The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Harrison P. Lyss, Principal at Jeff Works

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

Harrison P. Lyss, Principal at Jeff Works Jeff.com

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What can I tell you? We have an amazing gentleman on the show. We're going to be talking to him about his company and everything else. Harrison P. Is it Liss? Pronounce Liss? Liss. Yes, sir. There you go. Harrison P. Liss is on the show with us. He's the principal at JeffWorks. And we're going to be talking about his company, what he does, some of the styles of leadership, and how he leads, et cetera, et cetera. Harrison joined NRDC in 2016 and currently serves as a managing director where he's responsible for various disciplines, including leasing, asset management, entitlements, and development. His primary charge is to enhance the financial performance of the NRDC portfolio

of real estate projects across a broad range of asset types. Prior to NRDC, he worked at the GHP Office Realty, a leading owner, operator, and purchaser of suburban class A-style office and flex properties in the greater New York area. He's received a BS in economics from the University of Arizona and his MS in real estate development from New York University. He's probably in there too. Welcome to the show, Harrison. How are you? I'm well.

How are you, Chris? Thanks for having me. Good, good, good, good. It's wonderful to have you on. And wow, you've done a lot of stuff. Great bio. Give us the.com for, I guess, the launch of JeffWorks, and we'll be talking about that today. Sure.

JeffWorksApp.com. There you go. And do you want to plug the other, anything else? I mean, more or less, so NRDC, we're real estate guys by nature, but we're here today talking about our new project, which is JeffWorks. It's a co-working vertical that we've launched, and we've rolled out two locations and shopping centers that we own in New Jersey and Connecticut. Awesome sauce. So give us an overview.

What is JeffWorks and what does it do? So JeffWorks is a value-oriented co-working space. As I'm sure you're paying attention, co-working has sort of exploded in the pre-pandemic and post-pandemic era. And we have sort of created a value-oriented, convenience-based coworking brand that's geared towards the retail environment and is membership-based in nature. Nice. So does this compete with some of the other people that are doing the coworking space? It does. You know, it's not necessarily a full office solution or it's more of a third place, if you will.

It's somewhere to go to get out of the house for a few hours when you're working from home. Really, what we noticed during COVID is working from home is hard and people like to get out. So we have located our, you know, our locations are near where employers and the employees live. And it's somewhere for people to go for a few hours a day, a couple of days a week. And we've priced it as such that, you know, yeah, we can be an enterprise offering, but it's also priced in a way that employees themselves can see the value and pay for it on their own, out of their own pocket. There you go. When did you launch this? So we launched this in 2021, around Q4. There you go. And what makes you guys different than some of the co-working spaces that are out there? I think you've kind of touched on one or two items. Yeah, two of them. The big ones are value and convenience. You know, we're now really in urban centers like the WeWorks of the world,

where our two locations are in traditional shopping centers, you know, exterior mall, where people go for their daily goods, whether it be for a coffee shop or home goods or things like that, pick up a pizza and you could be there. And we think that co-working blends really well in the retail environment. And there you go. I'm looking at your website and it looks like you have two places open now. You have Connecticut and New Jersey. Do you plan on expanding throughout the country? We do.

We do. We, you know, there's always some tinkering involved and I'm happy to talk to you about some of the evolution of Jeffworks and what our offering has, what it started as and what we sort of have transitioned to or blended with the initial offering. Sure. Let's do that. Yeah. So what started as a, you know, our standard offering was a, is a $15 a month hot desk. So, you know, low cost, high volume membership, sort of like the planet fitness model of coworking where people don't feel like they got to go every day to get the value. It's

something that, you know, it's priced like two cups of coffee at Starbucks, but it's a place that you're comfortable with and you can sort of have a sense of community with the other members and things like that. And if you go, you know you know one or two days a month you don't feel so guilty about not using it yeah and sort of what we found interestingly enough is you know people people are using it sort of the utilization expectations have held true but there have been a lot of requests for more dedicated type services, sort of a more elevated offering. So we just rolled out a $100 a month dedicated desk offering where you sign up for a month and you pay a hundred bucks and you get dual monitors in your

own desk where you can leave belongings. You have printing services, things of that nature. That's more in line with a full-service office solution at a much more aggressive price than the Regis's of the world or the WeWorks of the world. I noticed that I think the lower plan has free coffee, at least the New Jersey place. Uh-huh. So, I mean, if you're, I mean, for $15 a month, that's,

I mean, for some people that is a stop at one stop. You get a storehouse and you spend $15 before you ever leave. Yeah, you can go to your place and get the coffee for free for the same $15 you'd spend for one stop. You know, you get like the coffee, then you get like, you know, a scone, and then you get your, you get like, I used to get breakfast sandwiches there. I mean, it's just so awful. What are some amenities that are inside the space? And I'm looking at the pictures on the website and it's a really beautiful space. There's lots of, it looks like there's some private meeting space. There's even one of those enclosures that I've seen that Silicon Valley offers where it's kind of like a phone booth. Phone booths. Yeah. So we've got,

you know, we've got a number of private meeting spaces. So for $15 a month, you have unfettered access to the open hot desk space, if you will, where we've got, you know, between 40 and 60 desks varying based on the location. And if you needed to have a breakout room for a meeting, you can book meetings for an additional price all within the Jeff app where we've got, you know, smart locks on six meeting rooms and you want to reserve your room, you just pop on the app, block it off for 30 minutes, an hour, whatever it may be. You get a digital key, you touch the key to the door, it opens for only you during that period of time. There you go.

Or just the account that you have, the card that you have on file with your account. These are great. There you go. Or just the account that you have, the card that you have on file with your account. These are great. When I tried to write my first book in 2011, I realized that I couldn't work at home. And I live by myself. I have two dogs. And I haven't been able to afford the divorces yet, so I'm still waiting to get married. I'm saving up. So I would go to Starbucks.

And this is long before this concept of co-working came up. I would go to Starbucks and start working on my book. And I found that I was highly productive because the problem is when you're a home, I mean, this is what this resolves. When you're a home, you know, if you've got family, a wife and kids, you know, they're, they're constantly, you know, Hey, you know, Hey, how's it going, dad? You know, or mom, you know, for me, you know, my dogs hustle me. So, you know, they'll come in wanting treats or wanting to play. They'll bring the ball. And then there's just so much stuff at the house that can take you away from what you need to do.

Your friend calls you up and goes, hey, you want to go play some video games for an hour? And you're like, oh, I'll just take an hour off. And then, you know, you end up at the end of the day and you didn't do anything. You know, you're like, hey, oh, I need to clean the sink. Or, you know, there's like a million things that can distract you. And the nice thing about the co-working spaces and going on is you can hone your stuff. You don't have distractions. If your friend calls you and says you want to do video games, you're like, hey, man, I'm not at home to play with you.

So, yeah, you're going to have to go do whatever. And sometimes it can really get you focused on what you need to take and do. Totally. and sometimes it can really keep get you focused on what you need to take and do totally i think one of the big things we noticed is look i mean covid sort of changed the way people work in a lot of ways for the better but i think one thing that's clear is you know remote work working from home has its own set of challenges and we wanted to offer a comfortable place for people to go that's near home but isn't at home where they can get out and sort of find their focus, which is one of the taglines we've experimented with a bit. Somewhere to just go that's a third place that isn't there. Maybe it's not their full service

office or their home office, but it's just somewhere to go for a few hours when you want to change the scenery, get out of the house, we think the space that we've created is really conducive to getting work done. There you go. And for the $99 a month at the Jersey location, I think this is at, does it vary from location to location? That offering, the standard dedicated desk offering does not. It's $99 a month, gets you your own dedicated desk with dual monitors for you to plug in your laptop to. We've set up about 30 desks at each location. We have the capacity for 30 dedicated desks.

And the idea is that people maybe will have more utilization there. Maybe they're there three to five days a week for, you know, five to eight hours at a time. And that desk is theirs. They can leave items on their desk. They have lockers and things like that. They've got printing services. They get, you know, unlimited use of the phone booths, which for hot desk members are an additional. And then they still have access to the overall space you know the soft seating areas and

and meeting rooms as well if they need it there you go and it gives you a virtual office business address too so you can use that as your business address have packages delivered things like that yeah absolutely nice those are those are good to have because you know you don't want people showing up your house you're like here's my home address on my linkedin yeah yeah that was one of the things we found we got a lot of requests for virtual assistants and virtual office when we opened and we weren't really set up for it so this is sort of a new offering that allows us to layer that in do you guys do package forwarding and stuff like that we do we do mail forwarding. Nice. Those are always good

to have, especially if you want to open an office in multiple locations and, you know, make it appear like you're, you're everywhere if you want. And, uh, yeah, I mean, Vegas is a great place for that too. Just about anywhere. I mean, if you want to have a California, LA, New York sort of address sort of thing, you can do that. But these are really popular because like I say, you get away, you get focused on what you do. And you know, I, I,

I've worked from home since what? 2004. I think it is. Um, and it's cool. Yeah. Before it was cool. Once I,

once my last partner and I broke up, I realized that I was saving so much freaking money getting rid of him that I can work from home. And yeah. So I replaced him with, like, a secretary. He was doing that much work. Right. But, you know, I'm really bad. I'm still bad to this day where I all, you know, I don't do eight hours of work, clearly.

And I'm known for screwing around. And, you know, I get to the end of my day and i'm like i really work harder and so you know but a lot of my money's made off the internet so and consulting and stuff so it just comes to you 24 7 but you you you still you know there's stuff you want to accomplish every day and so being able to go somewhere and focus is definitely something i need how do you see the role going out are you you guys going to take over all the locations yourself? Is there any franchising you guys are offering or sort of opportunities if somebody has got a building,

say, in, you know, someplace around the nation, they contact you? Totally. So, you know, we did two in shopping centers that we own, and the intent is that we want to really fine-tune the offering and sort of franchise them to other landlords as well it's a good way to you know rising tides lift all boats if we're successful it helps lease the space next door it sort of helps the the coffee guy down at the end

of the strip center sell more coffee that sort of thing. Nice. Nice. And yeah, I mean, if people maybe have a building or they're trying to get a space, this is probably a really interesting thing to have right now, because I don't know, how is the commercial leasing space going these days? I mean, I know that there's a big rebellion where a lot of people, they don't want to come back to the office. You know, if you're a company that's, you know, owns a big office, you got, you know, you're trying to get people to come back and they're like, no,'t want to we don't do that yeah sure and look office is sort of going through a bit of a of a transformation but you know we've been fortunate to remain pretty heavily leased well leased over past couple years and i don't think the need for

office space is going away so fast employee needs are changing and desires are changing the way people want to work are changing i mean there are people now that i think after all this time would work there's a big contingency of people that would only really consider jobs that have a hybrid a little bit more flexibility. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. The, you know, the thing is a lot of companies I know, and this started before the pandemic in the tech world, a lot of my friends would run, you know, build apps and run them with literally developers as employees around the,

around the world. So, you know, they'd have one guy in, I don't know, Sri Lanka or another guy in japan another guy somewhere in the middle of europe and you know they'd have a whole crew of people that they'd assemble and and do their work with and they were pretty you'd get pretty efficient i had friends that were running stuff in in australia and and you know basically they just they just get on a call and do it and it, you know, all this telecommunity, I mean, the world's a lot smaller. You know, companies that want to adapt to this could probably take advantage of hiring people and just say, go to this co-work space if that's your area, and off you go.

Yeah. Yeah. And look, I mean, we're not, we didn't set out to be a replacement to the traditional office. There are some of our members that have found it to be that use it more than others. But generally, we're finding that, you know, people like to come in for a couple hours a week here and there. They like the sense of community. They like some of the events that we put on, which I'm happy to talk more about.

And, you know, it's just a good third place to go. So tell us more about the community so we do these like member spotlight events where we'll have you know one of our members at a location could come in and give a talk sort of thing and we will open it up oftentimes outside of just the member base so it sort of gives a chance for our members to cross promote amongst each other. And you get to talking and the guy that you've seen there a few times in the past month might be a potential client of yours or vice versa. And it's been a really good, it's been a very good lead generation tool for us when we open it up to the outside community. And then our members always appreciate having, you know, somewhere to go to spotlight their own business. And you guys do business networking events as well?

We do. We do. Awesome. Awesome. Now, you guys have a JeffWorks app. Is that correct? Yeah. which is sort of like an omni-channel franchising platform that operates in different verticals, all on lifestyle needs-based.

So they're in laundry and fitness and salons, and we partnered with them to launch a co-working vertical. So they helped us. They built out an app. They've done a great job, and sort of it allows us to operate more hands off, sort of a clean user experience where all of the payments get managed within the app and the booking of meeting rooms get managed within the app. And it allows us to push out these networking events to our members and that sort of thing where it's not just, you know, emailing and phone calls all the time. So can people schedule coming into the office or, you know, say, hey, I want this when I show up or whatever. Totally.

Not the phone booth, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. You block off a phone. Let's say you've got a, you want, you're conducting an interview. You book, you're a member, you book a meeting room. It's a four person meeting room. You book it from, you know, 3 to 5 on Tuesday the 12th. And from that time, you get a digital key.

You touch your phone to the smart lock. And from that time, from 3 to 5, your phone is the only phone that can open that door. Wow. That's pretty handy. Yeah. This is the worst thing when you show up at some place. You've got, like, a a place reserved and you're like, ah,

crap, somebody's already got it. So you can do that right to the app. I did it this morning. I had a meeting at a coffee shop and it's like, you got to get there 20 minutes early because you're stressed out about, am I going to get a table? Is it going to be too loud?

That sort of thing. So we think this solves for a lot of different uses for a lot of different people. There you go. There you go. I mean, of thing so we think this solves for a lot of different uses for a lot of different people and there you go there you go i mean this is really the future of business like i said i've been doing since 2004 when everyone started doing it i'm like i kind of felt like i was invaded i was like yeah you guys all think this is a new thing i don't know i've been doing it for years i can work anywhere in the world as long as i got Wi-Fi. And even then, the Internet will keep going if I'm off Wi-Fi for a few hours or asleep or whatever. But 24-7, man, it's crazy.

I never thought before with all the companies we own, I never thought I'd sell stuff internationally or have an international audience and stuff until, you know, the Internet opened up with social media and stuff. And then things really changed. So you've been running NT since 2016. Of course, you did stuff before that. Talk to us about what leadership is for you or what your leadership style is that you use with your folks to lead your organization. Well, I'll speak to sort of a JeffWorks.

I think it's always important to incentivize people, to treat people, give people a sense of ownership over their work, that sort of thing. So we've got some interesting metrics for managing lead generation, things of that nature, and how people are compensated. And we try not to micromanage. Is there anything that you've ever liked reading on leadership or managing or stuff? You've been to school for it, but any authors or anything that you've ever liked reading on leadership or managing or stuff? You've been to school for it, but any authors or anything that you've enjoyed reading? I can't think of anything that comes to mind. There you go.

I got to look at your stuff, Chris. We'll send you out a copy of my book, Beacons of Leadership, for you. You know, it's just one of those things where a lot of people, you know, they want to go the next level with their lives and what they're doing. You know, people can lead from anywhere. So they can lead from co-working spaces. They can lead from an office. I think more and more, I mean, I'm kind of surprised the resistance I've seen at people wanting to go back to an office. And then a lot of people in like, for example, the tech tech space they kind of told them for a year or two that they could move around and like i know a lot of people that move from california silicon

valley to like las vegas or austin and then they're like hey you got to come back in the office and like i already moved man yeah a lot of people i'm sure you know that's the world has changed how people work has changed for better or for worse, and there needs to be some element of, there's more elements of flexibility than I think we initially contemplated. But I think that sort of lends itself to this third-place model. Yeah, yeah.

I don't know. I mean, for companies, I mean, they have so many different ways to monitor their business. I mean, I'd almost rather have an employee if they want to be remote using a co-working space than knowing they're working at home i don't know i would see companies might want to pay for the space and say hey we're paying for you to go to your booth we need to see you checking in on wherever the the thing i can see companies do

that yeah i mean we'd love to as we sort of reach scale see more enterprise type solutions for you know employers offering this so that it's more of a hub and spoke where it's like hey we want to we want you to come into the city or wherever it may be to the home office one day a week and then go bop around or one a couple days a month and then go bop around to the jeff works location that's right by your house. Yeah, I can see enterprise being a lot like enterprise being something that they would do because then you can get people to work anywhere in the nation, but you can know that they're at least in the office.

They're not screwing around at home, I don't know, sitting around naked eating Dorito chips on a bean bag like I do on Wednesdays. You know, that sort of thing. We know they were at the office, you know, a co-working space for the time. You know, there's nobody naked eating Doritos on a beanbag at Jeffworks. And that's one of the benefits. Yeah, yeah, that's, you know, if you've got roommates,

you might have to endure that. So this is another reason to get a co-working space. Exactly. If you've got roommates and they're doing that, you might want to, I don't know, get your own place. Anything more we need to touch on with JeffWorks and all that good stuff? No, I just would definitely encourage everybody

to take a little look at our website and kind of see the offerings that we got going on. And if you're interested in hearing more, we'd love to connect with you. There you go. There you go. Well, it's been wonderful to have you on. Thank you very much, Harrison.

We certainly appreciate it. Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me. Thank you. And give us your dot coms where we want people to find you guys on the interwebs. JeffWorksApp.com. There you go. And thanks, Madis, for tuning in.

Be sure to go to YouTube.com. Hit that subscription button. Go to LinkedIn, our big newsletter over there. All of our on facebook linkedin twitter instagram tiktok all those crazy places thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time thanks chris