be six months ago, maybe a year ago. It was before lockdown, I know, and I was saying to somebody you know she put this in print right Because you can just hold your camera over it People get mad bollocks. You know QR codes are dead and, honestly, your camera just recognises that Because people who try to think you have to have a special QR app and it doesn't work and you can't use it.
Speaker 2:And I saw some guy who's in print was telling me as soon as you're able to do a specific image like if I take a screenshot of you now, I can actually turn that into a QR code because the camera will. That's really smart, so that's an obviously neat extension of it. So I'm coming into the building and I need a meeting. I presume I don't have to book four hours in advance. I can just let you go. I need to meet the three guys from Product Dev. We need to meet like in an hour and you just tell me where in the building that is and you're optimising it, so I don't take up the boardroom with this 24 seats. If somebody else needs, you know more people in that meeting. So is the system in the background optimising all the time for these different meetings? Well?
Speaker 3:the beauty of how we work is that we kind of ask our clients to tell us how they want the system to work for them and then we build in those features right. So the QR code thing came from a really large multinational mining customer. I said, look, we love all the other stuff you do, but add in a feature to QR codes and the other technique that you mentioned there. We've got another client that's asked us to build in things like adding a Teams or a Zoom meeting to Cloud Booking. Ok, when a user comes on to our app, they can book a meeting room and add a Teams link to this so other people can dial in. Ok, that's good, but the trick part is that they also want us to create to turn what is a sensitive booking engine into a scheduling engine. So the user would say this is my requirement. You know I've got six people coming. Some of them are seeing you. You know, sell them on. I need a projector to present some stuff.
Speaker 3:And then they don't actually choose the room that they're going to use. They're allocating a room, yeah, yeah, and what it means is that if the room isn't new, you get a thing that was a bit of a synonym of ghost bookings, and it seems to be a legacy of when you've got a temp coming to the end of their contract. They'll say oh, you know what? What you can do before you leave is you book all the meeting rooms out for the rest of time just to annoy everybody, and that must be the reason they pick this. It seems that way. So if you have a no show in a room, if you don't check in within 15 minutes, the booking is deleted.
Speaker 2:Wow, so that gives you the whole walking through corridor. So you're wondering why all the rooms are empty because they're going to meet somebody from UX and then they don't turn up because they've got an important meeting elsewhere.
Speaker 3:Exactly so. If it happens a couple of times, then the whole sequence of me is deleted, because it's like, yeah, it's happened three times. Well, that's clever. It's a bit of a focus to me.
Speaker 2:So basically you're getting scored for your. Technically it's like if I keep booking meetings and not turning up, eventually somebody's going to say you can't book a meeting anymore. Jerry.
Speaker 3:We did have a client many years ago that had three strikes in your E what it was the that was it.
Speaker 2:That's great, though why not? When I was doing a bit of consulting, I'd sit in these bigger companies and look at like a meeting. You'd be looking at a floor of 500 people in front of you and then upstairs would be just a wall-to-wall small to medium-sized meeting rooms and you go up for a meeting and there'd be no din and you're thinking who's supposed to be in there? And of course, I wonder if it reflects a bit more of I mean, we'll come onto the COVID lockdown stuff in a second, but I wonder if it reflects well pre-COVID culture of people saying I want to have a meeting and then I'm really sorry I got to cancel, because you must see the cancelation. Do people cancel? They don't cancel because it's not easy.
Speaker 3:So what do you find? Ok, you know what? The problem isn't really people not showing up, it's people finishing early and then, in the mean, not canceling or not curtailing the meeting that's in progress. So there's a tablet outside the meeting room we supply those kind of things. That's red, that says this is Alistair's meeting until 5 o'clock. It's 2 o'clock and you'll meet and finish after 3 o'clock. As I said, you book the room for the duration Because you know it's not intentional. Do it and wander out of the main room chatting about the next steps of the project they're on, or whatever it might be, and forget.
Speaker 2:I guess it's just not a thing, right? So if I'm in a meeting three of us it's 11 o'clock, we've got another hour to go, we go and get a bite to eat and you just get your stuff and go. You leave it, then you go and nobody's ever had said to you. It would be helpful if you could think about the fact you're just leaving this very expensive piece of real estate empty for two hours.
Speaker 3:But my view, alistair, is you can't do it like that, because what you can't do is you've asked people to engage with another engine, another system, when their job isn't related to that solution. It's like my job isn't booking main rooms. I might be a project manager or an accountant. So I think the less we engage our users and require our users to interact with a service like last, the more effective it will be. And this gets worse the more senior right. Well, that's the thing. So it's like a perennial debate. So the property guys and the property directors, the facilities teams we need more space. And the ceaseless directors will say well, you know what, whenever I walk past you, me and Rick, just throw it in the empty. So figure that out and you won't have a problem.
Speaker 2:But I bet you, the same sweet sweet guys you know phone their assistants, say hi, there, I'll be meeting Jerry at 3 o'clock. Can you boot me in the boardroom Because I'm going to have a team. Let's get this in and press him, and then this boardroom of 24 people is for you, and then you turn it up. He goes. Actually it's 4 o'clock, so you just go for a pint and then that whole room sits empty, wasted for two hours. Somebody else was desperate to want, but they buggered off to readjust and spent a grand and a 20-person meeting over there.
Speaker 3:Yep, yep, it absolutely happens, and I think the largest spend I've seen from any client is that they were spending as one of the process in all these bookings for them. They were spending something like 14 million pounds a year on external venues.
Speaker 2:Let me just say that again, 14 million on external.
Speaker 3:On external, nobody talks about it. It's like a dirty secret. They don't want their staff to know how to book externally because they don't want them to do it. I'm like but they do, don't you want to control it and make it?
Speaker 2:more efficient. I know to empower them right, you want people to feel empowered, that they're part of saving 14 million pounds and doing things properly, because actually that 14 million quid is an impact on your bonus.
Speaker 3:They don't know.
Speaker 2:They don't know that that?
Speaker 3:thing might be spent because nobody tells them. It's bizarre Every time you have a Met Bar 1, it really manages it really badly because you have the travel team that are responsible for all the external bookings and the property or facility team that are responsible for all the intel, and all they do is blame each other. Your system would better. We wouldn't have people booking outside People of choice, right. So I've got to stay in the office or I can go to a nice plush main room in the West End. I'll take that choice. Thank you very much. Yeah, that's how it is.
Speaker 2:That's a pragmatic thing, isn't it? Because you can imagine, once you've opened the door, speak into the fact you can have the meeting elsewhere. And you've had a couple of external meetings and you found that really good one Just a mile away, which is actually got better biscuits, I mean pretty much Exactly, yeah, and you're not in the office, so if your meeting's at three and at four o'clock, it finishes early.
Speaker 3:Well, that's why they do it, because then they can go home Right. So what we try and do is, as I said, it's just called to make this process, so we try and create a challenge so that spaces are freed up. You know, it's a good day and of course, now it's completely different.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was going to say so let's get to the elephant in the room. You've built a business over 20 years which is dependent on people having meetings, and now they're meeting like this. So what did you see? It coming in February, in March? Were you thinking this early March? Or did you just go, oh shit, we have to react. And what have you done? That's what I'm really interested in.
Speaker 3:I guess we could see that something was coming. Right. I'll call it a knockdown in place with all white thing in early March, because it was obvious, you know. But this is worse, and I think that anyone that doesn't respond to any kind of crisis, any business owner that doesn't respond to it with a bit of innovation, right, frankly, you know, you get what you need to say you gotta watch yourself.
Speaker 2:There'll be a few people in LinkedIn going. That's not true, jair. I'm just waiting for things to return to normal. My LinkedIn's full of people and I have to say they're mostly our age going. Soon we should be back in the office and my team will be there to listen to me and I'll be able to see what they're doing. And I don't think they realize that it's not so much, even if the lockdowns are lifted which, judging by today's news, isn't.
Speaker 2:It's the 13th of September, everyone. Today's news is going to get worse, right? Boris is on at five o'clock. Well, what they're missing is, I think, is the staff are going. Hey, I don't mind coming in, but I'm just not coming in every day because actually I've saved eight hours a week commuting and that was expensive and boring and I never did like standing, you know, with my face and somebody's arm put anyway. So I think there's a generation of struggling a little bit with what may be the case that people will take a pay cut to live elsewhere. So, anyway, interrupted. So you're going to innovate, and what did you do?
Speaker 3:So okay. So what happened? Obviously, the first couple of weeks was my head, before the furlough scheme was announced, nobody really knew what was going to happen next. We had we were growing at a crazy pace anyway. So, since 2017, we released a new system in 2017, you know, and went from like five customers to 100.
Speaker 2:And it's worth clarifying. You have some of the world's biggest and best companies as clients. I mean we should maybe touch that at the beginning. I'll put it in the show notes, but I mean just run through for the audience some of your clients. I mean they are fantastic.
Speaker 3:So yeah, how many ranges right across industries. So Lloyd's Bank, Ennebos, Experian, Hitachi, most recently, Lloyd's of London. I get the taxi guys as well. We've just won a shot direct. He's the stuff of this.
Speaker 2:The who's who of every SaaS company's desired customers, right? So because they're. Also, I did ask the question for a purpose, because these guys you're going, oh my God, what's going to happen? What's going to happen? What does the lockdown look like? What does furlough like? What's going to happen to my business? But your clients are going through, you know, magnified a million times, because they're going hold on a minute. I have 30,000 staff and all this office space. So you kind of had a double-sided innovation problem here, didn't you?
Speaker 3:Well, we don't just put main rooms. You know, our system is. Our system is actually a data-led building management solution. Okay, so what we're trying to do is to help companies to make their buildings become more efficient. We were about that anyway.
Speaker 3:But I've been an evangelist for the last few years about where the shift was coming Really In terms of the way that people were going to work in the future. I didn't realize it, that people's all going to kind of happen in the face of a couple of months in two weeks, right, I mean, we've had the world's largest ever work from home experiment and it's been a huge success. You know, zoom and Teams NewsHitch has rocketed, you know, and it's kind of worked out okay. And what we've had is it's really interesting me it's actually of challenges from clients, so a lot of our clients, because we operate internationally, you know, we've got clients all over the world. So right now we've had a couple of clients that have placed orders in, but just to give you some indication of the growth, our client list has expanded by 50% since May.
Speaker 3:So, wow, roast-bring during lockdown, during lockdown. So we've had what happened is the work the office environment has knew it Was this kind of a mine place, you know where. If you went to work and you had a bit of a sniffle, people will say you know what, let me just take a couple of days off. You know, don't infect your colleague, you'll be getting the flood.
Speaker 2:I mean, if you had a progressive boss, not everyone was like that.
Speaker 3:Well. So what's happened now, of course, is it's become an environment where, if you don't take adequate steps to protect your staff, they could sue you. So clients have ranged from having things like you know, like in France, a lot of people are back at work. I think a lot of big international companies would say, well, like they said, you know, we are deser a major part, so that's the regulation. So back to work. You go back to work.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so UK is different, the US is different to it and in various countries, the company. But what they're saying is that they want to, they want to be able to. So some companies are saying like, if you're in the blue team one week, you're at home, and if you're in the red team the same week, the blue team is are you in the office? Are they? Are you swap over deeply in between, and so on. Most companies are saying we only want to, we only want people to come in twice a week. So our system is capable of only allowing you to look at desk up to a maximum number of times per week. We have things like, as I mentioned, qr codes. You know, we've adapted our visitor system, so the visitor system now sends out a COVID question to any visitor that's booked in. Wow, so back there pre-streamed. They're pre-streamed again before they come and they're pre-streamed when they arrive at reception, you know, to make sure that they've got no further symptoms.
Speaker 2:So this means yeah, so this means sorry. I just a friend of mine, works for an unnamed, rather large organization, kennedy Wharf, which has, let's just say, multi-thousand desks in the building. He's one of a hundred people allowed in and he's only really in there because he's you either, allowed in there for your hardware, cybersecurity, security, and there's just, I think, the problem that you're solving there for them is they can't actually get everything out at the right times to the right places because they can't manage the desk space and also you've got to get the lift, and the biggest problem Kennedy Wharf is these high volume, high speed lifts so you can't use them. Yeah, quite.
Speaker 3:And the other challenge we get a lot from clients is, you know, like some of the bigger companies are talking about real estate reductions, permanent reductions, up to 60% of their current space, so this isn't going away. This is the time for this solution is right now. So that's a really interesting time for us, and I've always been working on the basis of trying to build a solution that would just help people manage their day more effectively, so to be at the heart of their schedule. So when they get impacted by the tube going down, but I don't want them to find out where they get to bank station, but they can't get the central one across town and I want to know that that's happened and I want to be able to fix it for them before they even leave their building.
Speaker 2:So you're adding layers of value into the product. Right, so I buy the product to manage my 3,000 people in London. I've got an issue now that I only want every second desk be filled and I want everything in the opposite of some budget in a week. So that's all fixed, really. But you're going a step further and saying, listen, as you're walking down to the, to the tube or the train, wherever you get it, you're going to alert and say, look, they sort of take my line, for example, grantham to Kings Cross, it's off because somebody's jumped in front of a train or whatever. You're not going anywhere for two hours and actually then I go, fear enough. I work from home and your system can allocate the desk to somebody else etc. And you're getting right ahead of the curve in terms of it can allocate the desk to somebody else.
Speaker 3:But it can also give you the option to then turn back back the meetings that you've got into video conference calls. So if everybody else is in the building ready to go with that meeting, the worst thing to happen is that you don't have to cancel it because all those other people have made it in.
Speaker 2:So you've told me in advance. I get back home, I switch on Zoom, boom, we have meeting. So you've got business continuity, efficiency, real staff benefit because I'm not wasting too much stressing about getting there, all that kind of thing but also what we do is we make sure the people that have traveled haven't traveled in vain.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because what you don't want to do, right? You get to the office. You kind of made that decision to venture out. You made it to the office and now the meeting's been cancelled. That's the worst of all works.
Speaker 3:What we'd rather do is not wait till you're on your way to the station, but tell you before you leave. It could even be that you've set them alert. It's like if the train's crowded. Well, if the station's crowded, let me know. I don't really want to travel when there's lots of people, so we might just send you a recommendation saying I have to look. You've asked us to let you know this, so we're suggesting that you don't go in. There's a bunch of people there already and we can tell you where they're sapping them, because we've got all sensors. We can then say we're moving the meeting that was in room 2 to meeting room 15, which has got video conferencing facilities, so everybody else can meet in person. What we're then going to do is add a team or a Zoom meeting, link it so you can dial in, but at least you're still there. That's the Kim. All these other guys can then mingle at a distance and go bring mingle at a distance.
Speaker 2:It's hard, isn't it? So that obviously gives you insight. There's a couple of things. One thing he said was really interesting. So, based on my LinkedIn feed and the people who are waiting to go back to the office they're all sort of the guys who do that tend to be more small to mid-sized companies. You're seeing, what you're actually hearing from the biggest companies in the world is that they're looking at 50% upwards office space reduction permanently. So they have accepted and are planning for working from home being at least part of time being a viable option.
Speaker 3:What they're saying is, in all honesty, a lot of them are saying to us we need your help to tell us how to fix this problem that we have, because what you've, then, of course, you've got a factor in is that I've got my own office at home and I've applied booking. All our staff work from home. We've got 60 people. All of them are home-based. We haven't worked since central London, but no one's been to since early March, so we're all geared up for it, and we've got a great culture that revolves around interactions like this one.
Speaker 3:Yeah, not everybody's that fortunate, and particularly younger people, so it's hard to get on the property ladder right, and you've got people that are living in house shares and flat shares. To me, the idea of a call centre operative for a financial services company or an insurance company trying to take me through security around the kitchen table with all their housemates, it's not so cool, right, it must be happening, though, of course it has to happen, and that's the thing, and I think these companies are saying we need some other way to do this. So we're working on other options at the moment as well as for how we can solve that problem with our clients and partners.
Speaker 2:And interestingly you said you've got this really good culture. So I did a bit of work around this little Friday night TV thing for another company. It was good fun, but the audience went from everyone pretty fast to half the company and pretty fast to the six people that really I would have been friends with at the company anyway and drinking beer with. So how are you, as a CEO, Do you speak to every individual every month? I mean, how are you driving that culture and what do you do that keeps people engaged? Because really I mean it is really Everyone's fed up of my bingo and quizzes, right? Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 3:I mean, we did have a weekly coffee morning that for the first two or three everybody showed up and we sent them all their cloudbook and mug so they could all join in and fill part of it. Yeah, it was like doing quizzes with your family. Honestly, that became really tiresome.
Speaker 2:That boxing day feeling like it's done. Can I go now Back me right?
Speaker 3:So, but the thing is it didn't. What we had to do, I guess, is to offer each other reassurance in the early days, especially if you really had to shield or more impacted than others. Yeah, because it was a frightening time for everybody, but let's remember we were already doing this. There was no advance to us.
Speaker 3:We already had a work from home culture and it's really funny, right, because we've used Teams for years and what we've found now is that there's kind of like a there's kind of like a snobbery thing that's coming, where people will write a long Teams message and people will fire back to say I think that probably should have been an email. I'm not quite sure how they make that distinction, but they're fierce to be taken care of around all of this stuff. Yeah, and I encourage the use of video, and there's two reasons for that, I think. When you're Even though the video experience is, you know me looking you in the eye now I mean, I'm actually looking at the green dot on the top on the screen, but I think it's important for people to be able to read each other's body language.
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely, and in fact it's actually a really interesting challenge. But I think it also stops people from doing other things. Right, when you hear the silence, when you ask the question, you know that person wasn't listening to you. Yeah, yeah, much harder to kind of do that when you're engaging like this.
Speaker 2:Isn't that? When you just pretend oh sorry, I was on mute and just give your brain time?
Speaker 3:to catch up, here's another phrase of lockdown. I think you are on mute, you know can everybody see my screen.
Speaker 2:I'm on mute for a reason, so I've got a complete call of duty over here and then jump back on your question when you ask. Because that face-to-face thing is really, it's exhausting, this eyeball thing that we're doing right now. It's hard, it's hard, you know. It's hard, yeah, but it's white. And if you're a junior and here comes Jerry Brennan, the CEO, right he's eyeballing you saying you're doing really well, right, what are we going to do next week? You wouldn't do that in a face-to-face, right. You kind of be in the meeting room and you look up and think, hey, we're doing really well, and there's these things and I'll do this bit of whiteboard, and you wouldn't be going like eyeballing them directly, like some kind of you know kind of thing of good analogy that can actually repeat on media there.
Speaker 3:But I think you do end up though. Yeah, you do end up. Initially, when you start doing this stuff, you kind of are trying to fix your focus on the, or like some kind of rookie reporter, yeah, but actually you just kind of relax into it. Yeah, that was easier, but the thing is for us what I talked about body language a minute ago and the nuances. So we get together. We have a monthly company-wide call where each of the departments talks about what they've been doing and what they've been working on. We have sprint reviews every Wednesday, so everybody gets invited to the own so we can all see the new team, Everyone, everyone, even if it's not everyone, okay, so they can't look at the people who are planning this stuff yet, yeah, they're involved.
Speaker 3:and then our dev teams, our respective sprint teams, will present the results of their endeavors over the last thought night, which is fantastic. That's pretty good. Yeah, he's everybody engaged. But the interesting thing is when we meet once a year and that's something that we put on as a business for everybody. Last year we went to the Jaguar Land Rover plant in Solihull and did off-road driving on the original Land Rover course. Wow, we had a murder mystery in the evening, which better than they do in America because our American staff thought there would genuinely have been a crime committed. They were being questioned.
Speaker 2:So that was quite a bit of a crime to do. I think he said he pulls a gun and shoots the host right, Right. Then it could have been serious.
Speaker 3:But, like you know, with my Irish heritage, obviously I'm not drinking involved as well. Right, and we now head down. You know, and what's really interesting is that if you didn't have that whole video thing, you hear the voice of the person that you've spoken to for the last 12 months, but you're not used to the face and the body language and the expressions and all that kind of stuff and it's you think, oh, didn't they be like that? That's part of why we do the video thing too, you know. But I think our culture is and mine's, I've always been a great believer that everybody has to be invested in the company, and I think we have a stair auction scheme that everybody's part of after the probation period.
Speaker 3:So I hope that everybody feels a sense of collective endeavor and shared ownership of this. You know, and it's never going to be the same thing, right? I mean, you know what it's like. You know entrepreneurs we all work 25 hours a day. We have no life, you know.
Speaker 2:Cool, wait, are we doing? No, no, no, you're completely wrong there, sorry, we do have life. It's not that I'm actually doing any entrepreneurial stuff right now, but it's called work life. It just merges into one. I've had this theory for years, for 20 years.
Speaker 2:People say, oh, my work life balance, like if you want to leave, set your own thing, right, you don't have a work life balance, and I think that's the hardest thing. Who leave a job to set up on their own, which about a million people are about to start trying to do this soon? I think, yes, you just don't have it right. If you're sitting in the evening, you sit there and you might answer some questions, you might bring your laptop and do some research, whatever. You might just work for like three days flat with six hours sleep, and then you'll and I think that whole thing is a real. That's the hardest piece for anyone to start.
Speaker 2:I always say to the young guys I help at Nottingham Uni Just don't see it as like, okay, it's this time I stop now. Now is when I play Dungeons and Dragons or whatever it is you do. You know well, you know, I've never played Dungeons and Dragons. Obviously far too cool, but I think that work life balance and I think, as a CEO, if you've managed to bring that in, so because you were obviously up here, you're, mr I have work life, all one merged up thing that isn't separated. But your staff don't know you paid them. Some of them will say I've done my day. Some people will always give you a bit more, but they can't give you a bit more week after week after week after week. Otherwise they just start going. I'm just exhausted because there's a mental switch between where you are and where they are.
Speaker 3:I think it challenges a leader, though, is to give people a clear steer on what it is you're trying to do and try and create momentum when it's needed, but also encourage, reward people and acknowledge people that have done things that have gone above and beyond. And you're right, there are different groups that every company's got. I always try to refer to the key people as the pillars, the people that are always there, will do whatever you need, and I'm blessed, I'm really lucky, I've got loads of those people that you could call on and you could count on, but I think the most important thing that we do is we try and create a genuinely flexible culture. So I say to people I don't care what time you start, it doesn't matter to me. Wow, I'm not interested in any of that. All I care about is output.
Speaker 2:Has that been your philosophy for a year, so that you've got people who actually, instead of everyone's been told this, now they're going? Yeah, I don't believe you, that you're actually. You've been doing this for years.
Speaker 3:So when I started working some home other than when we started Reddome for me, I wanted to be here to watch my kids grow up be a rap. And my own dad had to go and get a job in London when I was quite young and he would come on weekend but he'd be tired and it was going to be a big thing for me to be around and I kind of thought, let's see how far we can take. And I was just. The technology improved, it became easier. So one of the key members, one of my killers, one of the key members of my team, said to me a couple of years ago working at Cloud Booking made me a better dad and I'm really proud. Wow, I'm starting to warm my heart, Let me tell you, because what Chris does is he walks his kids to school in the morning and then goes to pick them up. Nothing gets in the way of that. I'm messy, so you know choice.
Speaker 2:You're way ahead of a lot of CEOs, especially the small, medium-sized companies, right, because they're the ones who want the present-easemstuff. Because they don't quite they haven't. I don't think there's so much trust. I think some of them I've spoken to not on here, by the way, in case. I mean he's thinking that Some of them I've spoken to I think it's not as much trust, as I just don't know how to measure it, right, because I don't actually just letting people go. I mean, when I ran, come and check, we didn't even count holidays. I mean I had no idea how many. I didn't even say this is a free holiday zone, take what you need. It just didn't get counted. And people said you might have to go off for two weeks and whatever, as long as you've got your back right. And I wish I had actually measured it because you probably find people too less.
Speaker 3:I think it's true, and what recently? We're working right now on a re-architecture of the system. So I took that decision quite early on in lockdown to say, well, there's not many people we're using the system at the moment, so let's take the chance to just re-engineer it and make it faster and make it better and all that. So my pact, if you like, with my dev team is look, I need you guys to really go for it over the next few months and let's try and nail this. Obviously, with things that have developed in the UK, it's less of a deal here because of course we're probably not going to see a mass return to work in so much, but that's only in the UK. So what I've said to the guys is I want to add some vacation time for you for next year. So take one weekends if you can try and avoid like two weeks somewhere, but take longer weekends that week, whatever. But then when you're done let's stagger it so you will get more holiday work finished and that's kind of a reward for those guys for that commitment.
Speaker 3:But I think the whole idea of saying to people I'm not going to check on you, no one's going to check on what you're doing right and what you then have is a kind of peer thing. So they all actually the guys will know if somebody's not pulling their weight. We don't really have a problem with that. I think there's so much collaboration goes on, like in any devs company, in any tech business, that if you're not doing anything, people will tell you. I don't have to tell them, I don't even have to know. They do it with each other and it really works well.
Speaker 3:And it's like I was saying to somebody yesterday that you kind of have that period where you're at school, where it's regimented, you know you'll be in by a certain time, you can't leave, you have an hour for lunch and you have a couple of years at university where you let your hair down and go crazy. You know responsible for your own deadlines and you know, on the whole, most people do okay, right, and then you go back to the school environment when you get to work. And.
Speaker 3:I just don't get it. I've never subscribed to that. That's one of the main reasons why I work for myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's like I wonder if we actually asked everyone who is like us to that question. The biggest shock is leaving uni, which, to be fair, I was shut out as well and then you get into it. I mean, mine was in, it was a print company God help me and it was, like, you know, the hours were 95, right, so all I want to do is get the pub. And Chris, everyone was in at eight. You're like, what was I doing at eight? Well, that's what. You just get in there, you get your desk clear, and I was like, well, not really, I'm hungover.
Speaker 2:You know, I was a total child of that age and then, but you just taught me that the last thing I want is somebody saying that this is when you work and here's a really boring, mundane job, by the way but it's such a boring, mundane but yet exciting job that you should be in at eight o'clock to get ready for the 21,000 pounds a year we're going to pay you. And you're like this doesn't make any. And I think I look at the kids now and I think, either, the opportunities they've got are fantastic, aren't they? I mean, if people like you setting a standard of what a CEO should do and how they should act and understand it's not presenteism, but it's actually output and, in a way that your peers will pay, call it out may also support you. I think there's a. There's a. There's a. There's a other podcast with bigger audiences that you should find these hosts of and speak to, because there are people who are focusing on this is like how do I do this and you've been doing it for over a decade?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and, as I said, we've, we've grown. A lot of our growth has come in the last three or four years, as I said, and that's when we've added all these people. You know we've, we've still considered can we keep this going? And I'll ask you I mean, we can. You know no doubt about it, I think it's how many people are there 60.
Speaker 2:Wow. So this is. This is not in sec. You know inconsequential number of able to only ever see on video.
Speaker 3:It's interesting because then it, then it then it kind of falls part of your, of your recruitment, your hiring strategy. So the first thing you have to look for in in person now it's you know it's difficult to gauge right, but but you have to find people who are self starters, who are happy in their own company, and that always means people who are very strong willed, you know, and very confident. So what you actually have in this company is probably 60 people who are all not afraid to voice their opinion, you know, and that's great, I love it. You know, it's great. It could create some interesting debates, you know.
Speaker 3:But everybody understands what we're trying to do. Everybody understands the end objectives and what we're trying to do as a company and everybody signed up to it, you know, and that's why our staff retention rate is huge. There'll be very running news people and our client retention rate is the same because we have the same kind of the same level of honesty and and and type of relationship with our clients. You know, we went, we went through a process with one of the world's largest real estate companies and they were assessing all the companies in our sector, you know, and they came back and gave us some feedback and said we didn't hear. We heard some customers would say look, you know it was an all plane sailing. Nobody gets it right all the time, but these guys never walked away. You know they never let's down and we'll kept at it until it was, until the system was embedded and mistakes and walking there's probably a LinkedIn course in there, isn't there Jerry's going to how to remote manage your business?
Speaker 3:Well, I've seen one company in the States I can't remember the name, but I read about it last year that have got up to 750 people. I think that's mightily impressive 10 times a number and more. But what they do is they get together once a quarter in some kind of auditorium which is kind of the Americans. The CEO stands up and gives them all the big work. That's not really my thing, but I'll certainly stand up the bar and buy them all a beer. Have a challenge.
Speaker 3:You really love the big work. You just do it. Yeah, sell that out my bag.
Speaker 2:I'll finish it. So let's finish up with where you're going. I love the fact. Every time you mention a customer, you see names. You see the world's biggest. Every time you mention one, you've gone the world's biggest. This is fabulous. It's so exciting. So you've got the world's biggest customers. You've got this great team. You've re-architected so you've managed to turn the pandemic into an opportunity. You're helping the clients and obviously there's a period of massive growth going on. So where is the cloudbooking going over the next couple of years?
Speaker 3:So I think it's probably not my place to label all the clients. Some of them are happy to, not all of them are, so you know what it's like, but I think it's been a really tough time for everybody. But what we have more than anything is that in the sense of and I know this sounds really funny, but it's true it's a sense of family. So my wife working in the company, my eldest daughter has just joined us as a project manager straight out of uni, and we have a lot of couples that work for the company, but the husband is a BA, the wife is a technical tester, for example, jenny. We do actually have a couple that do one design, one project management and so on, and I think there's a lot of kind of unity and spirit in that.
Speaker 3:But in terms of how we've grown, there's a bunch of stuff that we've got coming up and our next move is going to be to raise some additional capital to replicate a part of what we've got in the US. We tried to hire US staff and manage them from the UK in it. It just doesn't work. It's too big and over half our inquiries and our new orders are coming from the States now. So we need a presence there. I'll be.
Speaker 3:The next step is to replicate typebooking in Europe, in the US. The next, the other project we're working on, is to try and blur this, to do what I was trying to do in 2012, which is to blur this distinction between internal space and external space. I give people a platform that allows them to work flexibly from the location that suits them best, and that's interesting and that's a challenge that we're rising to, and I think that's the way the world is always going to go. It's just that it's been accelerated, and some of the ideas, some of the things we're coming out with in the next few months will fix that.
Speaker 2:I guess it was. I mean just to. I think I've not got this rule. It kind of was in the way that people were just sort of landing in Starbucks and having a meeting, you know on the way to somewhere, and they kind of were kind of doing it unofficially. Well.
Speaker 3:Starbucks saw that trend. So Starbucks actually created an outlook adding some years ago. They didn't really. They did. Yeah, about two years. I re-launched it a year or two ago with Microsoft to say, you know, I'm meeting a pal, this is the nearest Starbucks, next meet there. It was bizarre. But what they what, when you look at the way that Starbucks kind of repurposed their restaurants I guess you call them is that they're set up for hot desking. You know they've got free wifi. They've got they've got the kind of US free power supply points. You know plugs, little lamps that sit over the desk, very expensive coffee. But what they can't do is they can't stop the general public using. You know people coming, the kids coming in from school, the, the, you know quite that's how it should be. But I want to create something that cuts.
Speaker 2:That cuts away that problem but it gets people to sign the same ubiquitous, a professional environment where you're not going to have somebody coming in and you know sitting. You know I might pass the show again.
Speaker 3:When you don't have to take all your stuff with you whenever you need to go to the toilet. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because and also you're, you're what you're trying to achieve there will actually solve another problem for maybe for independent cafes, because we, as we all know, the city centers are being a bit of a hold out right now and local towns like the ones between you and me are much busier in the center. And the actual the cafe owner there said the best thing that people working at home was he didn't have office workers coming to his cafe spending £2.15 a cappuccino and two hours at a table. He's got half the tables because he's distancing. He's making more money, yeah.
Speaker 3:That's the trick, and, and, and those are the kind of people that we want to. We want to reach out to and connect with, you know, and try and solve this with them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Cause you can actually say we will have professionals who'll do this. Of course, he might not actually know what people the laptop and spending £2.15 a coffee come to come back, but the but they need somewhere else to go Right, Because actually there's probably fewer countertables.
Speaker 3:As well as the people that are that are house sharing. You know, you've you've got professional people that that, like my wife and I, I'm often having to go into the dining room or a kitchen, you know, or player has to do that to make your call, because we sit opposite each other in an office, you know we're called all day so we just look at the. You know this, this particular call meant I could sit in the office I had yesterday. I had to go in the dining room, you know, and so so if I had, if I had a place or I had a, if I had a designer of, of, of area that I could use consistently wherever I end up, that would kind of my holy grail, you know, and that's what I'm trying to try to do.
Speaker 2:And integrated into the Cloudbook you platform and available to everyone. Who's on it? Exactly right? Yeah, that's, that's pretty sexy. Well, it has been a fantastic journey through Cloudbooking and I appreciate it. Thank you very much for coming on, thanks.
Speaker 3:Alastair. Thank you.
