As a impact driven business and a purpose driven business, we aim for very high ambitions, while mitigating all the risks coming at us,
Hello, and welcome to the Business of Architecture UK, I am your host, Ryan wielaard. And this week I had the fabulous pleasure of speaking with space and Mata, who are based in the Netherlands. I spoke with two of the founders. There's a third founder as well who wasn't present. But I did speak with Jed hack out, and Metallian Paul, third members, Sasha basil, about their fantastic and very innovative business, which really has a number of different tentacles in different areas of architectural process and design from circular area development, Vision making strategic design, master planning, urban development, spatial vision, nearing community building sustainability works. And I think what was really interested in this conversation was we spoke about the ecosystem that they have developed, which they use to deliver self initiated projects. So a little bit of background about everybody did carried out his architectural training both AT T u Delft, and CyArk. In Los Angeles, Sasha studied architecture, RW th, action, and graduated cum laude, and Martin completed his Master of Science at the Technical University of Delft, the faculty of interactive architecture. In 2009. At the height of the economic crisis, they founded space and matter, they were united by the desire to improve the world for their children and all future generations. And their journey began with water ball wohnen, and a floating neighborhood in the Dutch powder. This circular and innovative design not only won first place in national competition, but also sparked the creation of space and matter. And for over a decade, government officials, product developers and community leaders have turned to space and matter for an array of innovative solutions to complex urban challenges. So in this conversation, we delve deep into the ecosystem and the different ventures that they have. There's basically five different companies and organizations which have been founded by these guys. You've got space and matter, which is the kind of design planning aspects there's common city, which is real estate development aspect, there's crowd building, which is kind of CO living initiatives. There's modular construction company called Boom builds. And there's a nature Restoration Organization called Summa Wila. So they unify these five companies, and use them to deliver these self initiated projects. We talk a little bit about how they do that, how they navigate and find and develop projects from start to completion, we talk about how projects are funded. We talk about the art, if you like of being an architect, developer, and contractor. And I think this is for me, this is this is such an exciting proposition of self initiated projects, where architects and designers are really taking the baton, really taking control of where their work wants to be going. And having a vision for it and figuring out a way to have it executed and delivered. And also being able to enjoy the rewards of taking that kind of risk, the same of how a developer might be doing so. So sit back, relax and enjoy space and matter. This podcast is produced by Business of Architecture, a leading business consultancy for architects and design professionals. This episode is sponsored by Smart practice, business of architectures flagship program to help you structure your firm for freedom, fulfillment, and financial profit. If you want access for our free training on how to do this, please visit smart practice method.com Or if you want to speak directly to one of our advisors about how we might be able to help you please follow the link in the information. But then, Ted, welcome to the Business of Architecture. Absolute pleasure to have you here. How are you both
good. Thank you, Ryan.
Honored to be here.
Excellent. So you guys are the founders of space and matter. You have got quite an interesting array of services. You kind of fall under the umbrella of mass planners, Vision planning circular error area development, a lot of high level strategic work that you were doing with with collaborators and other consultants, a lot of community and sustainably led initiatives. You guys were founded, when was it 2008 2009 2009? We started. Excellent. And you've got quite an extraordinary array of projects under your portfolio. And I think one of the things that we're going to dive a little bit deeper into as well, is this idea of the ecosystem. And the other kind of five businesses that have been, some of them have been co founded by you as well, or they completely separate entities.
No, we co founded most of them. Yeah, most of them. Yeah.
Excellent. Okay. And so we can talk a little bit about that, and that very unique business structure. So why don't we begin with how did the business start in the first place? What was the what was the impetus for actually founding the company?
Well, maybe it's nice to go back to when we started our studies in Delft, at least Martin and myself, we have another partner such as GloZell, but he's German. So he did not study in Delft. But at the first day of study, I was waiting in front of the, you know, the Faculty of Architecture. And then this guy approached me and he asked me, should we register here? And I go, Yeah, I think so. So we walked in together. And that guy was my time. So we really met at, like the first day of architecture in our lives. But after after graduating Martin, he graduated the year before myself and went to another to working at an architecture office. And I also started at one architecture, an office based in Amsterdam. And there I met Sasha, our other partner, and then one, one Christmas break, we thought session myself, why don't we just start a competition. And we did this, our whole Christmas was dedicated to pushing pushing for the competition entry. And in March of 2009, we heard that we won the competition. And we thought, well, let's just then start a company. And then I told my time, and maybe Metallian can tell us what he thought.
Yeah, exactly. Well, by the time I found out, like, okay, these guys are off the hook. And we have been drinking beers on Friday afternoons, and we should start a company someday, but which they you never know. And then for these guys, this was that the typical day in March 2009, which was actually at the brink of the economic crisis, and the Lehman Brothers, great times, etc, and the banking crisis. So I had a well paid job, but actually slept over it for one night, and I thought, I'll quit my job. I think this is the time, I also have to get myself off the hook and join the ride with these two guys get to know, Sasha as soon as possible, and already knowing cheered from the inside out. So that felt very comfortable. So it was actually the three of us starting this very adventurous ride in the midst of this financial crisis. Yeah.
And well, it's an interesting time to start a business. And for many people, it might seem like a terrible idea to start a business in 2008 2009. But actually, I have a suspicion that if you can start a business in 2008 2009, and survived for the first few years, then you've done the hard work of building up some, you know, well deserved resilience and business lessons. What was it like for those first few years? Obviously, you had this project that you were
Yeah, well, the project was actually so we won the competition. It was a competition about also, we had to make a fishing for 500, sustainable home somewhere in the Netherlands. But, and we actually got the price, we received it at the median income, so the largest real estate fair in Europe, I suppose. And whilst he and I were there with the two of us, and we saw that there were very little architects there, and it was only like real estate developers, investors and politicians and government people. And we thought, Well, where are the architects? Because we saw that this this meeting place was the place where decisions were made where the money was sort of flowing, right? And then we when we got back, we thought, well, we should maybe not start office together with other architects, but we should sort of understand how this real estate development world works. And the good thing about the competition was that we won 50k of prize money. So that also gave us a bit of runway for a year to do Just to find out if we could set up some, some stuff, so that there was sort of a comfortable starting position. But indeed, the financial crisis led us, you know, no one called us in those times that year. So we really had to come up with our own set of ideas and how to start up projects. And we're looking at how real estate developers initiate stuff. That is what we thought, the way to survive.
Well, this is a very interesting kind of proactive approach to business development, which I'm always very much excited when I hear architects and designers kind of doing this, rather than just waiting for projects to come. And often, many times when we wait for a project to come, somebody else has done a lot of the strategic thinking, and now your role as the architect, you've got to squeeze into some box that somebody else has been defined. So what were some of these insights that you were learning from the real estate world that kind of led you to, you know, take more initiative with starting projects?
Well, actually on starting framing the question and properly understanding what is the desire still there in society. And because developers kind of halted their development aspirations, investors were not really willing to invest anymore. Banks were like almost closing office, and not supporting property development anymore. But we were still facing lots of questions. And we had friends and friends of friends and babies were born here and there. So there's still the demand of relocating to a slightly larger house. So this housing demand was still there. And that actually led us to like, finding where the actual demand is in society, and then trying to frame these questions into potential briefings, which could eventually be a design briefing. And I think that's exactly what developers do and trying to grasp a certain demand and then frame that into a project definition and trying to solve that question by by yourself. And we are lucky enough to be skilled with a set of tools and creative language and visualization skills and imagination, and vision making, etc. So we started collecting those demands from our direct surroundings or direct personal networks and actually started translating these demands into potential projects. And one thing led to another was actually like almost unsolicited proposals that grew into fruition and became projects and that, and that was our business development strategy for the first few years, but it has determined a lot our DNA, which is still inside the company, and still should, trying to find the questions that are in our direct environments and coming from ourselves instead of waiting for a question to come at us.
So literally, kind of you're scouting around looking at different sites, visualizing potential and possibility for what could happen there, having an understanding of what you know, what the market demands, doing some preliminary design work and taking that work to other consultants, companies, organizations that could facilitate the building actually happening?
Well, I think one of the best examples and we actually all started that like was one of the first projects is to sweet hotel. It's a hotel in this little rich Guard Houses in Amsterdam. And we heard that the little houses were running fake and because the city would centralize the bridge, the you know, the technical system for it. So we thought that would be a really cool place to sleep, RIGHT TO to have to spend the night as a tourist or as someone from Amsterdam. So what we can do as architects is not just, you know, think of a great idea, but also translate it into something visual so that we can show people this is what we mean. And what we did with us with us little hotel rooms. We thought we we call them sweets, right as in hotel suites, but it's also like the candy in in, in the city, right? So because they're all very special. They were were built in a in a timeframe of 100 years so an old by pretty cool architects. So what we did was we translated all these houses into Kennedy together with a candy shop. And then we went with a box of candy to the elements to the municipality and ask them where they can we use these, these these fake and bridge houses to turn him into a hotel. And we also obviously needed a hotel operator for it. So we approached them and some guy that helped us with all the permitting and stuff. So you know that that was sort of getting everything together around an idea and around a sort of, well, yeah, identity and a nice nice visuals at Have a sort of package with everything you need to do it. And that is all, you know, that is taking initiative and tying everything together.
And we you know, so the people, how did you identify who would be the right people to take the projects to?
Yeah, indeed, in this case, it's the property owner. And because it was existing property, but running vacant, and then being able to transform that into a new function for the object to have a bright future again. So in first instance, and talking to the municipality to find out, can we obtain those rights to get the transformation going, and then finding a hotel operator who is like crazy enough, or who has a certain appetite to run this difficult operation? And because it's very high sympathy factor of wow, I can sleep in this unique object in the in the city of Amsterdam, surrounded by water, but it's a collection of 27 dispersed objects. And so from the operational point of view, it's a pain in the ass. So how do we target a hotel operator who is creative and unconventional and willing to set this up together with us? And that's where we actually found our partners from the seven new things. And they've realized some unique hotel concepts. And we just started the conversation, also showing the box with candies and showing the city map where these objects are located and then imagining, or actually sharing our narrative of our imagination, how cool would it be waking up in this location or waking up and that location, I go out for a coffee, because there is already a coffee shop in the neighborhood, I can pick up a rental bike there, I just go to the swimming pool that's already there. So we really imagined the direct neighborhood to be at your surface. And normally, a hotel wants to be all the surfaces inside the hotel, the restaurant, the swimming pool, and the coffee shop, etc. But we believe in the local context, that's your surface level, you just need a place to sleep in the middle of the urban jungle. And I actually went for it together with us. So yeah, we were lucky enough finding the right operator, and then things move forward. Yep.
And do you end up creating a, like a joint venture in these kinds of relationships? Or do you take a much more traditional role as architect designer, providing those kinds of services, it's
a combination, we opted in for setting up the business entity together, and in which we are still small percentage shareholder. But of course, I'm running a startup business in our first few years, we also needed to make sure we can get our invoices in on our time spent and the services provided to get that property paid. So it's a combination of both Yeah.
But it's also something that we learned along the way. So in another sort of business that we set up called we build homes, we did not set up a joint venture, and that is actually that eventually became a sort of a problem. So now if we have this new sort of concepts and ideas, we always try to really make an entity like a former entity and collaborate in the proper way. So with shareholder ship,
this is absolutely amazing. And it surprises me that more architects aren't doing this. Because it because it's really like, you know, I've spoken to lots of architects about this as an idea. And there's only a handful that have actually gone out and successfully done, what architects are actually very good at, which is being very propositional, ie you being able to find a site. Think of a brief for it, think of how that piece of city could be used, and then actually go and connect with the right sorts of people. Why do you think that this is a very challenging thing for lots of architects not that they end up not doing it? And what made it easy for you?
Well, I think it's part of our education, you know, you you also during university, we never were taught, you know about, about business development, or about real estate development. And those are things I think are crucial to learn. And it's kind of weird. So if, you know, if you would talk to a regular real estate developer as an architect, and then the real estate developer tells you, Well, if you find a nice side and have an idea, just come to me, and I'll help you, I'll give you a commission. So that is how, you know how we were also approached and but now we think you give us a commission. We share the profits of the whole development, right? Because that's where the profit is in eventually making the thing and selling it and not in a commission. So but it's something you Yeah, you need to at least we found out sort of how it works. And maybe that is also good to tell. When we set up our first office. It was we rented like a A little workspace at a real estate developers office. So it got to know these guys. And then one of the one of the juniors there, he left that real estate development started his own business. And then we started to collaborate. And he sort of led us in, in the development. And in that way, we sort of learned how project development works, how to set up, I don't know the English word, but you know, the your your costings and earning stuff. And the word, I think we needed that sort of collaboration to understand how it works, and to also set it up ourselves.
Yeah, I think it also has to do with what's the value proposition you can offer? And what is the surface fee, you're taught to ask for that. And it's lacking in, in education, that business modeling is not part of architectural education. And we do 3d modeling and visualization. But part of education should be about business modeling, and how to make your value proposition stand out from the rest and then question yourself is being paid by the hour, the best way of capitalizing on the value you provide, because we strongly believe in the amount of hours we spent, or the value we provide, sometimes is not determined by the amount of hours spent? No, it's much more valuable than that. So it also starts with respecting and understanding the value you have to offer. And are we capable of finding a sight detecting an empty building, getting the right to transform one of those empty buildings, that's already a very valuable position to start from, even if even before pictures still has to start?
Yeah, it's so interesting, actually, that those sorts of things become enormously valuable to a client. Or even for example, when you're working with developers and I spoken to many architects before who very, very simple premise, they might structure their fees in a way where they delay getting paid early on. And they negotiate kind of either an equity slice at the end, or a much, much higher fee, because they've got the ability to postpone their fees until they've got planning permission, for example. And, you know, there's no design involved in that. But it's very, very valuable to be able to do that for developer. And you can treble your fees, in some cases being able to do that's also an instrument. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's, that's really interesting, because when you start looking at the property world, the real estate world, it's very creative in the way that they structure deals, and being able to understand where the, as you say, where the value proposition is for the client, for the developer, like, Where are their pain points, but what are they really struggling with? And actually, it's not always a design solution, but rather a way that you're designing the way that you provide the service or in this case, you know, how you might be structuring?
How can we contribute to lowering the risk? How can we contribute to spending less less cash flow upfront and like understanding the way property development actually works, and then trained as creatives? We can also work with numbers, we can also work with cash flow schemes, as a creative you can also ask questions like, Why is it like this, and maybe a trained developer development professional might not ask these questions, but from an outside perspective, and with a creative questioning mind, we can we can find new financial models, which they would not have thought of, and I think also inquiry creativity in the business modeling in the development arena, comes at hand very, very valuably. Yeah.
So is this how that your service has kind of expanded then rather than just purely doing straight architecture that you move down to doing more strategic vision? Aspect type of work?
Yeah, well, actually, we so we were also asked by how we started the sort of more real estate or property development things were a bit of a coincidence that the city of Amsterdam was not able to get, you know, in the crisis times get the real big real estate developers eager to develop housing. So then the municipality decided to give plots out to citizens. We call that C POS. It's a sort of collective commissioning. And we managed to win some of those tenders. And we were then sort of guiding these groups of people. You know, we had a sort of collaborative design approach. We had our junior developer friends, helping out with that stuff. And together we were we were developing for those people. And that led us to understanding how this whole process
works. works? Well, I think you need them where the municipality flipped the way of like, like granting land to the people that still have the demand and which is the residents and developers were looking at the risk and the risk in their appetite was too high. But if we were still capable of clustering a group of future residents and actually do it on a DIY kind of level, which helped us to increase ambition while lowering the risk, and because you have your future residents already on board in a very early design stage, but for a normal developer, that would seem very labor intensive, we have Medine, how do I have to manage like 20 individuals and make sure that lands into a mosaic or a Tetris kind of configuration of individually designed apartments, that's a hell of a job? Well, indeed, it is labor intensive. But the fact is that for us, this is, this is the way we work, you know, it's a lot of fun, we can increase ambitions, we can make projects even more unique and stand out instead of 40 apartments of the same size and repetition is more leading instead of customization. So for us working with a group of individuals and making custom made work times 20, or times 40, that results in a very special collection of apartments in a unique building. So our work is way more fun. Yes, it is labor intensive. But if we get paid for the labor we do, we're also happy to, to be well paid for the fun work we do. And then the projects that come out, have a very unique way of standing out from the rest. And actually, that has helped us to understand, Okay, can we standardize this approach and this way of working to make it less labor intensive to actually make this way of working more smart? Can we actually start designing the tools, because if we have to change the design process, but the tools are not there, then we have to start designing the tools to help us still make it into a smooth process. And one thing that came out of this, and so these businesses, they grow organically. One platform that came out of this is crowd building, which is actually an online platform by which we aggregate people with similar or common denominators in their demand, and how can we actually facilitate the process of individual future residents find their future neighbors, even before the apartment block is there so actually build the community in order to have the community build their own housing block? And then the interesting fact that kicks in if you have a group of residents with a certain kind of common interest? Wow, how cool would it be if we could share a music studio? Oh, I'm fond of cooking. Okay, let's make a proper kitchen facility in the ground floor and have a cooking studio, which we can share. And as we build more social structure within the block, the residents are more happy, and the architecture that comes out is more unique. So drug building platform is now a tool that's revolving around the subject of build your own collective and will step in as soon as the collective and the group of future residents is strong enough and the demand is clear enough, then we can help you find the site to translate your demand into the future residents residency you imagine.
So let's let's talk a little bit about this ecosystem. And this is what the original question was actually was, was how the services have kind of evolved into what it is that you're doing now and kind of moving away from being straight, straight architecture. And so this ecosystem you've got, what is it five ventures that are that are part of the crowd building being one of them? Then you've got space and matter? Common city, which is your real estate arm? Is that correct? Yep. And then there's the boom builds, and then Summa Wallah? Yeah, just so boom builders, that kind of modular arm of it. And Summa Waller is to kind of nature, reservations on nature regulations. So do want to talk a little bit about how they have all the kind of genesis of all of them, if you like, and, and how do they interact with each other?
Yeah, that is what I wanted to say before. So while doing that those were guiding those groups towards their, you know, Dream recipe like buildings, we only got paid for the architecture, right? So we could only sort of give them the architecture bill. And then we thought, well, that's not smart, because we are also guiding the whole process. We are sort of developer for these groups. So we should have a separate entity in which we can offer the process and that is how that started. So we sort of split up our services. And eventually that is what common city is now well has become common city. So that is indeed the real estate development part. But also still does a lot of this this process. Coaching for for bottom up, community driven and let developments. And then well, crowd building isn't the platform in which in which we can get these communities inside and also create new opportunities. So that is sort of the aggregation and then split America and do the design capacity can do the development. And then obviously, we thought, well, we also need to build it. So that is where we're boom came in. But maybe Martin, you can tell a bit about how boom, yeah, exactly.
It's like organic growth, a new branch starts, as soon as we see the need that we need the new branch. And so if we already have the groups, and we have the process in place, and the design can be delivered by space, no matter, okay? Eventually, the project needs to be built in our ambitions. And we want to have this biobased transition happening rather faster and sooner. And we detected in a market that contractors were not always directly in for the appetite, okay, let's put it up in biobased materials and renewable materials. So we have to find out ourselves, like how to get the Bio Base building built. And we have to get into the insight of all of this. And then gaining a lot of knowledge on this, we actually emerge that into boom builds, which is the well yeah, the knowledge barrier, let's say, if we want to have a bio basic building built, we bring in our partners of boom builds, and they can help us translate, do cost, quotations, etc, to eventually get those designed buildings for the residents already in place. And the process properly managed, also translated into a renewable renewable materials building. And that's how that's directly how the four entities directly interact with each other. And so in the ideal situation is the four of them overlapping their circles and services.
And there's one bringing business for the other side. Sometimes you might be kind of front facing with the crowd building on a common city, for example, and then it ends up being, you know, it's become each one becomes a funnel for new work for the other services.
So you could say all four of them have a individual front door, but the back office and they are connected on their backsides. It does
so but the opportunities we generate with crowd building can be developed by common city who can commission space and matter to do the design work and eventually boom builds to organize the actual construction.
So there's, there's an enormous amount of risk in this. So as you know, how, how have you managed to manage your own risk? And then, for example, architects, becoming builders can notoriously be very, very difficult. How have you kind of mitigated your risks in the cloud? And how have you chosen the sorts of other people to be working with if you like,
well, actually, boom is not really a building a builder, it's not a contractor. But they they did, they have all the modular building systems that we did exist in the Netherlands inside, they understand them, and they translated them to sort of parametric model, in which they can very quickly see what sort of building method would fit a design best. So it is more sort of call or guide, or we call the technical developer, or
a right, okay, so they're kind of like a, like a menu.
Sort of, but it sort of helps you make the right decision.
And interesting ly enough, Ryan, you say there's a lot of apparently, there's a lot of risk involved. But I think what we tried to do is actually to minimize every potential risk involved. And, for example, having this community on board in a very early stage, which means your offset is already guaranteed in an early stage. So risk couldn't be less. On the other hand, if we make sure that common city as a developer, is governing the process and maybe pre finances some of that and has its name on the contracts and the contract with the municipality or contracts with future contractors, we are in control of that risk. The same as if we want to get this building built in bio based materials. We have to be involved because we're knowledgeable on this subject and getting down to it at the bottom of it, we can control the risk and actually minimize these risks. So yeah, obviously there is risk involved. But these entities help us to minimize this risk while realizing the emissions we have and Because indeed, as a impact driven business and a purpose driven business we aim for have very high ambitions, while mitigating all the risks coming at us. And I think that's a unique combination we have in house.
Yeah, I mean, you can see, it makes a lot of sense that actually having these different arms to the organization actually provides a lot of support and foundation. And, you know, there's multiple streams of revenue coming in. There's multiple avenues for business development and projects to be being realized, you've got a kind of vertically integrated suite of services as well, you can consider all things with a higher level of degree. And actually, it's kind of you know, when you think about it like that, then you start seeing that you start actually seeing how precarious and risky traditional architecture practices, which kind of comes back to the other question of like, why am Why are more people not doing this sort of initiative based? Structure?
Yeah, well, it takes an entrepreneurial spirit and thinking outside the box and a yes, we can approach and because there's always yes, of Yes, buts. And what if, and, and I think we are? Well, we have, we have a good appetite of doing business and a strong belief in, in our Yes, we can approach and sometimes it's a self fulfilling prophecy. And let's get this started. Not knowing what's around the corner, but we will find out along the way, and we will solve it along the way.
But what also triggered us to become sort of, you know, to take more initiative was also competition that we worked on for the library in Helsinki, a long time ago. But there were 550 entries. And we were we were chosen by the by the public as one of the top five winners. But eventually, only one could win. So then that means 549, iPad architecture officers have spent months to create that entry, which is a complete waste of time and work and effort and money. Yeah, we thought then what why are we? Why are we doing this? Right? So what if we would in this time, just start the initiative, we would have way more chances to make it a success. And if all the oldest 505 149 officers would have done it, you know, what you wish you could have managed? Then with the time spent, it's that there was a sort of mind switch for us?
Yeah, yeah. And I think even continuing on this critical assessment of what is the role of the architect, and what are those architects, and we're also architects, what are we doing? And what is the status quo we're keeping alive by contributing to these ridiculous competitions, you know, the amount of intellectual waste that ends up in the in the trash? Can we not flip that around and as architects and befriended architects and colleagues, architects, what have you would decide not to spend your time on a competition where chances are 90% of losing, if we can flip it the other way around, rather commit two months of your time and actually offer your time to design a ready made, and let's say, we've done this with, we build homes, and we're now also doing this with the boom builds proposition. So designing a generic apartment block, for example, for a market demand, which we seem to have a control over and which we see as relevant because we understand where the communities are and where the demand actually surfaces and through our club and platform. So even before the question for an apartment block pops up, we should have some ready made already predesigned models by multiple architects who spent two months of their time investing in this ready made, and then we can in reverse sell the architecture as a product instead of selling the process and the architecture comes out. Why not spending this amount of competition time in a ready made department block, and then finding the group and the location that fall in love with this prototype, and then only do 20% amendments afterward afterwards to make it fit. And then if this model works, you've spent your two month time what have we we are capable of replicating your ready made maybe four times maybe even six or seven times that introduces a new revenue model which is more likely to be compared with product designers and you'll get a licence fee or royalty for every time where we've been capable of selling your design. And we will ask you to do the amendments on on a fee basis. And so it starts with with a critical reflection on on the role and position we have and why are we not the first ones to change this position and actually flip the coin and change the game.
That's such a lovely that's such a lovely business. model to, you know, actually doing the upfront work. And then you're able to positioning yourself as you know, here's a product, here's something that's already got intellectual property, inbuilt into it. And it's easier to sell to a client, it can appear a lot less risky to the client, because they can see something you get to control the shots on it
seems seems very controlled. Very logical, right?
Yeah, again, it's, it's kind of like why why is this? Why not more?
Well, this is same question we have. And
in terms of, you know, the real estate aspects of being developers, are all your projects kind of crowd funded? Or do you use private or institutional finance as well, most of the Find and
find more and more and more, and by the time we grow bigger, projects get slightly bigger, we start to be relying a bit more on venture investments or financial loans. But in the first 10 years, it was mostly crowd funded, and we funded from the inside out from the direct demand, and the people becoming the future owners also chipping in along the way. But now we can speed up this process and by saying, okay, we can pay upfront the first 50% As long as you can commit and sign this intention or sign this pre sales agreement. And then we'll call upon your financial contribution in the second 50%. Which, which actually speeds up the development curve?
Has it has it? Does it make it easier? When, say, for example, you're putting a scheme of housing scheme through planning permission, for example, when there's multiple potential owners who are going to be living inside of the the housing block, as opposed to it being a completely private developer who's trying to squeeze, you know, the land for every little last drop of value that they can get out of it? Does that have any kind of political sway to it? Or?
Yeah, we think so. Yeah, you know, I always thought that it's way better to actually have the eventual end users or dwellers of a building, you know, also talking to the municipality in what they want. They vote for these people, right being in the municipality. So it's a different relationship. And especially, you know, we are based in Amsterdam, Amsterdam is obviously your city. But if we do these sort of projects, in the provinces, like outside Amsterdam, they are a bit, you know, like, what are these guys from Amsterdam doing here? Right. But if we don't manage to get a group, a local group, talking and being able to be in the, in the face of the group, or of the development, that's, that's a way better way of talking.
Fantastic, very, very interesting. How did you then because one of the most difficult aspects of this, I would imagine, is actually scaling it as an operation. And there's going to be a point where you three, you know, you had to get other people involved. And with other people, when you start getting other people involved, there's a whole new world of challenges and complications and team building. How many people are you now working with across these different organizations is different businesses,
especially manner, the architecture firm is always around 25. People with a bit of overhead in there. The boom built a team is now around eight, I think, the developer capacity, how many more times
for four people, staff, excluding ourselves.
And then the power building of craft building is still small, but we work with a lot of freelancers. And, you know, like, not developers, in the sense real estate developers, but digital developers. But there's like two, there's no two people in the core team.
And what were some of the challenges that you that you had to kind of overcome in terms of growing the the team if you like, and finding the right people, if anything? Well, on
the one hand, it's useful and to have these branches and independent branches, but still collaborating because they're on the same route. That makes it manageable as small nucleus, like we have smaller teams that are kind of self governing. And we give them the responsibility themselves. We also give them insights into the smaller p&l and how to make this business work and how can we realize our revenue or our turnover goals. And it's also what the staff members like and to really be on board within the venture itself. So we want to prevent that we are building a pyramid with management and coordination top down it's rather a horizontal structure with these independent teams. Strong really collaborating and finding the synergy on their back ends, and having their independent front ends. And I think that's a very 21st century model and how to actually grow a business by making sure you have smaller, smaller teams running as a business. But as a total, it's a bigger business. It's, well, that's the ecosystem approach.
Yeah, it's a kind of like network model. Business decentralized. Yeah, exactly.
But what I really like about, you know, people, and the recruitment is that a lot of people that want to work, space and matter are really going for sort of purpose, do they want to give a purpose to their work, and that's why they want to join us. So it's, that is pretty cool to see. But, but how we split it up now. So we have three partners, Martin, Sasha and myself, I am now running the space and matter architecture, business, and doing a little bit of the crowd building stuff, Martin is fully focused on the common city. So running that and Sasha is, is focusing on sort of new concepts. So creating the new business ventures. So in that sense, we, we split up the three of us, and we come together, obviously, multiple times a week to, you know, to have a picking, picking each other's minds. But that is how we set it up now, and Martin is doing recruitment for the, for the development part. So this is a different different breed of people that you need that that's new for us to
and and how would you describe the purpose of the organization and has that has it has it changed from the initial inception back in 2008?
I think it has not changed a lot. Like, if we look back to the look back at it, like the first project that this competition that we did was was all about, you know, also transforming in a very smart way agricultural land in the sense that the farmers could have multiple revenue models and maybe creating a community in in the, in the rural countryside. And I think, you know, this this sense of community and not building architecture for the architecture, but building architecture to really create a good society, that is still the purpose we have. And that is the you know, the proper society is both socially driven, but also obviously sustainably driven, environmentally driven. And that is what we tried to combine.
I want to add to that, and that we've become aware that our project scale is actually the neighborhood scale. And we can make one apartment block with close involvement with the future residents make it energy neutral energy, self sufficient, etc. But if we really want to make an environmental impact, and a social impact, or project should actually be governing a neighborhood scale, where we can also have principles of shared mobility kick in and smart grids on a neighborhood scale, and even decentralized sanitation. And that's like the economy of scale of these alternative systems to be picking in. Not on a project scale, but actually on a neighborhood scale. And let's say 200 residents, or 500 residents, which is a composition of multiple buildings, living working, and sometimes education and culture, and that on a neighborhood scale, we can really have decentralized systems kick in, and then they they become independent satellites, harvesting their own energy cleaning their own sewage water, potentially growing their own food supply, having a certain amount of electrical vehicles, which they share and servicing their own mobility, demand, etc. So that already goes beyond architecture. And going beyond the physical hardware. It also requires organizing the software and the organization of flows. And we like to contribute to the built environment as a circular built environment, because that's the transition where we are facing aren't the incorporation of the natural value values and making our cities rain proof and establishing them on the basis of renewable materials, etc. We can do that if we incorporate all these flows, and it's also what church refers to as the first project, which made them when that initial competition, I think it was a integral design approach on a neighborhood scale where all these facets have been touched upon and unlocked the potential of really showing that one plus one is three. Sometimes you can do it just on a project scale, but on a neighborhood scale, you can.
Amazing, so it sounds as well that actually the future of a lot of your business development might come from further collaboration or the kind of where you're at now. You could actually, you know, if you do ever have other other architecture practices, practices, for example, listening to what you guys have been doing, and then they've got an idea. And then they say, actually, well, it might be easier for us to collaborate with you guys, because you've already got the infrastructure set up. Does that happen? Or would that be the next step? Or?
Yeah, that happens a lot. And also the other way around, we also invite colleague architects to join us. So for example, with the ready mates concept in the boom builds approach, we've invited befriended architects to spend their two months of time on building this catalog of apartment blocks. And also the other way around, if, if they're working on an assignment for a client, and they feel they need, like our support in that, and we're bi directionally referring to each other's expertise and willing to join forces. Yeah. So we're very open for collaboration.
Fantastic. Love it. Have you done any work outside of outside of the Netherlands? Yeah.
Yeah, we we also really try to get more work outside of the Netherlands. But not a lot of builds work, I have to say. But we are we are now focusing on the US. In California, we are trying to set up some some new business collaborations. The Nordics, UK was also always on our list, but never managed to really, you know, we'll get something off the ground. But we are very Yeah, we think the Netherlands is a very nice and small country to sort of make the prototypes, right. So we have this floating neighborhood is really good for concepts, but scaling up and replicating the concept. I think our country is just too small. So that's why we are really looking for for places where we can replicate the floating neighborhood or replicate the urban food hop or replicate the summer wildlife sort of, you know, nature based concepts that might then be in the US or elsewhere.
Yeah, yeah, we believe in that Amsterdam is a city that works for us as a incubator and to test create and validate our ideas. But eventually, the Netherlands is too small, to really scale up and replicate what we have to offer to the world. And so indeed, we have a strong focus on the Nordics. Now, that seems to be very receptive. And similar cultures and strong economies also, pushing towards a more circular built environment, the sooner the better. Similar to California, which is very progressive, but also, let's open up the collaboration, invitation to listeners now listening to this podcast, please reach reach out to us and become part of our network. And let's, let's create circular neighborhoods together, wherever.
Fantastic, well, I will put all the details of how best for them to get in contact with you in the information of this podcast. So I think that's a perfect place to conclude the conversation really, really inspirational stuff there makes my hair stand on end hearing. You guys have been so sort of proactive and taking the initiative. And, you know, I really think that this is the future of how architecture practices should be structuring themselves. Because at the moment, there's, there's, there's a lot of complaint within the industry, but it's usually as a result of us always doing things the same way we've always been doing. And whereas actually, we have the skills and the talent and the know how to make the propositions of how the city should be be, you know, being created. And we can have, we can we can create the seat at the table ourselves, which is exactly what you guys have been doing. So thank you very much really brilliant thinking Ryan.
Thank you, Ryan, for inviting us.
And that's a wrap. And don't forget if you want to access your free training to learn how to structure your firm, or practice for freedom, fulfillment and profit, please visit smart practice method.com Or if you'd like to speak to one of our advisors directly follow the link in the information. The views expressed on this show by my guests do not represent those of the host and I make no representation, promise guarantee, pledge warranty, contract, bond or commitment except to help you the unstoppable
