The interior of your building must matter to you as much as the exterior–the future of work demands it.

There’s so much you don’t know you need to think about when constructing a building. Before you waste time and energy building something that misses the mark, (or worse, doesn’t work and needs to be rebuilt) let us show you around NextSpace, our immersive workspace gallery, where you can see, and plan for, what you are not thinking about.

When you design a new building, you’ve got budgets and professionals guiding you –broker, builder, designer and architect. You’ve got a team helping you out, which is great. But everything comes from a separate person, and so much of it requires you to imagine what it might be like: the AV, the tech, the comfort, the lighting, the furniture, the window shade cavities. Yes, the window shade cavities.

In the past, people would just throw together some cubicles, balance a piece of wood on top of saw-horses, and call it good. In so many cases, the interior and all those details like tech, AV, and acoustics, came almost as an afterthought, and so did its budget. 

But that doesn’t cut it anymore.

The future of work demands that the interior of your building matters more than the exterior. 

Immersive workspaces provide an environment where your people can perform at optimal capacity and peak efficiency, where creativity, collaboration and inspiration are limitless. 

And the most talented people in every industry are expecting that kind of work experience. 

Let’s be real: If they’re going to be in the office, they want it to be cool, for the tech to work, for the lighting to be good, for the vibe to be inspiring and comfortable. If it’s not, you might end up losing or disengaging move-the-needle team members who feel like they were not considered when the place they were going to work at every single day was being designed. 

To avoid that reality, your interior needs as much thought, if not more, than your exterior. How your building functions on the inside (and how it doesn’t), and the care and consideration you put into the experience of your people will be reflected in who wants to work for you, the level at which they work–and your retention rate.

As a visionary leader, it’s your job to create a work environment with the same level of excellence that you expect from your people.

Lesson 1: We did the math. Time is Money. 

Sometimes good enough is good enough. But it usually isn’t. 

A coffee from Starbucks when you’re running late? Good enough. The tech in your conference room that takes ten minutes of fumbling to get going at the start of every meeting? Nowhere near good enough. 

Picture this: Jill and Omar from accounting, Lucas from marketing, Emilio from R & D and Zoe from sales are all sitting around your conference room table, waiting and waiting for the Wi-Fi to work, the projection screen to roll down or the sound to kick in. Every time a team meets in that conference room this happens because they’re using AV that’s just good enough.

And precious time and money are wasted. 

We did some math. Imagine you’ve got five people sitting around for five minutes at the beginning of every meeting and you hold meetings in that conference room five times a day, five days a week. 

That’s 32,500 minutes per year, or 542 hours. 

If everyone in that room earns $40 per hour, that’s nearly $22,000 per year in lost time and money because the tech wasn’t good enough. Compound that by the six years that tech was installed for and that is $132,000. Multiply that by the 15 rooms you have the tech installed in and we’re now talking $1.98 million. 

Lesson 2: Think about where you shouldn’t invest your money. 

It’s not unusual for someone to be guided by their architect or builder to spend money on building details that may look good, but serve no day-to-day function for employees and clients. Our purpose is for visionaries to see where their money will do them the most good in the long run. 

True story: The design of the NextSpace is cantilevered and it cost us $700,000 extra to build it that way. We realized the extra cost had no return on investment. If we had this to do over again, we would have invested this money differently. 

If we had asked from the very beginning, “Where shouldn’t we spend money?” Do you think we would have said yes to the cantilevered design? 

No. 

That was our object lesson in function over form. The building will not appraise at a higher value because of its design, and we will never get $700,000 of value out of it. Ever. 

Lesson 3: Beware the cost of not doing it right the first time.

A client visited us recently and we took them into our one-of-a-kind boardroom. 

We’d been telling him he had an acoustic issue with his new space, but he was sure what he was putting in was good enough. 

We walked into our boardroom and closed the door. 

The client just looked at us and said, “I get it.” 

Our boardroom has the best acoustics in the Valley because we know it makes a difference: to productivity, to privacy, to delivering an exceptional experience to your clients and your team and it allows the technology to work better. 

After his visit, the client hired us to create a custom ceiling, making it look exactly the same as the existing one, by shrouding it in acoustic treatments. This retrofitting can cost anywhere from $20,000 to $200,000. 

This client’s building has wall coverings on one end, technology on the other end, glass down both sides. If we had installed the acoustics from the beginning and didn’t have to work around the lights, the mechanical systems for the blinds and everything else, it would have been a tenth of the cost. 

Lesson 4: Make the process less painful by bringing the right people to the discussion.

When we were constructing our building in 2019 for NextSpace, we spent six months and about 15 hours trying to come up with a solution to hide a door in our executive speakeasy lounge.

At every single meeting, for months, we talked about the door for 10 or 15 minutes. Then one day, we stood in a construction meeting at our building with the engineer and the architect, and the construction guy said, “We need to drywall it.” 

And the engineer was looking at the architect and the architect was looking at the construction guy and we asked, “Who does the install on this?” 

And they all said, “Oh, Bob’s door shop. They just did one of these last week.”

We invited Bob to the next meeting and when he walked in, we said, “We want to hide a door right here.” He looked at us, “How do you want to control it?” He listed our options. We told him what we wanted, and he said, “Great, I'll send you over the drawings.” 

The problem was solved because the right person was finally in the room. 

We’ve made these mistakes, and learned from them and can pass them on to our clients. 

It’s so satisfying to see our clients benefitting from our experience. 

After hanging out with us at NextSpace, they don’t have to guess, they don’t have to wonder, they don’t have to make costly mistakes and live with bad acoustics, under-performing tech or blinds that don’t fit.  

NextSpace exists to save you time and money while inspiring what’s possible. My team and I would love to help you build immersive workspaces that work without you wasting time, resources and money.

Come visit us first. We'll make this process a whole lot less painful.