I’m just back from our Executive Advisory Board Client Summit held in Atlanta this week and reflecting a bit on the many conversations and takeaways from an intense and exciting couple of days.

The format we prepared included the usual items for these types of events such as product road map reviews, infrastructure and technology updates as well as a state of the company presentation by our CEO. – All well received and I believe, meeting the expectations of our guests.

Seeing past the present

It’s part of our culture here at Building Engines that we don’t always like to just do the expected and therefore decided to layer in some additional sessions that we thought would be interesting and provide some unique value for our guests.

This included a terrific keynote presentation from Phil Mobley and Koine Communications on the converging trends, implications and future opportunities related to the rise of technology and impact on tenant engagement.

He introduced very unique and thought-provoking concepts for the audience to think about. These included the transition from traditional property management in terms of role and responsibilities to that of “workplace and customer experience management.” – Driven by the expectations of the modern office worker on how they want to interact with the place they work, and the building itself.

Additionally, a few of our customers delivered best-practices presentations that were very well received:

Technology Deployment Process

Even though all of the people in attendance were our clients and deployed, we felt this was an important topic for the group as technology begins to take a larger role in commercial real estate operations.

And even with SaaS platforms such as ours, where deployment is much easier and faster than with legacy enterprise applications, the value of executive level sponsorship and an organized data collection, roll-out and deployment plan gets you to value faster and increases utilization and adoption. A wordy way of saying, “speeds up the ROI.”

We allocated an hour for this session and easily could have gone on for several hours based on the questions and peer-to-peer sharing of lessons learned. – More on that in a minute.

Operational Risk Management and Preparation for Security Risk

This was conducted by long time Building Engine’s client and the de facto leading subject matter expert on this topic, Beacon Capital’s Joe Donovan. Joe’s breadth of knowledge, insight and delivery always makes him captivating and again, the subject was very relevant to the entire audience, regardless of their role or organization.

In addition to his clear expertise, what is truly great about Joe is his willingness to share information. As he said, safety of our tenants and employees is a collective responsibility and only by working with each other as colleagues and neighbors, can we truly mitigate risk. (And we know a thing or two about risk management)

Collaborative Working Sessions

This spirit of collaboration, even among industry peers, who are occasionally competitive, was also clearly evident in our working sessions where we divided people into groups to discuss and create a product vision along guidelines defining desired outcomes and operational insights they might not currently have. It was a unique experience for most people in the room to participate in part of the software development process and the communication and sharing of ideas was terrific to watch.

There was a tremendous amount of industry experience at work and my sense from watching and listening was that everyone enjoyed the opportunity to think through the exercises with their colleagues while also learning something from each other as well.

It was a terrific couple of days in all and we can’t thank our terrific customers enough for their effort to attend and thoughtful participation throughout.

Until next time!