Grow Places

GP 46: Why Tribes Matter: Human Centric Real Estate Events with Rob Marten of SPACE+

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In this episode of the Grow Places Podcast, we sit down with Rob Marten, co-founder of SPACE+, to explore why tribes — small, intentional communities — are at the heart of human-centric real estate events.

Rob reflects on his journey from organising a village music festival called “Twigstock” as a teenager to co-creating SPACEUK, one of the UK’s most distinctive property events. Through candid stories and industry insights, he explains how smaller, more focused gatherings help challenge assumptions, create serendipity, and foster the kind of connection the real estate sector urgently needs.

We discuss:

  • The philosophy behind SPACE+’s "tribes" approach and why scale and intimacy don't have to be at odds.
  • The importance of genuine diversity in event programming — and the responsibility organisers have in shaping who gets heard.
  • Why real estate struggles with public-facing language (think: build-to-rent and single-family housing), and what that means for the sector’s future.
  • How SPACE+ aims to “curate serendipity” and why in-person events still matter more than ever in a post-pandemic world.

From live music to meaningful placemaking, this episode is a deep dive into how we bring people together — and why it matters.

🔗 Listen now and discover how human-centred convening can change the face of real estate.

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the Grow Places podcast, where we explore the virtuous circle of people, growth and place Brought to you by Grow Places and hosted by our founder, tom Larson.

Speaker 2:

Rob, thank you very much for joining us. I know you've had a really busy day of travel and different events coming together with family and in live music and sporting events. So a good conversation. I think today about bringing people together which may be quite apt for what you do and your work at space, but why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Speaker 3:

sure thanks someone thanks for thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of the the pod, so I'm Rob Martin, co-founder of space plus. We're an events company that focuses on human centric real estate. We've got three annual events across the year for the UK market One about resi, one about asset management, and then we have a flagship event called Space UK.

Speaker 2:

Awesome, awesome. And so what's the common theme between all those?

Speaker 3:

events then. So I think human-centric real estate is the thread that connects them all. You know we're a big. One of the things that we're known for is our tribes, so we try and connect people in small groups with this bottom-up approach, with this idea of perhaps the smallest viable audience so it could be a small group of co-living operators or a small group of heads of asset management we create lots of those groups and that forms the the larger event. So that's sort of our bottom, bottom up approach to creating events yeah, yeah and um no.

Speaker 2:

I must admit I think it's super refreshing the way that you guys approach events and um, you do have the you, the more kind of formal, kind of panel type discussions, which are really valuable. But the way that you've broken it down to make it more kind of human, more informal, more intimate in that sense, I think is super interesting and it definitely keeps me coming back to the events as well.

Speaker 3:

Good, that's good to hear. Yeah, I mean, that's the. That is always the the dilemma for events of how do you create the scale that people want an event, and particularly in terms of that value of potentially sponsoring an event. And people want to see scale but also having the ability for it to be intimate and create connections, and those two things don't necessarily need to be competing, but what it means is that the event organizer has to curate more than they otherwise would, at say, a big exhibition.

Speaker 3:

I've been reading recently about sort of the origins of the event industry and I spent a bit of time reading about the great exhibition in 1851 at the then Crystal Palace in Hyde Park and it was sort of positioned as all industry for all nations, so it's probably about as broad and generic as you can get right. And in one exhibit they had the Koh-i-Noor. In another exhibit they had the first publicly available flushing toilet and the attendee list was like Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday, the Bronte sisters, karl Marx, like this absolutely weird and wonderful diverse of people from different nations looking at different stuff. And that's potentially like the first. And that was B2C and B2B sponsored by Schweppes, like the first soft drinks company. So you have that idea of all things for all people.

Speaker 3:

So that's potentially like the starting point for massive events and then over time, as sort of conferences and meetings developed, maybe from sort of the 1970s onwards, niche became much more important to people. So at one end of the spectrum you have still do have the huge trade shows which are I mean that industry is is huge um contributes. The trade show industry alone contributes 11 billion to the UK economy. But then the conferences and meeting space, which then takes up to a £62 billion contribution to the UK economy, is really about niche. If you go to a conference centre anywhere around London or around the world, you'll be amazed at how niche and specific the topics are. And that's this idea of people finding their tribe, finding those people that have got that same interest area as them, where you can go and in one, two days meet exactly the right people for you. So those two things coexist the trade show and the, the meeting or the conference or the summit.

Speaker 2:

Very different, very different things, but um, both providing value, I believe to, to industry yeah, yeah, fascinating, and I think that the choice of words, the choice of the word tribe is really fascinating as well. Um, and so what does that kind of kind of mean to you? What? Why do you feel like, um, on a, you know, on a human level? Why are tribes, um those forums, really attractive to people?

Speaker 3:

yeah, I mean there's. There's two truths here and I'll tell you both truths and you can you can pick the one that you like the best. Um, so seth godin's got a book called tribes in which he talks about the idea that you know, these tribes are just people with a shared interest. Um, so those, those tribes already exist. People have got shared interest as other people. They're already there, they're already part of the world. They're just not necessarily together.

Speaker 3:

So bringing those people together physically into a tribe is a huge part of what marketeers try and do to launch products, and that sense of belonging and togetherness is a huge part of live experiences, and I think that we saw with the pandemic that there was this view that was forming that, both in terms of the events industry, that it became virtual and people got very excited about virtual events, and some evaluations of online meeting platforms went through the roof and have since gone through the floor. Since gone through the floor, um and also apply applicable to cities and communities was this idea that um, people were only in cities because, um, their job was there. And I think that with cities, we learned post pandemic that it wasn't really about the job at all. It was about meeting people in person, the connectivity and the great things that you can do in london, how awesome it is as a city, and manchester and liverpool and leeds, um. But from an events industry perspective, I think that virtual meeting has now got its place, but the desire for in-person meetings is greater than ever.

Speaker 3:

But I mean, it's not that just applied to events. I mean the UK theatre industry has grown, is up 11% on pre-pandemic. The London theatre industry sorry is up 11% on pre-pandemic figures. So all across the board there's loads of examples of where people strive for human connection and that means that there's no better time to be in the events industry. But the same applies for lots of other, lots of other industries as well. It means that you have to do it very well and you have lots of competition, way more competition than there's ever been. But there's great opportunity because people want that communal human connection as part of how we are as humans.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, fascinating. And so how do you view real estate in that context, then? Because your purpose, your passion, is the events, the bringing people together aspect. Why have you sort of um overlaid that with real estate?

Speaker 3:

so I worked for. So the first 10 years of of my career I worked for an events company that was pretty much sector agnostic. So I worked for this company, terrapin, for a couple of years in London and you know the first event that I worked on was a hedge fund event in Sweden. So straight out of university, learning about asset allocation, doing this weird hedge fund event in Sweden very successful Apparently, they like hedge funds in Sweden. And then I moved to the US. I launched some low cost airlines events in Miami and a rail event like a South American rail event. And then I moved to Australia, spent a few years living in Australia running events teams, and then the same thing in Johannesburg. And when I came back to London, when I was about 30, I started working for the Global Real Estate Institute which is now.

Speaker 3:

GRI Club, which is a bit more the private equity real estate end, whereas we cater more for developers and occupiers that are really on the investment end. So I worked for them for quite a few years as managing director and the last thing that I did there was to sort of reboot the Indian market. So I spent a lot of time going backwards and forwards, to Mumbai and Bangalore particularly, and then, when I left GRI, I had a mini midlife crisis where I started writing a book about the Spanish conquest of the Incas, which is cheaper than buying a Ferrari so, as midlife crisis go, it was fairly inexpensive and the fact that I didn't have much money for a year. I got to the end of that year I realized I wasn't very good at writing a novel. So I decided to launch a business, and the last thing I did was Indian real estate. So I decided to launch a business and the last thing I did was Indian real estate. So my big idea was to launch a prop tech event which would be very similar to Cretec New York, but take place in Mumbai. It was a little bit ahead of the curve, but we had a couple of hundred delegates, went really well, did the same thing in Singapore. And then covid hit so we launched this business. We had four or five people in the business. It was going really strong for the first year. It's sort of in events, you don't really expect to make any money until second or third year. Um, and covid basically just scuppered everything that we did and by that time we'd launched one real estate event in the UK.

Speaker 3:

So after this sort of dalliance with PropTech the other side of the world we were looking at the UK property market and just saw this big disconnect really between how property companies wanted to grow and develop and be perceived, particularly in terms of their shift to space as a service, human centricity, improving their diversity. Between that and the conferences that existed in the UK market, which we felt were very much like an aggregation of suits and slides. So we thought that was ripe for disruption. And so one day in sort of mid 2019, I took a marketing manager and a director from CBRE to Ministry of Sound during the day and pitched this idea to do a new real estate event about human centric property at the ministry of sound nightclub, which I think was. They thought was a bit weird, but they got behind it and became the headline sponsor. And then suddenly we had an event and um, the set, that then managing director of lend lease really got behind it, um and um, we sort of built this kind of alternative, slightly cooler image than the things that existed.

Speaker 3:

So that first Space UK at Ministry of Sound, I think, really disrupted what was in the property events market. You know radical things like having lots of female speakers, you know, and we sort of developed that position through that event. And then, as I say, the next year was COVID and it really set us back probably by 18 months or two years. So even though we're five years in as a business, in sort of events terms this is sort of year three or four. But the property industry is so interesting from so many of the reasons we just talked about in terms of the needs to bring people back to places, that desire for human connection and what that means for the office, what it means for co-living and bill to rent, so many of those human-centric connectivity issues are more important than they've ever been.

Speaker 3:

And also the property industry has been going through this period, as we know, of change that other industries went through maybe 10 or 15 years ago, towards being an outward-facing, customer-facing industry. 10, 15 years ago I was working on um utilities events and they went through exactly the same period. You know people used to say with with electricity utilities that the average customer spent four minutes um interacting with their energy company, which was four quarterly, one minute on four quarterly bills. And then when smart meters came in, they had to become these sort of interesting, sexy customer facing companies that were very alien to the market then and you know some people, some companies like Octopus did have done very well out of that that positioning. Then the property industry, 10 years later, has gone through the same, the same thing.

Speaker 3:

You know, this shift from being a rent collector towards being a service provider and a curator of experiences is which you know, you know more about than the most. That's a fascinating change. It makes it a great time to organize events because there's a big knowledge gap, events because there's a big knowledge gap. So what I really believe with with our style of events is about curating serendipity, which sounds really pretentious, but I'll try to explain a little bit what I mean. Like, my view in general is that the best stuff at events happens between the scene changes, um, but that's not a particularly efficient way to use time to just rely upon happenchance. So in the way that we build our events, we try to engineer that happenchance and the tribes is the best way that we can think to do that. So putting those people together in a group of 20, 30 people that have got a similar interest, it allows people to challenge their own thinking and it shortcuts that process of networking. So if that group of 30 people in a tribe there might just be two people that you don't know, that you need to meet, um, and that's one thing that's very difficult to do virtually. But it's by their response to something in the tribe that makes you think, ah, we could potentially partner with them, we've got an asset we could sell to them. You know, whatever it might, we can sell our technology to them, whatever it might be, that allows you to say afterwards hey, tom, that thing that you said in the the tribe, I think we've got a shared interest there. So it there is a big.

Speaker 3:

There's a difference in my mind, between curating that serendipity, but also we don't want it to be contrived, and that's a really difficult thing to to get right and I think in terms of curating any experience you know, nobody likes force fun, right, um. So we want to not be seen in that process. We want to work as hard as we possibly can to put it all together but then close the the door on the room, um, and so much of the time people come out of that saying to us that they make met some great people that they didn't know that they needed to meet, and that to me, is is very satisfying, um, and one of the reasons that we we do what we do yeah, yeah, fascinating, so that that that element of your purpose being about the convening and, as I say, necessarily controlling what goes on at the events, and that being the joy and the, the intrigue that happens there is is is really um, is really great and um and how, how?

Speaker 2:

how do you kind of come up with the program, though, cause there is some element of kind of steering um towards themes or towards um areas that you're particularly interested in or that you're feeling sort of heartbeats coming up from the industry about yeah, I mean the.

Speaker 3:

The core part of this is that we spend as much of our time possible talking to landlords and occupiers about their challenges. So that is the basis of everything that we put together. So so that is fundamentally important. If it's not addressing the challenges that those groups face, it's not valuable to them. So for that reason, we don't sell speaking slots to service providers. Our sponsorship opportunities at events are about hosting tribes. They're not about delivering talks and presentations and statistics. Yeah, we just do a phenomenal amount of research in meetings on the phone. We talk to people that are much more knowledgeable, much smarter than us, about what's happening in the industry and also try and intuit some things that we think are coming coming down the line. So there's that combination of what's keeping people up at night. Also, what do we think that they ought to be looking at? And that's a balance that is is quite complicated, um, but yeah, ultimately it's. If it's not about the challenges they they face, it's not going to be valuable yeah, yeah, interesting and then.

Speaker 2:

So I'm not going to ask this about your personal opinion, but if you were to do maybe a um, a um, a blind kind of survey of your team your, your, your company and you were to ask them what they think about the real estate industry, kind of as outsiders kind of looking at it, looking at the people, looking at the problems, looking at some of the good things, the bad things kind of, is there anything that would kind of come to mind about it as a sector, as opposed to, say, other sectors?

Speaker 3:

Well, I think one thing that's well, affordability is what they would. You know I think that you know for sure in something like the events industry, where the salaries aren't as high as they are in the real estate industry when they see the numbers that go around and the types, even what's considered to be affordable in build to rent, I think that they would find that a little bit rich. So, yeah, I think affordability is the thing that would be on most outsiders' minds. I think one of the things that I find really interesting when I talk to friends as well about the build-to-rent sector is just, they're just confused. They don't know what I'm talking about.

Speaker 3:

Like, real estate is really bad at branding in general, like across the board, and build to rent is one of the great examples of just the industry not getting together and deciding how to be customer facing. A customer doesn't care why you built the building. They don't care whether you built it to rent or to sell, or they don't think about that. Why it's built is not important, um, it's. So when you say build to rent for somebody not in the real estate industry, you then have to explain what you're talking about, and that's so stupid, like why would we expect people to understand what that, what that is, um.

Speaker 3:

So yeah, I think I often have conversations with friends who don't work in the property industry about what we do and then find myself explaining what all of these terms mean. But these, a lot of them, are customer facing terms. So, yeah, I think that a lot of time there's just confusion about what, what is being talked about. But I mean one thing that people who work in the property industry, I think, get it. People who work in the events industry, get it. You know the thing of can you explain it to your mom and dad? That's a really good starting point. Um, and single family housing. I mean, I was, I was trying to explain single family housing to a member of my family and I was just realized how ridiculous what I was saying like a single parent.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, exactly, and they're talking about they like and you know they live. They live really. They don't you mean a house yeah, it's like yeah, yeah, a house. Yeah, that's what I meant.

Speaker 3:

I meant a house yeah, what they understand as a house, yeah, but a rented house, okay. So yeah, yeah, yeah, but you've built it. Yeah, cool, yeah, and that's why they built it. Well, actually they didn't. Actually they were trying to sell it, but now they're trying to rent it. So, yeah, but they're calling it built to rent. Yes, there's. I think we can do much better at rebranding a lot of things in the real estate industry to make them just easier to understand yeah, yeah, totally no, I agree with that.

Speaker 2:

Um. I'm really interested in that example you gave of of crystal palace and um the fact that it was for everyone, it wasn't an event for sectors, and and your insight that we've gone the almost the opposite way, down to incredibly narrow events. Do you see any any value in broadening perspective somehow, whether it's um through collaborating with other conference events, or whether it's broader speakers like guest speakers? Because because one thing I'm I'm personally enjoying most is when I talk to people who aren't from the real estate industry, because you know, you can be in a bit of an echo chamber if you just listen to the people who are obviously very intelligent, very passionate about what they do. But they're in your space, yeah for sure.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think I think the biggest, the biggest way for us to achieve that is by looking outside the real estate industry and getting I mean there's lots of people who are real estate adjacent that are incredibly interesting. The first, at the first Space UK, one of the first panels that we did had a very diverse group of people, which was the chairman of the Ministry of Sound where the event was, amy Lamé, the night czar, and Roger Wade from Box Park, who are all real estate adjacent. I mean, we've then continued that theme about the nighttime economy across all of the Space UK events. It's always been an interesting topic for people. So I think it's one of those things where we've identified that the property industry, particularly in the UK, is very much a daytime industry compared to other parts of the world and real estate companies could do much more in utilizing their assets. And getting Amy Lamé to come in and talk about the nighttime economy and what that potentially means I think was very, very well regarded and she's a great orator. And then you know Roger Wade and his background with Boxpark and the way that they disrupted retail. Again, he, I guess to an extent he's in the real estate industry but he's not a conventional player. And then again Ministry of Sound the strength of their brand over two, three decades, but then becoming a co-working operator. So you only have to go around the ministry to their co-working space to see how they've incorporated that brand and that aesthetic into their co-working space, which I think is one of the nicest out there. So I think there's lots of things that people can learn from people at the margins.

Speaker 3:

I think it's sometimes difficult when it's really out there and wacky and so far away from the industry that people might not even show up because they don't get why it's relevant to them. So you can almost be too clever with it. That people might not even show up because they don't get why it's relevant to them, so you can almost be too clever with it. But I think those people at the fringes is incredibly interesting.

Speaker 3:

Last year at Alt-Resi we had a session on youth homelessness. In fact the opening keynote was about youth homelessness and again it's an incredibly important topic for the property industry. Their role in it is, you know, significant, whether they like it or not. But getting back to the, the original point, I think it's really about the margins. It's people finding people at the margins that wouldn't necessarily get the platform a property event, and that's again about thinking about it and curating it. Nobody's really going to suggest those things to us. So that's the, that's the bit that we've got to figure out, sometimes on our own and talking to interesting people like you and adam scott and people that have got ideas that are a little bit bigger than some others.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's really insightful and, as you say, I hadn't really thought about it until you said it. But that idea of the margins is really, really interesting, isn't it? But another aspect of I think what we as a sector really need to improve is the range, not of voices. You know diversity within this sector. You mentioned male, female, but also you know ethnic diversity, people from different backgrounds socioeconomically. How do you tackle that as an organisation? Because, yeah, because it's not easy to do, frankly, in real estate.

Speaker 3:

It's not. It's something that we spend a lot of time um thinking about and working on and it's one of and I'm not I'm not scared to talk about this because I've always been quite um upfront about it in terms of what our challenges are and how we potentially address them, and I think some sometimes people can be worried about saying the wrong thing, and I think that I've got enough support with the right people to, you know, be able to do that. I'll sort of go back to the first Space UK and how our approach to diversity, both in terms of gender and race, started. So we didn't put a huge amount into it for the first Space UK. We were just trying to get something off the ground. We did have a lot of female speakers. I don't know how much we engineered that or not. I think it might be retrospectively sort of telling the story differently if if I said that we tried hard at that.

Speaker 3:

But one of the things that was very noticeable after the first space uk, I think there was one black woman on the program um and I, soon after that, went had. Uh, it was like it said. I know this is a cliche, but I did a um online course as a part of a media entrepreneurs group that I'm part of, which was about diversity and events, and the person that ran this course and everyone whether they were running property events or airline events or oil and gas events said pretty much the same thing, which is there are no black women in our industry, or very few, very few black women in our industry. And the person running the course said, ok, name them. And nobody could. And her point was if there are so few, why can't you name them? And everyone sort of acknowledged at that point that they just put it into the too hard basket and said it's not my responsibility, it's the industry's fault. Now, it is the industry's fault, but our responsibility of events organizers is to ensure that we know who's who, that we've invited the right people and we give everyone that same opportunity to have the platform and then potentially platform others. So we then started this partnership with BWRE Black Women in Real Estate which are, you know that's been a great help for us. So we've done a couple of private dinners with them, but also we have an ongoing partnership across all of our events. So members of BWRE attend our events for free. We have as much correspondence with them as we can in terms of knowing who's who, so we can ensure that we're inviting the right members for the right sessions, and I hope that people see that when they come to our events that they see a greater diversity than they otherwise would.

Speaker 3:

Again, that takes a degree of curation. We are far from being great at it. We make a concerted effort to be better all the time. I do genuinely think that it's very possible that if you don't see yourself on a conference program, you ain't going to buy a ticket. I think that that is pretty much a logical conclusion.

Speaker 3:

We made a commitment to 50% females on conference programs. We achieved that about half the time. So some events are easier than others, like the tech event that we did unbelievably hard. This is within the context of we're very strict in terms of who can and cannot be on our programs. So if we were just putting a conference together where anybody could be part of the program, it wouldn't be so hard, because there's a very good number of females who work for service providers and brokers and agents and we would be able to do that.

Speaker 3:

Our rules which, of course, are there to be broken is that it's landlords, corporate occupiers, investors councils on programs, um, and getting 50 females at seniority level of that mathematically means that you have to invite a hugely greater number of females for the programs.

Speaker 3:

Of course, those females are also getting a huge number of conference invitations from others. So it is constantly a challenge, one that we're meeting some of the time and that we need to do a lot better at. But I mean, certainly gone are the days of, like all male panel discussions. You know things like that. I think if anybody does that now they should be called out on it. But even three years ago that was a norm for most property events. But I don't know if we've created any change in that. It might be a bit grandiose to think that we have, but certainly we've made a very conscious effort to do it, and I think people should be called out for manholes, as sometimes known yeah, no, no, yeah, agreed, and, as you say, it's a, it's a collective thing, isn't it industry and got to get more of diversity into those positions?

Speaker 2:

um, you know, vanessa murray we had a conversation with on this podcast about about that and the work she's doing at mentoring circle, about um pathways for for women in that case through to senior positions and I think, across the board.

Speaker 3:

As you say, greater diversity in in skill set, but greater diversity in opinion and background and culture is is fundamental really to to better places and projects yeah, I think so, and I one of the things that we decided right from the start with um the relationship with black women in real estate is I'm really, really sure that we shouldn't do sessions about diversity.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so one of the things that we saw maybe three, four years ago, was there were more non-white people appearing on programs, but they're on discussions about diversity, and I think that there is an element of that being patronizing and it's like people are getting their numbers up on um people of color being on conference programs by having sessions where people of color are talking about being of color, and to me that that doesn't seem right. We want people to be talking about what they do day to day as a property developer, as an investor or as a council, um, and just to have more diverse discussions, not discussions about diversity yeah, and so for you, you've talked about this kind of convening of people bringing people together.

Speaker 2:

Um, you're clearly very kind of, passionate and entrepreneurial, and you've traveled, so. So why do you feel like this is the work that you're putting your time to? And what, on a personal level? What? Why are you passionate about doing this?

Speaker 3:

I think from a very early age. Um, I've really enjoyed creating events, so I was thinking I sort of knew you might ask this question, so I I had to think about this. I had a little bit of reflection when I was driving to Villa Park last night. When I was about 15 or 16, me and a mate organized a music festival in our little village, so his nickname was Twig and we created this music festival called Twigstock, which we were very pleased that it worked on many levels, and that was later pointed out to us was just two levels, which we later conceded. But we basically put together as very naive 15-year-olds. We put together this music festival where there was 10 bands playing in the pub car park on the back of a flatbed truck, and we sold tickets at a music shop in loughborough called the left-legged pineapple and I think tickets were four pounds and we sold three units. So we did pre-event sales of 12 pounds, um, and we had a few hundred people turn up to this music festival and it was. It did go really well and we ran it again a couple years later.

Speaker 3:

Um, and so I had these experiences as a teenager of doing audacious events with no idea what I was doing and just trying to get my way through it and I remember someone for the counts from the council phoning my parents and saying we hear that your son's organizing a music festival by the river. It was literally on the banks of a river, like it is. Like a health and safety is a risk assessment. And so this guy from the council came down with me when I was 15. I looked about, you know, maybe like 10 or 11. So this guy from the council comes down, we go down to the river next to this pub and do a risk assessment of people potentially falling in a river at this music festival, which thankfully didn't happen. Um, so I like that idea of the audacious um seeing it all come together and people enjoying themselves whilst they're there.

Speaker 3:

So I think that that started with twigstock when I was at uni. I then did quite a lot of events, organizing stuff. Um, we had to organize our halls of residence, had a 12-hour ball and I had this big, relatively big entertainment budget and got people who had just been in big brother and some um music artists of the of the era to play at this or make what was like artful dodger. So maybe it was like slightly the era before um and we, yeah. So I, I did some stuff before and I think when I graduated, studied geography. When I graduated, I think, um, I didn't really know what to do with the geography degree, as a lot of people don't um, and I just stumbled across the events industry really, and I've done it ever since.

Speaker 2:

Amazing, amazing and what would be? Those sort of two or three things that come to mind that make a great experience, that make something emotive, personal for someone, that they're going to go away having a great time.

Speaker 3:

I think that there's. I think that you, I often think um about that. That experience has to be the known and the unknown. So I think that a sense of familiarity with the surroundings and the sense of belonging to something is a huge part of experiences, which is why people keep going back to the same theatres. I love going to the National Theatre. That to me is like a bit of a second home. In the last sort of five, six years I worked from there during the day. I like that familiarity. I don't go and see the same production over and over again, but I like the familiarity of the, the place, um. So I think it's that combination of a sense of belonging and familiarity with the unexpected.

Speaker 3:

Um, I think, for for experiences related to business events, I think you've got to get something out of it. You've got to get value out of it, demonstrable value. So not that it was just a nice experience, but typically that you've met some people that you think you could do business with, or you've got some big ideas that you can take away and share with your colleagues. So there has to be that great sense of value, but that sense of the unexpected that I mentioned earlier with meeting someone that you didn't know you needed to meet. I think that's's very important and very satisfying as an event organizer.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. No well, I look forward to coming to more of your events and learning stuff, meeting people. I wasn't expecting to meet and genuinely continuing to talk to you and have these conversations, because I think it's fascinating what you're doing, the programs are great and the perspective that you have and life experiences also, so thanks very much for sharing that today, rob. Thanks, tom. Yeah, very welcome Awesome.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to the Grow Places podcast. For more information, visit growplacescom and follow us at. We Grow Places across all social channels. See you next time.