From Where I Sit: Season 2, Episode 1 with Richard Leurig, Accruent President Transcript

Tom McGee:

Welcome to From Where I Sit, the podcast where we explore the forces shaping America’s built economy.  I’m your host, Tom McGee, President & CEO of ICSC. In discussion with prominent leaders and innovators, we cut through the noise to explore the trends and innovations influencing the future of our communities.

Welcome to season two of From Where I Sit. Joining us on the show today is Richard Leurig, president of Accruent. Accruent is a global leader in workplace and asset management software focused on helping organizations unify and optimize their built environments. Before serving as president of Accruent, Richard was the company's Chief Product and Technology Officer. He has nearly 30 years of leadership experience in product management and tech innovation across multiple industries, including successfully navigating organizations during the pandemic and the 2008 Financial Crisis. Richard, welcome to the show. Looking forward to our conversation.

Richard Leurig:

Thank you. Thank you. It's great to be here.

Tom:

A huge thank you to Richard, by the way, he's just on the legs of a European trip that he landed late last night. So thank you for being on the show today. And I'm really excited to talk to you. Proptech is a topic that is front of mind for so many people in commercial real estate. It's a $40 billion industry expected to grow, 12% annually, become a $90 billion industry in the next decade or larger than that. It's one that ICSC is very focused on, our members are very focused on. We want to build a proptech ecosystem and that'll include the launch of a major proptech event as part of ICSC LAS VEGAS in May of 2026. And who better to talk about proptech than you, the leader of Accruent, which is a global leader in that area. And just to start the show, Richard, and just for the benefit of our listeners, talk a little bit about Accruent, the scale of its product offerings, maybe the scope of its customer base, etc. And then we'll go from there.

Richard:

Yeah, thank you. Accruent has a long history—in fact, it was our 30th anniversary in August of this year—in developing solutions. It started with Accruent 30 years ago with leasing solutions in the commercial and retail space and built up over time through innovation, through development, and through acquisitions. And where we sit right now is we have nearly 5,000 customers around the world that span really two major fundamental areas of the lifecycle. The first being property, where information regarding space, space usage, leases, project management to develop space, everything from how you do complex event booking, how you utilize space for resources that are going there and using conference rooms, cubicles, and so on. And that's one major area of Accruent. The second major area is around the maintenance of those assets, but the maintenance broadly into other areas, which includes healthcare, factories, oil and gas, chemical, and so on, including the management of engineering documents and all of the different artifacts that are associated when a facility is built and maintained. So from as built through any changes that are being made to those facilities over time.

So we cover a broad gamut of things around the world. A majority of our customers are in North America, but we have customers literally around the world. We acquired recently a company in Brisbane, Australia, and have a number of customers in the Asia Pacific area. And then we have a large presence in Europe and a presence in South America. So very exciting for us because many companies now, as you know, are multinational when they come with commercial real estate. So a company that's trying to manage maybe a corporate campus or facilities or branches of a retail or store location oftentimes have those similar issues in Europe, similar issues in Asia. And so we're able to help cover all of those different areas for them.

Tom:

First of all, you cover so much of the commercial real estate industry and different property types, everything from retail to manufacturing and healthcare and everything in between. So you have such a broad perspective. Many folks think of commercial real estate as a very static industry and they don't think of technology, but commercial real estate has become very dependent upon technology. As you said, to move people, to move resources, etc. You've seen a lot of advancement over the course of the last decade or so in that regard, haven't you?

Richard:

Yeah, I think there's been a realization—and obviously the pandemic accelerated some of that around space management. But there's been a realization that the old methods for either maintaining a facility, looking at how much it's costing, the work orders, the deferred maintenance and so on, but also how do you utilize space overall? And then the last thing that has been more of a recent phenomenon is sustainability, is looking at energy usage and really that has been facilitated by the reduced cost in sensors and the ability to store large amounts of data at a lower cost. So we've seen really in the last 10 to 15 years, a major shift from perhaps technology not being on the forefront of how you manage different commercial facilities to all of a sudden changing where it is embedded in the heart of many things that companies are doing because they need to know how are they utilizing their space? Where are they utilizing their space? Are they compliant with certain rules and regulations and mandates? And lastly, what did they plan for the future? And that's what we're seeing lately, is a big push for the future planning versus now kind of the operational or tactical things that we've done in the past.

Tom:

Quite complex. I mean, when you talk about sustainability, I mean, just the various regulations that differ across the world and the need to try to manage against that. Thinking at a very practical level, when you mentioned the pandemic, the changes in the use of office, for example, to know who's in the office, when they're in, I mean, it was very predictable pre-pandemic because people were expected to be there five days a week. Now the whole flexibility of the use of office and how much do you need and where do you need it? All that kind of stuff, I think, is kind of top of mind.

You can't have a conversation around technology without bringing up the topic of artificial intelligence. And give a sense of how that is now playing into facilities management, real estate operations, to some extent into your service offerings. How does AI play into this?

Richard:

Yeah, so I think there's different things that you have to be aware of when looking at AI. First of all, we all know that AI technologies, especially generative AI technologies, not so much at agentic, but the evolution of AI is, AI wants to have a response and an answer for everything. So it will, if asked on the internet and the public web, will try to find an answer for any question posed. So I think the importance for us as

providers to the industry is to make sure that when we embed it in our products, that what we're providing are the answers that make sense based on the business that people are in and what they're doing. So what we've been evolving to is embedding of AI initially related to how do you answer support questions, assist with what's going on. That is evolving and has evolved into asking questions that previously may have required reports and dashboards. I talked to many, many customers. I go out and visit with many companies and people say, we're tired of dashboards. We're tired of reports. We just want to ask a question in plain language of all of our retail locations, which are the three that are the most expensive and where are the next three lease dates coming up and how much in deferred maintenance do I have on those particular sites? You want to ask plain language questions and you want to look at only your data and you want to make sure your data is not exposed in the public internet, which we don't do that. And that the models look at things that are answering questions that you would have, but those questions are open-ended. What's now evolving and we're doing a lot of work on in two other areas is onboarding of basically built environment documents, CAD drawings, other engineering specifications, specifications around instructions on how to solve things, and putting that into the system and actually gleaning metadata and relationships between assets that previously were not done. So it's really evolving from ask questions, get answers, ask more complex questions and get answers to how can we actually help you provide and make your day more efficient by actually entering the metadata off of a document, entering the metadata off of, mean, lease abstraction has been done for quite a long time of doing abstraction. A lot of AI is being used to do lease abstraction.

But the real question is, are the relationships between things in those documents that are not seen by the naked eye or by normal abstraction technologies? And I think the last area, the third area that we have invested a lot in is anomaly detection and predictive monitoring and maintenance. And that is knowing that a refrigeration system is about ready to fail days before it fails. The last thing, for example, a grocery or convenience store retailer wants is for a refrigeration unit to fail at the wrong time in the middle of the night and lose a bunch of perishable items. So we've invested in and are able to predict based on looking at sensor data up to, in some cases, 72 hours in advance that a work order could be generated. Somebody could come out and fix things during normal business hours. No loss of perishable goods, no high expense for rolling a truck to fix a problem in the middle of the night.

And you can look at that information. That applies across a number of asset types, it applies across manufacturing and so on. Refrigeration is one of the big ones because it impacts retail multi-site so much. The other thing is we've done anomaly detection around HVAC and air conditioning. And while that may sound like a strange thing, one of the things that commercial companies, whether you have employees coming into work, or whether you're a retailer and you have customers and consumers walking in to buy something, you don't want an environment that is hot or too cold and isn't working. So knowing when those things are going to fail well in advance and getting them fixed. So we've evolved with AI from preventative maintenance schedules over to the ability to actually predict what's going to happen before it happens. And that will get better and better over time.

Tom:

Yeah, that's huge. It's the cost effect of losing a bunch of your inventory because the refrigeration went down as enormous versus obviously easier and cheaper to perform maintenance than to have to replace something that the, in a crisis moment and that disrupts your business. The concept of smart buildings or autonomous buildings is kind of a buzzword that's starting to emerge. And that's a little bit about what you're just talking about here is a smart building concept. Look out five years from now. I mean, where do we go on that concept? Are we, what's the next evolution of that?

Richard:

Well, where I think it's going to go and where I believe it will go is what we call self-healing buildings, buildings that start to take action to heal themselves, which may be having to roll a truck with somebody with a wrench to fix something, but oftentimes may be bypassing problems within the building itself. So in the future, so as sensor costs have gone down, as buildings have become more smart with building, you know, the building information systems that are available now, what's happened is the ability for you to see everything in a new smart building is incredible. The problem in the industry is that there's a lot of older buildings that are either being retrofitted or not retrofitted because there has to be a business payoff to creating these autonomous, these smart buildings. But the more and more that that's being done, the more this is becoming a reality. And I think over the next five years, you're going to see more of it as older facilities. We're even finding this in universities and governments that they're retrofitting buildings to become smart buildings, even though it may be a building that was built in 1900, because they need to know, are they leaking energy? Is the air conditioner working? Is there a problem with the vents where the vents are leaking air as they work? And so I think what you're going to see in self-healing is that the systems themselves are going to start to operate independently.

Today, what often happens is you get an alert. I think there's a problem because the temperature on this floor is going up. There may be a problem. You need to look into it. You may have to open a work order on the HVAC system. What's going to happen in the future is that same person is going to come in in the morning and they're going to see that the building itself took the actions necessary to go get that problem fixed, which may involve a human at some point coming and repairing something. And that's where providing more information to that human. What parts do you need when you come out? What inventory do you need when you come? So it's one trip and you're done. How do I help you with directions and instructions to fix the problem that I've detected in my building? And this is the smart building doing this. I'm a big believer that these autonomous buildings are coming faster than people believe. You know, a lot of people tell me it's 10 years plus. I think it's five years or less. Some already exist.

I think the self-healing building is just people becoming comfortable with the technology, that the technology can actually start to make the decisions for you that you previously made. You didn't want to call somebody out if you didn't have to because it was going to cost you money. Once you trust that the building is going to heal itself through its actions that it's taking, what you want is a report in the morning. I found five anomalies last night. I fixed them all or I bypassed them and everything is good. By the way, we moved all the people that were going to be on building on floor nine to floor eight for the day because floor nine is going to have a problem today. And that all happened without human interaction.

Tom:

It seems like you'd have to build in some rule sets in regards to what the cost of that self-healing would be. If the building was to call out somebody to come repair something, just like there would be a human approval process, that there's an approval matrix that exists in regards to what the technology can approve versus what a human needs to be involved with. Is that fair to say or am I oversimplifying it?

Richard:

No, it's very fair to say it's that trust that's got to be built over time that the technology is working as it's desired. And the more and more that that trust exists, that those rules are working, the faster it'll be adopted. I mean, we know recently that there was a quick serve restaurant that was deploying AI for ordering and somebody ordered thousands of glasses of water and it took the order and tried to fulfill the order for thousands of glasses of water. I mean-

Tom:

That's the doomsday thing. That's the kind of example that people refer to. Yeah.

Richard:

Yeah, so you've got to make sure you overcome that. But first, what has to happen is the buildings have to support the underlying premise that they are sensored enough, that they're smart enough, that they have the systems in them that are smart enough to get all the data that you need to make those decisions and to put those rules in place.

Tom:

Richard, to many people, this will sound a little overwhelming because how do you identify the right technology? How do you even start? If you're in one of these buildings that needs to be retrofitted, you've invested in technology over the course of the last couple of years, but you kind of need to constantly be evaluating where you're at. How do you approach that? What's the decision model that you should apply to figure out what your next step should be?

Richard:

I think that what we're seeing is there's, as with any technology adoption or any adoption curve, there's the early adopters and they've learned through some painful, painful things. They've learned through what is right and wrong. And I strongly suggest that, and I've spoken at some of the proptech groups that have gotten together where they've gathered together commercial real estate people, people that are responsible for facilities management and so on and they share best practices and they share what their learnings are. This is a very hard thing, I think, to just, because I could easily suggest, go out to RFP and find what all the companies are doing, including Accruent. The fact is that there has to be a lot of learning within the industry as this is evolving quickly. This is not, by the way, for these companies that are our customers, the competitive advantage is not in the building system they use. In other words, I guess what I'm trying to say is, you're not sharing in these industry trade groups IP or intellectual property that can't be shared. These sharings are important across the broader commercial industry, the commercial real estate industry. And I think the more these things are shared, even in, we see this in retail, we bring together a lot of our retail customers with small regional retail summits. And they're willing to share all sorts of information because even though you might have a specific restaurant chain and another specific restaurant chain, you know, that are competitive on a day-to-day basis. Actually, how they do facilities management is not their competitive advantage. It's their food, it's their service, it's other things. So I think we've seen a lot of that in that sharing where we're also able to get a lot of voice of customer for us around what people are thinking because we clearly could be way ahead of where anybody is expecting to be right now in 2025, 2026. But we have to prepare as a provider to all of these customers for 2030, right now.

Tom:

Right. To your point, I mean, and using the restaurant example, sharing facilities management, the technology you're using to manage your facilities is not a trade secret. And that moves the industry forward and it's to the benefit of everyone. You mentioned earlier, just cybersecurity and touch on that with AI involved, the internet of things, things are in cyberspace, so to speak. How does cybersecurity play into all this? I mean, the doomsday scenario is that someone could shut down a building or shut down HVAC system or an energy system or something or do something even more sinister than that. And how do you get your arms around cybersecurity?

Richard:

The biggest concern about all of this, so we have two different concerns that are related to information security and practices, right? Number one is that you connect your building to sensors. You connect your building to a system such as ours and information is taken or hacked. And I think that the evolution of cybersecurity practices and some of the things recently with CrowdStrike and so on have really made a lot of companies up their game in regards to how they're protecting their own environments, their own facilities around that. With the evolution of cheaper sensors, the ability to do cybersecurity around sensors and cordoned off those. mean, early days, people would put sensors on basically the public internet. And believe it or not, that used to happen. It doesn't happen anymore. People know that they have to have different networks for different things, that they have to secure things in a different way usually relying upon their Chief Information Security Officer, we often help companies with our Chief Information Security Officer and our security team around how these things would operate, how we operate.

But the one that I think now is evolving that's even a bigger concern than that is these AI models that you talked about. Because a lot of companies are deploying AI models that rely upon public internet access or information or systems that haven't necessarily been vetted or secured properly. A lot of retail customers at the ICSC conference and so on were asking us, when we talked about AI, they were like, we don't want our information on the public. Our company won't allow us to do that. We were like, no, your information will never be on the public web. We don't rely upon models that require us to go to the public web. It's requiring a model that looks at your data and information and potentially benchmark data that we have internally. I think with people adopting AI technology so quickly. Recently, we found that a lot of people were trying to add AI, for example, to Teams meetings, to listen in on Teams meetings that were going out to the public internet. We as a company have been able to block all of those from occurring. But I think a lot of companies aren't thinking about those type of things. And I think that's where it really needs to evolve is the industry around security and cybersecurity on sensors and building systems has evolved to a point where they are fairly secure now. I won't say anything’s 100% secure ever, but I think where you're going to start to see now a lot of effort and focus in cybersecurity and information security is around the deployment of AI. And there's a safe way to do it and there's not a safe way to do it. And so that's what people need to look at.

Tom:

In some respects, part of the power of AI is its ability to access information from lots of different sources and then generate a conclusion. Then there's the question of the accuracy of the information that they're accessing from the public internet and also then the sharing of that information. It's a whole new world.

Richard:

Yeah, and I think it's a matter of information on the public internet is good for certain things and the question is what tool do you use when it's good for those things and what tool don't you use? So we were an early adopter of, let's use AI, but let's start to restrict it right away down to our company. And how we look at information, including release notes for software and instructions and training documentation and everything and pulling it in. We don't have to go to the public internet or expose anything to the public internet to do that.

Tom:

Right. It's kind of the old adage, facts help you make informed decisions, but you have to make sure they're facts, not data that just is extraneous and not value added.

Richard, let's shift gears a little bit because you have had a very distinguished career. You're a software engineer by background. You're now a president of large organization. I know one of the things listening to you talk in other settings that you emphasize a concept of the “better everyday way” at Accruent. Talk a little bit about that because I appreciate that concept of just focusing on what's in front of you right now. Just share how that philosophy and how that permeates the culture at Accruent.

Richard:

Yeah, so we're a culture that believes in continuous improvement. I think that's a foundation of ourselves and our parent company. Where I brought the “better everyday way” approach to Accruent it was that you can come into any company. And this has been my experience over the years in everything that I've done is that you can find within a matter of days and hours in most companies, 50, 100, 1,000 things that need to be improved. And the problem is it can become an overwhelming endeavor. It can become so big and so cumbersome that it's actually a weight that cannot be lifted from an organization. The whole purpose of the philosophy of the “better everyday way” is to say, look, all we have to do is get continuously better every single day of what's in front of us, make decisions on the most important things we need to address, then address them and move on and address them. And I often say in our company meetings and the roundtable discussions I have is that you just have to look back next week, next month, next quarter and next year and say, are we better than the last week? Are we better than the last quarter, the last month, the last year? And so this whole philosophy is about paring things down to problems that can be solved. I found this in software engineering to be the biggest thing that many software engineers, designers, architects, people really became overwhelmed with the magnitude of the problem that they were facing, whatever that problem is. And so you have to break these things down into the componentable chunks, little components of things, modules of things, phases of things, and get them done and show progress along the way. And I kind of evolved that over time to really any business problem we face. You could be sitting here facing whatever business problem or challenge that you're facing during the pandemic, during the mortgage crisis, for example, let's go back to that. We couldn't solve for the fact that the company I worked at at the time was losing customers that were going into insolvency literally on a daily basis, right? But what we could solve is to start planning for how we were going to manage our business in a way that took us for the next week, the next month, the next quarter through what we believed was inevitably going to be a big crisis. And what we were able to do therefore is realize in doing that, that there was going to be a sunshine on the other side, right? There was going to be another day tomorrow. And so we were able to focus things on innovation and R&D and things while the mortgage crisis was occurring. So we were helping those customers that actually were surviving, that were merging in portfolios of loans, of real estate and so on. And we were able to do that by kind of not losing sight of, yes, there's a big picture, but it can be overwhelming and it can almost be impossible to solve for. But what we can solve for is what do our customers need next month? And so I've kind of taken that forward to a crew and I think it works well because you often see as human nature that it's just overwhelming to tackle lots of big problems. I know that there's a lot written about this, but you just have to pare things down, believe in continuous improvement and look back and-I will tell you that I often look back and go, I can't believe where we were a year ago as a company. I can't believe the things that we were doing. fact, my team even tells me that often. I think you just, you have to get grounded in, we're making those improvements each and every day. And because we're making those improvements each and every day, it's important to look back and see that those improvements are occurring. And you can take the biggest of big problems that you're solving and turn them into little tiny problems you're solving over time.

Tom:

Yeah. No, I'm a big believer in that as well. We had the opportunity to interview Nick Saban about a year and a half ago. And he talked about the process that he employed. I know you're probably a Texas fan or a Texas A&M fan being based in Texas, but, in Alabama, he would talk about the process and he would recruit kids and they would say, I want to win the national championship coach. And he said, okay, well, what do you need to do today? Today leads you on that path to win the national championship. And I know I don't look at it this way now, but I've done a lot of endurance sports in my life and run marathons and people say, I don't know how you can run 26.2 miles. And I'll say, well, I just put one foot in front of the other. I mean, I just put one foot and then you put the next foot front and, then you finish 26 miles. It may be slow, but you got there and you have to put one foot in front of the other. So I think your philosophy is a marvelous one and one that I respect and try to emulate.

Richard, I want to go back to where we began a little bit and commercial real estate, I think, is a little slow in adopting technology in general, relative to the size of the industry. I want to, as we get to the conclusion of our conversation, look back and then I want to look forward. And why do you think as an industry, the investment in technology and commercial real estate to date probably isn't at the scale as other industries.

Richard:

I think the biggest problem has been that commercial real estate has not seen technology as a differentiator to their businesses. They've seen it as a G&A expense. They've seen it as something that they have to do, not something that they want to do. And so I think, you and you can take different things. It's always easy to look at the retail side of things, right? You know, if you're growing as a retailer and you're, you have lots of customers and you start to look at what is the service you provide. You fix cars, you change oil, you are a restaurant, you sell clothing, right? And you look at that and you say the best and most important thing is what are our buyers buying? Are they buying the latest clothing that people want to buy? Are we marketing those things? So you see a lot of spending on marketing, advertising, things like that, and the merchandise or the service that they're providing. And I think technology within, embedded in that was thought of as kind of an afterthought. Well, of course we have to fix a problem if there's in the building. Of course we have to know what's going on. We need to know our energy prices, but as long as we're growing, you know, how bad can energy prices get, right? Well, they can get pretty bad if all of a sudden you have, especially in Europe was hit by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, right? With high energy prices. So what starts to change over time though, is you start to say, okay, we've done all we can do as a commercial business to differentiate ourselves, to grow. We have competition that's coming and we need to say, okay, how do we differentiate coming in and having that personal relationship and that personal experience? So when you walk into a store, you want the lights to be working. You want it to be well lit. You want the air conditioner to be working. You want to make sure it's in the right type of space for your company, that you're in the right shopping mall, strip center, standalone, know that all of those decisions that you're making when a lease comes up for renewal and you're like am I on the right site? Do I need to go someplace else? Those things before were on a spreadsheet, were on a piece of paper. Somewhere, somebody was making those decisions and life moved on. Now those are looking at, people are looking at those as competitive differentiators. Am I in the right place where people do still want to come into a brick-and-mortar store? You know, what kind of relationship and experience, and I think the pandemic really pushed this experience thing to a big degree, which was everyone stayed at home and for a while everyone was like, that's great. We'll watch Netflix. We'll, you know, we can work remotely. I will tell you as we emerged from the pandemic, that personal experience you get from going to a retail location, going to a sporting event, going to different places really changed all of that.

When you look historically as well, the adoption of technology and manufacturing was done faster and for different reasons, right? It made them more efficient. You can produce the next widget at less price. So those workflows were very important. They were not as important in certain other industries where you just have a bunch of people coming and sitting in cubicles. To your point, you knew that there was going to be a hundred percent utilization of the cubes because you know how many employees you had or plan to have and you built for that. But when you don't know, how many people are going to come in on Thursday? We have days with one customer where 10,000 employees log on to find out where they're going to sit that day. That's a whole different ball game than it was 10 years ago. I think as we go into the future, what we're seeing from customers and what we're planning on and what our products are starting to do is look at all aspects of that facility, all aspects of that site or location, all aspects of all sites and locations you have globally and actually start to say, are you leveraging those things in the most cost effective and best way? So those workflows are emerging from who's going to sit on the eighth floor to where's the best place for people to sit? Do I know where people are sitting? Do I know where the deferred maintenance is that's going to cost me millions of dollars because I haven't been doing something on a specific facility or a specific set of sites? That's where AI comes in to help. But it is a big evolution from, we still have customers that are doing some of their work on spreadsheets and paper that don't have all the modules of our product and we're convincing them. And they have to be convinced because they don't see it as a thing, sometimes worth investment. Other ones that do see it as worthy investment, typically are those that are growing fairly quickly and are seeing it as an important thing to how they run their company.

Tom:

Yeah, I think technology is going to become a differentiating factor in commercial real estate. And you mentioned retail, which is an industry that's near and dear to my heart. And if you think about the retail industry and retail real estate, we're really kind of at a supply demand mismatch right now. There hasn't been a lot of new development in the industry since the Great Financial Crisis and the demand for space. Generally in most markets exceeds the supply of well-positioned space and you're starting to see retailers use their stores as really mini-fulfillment centers as well. And that just brings a whole element of complexity and the need for technology, both for the retailer, but also for the owner and manager of that property as well that is a way to differentiate themselves versus their competition. So well said.

As we near conclusion, I have two final questions for you. What trends in commercial real estate facility management excite you the most?

Richard:

I think the most exciting thing as a technology company and as a technologist myself is it's easy to say AI, but it isn't AI. It's actually the use of technologies to understand utilization behaviors and what's going on in the usage of space overall and the space intelligence involved with that. Not just from a cost savings perspective of do I have too many sites or do I have the wrong retail site? Do I have too many places where people are sitting? I think it's a full understanding of, you know, a lot of our customers are talking to us and want to know like, why do people come in on certain days? Why do people behave certain ways? You know, employee experience and keeping employees happy is an important part of that. Keeping obviously consumers in the retail front happy. And so people want to know what is going on. And that excites me because that's actually an interesting problem. What is going on with the behaviors of people as they work, as they travel, as they go to a mall, who goes to a mall and how much money do they spend? There's lots of numbers on that. But the question is the underlying technologies that are able to track some of those behaviors when people walk into a store and walk out of a store. And there's certain things evolving on that tracking. You know, we know about these cashierless stores that have evolved, right? Where somebody walks in, purchases something, walks out Amazon, so on.

The interesting thing about those technologies is that they're really just tracking human behavior. What are you looking at on a shelf? What are you looking at on a counter? How much time do you spend in there? What's going on in and out? Is this really the right site for you? When we look at employee behavior in larger commercial settings where you have a thousand employees sitting there, it's like, where do people congregate? What do people really do? Are they really going to the water cooler still? Do they just like to meet in team meeting rooms? Do we need more meeting rooms? That's the problems that are going to actually help companies manage their space, make happier employees and happier consumers going forward. And that's an exciting thing we're working on.

Tom:

First of all, I can sense your excitement hearing in your voice, which is inspiring. It strikes me as you're really moving from the tactical, technology helping you kind of make tactical decisions to really making more strategic decisions and differentiating decisions and that with the access to the information and technology can give you the information and maybe it helps you make the decision, but ultimately people have to use that information appropriately to make the right decisions.

Richard, I always love to ask this question for folks like yourself that have been successful in their career and have been in a number of different roles. For those folks that are earlier in their leadership journey or, or just on a leadership journey right now and dealing with, you know, all the complexities of that. What advice do you have for them in navigating their career and navigating a very complex, you know, journey in a leadership role?

Richard:

I just think that I've always found it for myself as I was growing in my career and for others that I was mentoring and coaching is that you have to be curious. You have to be inquisitive. You have to ask questions. You have to not live based on your assumptions, but actually ask everyone you encounter about their job, about their career. What are they doing? What is this problem we're trying to solve? I think that you become better at your job when you do that, your position or current role, and you become more well-versed as to what's going on. I will tell you early in my career, as you said, I was a software engineer, just a simple example. And I worked for somebody that used to be the head of finance. He was put over our business unit. And I said, I don't understand, what do you do in finance? Like what are you all doing every day? I mean, I understand it from school and taking a finance class, but what do you do? And he would sit down with me every night that he was in town, we were in different locations, and he would explain things to me, the budget, exactly what the budget meant, how that impacted the balance sheet, the P&L, what was going on. And he said, do you just want to run the budget process for my whole business unit? And I said, okay, I'll run the whole budget process for the whole business unit. And it was just my curiosity that later on I learned and figured out, gee, having that grounding in finance helped me all along the way. It helped me get projects approved that previously wouldn't be approved. It helped me be more of an influencer on acquisitions we were doing. So I think, you know, these are the things that people really don't think about too much, but are the most important things in your career, are those moments you have with the people you work around, with the people that you work with, and learning about new things and asking those questions.

Tom:

Yeah, that's great advice for both leaders and for those that are starting out in their career. Be inquisitive to your point. You start your career, ask questions and try to learn new and different things. But as a leader, kind of lean in and really show interest in your people and not, I love your don't assume, you know, just the, you know, be inquisitive as well as a leader and understand what other perspectives are. Richard, thank you for your time today. Thanks for sharing your wisdom. Thank you for doing this on the back of a red eye from Europe. So I really, really appreciate it. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

Richard:

Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you.

Tom:

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