Our story
Three founders, one complaint: nobody could show their working
Workplaced exists because three people kept ending up in the same meeting. A number was on the slide, the decision rested on it, and when someone asked how it had been arrived at the room went quiet.
Three people who had each hit the same wall
Rogier Woudsma had been measuring buildings since 1998 and could show his working for every figure he had ever published — and watched clients present his numbers next to figures that had no method behind them at all.
Nick Nunnington had spent a career teaching workplace strategy and examining it, and kept meeting practitioners who had been taught to ask the right question and given no instrument to answer it with.
Asaël Akkerman had sat on the client side of enough workplace projects to know that the argument is never really about the office. It is about which number the room is willing to believe.
What we decided not to build
The easy version of this company is a consultancy with software attached: sell the study, sell the interpretation, sell the fit-out advice, and keep the client. We decided against it, and the decision is load-bearing rather than modest.
We supply the platform and get it live. The advice, the measurement rounds in market, the space programme, the fit-out and the client relationship belong to the partner who does that work every day. A software company that competes with its own channel ends up without one, and a client who cannot get a second opinion on our numbers should not trust the first one.
What we are still not sure about
Whether the market wants explainability or just wants an answer. Every buyer says the first and a good share of them buy the second, and we have lost work to a competitor with a prettier chart and no method behind it.
We are betting that the tender, the works council and the second measurement round are where that reverses. That bet is the company.