Sales Management Podcast
Cory Bray, 8x author and co-founder of CoachCRM, digs into hot sales management topics.
Sales Management Podcast
97. Return to Office trends with commercial real estate expert Kellam Nelson
To get to the bottom of the semi-political banter we all see about working from the office or working remotely, I sat down with San Franciso-based commercial real estate expert Kellam Nelson to get his perspective. Tune in for this great episode that may generate some ideas for sales leaders out there.
Welcome to the Sales Management Podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, coach, crm co-founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. Everybody's talking about work from home is the way, and real estate industry is dying. However, one of my buddies is in the real estate industry, and so I invited him to talk to us today about trends he's seen. He's positioned in San Francisco, so he's got insights into San Francisco commercial real estate, as well as real estate around the US and around the world. So are people going to exclusively work from home for the rest of time or are companies coming back to the office? We're going to find out today, and we've got Kellum Nelson to talk to us about that. Hey, kellum, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm good, Corey. Thanks for having me Excited to be here. It sounds like the world has ended and everybody's just put the stamp on it that says work from homes away. What do you think? I couldn't disagree more. I think we're starting to see a lot of positive trends in San Francisco and globally, so happy to dive into a lot of that here today.
Speaker 1:Well, I see that you're. Nobody else can see this, because we're on audio only. I see that you're calling in from your bedroom, Is that right? Is that what.
Speaker 2:I see in the background or is that something? This is the office. Wait a second. This is the office.
Speaker 2:I made a point to work from the office today, Corey, as you can imagine, and I see people. I see one, two, three people behind you, Wow, yeah. So you know, I think a lot of people get caught up with the doom and gloom headlines, especially those related to San Francisco, which we've been seeing, for, you know, three or four years now since the pandemic, and you know there's some truth behind it. Yes, vacancy in San Francisco is up to 30, 32%. Availability is higher than that.
Speaker 2:Big tech has really pulled back and they're shedding excess space that they had space banked previously as they're going through hyper growth and needing to be just forward-looking in terms of what they think they might need in the future. But obviously the pandemic shifted that with work from home and or remote work. But we're starting to see positive signs in terms of demand in San Francisco. We're seeing companies like Salesforce publicly stating they expect employees to be back in the office at least four days a week beginning this October. We're seeing startups, AI companies, companies with a lot of positive momentum in the marketplace, getting aggressive and making big deals, big commitments on office real estate in the market this year and I think that's a trend we're going to continue to see. So obviously I'm biased, but we're starting to go in the right direction. There are a number of other metrics I could point to where we think we've hit bottom and we're starting to move in the other direction.
Speaker 1:Okay, and I want to clarify I never do intros at the top because that's boring. But what is your job and what do you do all day? So people don't think, oh, this is just some other guy, that's regurgitating news to us.
Speaker 2:Sure, so I work at a global firm, colliers International. I sit here in San Francisco, I'm on the occupier services team, right, so we work with tenants or occupiers of commercial real estate.
Speaker 1:You literally talk to people that occupy commercial real estate all day, and this is your opinion.
Speaker 2:This is my opinion, but I do talk Sounds like a fact then if that's all you do, I guess you could call it that.
Speaker 1:I love it. So what's motivating, okay? So I think Google and Salesforce. We can look at them and say, yeah, they're big corporate drones and they're trying to control their employees. Sure, we can have that debate as an aside, but what are you seeing with the startups?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think I mean startups are is the segment of the market that we're seeing as most active, right, these are. These are companies and founders who have these big, bold ideas, who want to put their employees, put their team, in a position that is strongest to achieve their goals. Right, and we're seeing most of these companies wanting to be together, working collaboratively in the office. Now, there are plenty of examples of companies working remotely that are doing extremely well. You know personal clients of mine who were in office previously went remote and you know are are raising their series F, doing extremely well. But a lot, of, a lot, I would say. The majority of other companies are with positive momentum in the marketplace, um, with employees who are extremely enthusiastic, wanting to come back.
Speaker 2:So, you know there's there's a number of companies this year that have been in the headlines, that are making big, bold moves, and it's it's exciting.
Speaker 1:So when you're talking to these folks that used to be in the office, you've got a successful series F company. They're probably only series F because the IPO markets are closed, because our wonderful Lena Kahn doesn't want business to survive. That's fine. We're not allowed to be political unless we're talking about Lena Kahn, the Federal Trade Commission chair. So when you're talking to these folks and they're saying, hey, colin, thanks for the call, but we're not interested in getting back into the office, what are they saying? What have they been able to unlock as a remote company? Or are they having a bunch of struggles? But it's just not worth it to come back.
Speaker 2:I think it comes down to it's working for them. When things are going well, you're not going to rock the boat, right, yeah? So why shift your direction? Pivot, unsettle people in a place where they're comfortable and everyone is achieving the collective goals of the company? Right, and that's great. I have no problem with that, totally understand and support that rationale and decision-making. But I think you know, over the last couple of years, especially with the momentum that AI companies now have, there's a lot of very young companies that see a lot of potential market share that they want to capture, and so you know. So what's stronger? A team that's remote, working collaboratively from time to time over the course of the day on Zoom, or a team that's side by side in sales or engineering or any realm of their business, to be as successful as possible, I pick the team that's working together under one roof.
Speaker 1:It's so hard to collaborate. You can. You can do it, you can figure it out. And if you're, you know some guy posted about this the other day, about how remote's the only way I was like, yeah, dude, you've been working for 16 years. I'm sure that you can find a way to keep your job and do just fine, but when you're trying to build a career or a company or a team, I'll tell you, the most impactful moments of my life have been on a whiteboard and there's nothing like it.
Speaker 2:Right, absolutely. I know you're a big guy who's um or you're big on whiteboarding no PowerPoints, nothing digital. That's true.
Speaker 1:A little smaller than I used to be, but who's counting? That's good. That's good. Yeah, whiteboard's huge man and the AI stuff. You're solving hard problems that are trying to grow fast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and it's easier to have that conversation when the person's right next to you than to have to call them up or ping them on Slack. It can be done, and the companies that are having ongoing success I don't have a problem with them. Why should they change?
Speaker 1:Have you seen any anecdotes of folks that moved away to try to operate in a remote world and then have moved back for this reason?
Speaker 2:I think we're seeing that take place a number of companies, but I would say those are the companies that probably didn't go full remote. They adopted more of a hybrid strategy, allowed employees to relocate but still have a notable presence locally in the San Francisco Bay area. The challenge is how do they get you know those teammates who prefer to work remote back into the office in a structured way so that the team can be more efficient together overall, and there's a lot of companies that struggle with that. At the end of the day, it also comes down to management leading the way. A company, whether it's Salesforce or some startup, is not going to have success encouraging or driving employees to work from the office together if they're not doing that first.
Speaker 1:And I think a lot of the big tech companies we've heard you know upper level management, mid-level management, the ones that are successful do that lead by example, and the ones that struggle they're not going to see their you know, top SDR or you know AE or engineer come into the office if if their boss isn't Right, well, and I think that the diversity of roles and getting people exposed to each other that's one of the biggest opportunities, because if I'm trying to learn how this business works, and the only people I ever talked to are the people on my team and my manager I'm completely isolated. I've never even talked to an engineer before. That's wild.
Speaker 2:Totally. I mean, I think that's a really interesting concept to touch on is like how do you breathe loyalty and community with a team that's remote? Can you do it? Sure, you know lots of companies love having their offsite, you know, twice a year, three times a year, quarterly, whatever it may be, and a lot of great ideas come from those events. But I think you miss out on a lot of that opportunity when you're not together day to day in the trenches.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what are you seeing in terms of office perks and office build-out? Has anything changed in the last year or so?
Speaker 2:We're still trying to figure that out. I'd say that overall would be seeing are more collaboration space, less like actual dedicated workstations. So you know, before it may have been 80 workstations with conference rooms, collaboration, all-hand space being the the balance of of call it a floor in a building. But now we're seeing that shift to call it 50% workstations or 40% workstations, and then 40% is collaboration space, because maybe on any given day only 40% of their team is coming in, but on peak days they see a huge influx of additional employees in the office. So now they have touchdown space, collaboration space where teams and and um folks can get together to collaborate Um and on those non-peak days it doesn't just look like a sea of empty workstations, which is quite depressing frankly, yeah, that's super depressing.
Speaker 1:If you've got 20 people in a room and a hundred desks, then you're sitting there thinking, why am I working? And all these people are cranking away somewhere potentially maybe not, who knows they're either surfing or coding. You never know. But, right, they're not there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I think, and that's a big part of it. It's like employees aren't wanting to come in when their colleagues are working from home. Yeah, and I think that's kind of the ongoing battle that we're seeing today. But you know, ultimately the workspace is a place to enable your employees to do their best work together, and you know that's what everyone's trying to figure out how do you enable that team to be as successful as possible?
Speaker 1:What about with sales teams? Specifically, what are your thoughts on phone booths? Versus doing calls from conference rooms, versus doing calls from conference rooms, versus doing calls from your desk, versus giving people offices? Any opinion on that front?
Speaker 2:I'd say there's benefits to each situation, right? Sometimes you're most effective and most efficient if you're in a phone booth or in a private space, where you can, or at home, frankly, when you can just really knock out your calls, or at home, frankly, you know, when you can just really knock out your calls. I have a friend of mine is at a small startup five or six people, it's a business development kind of outreach platform and their structure they're four days in the office Monday, wednesday, thursday, friday and then Tuesday. Everyone works from home because the founders need to make their cold calls as they build their business and the engineers are at home coding, getting their busy work done.
Speaker 2:Provide engineers in terms of what's going or working well on the platform, or what needs work, et cetera. Cold calling taking place on an open floor plan where your younger associates, younger reps, get exposure through osmosis of, of, you know, the more experienced reps who are doing the same thing. Right, so I like it all, um, and it can be a mood thing sometimes too. Sometimes you just want to hide away in a room and knock it out.
Speaker 1:Man. Another thing that's just huge. Imagine there's a salesperson. They're always doing this demo and they're showing the product and they're saying man, it would be so great if XYZ was a feature. You know, change a button, change the workflow, change whatever.
Speaker 1:Imagine something in your world, out there, everybody. Well, if that salesperson tells their manager, then their manager can go tell their manager and they can go tell the VP of product, who can tell the product manager, who can potentially mention it to the VP of engineering, who might talk to an engineer. So that's never going to happen. But if you're sitting there, if a column's sitting there and it's 5.30, and you walk by their desk and you say, can I ask you a question about the product real quick? Why do we do it this way? Or what if we did it this way? Or something like that, and as long as it's not right in the middle of everybody seeing the salesperson trying to disrupt the engineering flow, then those experiences could have a ton of impact on the individual salesperson. Maybe take their frustration and rationalize it and be like oh wait a second, I understand why we're doing this now. Or hey, I found something that might be an interesting way to innovate.
Speaker 2:I love it Makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, I mean just the. There's more opportunity for that collaboration between cross teams. And, uh, you know, in in the heat of the moment too, maybe maybe that same engineer or product guy here's, you know a sales rep walking through that demo, and something clicks a light bulb. Light bulb goes off, like that is confusing, or that doesn't sound like something we can improve. That's confusing, or why?
Speaker 1:why are you doing it that way? We built it this other way, cause that that's the problem with humans, right? We don't have APIs into each other's brains.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Right and we had that makes.
Speaker 2:That makes perfect sense. I mean, I'm not, I'm not a a tech sales guy, right? So you know I'm not selling. I'm not selling a technology platform or product. I'm selling my services as it relates to real estate. Two people that sell technology platforms?
Speaker 1:Yeah Right, I love it. I love it. I love it. Yeah, man, okay, well, talk to us about this one. Okay, so you don't sell a physical product. What are your thoughts on selling things that I mean you sell physical?
Speaker 2:products. We do, we do. You sell office space.
Speaker 1:You also sell. Do you do assessments on the front end or is everything kind of just around the? What's the front end of the engagement look like in your world.
Speaker 2:So the front end of our engagement is, from a strategy perspective, right, you know, what's the current state of the company? Where do you work? What's working? Well, you know just basic, rudimentary due diligence and questions like that. But if we're talking about a single location, it's like all right, what should the future state be? Here are the trends that we're seeing. Here are things that we should be thinking about. Here's what the real estate market looks like. So here's what you should be budgeting for and expecting. Now let's go out and see some physical real estate and, you know, from there, guide them through a process right, negotiating a term sheet or LOI, negotiating the lease document, making sure they're protected on all the fronts they need to be protected, and then ultimately signing that lease right and then ultimately signing that lease right. But you know, that can also scale to a global portfolio. Now we're working with Fortune 500s who have, you know, 75, 85, 100 plus locations.
Speaker 2:What's the overall holistic strategy that we're trying to accomplish here? What markets are we trying to sell in? Where are the sales teams located? Because that changes from culture to culture, language to language. How efficient? How much do we want to invest in our real estate? Where can we get skinnier, more efficient, spend less? How is that going to change over the next three to five years? How does the growth of the company look? What are the new markets you're looking to expand into? Not that real estate ever will lead that charge, but let's be prepared to provide executives with the information they need when they start thinking about something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the cool thing about what you just walked through is there's such a great opportunity to use social proof and customer stories around other folks that you've seen that are maybe one, two, three steps ahead of the person that you're working with today and you're physically seeing it. I mean, you can physically see that they've got a floor that's almost filled or a building that's almost filled, or that they're going to expand into another city or a country and so they're going to need some other space. I think what sellers often struggle with is how to visualize that type of stuff for non-physical world asset or product Right, and so I think one thing that folks can think about with their teams is I was listening to a podcast the other day and they were talking about the surface area of a software product. It's like that's such a cool concept because you think about it, it really does have a surface area. You might not measure it in inches or feet, but it's measured in terms of the number of things that it does and how it works and all of those types of things, just like an office building would have surface areas.
Speaker 1:So a product that just does one little thing, a little app that does a wordle, for example. You know it's a very small surface area product. You just guess six times and see if you can get the word right but something that's more like SAP. Sap has massive surface area. You can pretty much do anything with it. So, thinking about that and how you understand what your prospects and customers are doing with your product today, versus what they could be doing with it or some super future version of it, I think that you're in a cool spot because you can physically see it and a lot of people have to more conceptualize it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can see the challenge there, but it's a lot of opportunity obviously, especially if you're creative about understanding's a lot of opportunity obviously, Um, especially if you're creative about understanding what the surface of that product is and how you can help the team grow it.
Speaker 1:I have a crazy, like super detailed question Like how do employees get better parking? You know some companies won't pay for parking. Like I know that's probably completely out of your, out of your realm, but like I've got so many friends that I've got a guy. I know a guy who will not go to the office because in his city his company won't pay for parking. In all the other cities they have offices in, the company pays for parking. But he's like I'm not going to go to the office and pay $20 for parking. Screw them.
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, that doesn't make sense. Why is he being cut out in that market? Is it just New York and it's 20 bucks versus like five bucks?
Speaker 1:No, it's not. It's 20 bucks, not 60. It's not New York, it's 20 bucks, not 60.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, it seems short-sighted, right, I think that comes down, comes back to like how are you empowering your employees, how are you enabling them to be successful? If you're trying to drive them, or have a mission of getting folks back into the office working collaboratively together, or have a mission of getting folks back into the office working collaboratively together, don't create friction with stupid rules like that. Get this. This is kind of interesting. So you know, we've heard all of all sorts of tactics and like strategies to try and get employees back. So you know, at the end of the day, it's always going to come down to money. Sometimes we're seeing or heard that companies are providing a bonus. Right, obviously, like all right, if you work three or more days a week in the office, you get a $10,000 bonus, simple enough, right? There's incentive there, stipends, to improve their home home office setups right here's.
Speaker 2:Here's 2500 bucks a year, or whatever the case may be, to invest in just whatever it is. You need a nice chair, nice desk, sit, stand so that you're comfortable and productive when working from home. Okay, but what's confusing is what happens when you offer both or like like, like a choice.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can either have $10,000 over here or $2,500 to stay at and work from home. Now you're creating conflict and confusion. What's the actual motive here, I guess? I guess it could just be to make them happy, but but now you're also just rewarding behavior that would be otherwise happening anyway.
Speaker 2:So I think it's important for these companies to have very clear intention and goal and the last four years it's been very confusing as an employee because it hasn't been crystal clear and management hasn't led by example when it comes to whatever that motive might be.
Speaker 1:Yep, yep. So let's put on our tinfoil hats. What's the impact of AI going to be on the workforce and how's that going to impact commercial real estate?
Speaker 2:So I think the impact on the workforce is a much deeper question, right, Like, is it going to displace salespeople, engineers, things of that nature? I think it could right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, customer service. I think I see customer service. It's like they have a question, you got an answer. I mean, do we still need a person for each one of those interactions in the loop? Yeah, I mean I think close need a person for each one of those interactions in the loop. Yeah, I mean, I think You're getting close to that one.
Speaker 2:I had to call my bank the other day and I won't throw them under the Well. I had to connect with my bank the other day and I actually was in Vegas over the weekend and so I didn't want to call them. I was like in the casino.
Speaker 1:No follow-up questions on that one. I was in vegas and so I I wanted to use the chatbot.
Speaker 2:It was such a disaster. Like you're gonna get a lot of legacy businesses like old, old guard companies that are a lot slower, like incredibly slow, to adapt ai and all of the technology systems that are out there to optimize their business. So I don't see it shifting super quickly Like we're going to see. Call it the previous generation of technology, and all of that for quite some time until we truly, truly see the next generation, you know, effectively everywhere.
Speaker 1:Well, that's really interesting.
Speaker 1:So maybe what happens is that it's not that employees shift out of the workforce, it's employees shift from legacy companies into new age companies, and so we'll use, let's just say, hooli Bank, for example, so we don't throw anybody on the bus in the spirit of not doing that, let's say that Hooli Banks, you know, they've got a stagecoach logocoach logo, randomly picked that one out of my mind and they don't really have the best tech for their customers. And this new bank comes along and they're like wait a second, we do everything great, and they end up building this behemoth bank. Now the legacy bank still has all their legacy customers, so they're still going to be fine. They're just probably not going to grow as fast. Maybe they'll start decaying a little bit. But then you've got all these other little ankle biters that start popping up, become real businesses, start scaling. So it's not hey, there's going to be all these white collar workers shift out of the workforce. It might just be. There's a flow of talent to innovation, everybody keeps working, but they're just doing really cool stuff.
Speaker 2:They're just doing really cool stuff. Yeah, I like that. I agree with that. I think with the collapse of SVB and then first Republic I think we saw a lot of that taking place or technology bank, which really ultimately kind of hangs their hat under someone else's institution in terms of the actual bank itself? Yeah, because they're not a bank.
Speaker 1:They're a front end for a bank, but they're the front end that just does all the things that you wish. They. With Mercury, you don't pay wire transfer fees. It's wild, which I don't know.
Speaker 2:It's like well, why should it cost anyone something?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. So it can run through Bank of America's four trans servers Right.
Speaker 2:So, circling back to impacted AI on the real estate market, this is kind of wild. So, believe it or not, openai like the leader in the AI movement, they've been around for 10 years. Is it 12 years? Maybe They've been around for quite a while. Is it 12 years? Maybe they've been around for quite a while.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think 20, 2013, 2014.
Speaker 2:Which is wild, but actually I remember when they first were a thing in the market, in the real estate market. They leased a building out in the mission and they were there for a long, long time and actually just moved out. So what was it? Two, two and a half years ago almost now, when chat gpt was released, was really kind of the beginning of this ai boom. Yeah, and all of these stealth ai companies or companies operating as whatever they were operating as really began to leverage the ai kind of brand or or this, the, the positivity and momentum that was kind of being led by open AI Right. So open AI. They're our most active user in the San Francisco market. They previously occupied 150,000 square feet in San Francisco between two buildings. The enough space is like if you look at typical ratios in terms of workstations or headcount per square foot 750 employees, right for that footprint. Late last year they leased 485,000 square feet in Mission Bay. So now we're talking that's space for what? Another? Call it 2000 employees, yep, and are actively in the market for another 300,000 square feet in close proximity to that Mission Bay property and they're still out in the market for more. So, just like the growth because of the momentum they've generated. The amount of hiring that they're aiming for and accomplishing is I don't know. It's hard to think of another company that has gone through growth from a real estate perspective that quickly.
Speaker 2:No-transcript. Who are, you know, leveraging AI? I'm sure, but they're in high growth mode, you know, going from 70,000 square feet to 100,000 square feet. So these are the guys who are leading the charge in terms of growth. They're also the ones who say you must be in the office. We expect you to be in the office two to three days a week, yet they're the ones who are tripling, quadrupling or more their real estate footprint in San Francisco. So they're bullish, they're gung-ho, they're all in, which is one reason why we're optimistic that the San Francisco market's going to start to bounce back. It's going to take a long time to get there, but we're seeing positive signs in terms of tech, ai, bringing and helping out the real estate market here locally.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. I mean, what's the residential world like? Are people able to find housing all these employees?
Speaker 2:I think so. I mean, I think we're going through the same thing as any market in terms of you know, the challenges that interest rates have created. Yeah, I think in our market it's bifurcated the high quality market in terms of residential, whether it's homes or apartments, is extremely tight, and commercial office space the high end, high quality space is not available.
Speaker 1:Beautiful views balcony is not available. Beautiful views balcony.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Whatever it might be you know best location, best views, highest quality, whatever construction that's extremely tight and it's expensive. But anything below that top tier you start to see it softening big time. You know whether it's, whether it's office or residential, you can find a spot in any neighborhood, or probably a home, unless it's pack heights or select neighborhoods. But I think that's probably a trend that's consistent, whether we're talking about residential, office, retail, for that matter. Location and quality is is still King and always will be.
Speaker 1:Love it, man. Well, maybe I'll come back. I don't know, probably not, but you said why not? Hard part about living is you can only really live one place unless you do. What I've done for the last year and a half is live nowhere Did I tell you that Elaborate a bit. I don't have a house or a place to live when do you pay taxes.
Speaker 1:I have a permanent address. So that's the funny thing, right? So when I'm in the US, I'm in Texas, but when I'm not in Texas, I'm traveling around. I'm vacation, not really Cause I work all the time, but just live in Airbnbs.
Speaker 2:Right, and that's great. But you've been doing what you've been doing for years and years, right, yeah, for for folks who are earlier in their careers, you know, I think having a home base, having a community, is important.
Speaker 1:When I build a team for what we're working on right now. Oh and, by the way, if anybody out there wants to know what we're working on, I haven't really been talking about what we've been working on, but shoot me a note freestuffatcoachserumcom, freestuffatcoachserumcom and I'm going to send you a complimentary sales coaching course, but we also got a lot of really interesting stuff. So if we worked together in the the, yeah, no, we're going to build a team in an office. I'm going to be there every day and that's the plan and there's no.
Speaker 1:Because I think Hillman and I've just seen what happens when you are, our client base has been fighting the remote thing and you have like 25% to 30% to 40% rock stars who just crush it and they're doing great, and then you got just issues everywhere. I mean I was talking to a client yesterday, ceo of a company, he. I mean I was talking to Clay yesterday, ceo of a company. He's like I got two people on my team that literally don't work. They work enough to not get fired and they know what that bar is and they quote statutes when they talk about it from a legal perspective, I'm like, wow, that's terrible, right, yeah?
Speaker 2:No, I think that's a big thing. One thing I wanted to show you, actually, I think you know how there's always been a trend of like turnover and tenure at technology companies, and how traditional companies, you know people stick around, but in technology, people jump ship every couple of years, right, yeah? So I follow someone on LinkedIn and they have great data, great information and great resources, so I'm trying to get this up just to show you. And so what does tenure at startups look like pre and post COVID? And so what this graph and I'll try to articulate this as best as possible it says will you make four years at a startup?
Speaker 2:Less than four in 10 startup employees vest their full initial four-year grant. So this is talking about their grant when it comes to equity in the company that they're working at. But what it shows me, from my perspective, is how long are these employees staying at their company? And I think the best kind of data points to compare might be for someone who was hired in 2016, 15.5% of those people left the company within one year. Now, in 2022, that's gone up to 23.3%. So an 8% increase 2016 compared to someone who was hired in 2022.
Speaker 1:An 8 percentage point increase. But that's really a 50% increase, going from 15 to 23%.
Speaker 2:It's an 8% absolute increase, but a 50% increase compared to where it used to be Wow.
Speaker 1:That's a legit number.
Speaker 2:That's a notable jump right. So if I have a company and I'm hiring up a team, there's now a 23% chance that the person I just hired and the person I'm going to spend a lot of time investing resources and mentoring into is going to be leaving the company, compared to the 15% chance that it was in 2016. That's notable and what's driving that, I don't know, but to me it seems like loyalty. The length of tenure at companies for startups continues to go down, just anecdotally in things that I read and see on the internet. So you know that's a problem and how are companies and startups going to address that? I don't know, but something to continue to track and and follow. I'm a proponent of work from office. It builds loyalty, it builds continuity, it it builds a stronger community within your company.
Speaker 1:And you also have a lot of loyalty. I think we met seven years ago or so and you still worked at the same place, right? How long have you been there, right?
Speaker 2:13 years.
Speaker 1:You worked at the same company for 13 years. 13 years how do you keep it fresh? What's your advice on that?
Speaker 2:You worked at the same company for 13 years 13 years. How do you keep it fresh? What's your advice on that? How do you keep it fresh? I think it stays fresh because you know and I think you know someone in software, sales or technology can relate is it's not necessarily what we're doing or what we're selling, but it's who we're working with and how we're helping them, and so every customer, every client, is different. And so, therefore, because every client we interact with, every deal we work on, is going to be different too. So I think that's what keeps it fresh.
Speaker 1:And you've got a product. Your product is great, what you do, your brand, your offering. You've got a solid company. So you've got a combination of working with new clients, being able to have new challenges every week, every month, with the foundation of having a really strong organization behind you, which seems like a one, two punch. That's pretty killer.
Speaker 2:Right yeah, appreciate that.
Speaker 1:I love it, man Cool. Well, anything you want to plug today, how do we get you some leads from this?
Speaker 2:No, I guess if someone wants to follow me, Kellum Nelson on LinkedIn, that's K-E-L-L-A-M, as in Mary Nelson, N-E-L-S-O-N. Try to post interesting content on real estate, what we're seeing in tech trends and the like. So there you go.
Speaker 1:How does someone convince their boss to get a nicer office?
Speaker 2:They introduced them to me.
Speaker 1:There we go. Yeah, cause I worked with one of these one guys and they were seed stage. They were being super frugal, which I think is really smart, but they had an office that was on an alley over on 16th and mission and it was one block from the 16th and mission BART station. It was in an alley and that was the shadiest place I've ever professionally walked, you know. Then they ended up getting a nicer office and so I think that, pushing upwards, you're going to attract, especially as companies start growing out of the six engineers writing code in a room phase and you start attracting executives, you start bringing customers to the office. It really is important and it becomes a competitive edge, because if your customer comes to an office like that, they're not going to have any confidence in your company.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I mean obviously, right now there's more opportunity than there really ever has been for a company that's looking for that next space to do what they're trying to do. So I mean it's definitely a tenants market. I'm optimistic that the market is improving but at the end of the day, I represent the tenants right, the occupier of that space, and it's a fantastic market. To go get better value for your next space, Absolutely. To go get better value for your next space, Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Buyer's market. Baby, let's go All right. Thanks, Colin, Really appreciate it. Everybody else thanks for joining us on the Sales Management Podcast. We'll see you next time.