Find Your Gel With Craig Robinson

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This is Real Estate Investing live from New York with James Nelson, the principal and head of Avis and Young's Tri State Investment Sales Group. In this program you'll learn about the world of commercial real estate and find out why it's one of the largest investment opportunities in New York and around the world. Now here is your host, James Nelson. This is your host, James Nelson. I'm principal and head of Tri State Investment Sales at Avis and Young. And thank you as always for tuning in. It means so much to me and I really appreciate your comments. And those of you who've reached out, you can connect with me at LinkedIn amesnelson NYC. You can also follow me there on Instagram. We put out a lot of great market intel. Also opportunities in New York City. Don't forget that I'm an investment sale broker. We've got a great team here in New York. We have a lot of opportunities, but we also also have a lot of insight. And insight is really key to making the best investments. And today's guest has a ton of it. I had the chance to hear Craig speak at a recent luncheon for the Young Men's and Women's Real Estate Association. Craig has a super impressive background. He used to be the CEO of Global Corporate Services at Newmark Knight Frank. Before that he was president of Colliers International Group for the US Region. But now he has been appointed the chief executive for Industrious. He's their chief growth advisor. And he is really at the forefront of the future of the workplace. And so we're going to talk about that on the show. But what above and beyond what I found so interesting is the advice that he has for people getting into the business. I know we have a lot of college students who listen to this program. You're probably looking for advice. Where should I start up?

Where?

What makes for a good job? Craig speaks a lot about mentors and that mentor mentee relationship. And don't forget this is a two way street. Oftentimes we think of for those of you listening, going and finding the mentor and just receiving. But Craig really talks about that relationship. He also talks about how to be most successful in the workplace, not being afraid to ask questions, to be vulnerable. And then he also talks about gel and you're gonna have to listen to this interview to find out what this is about. But this should really be your North Star in figuring out where you want to be most successful but also be most happy. So we're going to have a brief word from our sponsor and Then we'll get right into that interview with Craig Robinson A Different Approach to Putting Our Clients First Avis and Young's Tri State Investment Sales Group sells multifamily office retail development and specialty sales throughout the New York metro area. As experienced thought leaders in our industry, our 35 member group is available to help you make informed investment decisions by advising you on your current holdings or identifying new opportunities in the marketplace. Our one unified team is built on an industry unique platform which promotes unparalleled collaboration and teamwork. We share core values of hard work, integrity and expertise. We put our clients first, providing tailor made strategies to achieve superior results. Please Visit us at aytristateinvestmentsales.com and and follow us on Twitter LinkedIn and Instagram amesnelsonnyc to learn more. And now I'm thrilled to have with us today Craig Robinson, who is the new Chief Growth Officer for Industrius. Industrius created this position in response to the post pandemic trend of large corporations and growing startups alike seeking to use Flex offices in combination with traditionally leased workspaces. Formerly, Craig led powered by We WeWork's business unit that provided real estate development, technology and management services to landlords and tenants. And prior he was CEO of Global Corporate Services at Newmark and U.S. region President Colliers International before Craig, welcome. Wonderful to see you.

Oh James, thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Great. So Craig, I got so much out of what you had to say at a luncheon a few weeks ago for the Young Men's and Women's Real Estate association. And you know, certainly you talked about the future, the, you know, the workplace and really interested to hear about what you all are doing with Industrious. But I really loved the advice that you had to give, especially for those who are maybe earlier on in their careers and thinking about how to grow and that's a big part of our listenership there. So I know our audience is going to get a ton out of this today. So you know Craig, maybe it'd be helpful for our audience just to give a little bit of your background, maybe how you started out, how you found your way into real estate.

Sure. Well, first and foremost, I'm really glad you're having this conversation with your audience. I think all too often we talk about the big shiny buildings and the brokers and developers who make all this money and how to be successful, but we really very rarely have authentic conversations about our true journeys and ultimately what drives us and and encouraging other people to Kind of look inward and make sure that they're really managing their careers for the right reasons and for the right goalposts. You know, I've been in the commercial real estate space for almost 25 years and you were kind enough to kind of read my bio snippets. But it would be disingenuous if I were to let anyone imagine that my bio kind of was this real linear kind of journey. In fact, there were just so many moments in my life and career that were just unknowns and unwinding and dark spots. But let me just kind of go back before all of that. I originally from Atlanta, you know, thought I wanted to be an engineer, went to MIT and kind of, you know, baby boomers encourage their Gen X kids to like do the right thing, get a good job, go to the right school. And kind of being an engineer was one of those things realized pretty quickly after coming out of mit, working for Arthur Anderson, doing consulting that I wasn't, I was really interested in spaces, community, people, all these things that I didn't have the vocabulary for. But I kind of knew it wasn't like technology, software implementations. And I found myself really interested in real estate and went back to HBS and got an MBA and the rest is history. I've been doing commercial real estate since by and large, mostly on the services side, Trammel, Crow, cb, the likes, a few years on the investor developer side and the past, call it 10, 12 years, have really been very fortunate to have the opportunity to kind of build and grow businesses that were doing really interesting things. They're either challenger brands or doing something kind of non conventional in the way we thought about space or business models. And certainly, you know, having the opportunity to lead sales and marketing and strategy here for industrious is just really consistent with where I've been going for some time. I also have the great fortune of sitting on a few boards and I get a chance to stay close to really where innovation is happening elsewhere, you know. But one of the things I tell folks, you can, you know, draw a straight line through any scatter plot and that's effectively what our bios look like. It's like it's so obvious that you're just going to go from the bottom left to the top right and that's, you know, anything but true. So, you know, one of the things I'd maybe love to share, James, is just, you know, some of those moments and things that I thought were kind of, you know, kind of inflection points either in the way I thought about decision making or the way in which people play a role in my life that helped me to get to where I am. So, you know, I can go into some of those thoughts, James, but maybe I'll just pause there, just in terms of my background, my bio.

No, I definitely want to hear more about this because I appreciate the fact that when I heard you speak, you talked about being vulnerable and kind of putting this out there. And it's not like just, you know, you showed up in day one, you were the US President for, you know, for Colliers. I mean, there were certainly steps along the way. And, you know, a lot of our listeners are also college students, and they're thinking about, you know, how do I break into this business? Or maybe it's someone who's in a different industry and they're trying to find their way into real estate. So I think those early stories are incredibly helpful. You know, what were some of the ways early on that you were able to learn and grow and maybe if you want to share about some of the obstacles as well.

Yeah, no, thank you for that. It's interesting, you know, a few decades in the game now, and maybe you might have beyond the decades. I don't know, we probably watched the same cartoons as kids, but I realized that there was just kind of seasons in your career and, you know, and when you're, you know, coming out of college or out of grad school or, you know, maybe trying to pivot, you know, the first stage or the first, you know, game, it's just getting in the game. And. And a lot of that is just like going to the right schools, having the right kind of connects and kind of being clear around which game you want to get into. And for me, a big part of that was just having the right mentors, the real estate space, commercial real estate in particular. But I think real estate more broadly is murky. It's super relational, and that's really, really difficult for people to kind of find their way unless you just have really good sponsors and mentors. And I've had the benefit of both those, particularly to get in the game. And once you're in for a little bit, then you realize, like, gee, I finally got my shot. Now it's about, how do I stay in the game, really, and not get turned out or not burn off your whole draw, if you're a broker or not, lose it all. And that really is about developing your craft and getting good at the work that you do. And that takes time, and hopefully you have enough time to get Good enough at it that you get to the next stage which is to start like you know, winning the game. Like, okay, I'm in the game, I'm planning, I'm a player, you know, I'm a broker, I'm a developer, I'm an architect, I'm a designer, whatever you do. But you're in the game. You've got a craft, you're developing your skill, maybe starting to develop your brand. But that next thing is like, okay, how do you win? And oftentimes we go into every thing thinking you're going to be the CEO, the MD or the chairman or whatever. And maybe that's just by laws of geometry and org charts that that's probably 1%. No one ever really studies the other than 99% or even has kind of the emotional kind of readiness to deal with the likelihood that that may not be winning for you. So defining what winning looks like. And I'm going to come back to that.

But once you start, Craig, I don't want to stop you if you're on a roll, but I want to go back to it because it's so important. And you talked about how mentorship played a very important role for you early on your career. So I'd love to hear from you what makes for a good mentor and then maybe talk about what that mentor mentee relationship looks like. Because I think oftentimes people that think of that as just a one way street. So maybe maybe talk about that dynamic and for our listeners, you know, who should they be thinking about who would make a good mentor?

Yeah, so I think about mentors multidimensionally. I mean there are different mentors for different stages of life. For different areas of your life, you may have multiple mentors, effectively a board of advisor. But I think of mentors as people who kind of help you navigate the hand to hand combat, the day to day. Do I take this job, do I take this job? Or I'm trying to negotiate the right role for me, how do I do that? I got this really awful performance review. What should I do? I mean like these are the things that like mentors who may not look like you, they may not be in your same industry, they're probably, but, but these are people who know something about the thing that you're dealing with. And to your point, hopefully it's not a transactional relationship, it's a relational connection that you have that kind of goes both ways. But by and large the thing that I have found, people generally get mentors. People generally don't know how to find mentors or how to be discoverable to mentors and oftentimes how to get the best out of mentor relationships. I'll start with the latter. One of the things that took me a long time to realize is that unless you're willing to be vulnerable, to say, hey, I just had a really awful performance review or I'm really struggling with this thing, or I have this thing that I'm supposed to do my job, but I don't think I'm really good at it and I really just don't know what to do. Well, first and foremost, raise your hand and say I need help requires a certain amount of vulnerability. And the only way someone can help you is if you're willing to be vulnerable. And that is something we're just not in society. In many, you know, certainly where I come from, it wasn't something that was encouraged. In fact, in our industry, you're encouraged to like, pretend like you know everything, to come across like you're in complete control and confident. And even if they're duck feet under the water pedaling hard as heck, you know, the idea is to look cool, calm and collective above water. But unfortunately, that doesn't make you really help coachable and it doesn't allow you to get the help when you need it. And the other thing too is we kind of just assume that if you do the right thing, eventually the right things will come to you. The role of sponsors are really powerful. When I went from, you know, being kind of a BD sales person at a pretty, you know, reasonable level, but I was an individual producer contributor to being a division president, it was really a sponsor, someone who was in a room that I was not. Who says, you guys don't know Craig, I do. I think he could do this thing. And those are those step functions, they're not linear. They're step functions where someone pulls you from one rung to another because they believe in you, they see something in you. Those are sponsors, oftentimes not mentors. Sponsors are people who are advocating for you to get you in the room that you're not. And they're probably in that room and you're not. And so for those people, you never know who they're going to be and when someone's noticing you and thinking about you. And so for me, my sponsor many, many years ago was someone who actually I worked with on a diversity recruiting initiative. I would have never thought that that was going to be a place in a forum where somebody wouldn't notice Me, but they did. So I just say, James, the role of mentors and sponsors are so powerful and oh, by the way, you never outgrow them. I still to this day when I was like, how do I get on corporate boards? Or how do you get on the right boards? Like, still need mentors, still need sponsors. In fact, the higher you get up in your career, the fewer people around who can really relate to you. So the universe of people who can do that becomes smaller. So I would just say that. Get in the game, stay in the game, win it. And the other thing too. We talked about this, James, when we were together in New York. I think the key to winning the game is to really understand what Lane. I use this acronym and it's really kind of a framework called gel, G, E, L. I want your listeners, if they can just close their eyes and just imagine an equilateral triangle and each of the corners of this equilateral triangle, there's a letter, there's a G, there's an E, and there's an L. And I'm going to come back to this idea of being in your jail. The G stands for what is Craig? What is James really, really good at? What is your, you know, your, your God given talent, the thing that comes easy for you, it's really, really hard for someone else. The thing that you could do with your eyes closed and you know, and it's just, you're, you're just blessed to have this thing. Um, now that sounds like an easy thing. But most people aren't honest about their G because we spend so much of our lives wanting to be good at something that we think others value. Maybe you were good at sales and marketing, but you know, maybe you went to a school where like the quants and the math people were like the cool kids or hey, I really like brand and. But you know, everybody went and worked on Wall street or went and worked for, you know, doing this thing. And so you're trying to be good at something that you're really not. And instead of saying, what is it that I'm really, really good at? Number two, E. What is it that you really, really enjoy? What excites you? What activates you? What is the thing that you get up on Saturday morning and do for free? You would read an article about this. Not because someone told you to read it, just because you're curious, you're hungry. You think about your dinner conversation and the conversations that you just find yourself bringing up with your friends and just think about that and it may not be about work. It could just be the broader you think of your skills in terms of what you're good at and what you enjoy, the more likely it is that you're, you're, you're going to see all the possibilities. But that's E and then the last is L. What is the lifestyle you want? Risk, reward? I want to be a billionaire. I want to spend a lot of time with my kids. I want to, you know, I don't want to be on a plane every week or I want to, you know, whatever it is. You know, there are so many times when people invited me to do things that felt really, really risky, whether it's being a broker or doing venture capital or something where your payout was going to be super. And I was like, I'm risk adverse. I know that about myself. Or I know that certain things are really important to me and other things are really not. And guess what? That's not a group decision. That's not a democracy. That's not something where you poll everyone and say what makes you happy? What's the lifestyle you want? It has to be really individualistic. So here's the thing, James. This has to stay an equilateral triangle. If you do something you're good at and it excites you, but it doesn't give you the lifestyle you want to meaning, like you're creating all this value, you love it, but you're not getting paid, you're stressed, whatever, you're going to like, really be angry, you're going to be disgruntled, right? If you do something that gives you the lifestyle you want and you're good at it, but it's not something you're super excited about, you're going to burn out because you're burning a really, really expensive fuel in order to do these things. Now if you do something that you really, really love and it gives you the lifestyle you want, but you're not really good at this thing, you're not going to be a top tier performer and you're going to like top out or get churned out. So when you're thinking about how do you get in the game, play the game and then win the game, there's no way to win the game without being in your jail. So just reflect on what you're good at, what excites you in the lifestyle you want, and make sure you keep that balance.

That's awesome. Yeah. Craig, I love this concept and I know our listeners are hopefully they're taking notes because it's so true what you're saying. And I think that the really most important part is that honest self reflection. And I really like what you had to say that, you know, it's not what you think you should be doing, right? Where, what, where you know, what skills that you should, you know, try to go acquire, you know, don't swim upstream, embrace, you know, those pieces that you're, you know, you're very. Come naturally to you, right? And it's got to give you that excitement and that passion. So think about this, you know, so if you, if you have a team where everyone has embraced their own gels, right, Talk about how, because if you had a team where everyone was just good at the same thing, right, that wouldn't get you from place A to B. And I'm very passionate about team building and whether you're an investor and you're looking to build out a company to go buy properties or you're working at a brokerage firm, you know, having people with complementary skills is really, really, really important. There's things that I'm good at and there's things that I'm horrible at. So I think, I would imagine that if you had a team where everyone had really mastered their own personal gels and you can put those together, that there's probably an exponential effect that you could have by putting those people together.

There's so much research that shows that diverse teams and diversity, broadly different jails, different backgrounds, different experience, different points of view, lead to better outcomes. And so the research is super clear and consistent on the benefit of having a team where you have lots of different superpowers. No one ever looks at the Avengers and says, gee, I wish there were four more Incredible Hulks. Like no, it kind of works well because there's Iron man, there's Captain America, and they all fight some other part of the villain, you know, in the way that they do. And I think of our teams that way. But to your point, there are two things that we, you know, if you double click that are, you know, need to be understood in terms of, to activate that. One starts from you as a leader, being able to assemble a team and understanding the strengths that you need in order to achieve the mission and goal. Which starts with understanding what you are good at and what you're not. So I know, for example, for me to build a high performing team, it has to first start with what are the things that I need to complement my strengths. So being honest about your strengths and, and not being intimidated or threatened by the Fact that someone shows up with a strength that you don't have, and being able to acknowledge that and recognize and say, I'm so glad you're better at this thing than I am. In fact, that's why I need you on my team. And I think everyone has to first and foremost get comfortable with what are the things that you need to compliment and supplement your own superpowers. And then I think on a team where you want to reward and acknowledge and celebrate differences, how do you do reviews? How do you measure performance? Are you effectively recruiting to the same box and measuring and using the same attributes to assess the value, or are you really celebrating and acknowledging the superpowers of one and they may look really different? You have a team that's not afraid to be different, and their differences are rewarded and celebrated. That may, again, be functional. Your jail, the things that you do really well. It could also be situational, it could be contextual, but it can also be just, again, just diversity and the broadest of senses. And I think this is easier said than done because people, individuals are insecure, teams are insecure. People like the Homo sapien likes conformity. And that's a little bit of just how we're hardwired, is to find more people like us. But the reality is, if we really want to activate the power of ourselves and our teams and the company, then you really gotta get good at bringing these different jails together.

You know, I want to share with the audience the question that I asked you at this in person lunch. And your answer, that has helped me tremendously because I asked you, I said, so, Craig, how do we create this environment where people can feel comfortable with raising their hand and asking a question, maybe something they don't know, or bringing a different perspective to the table? And your answer was, as leaders, we have to show that we're vulnerable, too. And I did this the next morning, a sales meeting. We were talking about how. How interest rates were set and these complex swaps. And we were talking with our debt equity group. And I raised my hand. I said, scott, this is really interesting, but this is like way over my head. Can you explain to me just. Because if I don't understand this, I'm sure maybe half the room here probably doesn't understand it as well. So I think also for the leader to be vulnerable and say it's okay to ask questions, I think it just reinforces that this is an environment where people, you know, they don't need to know everything. And it's healthy when people ask questions or bring different perspectives to the table.

You know, it's such a great point. And I'm glad you did it, because when you do it, you signal to the people on your team that it's safe to do it. If your boss can acknowledge in front of everyone that they don't know something, then it says to you that it's safe for you to do the same thing. Jamie Hodari is our CEO, chairman, founder, co founder of Industrious. And, you know, the way he runs our executive meetings is very Socratic. He asks lots of questions. And actually, you begin to realize that the value is not in having the answers and asking the questions. And so it's great to be in an organization where intellectual curiosity is more interesting and more valuable than the knowledge. To some degree, and I do think that is an important thing we can do as leaders, is to raise your hand and say, gee, is it me or does anyone else not understand that? I have no idea what that means. And so I recently brought on, as you described, my background is really much more on the B2B commercial real estate. Tenants, landlords. And a big part of our business is really B2C. We're really dealing with small businesses, individual solopreneurs, and it's a good percentage of the people, the tens of thousands of people who come in and out of industrial spaces every single day. And that was a part of this business that I didn't know really well, to be honest. I really understood the enterprise side of our business, but I didn't know what we call the SMB side. Most commercial real estate organizations don't really sell to an individual, and I was fortunate to come into an organization where we had strong muscles. But there were a lot of things that I just didn't understand about that business. So I spent probably the first 60, 90 days asking a lot of questions, which, you know, maybe there are people who are like, wait a minute, does this guy know our business? But the reality is I needed to demonstrate that there are certain things that I need to learn, and I value your competence and your strengths to help me get there. And I'm going to recruit someone into my team. And I brought on someone to run this part of the business who. Who compliments me and who's strong in that part of our business. So I think we need to do more of that as leaders, because then the people on our teams will be empowered to do the same thing for their teams.

That's awesome. Thank. Thank you so much for sharing that. So, Craig, I'd love To get your perspective and advice having. I mean, you've held positions as head of the US Right, for one of the largest brokerage firms out there, and then also a CEO of Global Corporate Services. So I pretty much spent my entire career, or I have spent my entire career mostly in one market here in New York City. And yes, we work on assignments throughout the country with our various offices, but you were in a position where you had to actually oversee multiple offices throughout the country, multiple corporate clients around the world. For our listeners who are thinking about branching out. Right. And maybe it means right now they have holdings in one city, but now they want to go and they want to expand. And you see a lot of this right, where, whether it's they're now going to tackle maybe multifamily in the Southeast. What advice would you give to someone who, who is trying to oversee operations in multiple cities? You know, how do you, how can you effectively do that?

Yeah, that's a great question, by the way. You know, having a bigger organization, more footprint, more geography doesn't necessarily mean better. I very much think that was of my generation, which is the more people you oversee, the more markets you oversee, the more successful you are. And that's really like, there's a fallacy in that in a big and major way. But I do think we're in a place in time where people should be thinking about how do we expand our reach, our impact, our influence, and whether that's reaching more customers or reaching more people or whatever the kind of the goal is. And I do think about that a lot of different ways. One, the horrible but yet beautiful thing of what we learned over the past two years in this pandemic. And Scott Galloway, he wrote this book kind of post Corona, which is a great kind of call to action for us to rethink business models in the world that now you've got permission to roam use technology very differently. And so I guess the first thing I would think about is the people who are winning in this post Corona age or people who are thinking about how to do things digitally using technology. Do you literally have to open up an office and have a branch and have a bunch of employees and this, that and the other, and like this very kind of analog way of thinking of expanding. How can you use technology differently? How can you think about your customer in a way that takes some of the rigidity around the ways in which we thought we would get to them? I guess my call to action would be to really loosen the way you think about scaling your business Number two, I think a lot of the assumptions around scale are very different now in terms of the capital, where labor is and what people want and, like, how do I get them and how do I attract and retain them? That's a big part of the business that we're in now. We really are capitalizing off the idea that people want to expand their businesses, but they want to do it in a really different way, a much more lean and nimble and flexible way, a much more authentic way. And so that is creating opportunities for us, like, really step in and help people who are thinking about scaling their businesses in a way that is consistent with the volatility and the uncertainty, but also too, just the kind of the pace of new opportunities popping up and how you want to really be nimble and capturing them, but also too, just making sure your infrastructure and your resources and the way you tap labor and use space is really giving you that agility that you need to kind of think about scaling. But, you know, those are just kind of two. Two thoughts. But it also kind of takes me back to the beginning of our conversation, James, and I'll be done with the idea is the whole concept of the game. Get in the game, play the game, win the game. I think the season we're now in, James, is how do you change the game, right? How do you change the game? And why try to go win a game that there are already a bunch of in comments, the rules are kind of, like, been built to, like, favor people who are not you. And I think we've learned over the past two years that now's the time to shake the Etch A Sketch, draw your own picture, redefine what success looks like, Create a game where you're the winner, right? And I think for people like me, listen, I'm an African American male from Atlanta, Georgia. There are not a lot of people like me in commercial real estate, particularly not people who've had roles like I've had. If I were trying to be like you, James, I will probably fail. The only thing I could do is be myself. And I got to figure out the game that myself, my Jill, can play and win and ultimately be a change agent. And I don't know what that looks like for your listeners, but as they think about corporate, quote, unquote, scaling, growing, whatever the attribute for success is, I would say, like, are you trying to, like, get really good at playing someone else's game? Are you looking at, like, how can you change the game or even create your own game? And then you might Define success a little bit differently.

Wow, I love that. Powerful. Changing the game and it really. I'd love to hear more about your time at we work with Powered by We because I got to imagine that was part of it taking physical real estate and kind of the intersection of prop tech. And we're at this golden age now where for the long time real estate was kind of in the stone ages. Fintech was way far advanced and all of a sudden you have this massive, massive influx of capital so our business can run more efficiently. So you know, where, where are the opportunities there today? And again, maybe for our listeners, maybe it's not going and working at a traditional real estate firm. Maybe it's going and working for a proptech startup.

Oh, great question. In fact, if you think about where capital is flowing in our business, where the talent is moving in our business, you know, so much of the good things that you, you know, you want in life are really gravitating towards one where there's really open minded, you know, kind of thinking innovative around like what's possible. A lot of growth, an appreciation for people who are bringing in new ideas. And a lot of that is happening in the parts of our industry where, where there is, you know, technology is alive and vibrant. New business models like, you know, flex service providers are really thriving. And I would tell you we're still in such the early innings, like in the Flex space as an example, we're just like 1, 2, 3% of kind of the overall market spin. You know, back in the old days, if you ask, you know, you know, a tenant like tell me about your portfolio, they would have said well there's a pie and it's like how much is owned or leased? And now there's this little sliver kind of how much is shared that's flexed and I think that's going to open up, open up, open up over time. And so I think there's going to be massive opportunities even just in the space that I'm in. And I think what we've seen just over the past few years with WeWork, IWG and industrious, the industry seems to be consolidating around a few kind of players that are doing and operating at scale that were one still in the early innings, but kind of the firms who are really leading this space, including Industrious, we validated that there is huge demand, huge demand for one flexibility, huge demand for spaces that are inspirational for all of the organizational, human, strategic impact. And, and that's not going away. I, I told you the story, like, it was interesting back in the old days, when you want to work for a company and. And they gave you a phone, a mobile phone, you got a BlackBerry. Why did you get the BlackBerry? Well, that's because the IT department said that's the most secure and safe thing and no one can hack it. And you could throw it off the top of 85 broad and it will hit the ground and still work, but no one really. I mean, for the most part, it was cool to have a phone back in the old days, but, like, for the most part, it wasn't like the coolest phone. You probably had an iPhone at home because it was sleek and it was cool and it reflected you and it was fun and it connected to your life in a way that felt very natural. The exact same thing is happening in workspace. It used to be that they said you have to come sit in a cube, in a cube form in this very boring office space, and you have to be there Monday through Friday where I can see you and manage you. And it was kind of like this very 1984 ish, kind of BlackBerry analog. Right? And. But people really, really want spaces that are comfortable and inviting and safe and warm and casual, because it turns out that you work better in those spaces and you're just happier. And it turns out that that kind of leads to better outcomes. And. And so what's happening is now, if you went in any company, of course they support the iPhone. But it wasn't like a corporate IT person who says, you know, we think we should have the iPhone. It was the human being who set these things. And as a result, now the company is kind of in response to the desires of the individual, saying, we need different types of workspaces, we need more flexibility, we need more choice. And that's where we come in. But you, to your earlier question, you could just rinse and repeat that in so many parts of our business, where are their information asymmetries? Where is their fat? Where are there too many people doing something that you could have fewer people doing? And there are just so many of those opportunities that, yes, you could go be a traditional real estate broker and do great, be a developer, be an architect. Those are fine. I've spent more of my career doing that than not. But if I were graduating from college today, I would seriously consider where is their growth? Where is there room for lots of innovation to be impactful? Where could you really make an impact and difference? And those are some of the areas that I get super excited about and I really, really hope that we draw more people into our industry because that is way more interesting than maybe even the building itself. The opportunity to really solve some of these tough problems in a multi trillion dollar industry. Oh, man, that's really, really cool. And guess what? There are no incumbents, there's no institutional players. There's no one who's a quote unquote winner. I mean, we're still early innings, so this is a great time to get it.

That analogy of the BlackBerry is so powerful because you instantaneously get it right. And so with that in mind, I mean, I've got to ask, what is the future of office space out there? I mean, here in New York, and someone might be listening to this two years from now, but at the time we have 18% availability here in New York City. That's 100 million square feet of office space that's unspoken for. I mean, what happens to that all, especially if now you've got this new hybrid workplace or maybe flexible space, does that office. Are we still going to need the same amount of office space? Is some of that going to have to be converted for other uses? I mean, I can't imagine all of this space can be repurposed and utilized in this new format.

Well, James, you're not going to like my answer, but it's the honest answer, which is the only thing we are consistently good at, is being horrible predictors of the future. I have been a member of cornet for almost 20 years. I was on the board, and I feel like at every Cornet summit we had some great futurists who would come and tell a great story, which was always exciting to just imagine a world of different possibilities. And I realized in hindsight that much of the value of the futurists, and there are some that were better than others, was not so much in predicting the future, but getting you to imagine a world of many different possibilities. And so I'm also just reminded, you know, in my early days, we used to do corporate real estate outsourcing, and I used to do a lot of that. And there was one big bank that was one of my clients that, you know, a year or so earlier, online banking had just been announced. And this was like the big thing. Now you can go online and do all your check cash and all. And now this, of course, is old school. But back then, you know, you know, late 1990s, early 2000s, it was still a big deal. And people said, this is the end of bank branches. No one will ever like no CEO of a Major brink is going to ever build a bank branch ever again because. Because like it's going to go away. Well, fast forward bank branch is still here. In fact, my client at the time went and like rolled out 500 bank branches the next year. Right. Because one, all of the conviction we had, it turns out was wrong. But most of all what we didn't realize is just that it wasn't so much that the space would go away, but the role and the value and the purchase purpose of space would evolve. And I feel like that's a little bit of what's happening now. You know, AWS alternative workplace. That that is an old thing. Hoteling old thing. Like a lot of the reasons why we used to do things around flexibility was largely kind of a CFO driven, like how do I cut costs? Which is still a really important thing. But like now we're starting to realize like the built environment has a really powerful role to play in my brand, my culture and connections and organizational outcomes. And so I just really think it's not so much that space is going to be we're going to use less of it, more of it. It turns out that we're actually probably using more space, but it's more distributed, its ownership is more distributed, it's more in fractional kind of components that probably net net we're using more, but we're using it better and it has a better outcome. And so James, you know, what does that look like 10 years from now, 20 years from now? All I know is that I'm going to be wrong no matter what I tell you. Which, you know, I think means that we're going to be in business for a while because the more uncertainty there is, the more flexibility you need to accommodate lots of different outcomes. And I think that's the business that we're in today. Maybe we would say we're in a flex space, but maybe in the future we're just like how do we create more optionalities for organizations more broadly? But either way, I think it'd be fun for us to continue to imagine this future. Lots of different kind of outcomes.

Craig, I really appreciate that answer, especially from where you're sitting today. I mean you could have easily said this is the death of traditional office and it's not one specific answer. I mean it's going to continue to evolve, right? And for us to sit here and try to predict what's going to happen down the road, I mean, I think the important part is to, to continue to stay at the forefront. Right? So how Would you encourage our listeners, you know, whether you say, read the tea leaves or kind of under, to kind of stay ahead of the trend. So how do you stay informed? And, you know, maybe it's where industrious is looking to open offices or, excuse me, workspaces. How do you know what cities to open up, what the demand's going to look like? I mean, I'm sure you all have pretty sophisticated algorithms for this, but how do you decide where to go?

Well, I'll tell you the way we're thinking about it right now, and again, we reserve the right to draw with a number two pencil, erase it, and draw again in a few years. Because I think the demand curve is very dynamic. I think human preferences are very dynamic. I think they're evolving. Organizational priorities are evolving. And I think part of anyone who wants to be a partner, whether it's an advisor or solutions, you know, kind of partner to, To. To really be thinking about, how do you stay really close to that demand curve? And anyone who's, you know, who takes their eye off of, like, the demand curve. And I don't mean it an aggregate like what do companies. But what do human beings want and need? What are the unmet needs and desires, whether explicit or implicit, that we want to be thinking about? How do we solve for? And. And that requires a different kind of skill set than we've historically developed in this industry. Again, coming Back to the B2B, we talked about tenet, but really a tenant is a collection of human beings. We never talked about the human being. We talked about landlords. What landlord is an asset manager sitting up there, and they have aspirations and fears and desires. And so thinking a lot about how do we bring humanity into this industry. And I think that's a lot of what we do in our design and how we think about servicing our space, which is why we lean heavily into hospitality, which is why I think it was great for our business to really start at the SMB. The small business, which is really, really getting close to the individual, shows up every single day in your space, and you get to know them and what their needs are. And then obviously at scale where their company has 10 employees or 10,000, it's still a company, you know, collection of human beings. And I think that's one of the things that I think we've learned to do really well. People will come into space, but not because they need a place to work. They come into space because they want to meet, they want to build relationships, they want to connect, they want to be Inspired. There are things that they want to do that they can't do in their living room. And so thinking about that, what does that mean in terms of what that space looks like and how do we service it? So whatever you do in the real estate ecosystem, I think my call to action would be to really, you know, spend a lot of time, get closer to the end consumer of the thing, the pain of the thing that you're trying to solve for and stay close because it evolves and it changes. Think about how much, James, your preferences have changed. I order more online from grubhub than I ever did. I never thought I would. I do so many more things different than I three years ago. What does that. Never do that. So if you were only making decisions about who I was three years ago, you'd make very different decisions. And so the question is, what does that look like in brokerage? What does it look like in investment sales, property management, facility management, outsourcing? These are the types of things that I think if we're going to really be good at innovating, winning the game, changing the game is really, really getting closer and closer and closer to the person you really are trying to delight in and make life better for.

Well, Craig, this has been amazing and thank you so much for taking the time and sharing your story with us. And just as we close, you know, in short, what would you say has been the key to your success?

Oh, man. Stay hungry, keep learning, stay humble. I think that is the. And I haven't always done those things well, but in hindsight when I've done those things, things have worked out better for me. And I think we should all just feel permission to be say, I don't know, say I need help, say I want to be helpful and then look for ways that authentically allow you to do those things.

Awesome. Well, Craig, thank you so much again for joining us. I know our listeners are going to get a tremendous amount out of this. Just so appreciative of your sharing, your being vulnerable because I know it's certainly going to help others out there to achieve the same success that you have.

Thanks so much, James. Thanks for having me. Happy to come back anytime.

Thanks again. This is James Nelson, your host of Real Estate Investing Live from New York. As always, really appreciate you joining. If you have not connected with me yet, please do so at James Nelson nyc. I love getting your comments and if you have not checked out my new website, please do that@james nelson.com I built this site for you to give you the Inside Edge to Real Estate Investing until next week. Thank you again. Thank you for tuning in this week to Real Estate Investing live from New York. Please join your host, James Nelson for another program next Tuesday at 7pm in New York, 4pm Pacific Time on the Voice America Business Channel. All shows are rebroadcast on Wednesday mornings at 7:00am Eastern Time and 4:00am Pacific Time, as well as always on demand. We'll talk again next week.