435 Podcast: Southern Utah
Explore the heartbeat of Southern Utah with the 435 Podcast, your go-to source for all things local in Washington County. Stay ahead of the curve with our in-depth coverage, expert analysis, and captivating interviews. Whether you're a resident or visitor, our podcast is your key to unlocking the latest happenings and trends in St. George and the surrounding areas. Tune in now to stay informed and connected with our thriving community!
435 Podcast: Southern Utah
Building Economic Growth through Strategic Workspace Development
Have you ever wondered how remote employees cope with loneliness despite their freedom? Join us as we uncover the paradox of absolute freedom with our esteemed guests, Nick and Weston of Kiln. We'll delve into the importance of community and genuine human connections in combating the hidden struggles of remote work. We'll also share personal stories that shape our appreciation for community and hospitality, setting the stage for an engaging conversation on how Kiln's innovative coworking spaces aim to make a difference.
Hear firsthand from Wes and Nick, the director for Kiln's new St. George location, as they reveal the lesser-known aspects of the hospitality industry and the challenges of relocation on families. We'll explore Kiln's strategic expansion into St. George and the unique staffing model that supports local economic development, making it an attractive destination for tech businesses and startups.
Discover the dynamic growth of St. George, the benefits of Kiln memberships, and the company's thoughtful approach to creating community-centric workspaces. From fostering workplace loyalty and team collaboration to offering unique networking opportunities, Kiln is redefining the coworking experience. Tune in to learn about Kiln's upcoming expansion plans across the U.S. and how each location is uniquely curated to fit its community. This episode is packed with stories, insights, and a vision for the future of coworking spaces that you won't want to miss!
Check out Kiln Coworking Space webpage: www.kiln.com
Looking for a Real Estate expert? Find us here!
https://realestate435.kw.com/
Below are our wonderful friends!
Find FS Coffee here:
https://fscoffeecompany.com/
Find Tuacahn Amphitheater here:
https://www.tuacahn.org/
Find Blue Form Media here:
https://www.blueformmedia.com/
#Coworking #Podcast #EconomicDevelopment #435podcast #Hospitality #Community #southernutah #stgeorgeutah
[00:00:00] Intro.
[00:03:19] Luxury Hospitality and Community Connections.
[00:15:16] Kiln Expansion Into St George.
[00:21:03] St George Economic Development and Location.
[00:29:49] Kiln Size and Business Types.
[00:36:22] Kiln St George Community Engagement.
[00:47:13] Workplace Loyalty and Team Collaboration.
[00:56:10] Unique Networking Benefits at Kiln.
[01:01:52] Kiln Membership Benefits and Pricing.
[01:11:07] Kiln Expansion Plans Across US.
[01:17:30] Kiln Community Engagement and Growth.
So he found like a little mini community in Thailand that he could connect to, but he was depressed. He's talking about how he's like the quality of his life as a digital nomad and the absolute freedom made him depressed, and so it's. It's interesting because, um, what Arian picked up on was probably a lot of the conversations around a lot of those digital nomads thinking I need a community. But then there's also this other case study around the businesses, incubators and things like that. There's this other data set that's kind of pointing in that direction as well. So I just listened to that and I'm like that seems weird. He was so depressed, like that, but he was so willing to like express it and it points to that. Going back to community and hospitality, right, it's like you have to have people that you love and love you in your community.
Speaker 2:So I think it's such a cool idea. Oh man, I could talk about this forever. I think and this is my vision for like where I think Kiln is continually going to. But when they kind of flew me out and interviewed me, they're obviously just like with Nick and several other of our people are from hospitality. It's like they're excited about the idea of like, okay, luxury, kind of white glove service or and really premium service, how could you bring that in?
Speaker 2:And you know, as I looked around and thought about it, I I was like I don't think we're going to pamper people a ton within coworking and that's why they want to be there. Like, everyone likes to be pampered a little bit and it's good. But you're going to like a five-star resort and getting a massage once every once in a while. You're not doing that every day and if you were, it would lose its specialness anyway. It's like kids who grew up going to the four seasons every, like it's not that special to them because they're used to that their whole life, right From the blue form media studios.
Speaker 3:This is the four, three, five podcast the pulse of Southern Utah.
Speaker 1:Hey everybody, thanks for tuning in to another episode of the 435 Podcast. I'm your host, robert McFarland, and today we're going to get into the thrilling world of co-working spaces. Kiln International Company has picked St George, a 40,000 square foot building at River Crossing. But the whole story is actually very fascinating, so we hope you enjoy this episode. Sit down with Wes he's a regional director and Nick he's the director for the St George location. You're definitely going to want to meet these guys. Enjoy this episode. Thank you to our sponsors. We'll see you guys out there. So where'd you guys grow up? You grew up up North, so I'm from.
Speaker 3:Northern California. Northern California, that's right, that's right. Moved out here to go to school and play baseball out here, and oh yeah, that's right, that's right, I've just stayed. Yeah, it's a great place to be in, but yeah, living in Northern California great spot to be right outside of Lake Tahoe. So oh man.
Speaker 1:I asked my wife to marry me in Lake Tahoe. You're kidding. Yeah, she had no idea Her family was all there, not that anybody cares, but yeah, that's where I surprised her. Like Tahoe, we love Lake Tahoe.
Speaker 3:Oh, it's the best. Oh, it's the best. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 2:So, weston, where are you from? Texas, texas, suburb of Houston.
Speaker 1:Houston, nice man, yeah, in some ways I mean just like any big city, though right Like you know it's, it's, if it's a burb of something, right it. They kind of all blend together and there's some good things and some bad things yeah, hot and humid, a lot of bugs, but super nice people.
Speaker 2:good food, um yeah, you know you kind of love where you grow up. So yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:That was good, and your family's from there, no, actually my family's from there.
Speaker 2:No, actually my family's from California.
Speaker 1:Northern California is where your family's from. Is that what you said?
Speaker 2:Yeah, my dad's from the Bay Area, but my mom's from LA. Anyway, they moved to Texas for my dad's work and I was born, so I grew up there. Nice, yeah, it was good Back in the 80s.
Speaker 1:Born in 86. 87 here. Where are you at, Nick?
Speaker 3:97.
Speaker 1:97? You're my nephew's age. That's awesome, dude. Yeah, that's cool. It's funny thinking about where people move and like the years that they move there and like jobs and stuff in the 80s. Yeah, there's a lot of people moving from California to Texas in the 80s for a lot of different other reasons. So what brought you to? How'd you get to?
Speaker 2:St George, okay. Yeah, good question. You know, a lot of my family has lived at some point or another in Utah and we'd like take family trips out here. A lot of my older siblings went to school out here. I went to school out here. Where did you go to school? Uvu, okay.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:Cool, go Wolverines. Yeah, I studied hospitality management so I actually got into hotels, which Nick also did.
Speaker 1:I worked at.
Speaker 2:Southern Utah, at Amangiri, which is near Lake Powell.
Speaker 1:Crazy, that place is insane.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what's funny about it? Looking back, this was like 2013-ish. I was there a year and a half but we were newly married with one child, our daughter, and I was doing this purely for the resume, right. It's just like awesome experience, really cool place. I loved it, but long days my wife we lived in Page and she's just like newly. You know, we've been married like a little over a year. A little baby and she's just like. I just burned through every show on Netflix for a year and a half.
Speaker 1:There's a total of 10 families that live in this town and none of them have little kids, yeah, and there that live in this town and none of them have little kids. Yeah and uh, yeah, there's nothing to do.
Speaker 2:It was crazy, but I mean beautiful I. So I've always loved Southern Utah. For that reason.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, so Amagiri, I can't. I can't pass on Amagiri. So you worked there for a year in 2013.
Speaker 2:It was fairly new at that time, right. Yeah, I think I came once they'd been open a year. I was there a year and a half total. Um, it is unbelievable. I mean like it was it's cool to work in resorts and hotels and even with kiln. Like when you know everyone who comes in the doors is like pretty excited, right, like they're like they're amazed at the landscape there and that they were sold before they walked through the doors.
Speaker 1:They were like this place I know is going to be amazing and aman is cool because they don't really do any marketing.
Speaker 2:It. It's all like word of mouth, it's like super ultra lux. And so there's these people that have like talked to their friends who have been or they've looked at things online, but it's not like it's. There's some like kind of mystery there. Yeah, yeah, so they're like really curious of what it will be like.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I'm curious on the like, the management side of it, those first couple of years, because of that word of mouth thing, did it take a minute to get rolling, or was it you guys stayed busy from the jump?
Speaker 2:Good question, busy from the jump for the most part.
Speaker 1:Again, I wasn't there the first year, but I think it was like those two years. Like even most startups you just think of, like any startup business, it takes time to like catch on right. It's not like instantly word of mouth spreads and you're, you're blowing up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this is probably like location number 20 for them or something like that oh really for the resort based out of phuket, thailand.
Speaker 1:So we went to. I went on my honeymoon in phuket, jeez tahoe phuket you are well traveled I did nine countries. I backpacked europe too after college, so I've been all over europe too, too. Wow, I sidebarred you. Sorry about that. It's a great sidebar.
Speaker 2:No, you know, what's funny is people who've gone to multiple Amman resorts they kind of have labeled themselves and now internally at the company they go with it. They call them Amman junkies. And so you know, at any like ultra luxury resort or hotel, you have kind of like a sheet every day, a status sheet or something that shows all the guest information People who are coming in that day, yeah, people who are in their middle of the trip called a stay over or who are departing. But you got all these profile notes on them and there was a section under every name of how many different Amman resorts they've been to. So when you had someone that stayed at like 27 different ones and had all these like labels, you're like geez, because there was in minimum of 1400 a night when I was there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know Right now. I think it's like three grand now or something like that, Right.
Speaker 3:I think yeah.
Speaker 1:Or more. I mean again if it's three a night or five a night, whoever can afford that doesn't care. Yeah Right, is that probably true, very true, yeah. So the descriptions I want to know more about the descriptions. We're not into killing yet. Did they have, like, how many kids they have? Did they have like personal profiles on them too, especially like that guy 27,. Like resorts, the resort staff gets to know this guy, this person, woman or man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think the goal is like if they've never been to Amman, giri right, they all have a different suffix. So Amman means peaceful, and then Giri meant mountain Okay, still does in sanskrit um. So we, we would like to say that even if they had never been to amangiri, we should know as much about them as the one that they stayed at in france or wherever. But it's all incumbent upon or dependent on those team members.
Speaker 2:they are putting the notes in, obviously, right, yeah yeah, but you're looking for anything like oh, I notice that this is what the drink they order every time, right whenever they go to eat or um, you find out an anniversary or a birthday or the name of the dog, you're just trying to put anything in there that'll be relevant and just even if it was something really small. If you show up across the world and they're like, oh, how's your dog Buster doing? They're like blown away Right. So it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:So hospitality, I mean, those are like some fundamental things. So, you know, thinking of Amman as a brand and Kiln as a brand, you know it sounds to me like co-working space. You know, when you think of WeWork, they were around this brand of kind of like you're going to get a ton of stuff, and they were onto the right idea, like the design of the office space, the features and things like that. They were onto something, but then they had a poor business model going into it and I think most people are kind of familiar with we work because they had, like the netflix isn't there like a movie or documentary about them? So but but applying that luxury feel, that almond geary experience to office working space, that it's almost like it's needed because you're building business relationships with the people that are in these, these locations Right, absolutely yeah, and so for you as a staff, is that kind of like a a pinned high point here? It's like this is a hospitality business and we also rent office spaces.
Speaker 2:Is that right? Yeah, do you have any thoughts? I have some, but I'll look at you first.
Speaker 3:No, no, you're hitting it.
Speaker 1:I cut Nick out of that conversation.
Speaker 3:No, no, no, You're fine. Yeah, he couldn't hear you. Yeah, I'm going, I'm going deaf, so no, uh, hospitality is really what we do, we.
Speaker 3:We sell office space but it's the, it's the community thing as a hotel where you see somebody walk through the door and you know their name, you know their kids, you're asking questions on how their life is going, versus strictly about business and that's that's a business model that works, and that's a business model that kind of takes after, versus the, the competitors, where it's business first and you can kind of see the shift in how people react to that, where people would prefer to have a personal connection to the person that they're going to see every single day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, what's cool about hotels that Nick would probably say the same as like getting to know these people that come stay, but oftentimes they're staying one night, you know, maybe four or five at the most, usually unless you had an extended stay property. But like here, you know, if Robert has an office, I'm going to see you every day for years theoretically Right, and so we're going to get to know you and experience those ups and downs with you. Like you just hired your first team member, got your first customer, you just raised a huge series round. You had to lay off someone.
Speaker 1:Like or you're downsizing into that kind of a space, right when I had an office space, and now I'm having to shrink to this space and figure out, as a business owner, how do I do that functionally?
Speaker 2:Yes, I was just talking to Peter West. He's a CEO and co-founder of Quality, really cool company up in our Lehigh kiln and they are great. But like just, they are really smart guys. They've used AI in their company but they've totally pivoted all since they raised their funding. And just hearing like all he's done and being able to see that they're going to like, um, you know conferences and stuff. So you just have these conversations with members and you just you just root for them and you just you love that. You get to be a part of that and it's not just over in a couple of days.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's such a cool idea and it's it's a totally modern like setup. It's like we are set up to evolve to this kind of like a work environment. And, um, nick and I, we were talking about amazon, how they're calling a bunch of people back, so it's it's almost like it's just a reorganization of the industry once again. We did it in 2020 and now we're doing it again right four years later. Uh, but the we workspace idea, the kiln idea because kiln goes back a long way as well that idea is, for sure, going to make it through any of that readjustment. So there's a space for that uncertain, you know, without a doubt. And then there's a bunch of businesses calling people back. How have you guys kind of looked at that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, looked at that. Yeah, uh, I mean you can see kind of history repeating itself right now a little bit with with amazon and with these big companies bringing people out of remote and into the office and where we had to adjust is making it flexible for people, and so the kiln model is is making it a flexible workspace so that you can have funding one month and not the next month and it's you have that peace of mind that you're not locked into somewhere for three to five years, if that makes sense. And that's what people are looking for. They're looking for flexibility, whether or not they work remote or they work hybrid. Kiln offer is a place where you can do both.
Speaker 3:And it's a place where you can grow community and come in and work in a luxury environment that you feel like you're being taken care of at a large office space for for an Amazon or for an Intel or something like that. Yeah, but it's more intimate and flexible, which is really nice.
Speaker 1:That's cool. I want to take a step back, though. Let's go back to how did kiln start? When did it get into the industry? Maybe we'd get a little history on it. I don't know who wants to deal with that one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wish Arian were here. He's our co-founder and CEO. He's much better at telling the story. He's a great storyteller. One day, I want to meet him. I want to meet him. We'll bring him down.
Speaker 1:We could all go to Amangiri together. That's right.
Speaker 2:On Kiln yeah, on Kiln, yeah. So, arian, he was working for Barclays Bank, Lived in Barclays Bank. I lived in London, I believe, at the time, but they tasked him with kind of exploring and starting a co-working brand within their company. So, he and Lee, they opened ones in South Africa, london, dubai or, excuse me, mumbai.
Speaker 1:Amsterdam, did you tell me Netherlands, or there was one in like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm trying to think of all of them. This is a company called Rise.
Speaker 1:France, for sure.
Speaker 2:But yeah, they had one in Dubrovnik, I want to say, but at any rate they had one in New York, which I've been to, actually Cool space, and it's just really interesting. It was, like you said earlier, focused on fintech, but this idea of being able to have more community focus while you're at work and seeing what kind of creativity would happen. A lot of times you get, even in a really nice class, a office building. There's still a lot of siloed people and you know there is a time for deep work. No one's ever trying to say like you should never have alone time and never be heads down, but like I don't know who says that.
Speaker 1:If they say that, don't listen to that. Yeah, I know yeah, absolutely they're.
Speaker 2:Also, I think everyone recognizes the trends of like people are struggling with mental health more than they ever have. Right, the pandemic was super hard and more of us have like it's really cool to be able to have a home office, but, like, is it the best thing for us to always be there? Yeah, so this idea of coworking and what Arian is explored with Lee is like hybrid is here to stay. Board with Lee is like hybrid is here to stay. There's a lot of benefits in being together. There's a different type of work you can do and we're a lifestyle brand. That's how he wants it Like we want your life to feel better because you're at kiln, not just your bottom line, but we feel like we're accomplishing both for you.
Speaker 1:Something you said there really jumped out to me and I was listening to Lex Friedman, do you listen to?
Speaker 1:his podcast, Lex Friedman. He had this guy named Peter levels on and he is a digital nomad and he was one of the first digital nomads, like right out of college I think college or high school, maybe it was college yeah, Right out of MIT. He started just traveling the world and coding and creating stuff and he did this challenge where it was 12 businesses in 12 months and he was just coding, just creating software as a service type, you know, programs and seeing if people will buy them, and he's done 40 up until this point. But his journey is interesting because part and I'm bringing this back to something you said um, he was so lonely he thought this adventure like when you listen to him taking this adventure venture, traveling all over me, backpacking Europe or him, you know, living all over the globe for, you know, two weeks here, two weeks there, but he just goes to the cafe and he stayed in Thailand for a really long time because the community, like the people there in Thailand were super nice.
Speaker 1:So he found like a little mini community in Thailand that he could connect to, but he was depressed. He was talking about how he's like the quality of his life as a digital nomad and the absolute freedom made him depressed, and so it's interesting, because what Arian of pointing in that direction as well. So I just listened to that and I'm like that seems weird. He was so depressed like that, but he was so willing to like express it and it points to that. Going back to community and hospitality, right, it's like you have to have people that you love and love you in your community.
Speaker 2:So I think it's such a cool idea. Oh man, I could talk about this forever. I think and this is my vision for like where I think Kiln is continually going to. But you know, when they, when they kind of flew me out and interviewed me, they're they're obviously just like with Nick and several other of our people are from hospitality. It's like they're excited about the idea of like, okay, luxury, kind of white glove service and really premium service. How could you bring that in?
Speaker 2:And you know, as I looked around and thought about it, I was like I don't think we're going to pamper people a ton within coworking and that's why they want to be there. Like, everyone likes to be pampered a little bit and it's good. But you're going to like a five-star resort and getting a massage once every once in a while. You're not doing it every day and if you were, it would lose its specialness anyway. It's like kids who grew up going to the Four Seasons every, like it's not that special to them because they're used to that their whole life, right? So I'm like I don't. And plus, we don't have the team size.
Speaker 1:Well, the interesting thing, just another quick side working in an office where I've worked, in an office where everybody has to, we're all in the same, singularly focused mission, everybody knows that one person in the office that's like, oh man, they came into the door again and this is going to be 35 minutes and you want, you want to talk to them. What they have to say is important, you care about them, but there's it's overbearing Right of having, you know, that balance between we don't want kiln inserting themselves into our business, but they want to like fully in support mode, right, yes, yeah, we're very thoughtful in the design that way.
Speaker 2:Um, what I was going to say is just I think that what people, what makes people really happy, is when they feel like they're contributing to something, not just belonging, right, yeah, and um, I think people actually like to have a little bit of parameters, not total freedom and like something required of them Obviously not much. We're not going to go out in a marketing campaign and be like hey, come here because we're going to force you to mingle or something. But it's the best communities and they're all actually really good at this are the ones where members are hopping in. When they see one of us giving a tour and being like you got to be here, what's your name, I want to help you. That's awesome, because it's it's their community. We're just there to kind of support and facilitate it. We're not a five-star, you know resort where we're just like you go and kind of do your own thing and you're just relaxing and it's it's like this fine line of like what people really want and need and they want to be part of something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a cool idea. So the history he started it. He was working for Barclays, so then it. But it was kind of found. It was I said in the intro. It's founded here in Utah. So jumping forward to the St George location what was it about St George? That was like we want to put one of these world-class places in St George.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it's. I think it's just the vacancy of office space in St George. Uh, it's growing at a rapid rate and we see the all the people coming in from other states, moving to Southern Utah and if you look around and you, we don't have anything like kiln and we also have very low vacancy of office space office space too is like yeah, absolutely we're gonna all call it what it is exactly, and so I think we're minus one percent vacancy in saint george, which is just crazy.
Speaker 3:So if you need a space, good luck and so I think that was the pull of kiln in saint george is they saw the the rapid growth of southern ut.
Speaker 3:And also, there's not a lot of competition in Southern Utah. There is the WeWorks of the world, there's the Regis of the world. There's none of that down here, and so bringing Kiln which is, like Weston said, a lifestyle brand that really fits in with the culture here in Southern Utah, where we're outdoorsy, we granola-y, you could say even and also business-minded people are in St George and we're trying to build something like places like Tech Ridge and Atwood Innovation Plaza where we can keep big business in southern Utah instead of having them have to graduate to something else.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good thought. Yeah, you summarized that well. Did he miss anything on why St George? No, no, not a thing. What about the technology? You know we have tech Ridge that they're developing out. There is a kind of a spillover from the Silicon slopes up in Utah County down into here, but we've had a hard time retaining a lot of those, those people, for various reasons. Did you have? Was that into consideration at all? Cause, like maybe you're preemptive on what a wave that might still be coming or trying to fill a need to add to that, was that considered at all? I?
Speaker 3:think I think we've seen the history in St George of businesses starting here and outgrowing St George and and that's when we see them moving up to Salt Lake or down to Vegas, and so that absolutely was in consideration, because it's somewhere where you can grow and keep your business in Kiln, because we can host up to 50 employees and that's a pretty decent sized business and there isn't something like that here, and so that's what we're providing is a space that people can stay and build a big business. We obviously have the places like Bayesian and Zonos that are busting at the seams of their buildings, and so it's providing a larger space for these companies to stay in southern Utah, yeah, and not have to migrate up to Salt Lake or down to Vegas so that you can grow your business. And that's obviously what we're trying to build with our economic development here is keeping these big businesses and big names in St George, yeah.
Speaker 1:Speaking of economic development, have you guys been in conversations with the county and the different economic developers and things like that? Yeah, absolutely, they're all great. They're all so excited.
Speaker 2:It's cool to come down and be like, wow, absolutely, they're all great, yeah, they're all so excited, they. It's cool to come down and be like, wow, you guys have been working on this for years, like we're, we're the new guys are coming down just like able to benefit from all this and we just want to see how we can fit in and be a support.
Speaker 1:But it's like there's a lot of exciting stuff happening here elaborate on that, like what made you think that for for something, like what did when you didn't know coming in, what was said to you that gave you recognition of that right there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean over the years, you know, just having friends, uh, that have gone, come down here and gone to dixie or anything like that, and they've just, you know, mentioned it. So I've always thought like, oh, I hear st george is growing a lot. But then coming down and talking to chad, you know, economic development, um, and we, and we really liked Chad and gotten to connect with them, and he's like done economic development for other places. I've lived out in North Carolina and just kind of randomly up in Provo oh crazy, and just like seeing like there's people who have learned from different areas and then they've come back here and they're all implementing it. And when we met with, like, the mayor's office, we met with the County, they're all saying the same thing and they're complimenting each other and they're saying like, hey, you should talk to so-and-so, or they're doing this. It's not like, again, it's not all siloed. Everyone feels like they're they're working towards the same thing. Yeah, we call it Dixie spirit, that's the spirit there.
Speaker 1:It is Now, you know, very noticeable. It's very noticeable.
Speaker 3:It's, it's definitely down here, because you have people that we don't even ask to post things about us that are just posting on LinkedIn or on Instagram or on Facebook or commenting on a marketing ad that we post it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:We haven't done a whole lot of you know out of market stuff. It's a lot of. It's been word of mouth and also people posting about Kiln because they're so excited for the economic development and just the river crossing development in general. I know we've been trying to get that. I know you brought that up.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you brought that up, because it was a sidebar that I chose not to take as we were talking. It was that location. So back in 2019, we were moving offices Keller Williams Realty so I was running the KW office, so I kind of did a WeWork space for real estate agents. Like it was only real estate agents, right? So, like, thinking of what is a brokerage? What does a brokerage provide the agents? Right, there's obviously they have to have a brokerage to sell real estate. Some people might not know that, but the brokerage element is you got to hang your license under that brokerage and then that brokerage is going to promise you certain things. Right, they're going to provide services in, namely leads. Right, it's going to be the first thing. It's like we're going to help you get business. And then there's all these other fallouts, office space being one of them. So managing office space was always like such a weird dynamic for real estate agents, cause some of them see zero value in it. Like me, like I 'll work from a car, like I'll just work in my truck or I'll go to a cafe, or I literally can work anywhere on the fly. I don't have to have an office space, but that like isolated quiet. Nobody bugged me time, it's hard to get because you're so I'm always talking to somebody, right? And so, um, back to that location. We were moving offices cause we got out of our lease Keller Williams and we were looking for office space and I'm like that's the spot. It's vacant, like we need a building right there. We need to build a building right there, and it's just such a big project to build building right, you guys are watching this happen all the time and we didn't have enough time, like truthfully, like we had about a year lead on knowing whether what we were going to decide to do and a year wasn't enough and it was right. And if, if we would have to, covid would have happened like right in the middle of it, and it would have been a total disaster. And so in 2020 is when we moved office spaces.
Speaker 1:But the whole time I'm looking around the County. Where would I put a real estate office If it's not right on the freeway? That was it. River crossing Cause it's like the suburban, it's like the bridge between all of the businesses and the commercial stuff and on the edge of all the suburbia, right. So it's almost like your first stop in to town from the suburb of St George instead of Houston, right? So yeah, it's such a perfect location. So that site you said you had a hard time getting in.
Speaker 3:Well, walk me through, like how you guys know that, no, just just living here for a while, while I know that site's been trying to get up and running for years, and it's just taken so long and so long, and I don't.
Speaker 1:Do you have any insight as to why?
Speaker 3:from what I'm, from.
Speaker 1:My understanding is you don't have to blow anybody up yeah, it was sold.
Speaker 3:It was sold finally, and that's when the development started to take shape. Um, and just getting people in that actually would work in that space as well. Like we're gonna have uh sprouts farmers market, we're gonna have kiln, we're gonna have a bunch of restaurants and and it's gonna be.
Speaker 1:Starbucks is already. Starbucks is open, mcdonald's is pop eyes across the street exactly, and so the finally it's starting to end multiple banks in there, actually.
Speaker 3:So we're Big Maverick, that's what I hear, big Maverick.
Speaker 1:That's what I hear, big Maverick, across the street.
Speaker 3:Yeah, big Maverick, yeah, right, but no, it's just taken so long to get that development off the ground. But it's such a prime time location, especially on River Road, especially on south river road, where highly needed. You have to go that way to get to your home and so you're going to cross the kiln, branding that whatever's in river crossing every single day. Like when I got hired, I think I told weston I'd driven by that building a hundred times. I had no idea what it was, had no idea what was going in there.
Speaker 3:I thought it was the grocery store yeah then I found out that it was kiln and I'm like, wow, I literally drive by that every single day, so it's just such a great spot to be in and river crossing Like. Like I said, it's taken a while to get up off the ground, but now that it is, I think that we're going to see a lot of hub spot going there.
Speaker 1:Well then you got the road. You might not even know the road that's going to connect. So like as, uh, george washington, I think it's what they call it now yeah, but as that goes out across down the virgin to connect in with the freeway there, I mean it's just, it's going to just keep getting better, so it's like that's great. If somebody hasn't signed up for kiln and they're looking for co-workers space, they have to come check it out truthfully, because you, you're going to miss the window. Yeah, it's going to be full, and then it'll be always full. That's the plan.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's the plan.
Speaker 2:That's great. I mean, it's good to hear validation of the spot that was chosen, and neither one of us can take credit for that. But Arian and Brighton and our team did a great job. They nailed it. You know, this is interesting. One of the strategies of Kiln in general is we don't really build in urban areas, and there's a reason for that most co-working, if you look at, we work and they're all. There's some great companies that do it, but they're like rushing to get to these big cities because there's just such a huge addressable market, right. But but we're thinking that hybrid work is going to be more and more here to stay, and people live outside of the city oftentimes and and more and more moving outside, and so it's like it's going to be a lot more convenient for them to go somewhere that's 10 minutes from their house rather than having to drive into the city every day. Right, and so we're.
Speaker 1:obviously we're still in bigger areas, but, like we're, we're not in LA or New York right now proper, and I don't know if we will at some point but, like I think we're have growth there, right, Because if you go to those big cities, a full space is still a full space and so, like as you, this is 40,000 square feet, this office. Where does that rank on size to the other killing locations?
Speaker 2:It's about average, maybe slightly above average now, slightly above. Yeah. Yeah, I mean our biggest is 80,000 in Lehigh, which we'll probably never do that big again. Um, yeah it's working well there. But I think a lot of places it's probably a little bit bigger. Um. But then we have, you know, some in North County, san Diego. There are like 5,000 square feet each Um. Those were takeover of a you know an existing uh coworking company there. But 30 to 40 is kind of the average going forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah is kind of the average going forward. Yeah, yeah, and that's the other thing, too is when you're testing out this idea, when you're running the business model out slowly and methodically, versus the WeWork where they're like just buy everything, just rent anything and then we're gonna make a premium on it, right, they just totally they miss the tenant improvements and the cost of, like, remodeling a lot of these places. The math didn't math from the beginning, right, and so when you look at the model that's doing it the right way, it seems like this is like the progress growth. And then you're agile because now you can. You can shift things as we see these markets change. Right, it changed in 2020 and then it's changing again 2024. So I think it's a, it's a smart business model which I'm excited about, because the first thing I thought was like 40,000 square feet. I don't know if they're going to be able to fill that up, right, it kind of made me nervous.
Speaker 3:It's like you said how many, how many businesses we can house up to.
Speaker 1:Well, I guess maybe not businesses, but like I guess offices yeah About 100, 120, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting because you know we'll have a lot of club members. That's one of the most popular options, which is more entry level.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, I keep forgetting about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, we don't, like Nick said, like we don't sell office space, we sell memberships to a community and you get access to any kiln and there's. We use a lot of space that could be considered. Treat it as like nice sitting areas or a podcast studio or a lot of meeting rooms.
Speaker 1:I know a really great podcast production company that could help businesses. We've talked about it rather than yay, blue form media for you in the house. But and that was another thing, right that that was a highlight of of the intro, right Is that podcasts like those, that's like an amenity that is is powerful, which is why we're all doing a podcast right now. That's right exactly so. Um man, what else was I gonna? I was gonna ask you something else.
Speaker 3:I got sidetracked well, if we're talking if we're talking about the build of kiln something really unique about st george's it's actually the second ground up build that kiln has ever done.
Speaker 3:Normally we take over old retail space or park city's a bowling, an old bowling alley, right, and we we innovate that into an office space.
Speaker 3:Kiln st george is going to be the second ground up building that they that kiln has done and the first one in provo, and so we're we're lucky that we get to learn from provo and and figure out what works and what doesn't, obviously. But also it's super cool to see the vision of Lee's mind come into his own building versus taking over a space, and so everything that's in these ground up kilns is coming straight from his brain and exactly what he thinks works. And so we're really lucky to be able to build up versus take over a space, and you can see, if you've ever been to La Prova location, it's beautiful and it's so well thought out where the community space is actually usable, where we can sell these club memberships, that people can just have access to these spaces, and also the amount of meeting rooms that we're going to have is also super valuable to a real estate place, like, like you were talking about where it's like hey, does this have value for me?
Speaker 3:It it does, because you can bring clients into a beautiful, beautiful space at a club membership type pricing where you're not having a massive office space where you're, you don't really feel the the, the benefit and the and the uh return on your investment. You know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and there only should be so many real estate offices in prime real commercial spaces. I feel like if I was, if I could do a ordinance change, I'd be like no more real estate agent offices on main highways, we can't add anymore. Okay, if you're in a main road you can't be a real estate business, because we need, like, retail shops, and you know we need those spaces too. Real estate just ends up filling in the gaps when another business doesn't take its place. But this is going to be a great option for real estate, for sure. Absolutely. What other businesses? That was one of the questions. What, what, what do you see is the types of businesses that normally take over a kiln space?
Speaker 2:yeah yeah, I would say I'll speak generally to it and I would love to hear nick's thoughts thoughts on more on what he's seen as talking to the community here and what St George would be like. I think when we first modeled it out, it was like this expectation of 75% like tech startups essentially. And you know, if you go to Lehigh or some of these places, I think that's probably pretty accurate.
Speaker 1:And that's based off club membership or like that would actually.
Speaker 2:Everything. Okay, yeah, everything off club membership or like that would actually everything. Okay, yeah, everything. And um, you know it's it's pretty true in a lot of areas, but, like lately we've been seeing more balance. You'll have professional services companies coming in right or you'll have like insurance brokerages or different things, and I think it's good, I think it's it's fun to have other tech startups around each other and they can like be like oh, how's this going? I heard you just raised, but also like um, they're they're pretty stressed out founders and teams, and like it's nice to have some other people a little more steady and just at a different stage and can all kind of like help each other. Um, and and you know it's cool to have an attorney in there who's like these startups like what do I do? I have this problem. They can just go sit down and talk. So it's, it's going turning out more balanced. What do you think specifically about St George, nick?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, we're definitely seeing the tech, obviously, because that's a big focus of St George right now is to bring tech down to Southern Utah. So we're seeing a lot of that. But we're also seeing the insurance. We're seeing the, the real, the real estate agents. That's a really big one. That I've been keen on focusing on is why not, you know, why not have a nice place to come and meet clients? And so we just joined the board of realtors. Um, and so we're, we're uh, what is it? A host with them.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like affiliate, affiliate yeah, so we're affiliated with the board of realtors now, which is really cool. And then also, wellness is going to be something completely different than any location, because, shoot, on our first tour it was four or five wellness professionals that either teach yoga or, uh, plan hikes, or vacation wise, where they curate vacations for people that come down to Southern Utah. And here's the hikes you need to go on.
Speaker 3:Here's the here's the reservoir you need to hit, and so I think we're going to see a lot of the wellness side of that as well in that's in our, in our spot.
Speaker 1:Who was? There was a couple on the tour I went on. I don't know if you remember she was pregnant and they had toured the Provo office before. Who was? What was that business Do?
Speaker 3:you remember, oh shoot, processing company, I believe. Is that what you're talking about? Oh, I think that's right, that's right. And she was like oh, it's going to be just like Provo.
Speaker 1:She sounded so excited I just standing next to her I was like, oh yeah she, she walked through the Provo one and she can see cause we're just, it was just wood and concrete and like you could, you had a really vision.
Speaker 3:We're trying to paint that for everybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so, uh, she was so excited and I was like oh man, she sold.
Speaker 3:You're like, she definitely goes, and we're really lucky to have Provo as a as like a key for us. It's not too far away too. Yeah, exactly, and it's like if you're going up there, just stop by. People will give you a tour of the Provo office. But also we have pictures and video of that office that is going to look very, very similar to ours, so we can go on these tours and show you what it's going to look like right now and then have photos of what it's going to look like when it's done, which is really cool, and it gives more of a perspective for people to get excited, because there's only so much we can do on a tour to get people excited and paint a picture and how creative someone's mind can be. But yeah, it was. I remember her saying that actually, and it was. It was cool because it kind of elevated the group a little bit.
Speaker 1:Cause they were like.
Speaker 3:Oh, you've been there, you've seen this, and it helps them paint the picture for us as well. But yeah, those are the kind of people we're looking for right now, and then also just startup businesses is what we're really looking for, because if you can grow in St George, you'll stay. There's no reason to leave because it's such a beautiful place to live. The weather's great 80% of the time and it's a great community that we have and all these events that I've been going to and all these people that I've been talking to.
Speaker 1:it's I know I feel like I've seen you in a bunch of places lately.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I've kind of been all over the place that's good, dude. Then you're doing the right thing yeah, and so it's been really nice to kind of like get people's perspective on what kiln's going to be and just the excitement around it is something that we're us and the team down here and also the team and headquarters is. They're really excited about the location in St George and how how they picked it, where they picked it and the type of people that we're going to bring in.
Speaker 1:So we do have a good percentage of listeners that are up in the Salt Lake area, Right, and so you know, thinking about the different locations there, how many you have Lehigh you have Provo, lehigh Provo, provo, park city, park city, salt lake.
Speaker 1:That's in the gateway, um, and then holiday location coming soon, um, which is gonna be really cool, um so in any of those locations, right, if you wanted to stop by and see you say you would say the provo one's gonna be the most like the one here it's a new replica, copy and paste of what we're going to have down so.
Speaker 1:So if, let's say there's, you have somebody that's got a club membership up there and they're thinking, maybe I don't want to live in salt lake or park city, I want to go where it's warmer, right, they could come down here, and then they still basically could pick up their club membership and just keep running right.
Speaker 3:Exactly, and that's kind of the one of the perks of kiln is is you have access to every kiln. Whether you're in San Diego, whether you're in Boise, idaho, portland, oregon, you can go to any location and work out of it. And so, just signing up for a club membership, you have access into all these locations and also 24 hour access, which we'll staff it majority of the day. But if you have an idea at 10, 10 o'clock at night and you need to go, just go jot down some stuff, you have access to kiln. You can go in and work out.
Speaker 3:And there's a little gym and there's a little gym that you can book out.
Speaker 1:You can book it out, you know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's really cool.
Speaker 1:Can you book it out at like 1130? At night, you can book it out, so let's walk through the staff, so staffing.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know I'm a business. I want to sign up. Who's there to do what Like if I, who like, introduced me to the team?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and we're going to be pretty unique down here in St George versus the traditional kiln model, because we have a need for events down here. There's not a lot of event space that can host people, and so we'll have myself black desert will cover a lot of that, luckily. Yeah, they will, they will and so we're actually working with black desert on taking on their smaller stuff that they yeah, it's not worth their their setup and all that space.
Speaker 1:yeah, or spillage right where it's like I got somebody it's wants the space at the same time. Can I toss them over here? Exactly?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we're partnering with them on a lot of those kind of things. But yeah, so we'll have myself as the director down here in St George. I'll be kind of leading the community, leading the staff, and then under me will be a what we call a member success manager, and that's technically what our sales manager is going to be. So they're going to be in charge of the accounts. They're going to be in charge of bringing members in, doing tours and just kind of maintaining the sales pipeline. And then on the other side we'll have the event staff, and so we call them the member experience managers, and so they're going to be taking a big part of hosting the networking events, hosting the luncheons that we're going to be doing, bringing in outside events to our theater room, our atrium places that people can meet and network, and that's going to be their main job. And I think that's going to be such a huge part of St George because everybody that I've talked to wants to host an event at Kiln. It's just such a beautiful space. We don't have a really a theater type area in St George where you can host a presentation with a theater space, and so they'll have a couple of people under them just working, part-time working, help running events, and then we'll have to do a movie night where I like, invite my past clients
Speaker 2:and it's like a private movie theater. That has been done. Also, setting up like this. Jeremy larkin is not allowed to.
Speaker 1:You cannot allow jeremy larkin to use that idea. He's the only one excluded from this idea as I had it. Jeremy larkin yeah, he. He's never going to listen to this, but he'll hear that I said this Right, so I know that for sure. He can't use it.
Speaker 3:The Provo location was like streaming the Olympics, like it's. It's just like a cool space that can be used for pretty much anything, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Arian said something interesting recently in a meeting and he's like I don't want to see any kiln logos inside a kiln. You know like, typically you'll see it like hey, there's an opportunity to brand like dry erase board markers and stuff like that and it's just like kind of a nice touch. But he's like this is the member spot, it's not ours, and that theater and that meeting room is there to make you look good. Yeah, Not us, yeah. And so, yeah, having this experienced team is there to think and put ourselves, put themselves in your shoes and say like, hey, if you're doing an interview today or bringing in a prospective employee, whatever or client like what would make you look good, We'll kind of act as a receptionist for you at the front desk a little bit and offer water and go get you. But we really wanted to feel like this is the member space.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Actually, that does, and and the really cool part about it, which is completely different from me, is when I interviewed none of our staff is going to have an office, so we're out in the community the entire time, yeah, and so you'll have complete access to us, which is something extremely unique and what I'm not going to be used to until we get rolling, but it's. I think it's such a cool concept of not having an office and it just kind of shows how Kiln operates a little bit, where it's mobile work, right, like we're not just sitting down in our office and you don't have access to us, and so that's going to be really cool, I think, for people and for our members to see is our staff is going to be out in the community space constantly and you'll have access to us.
Speaker 1:So it was you, it was the sales manager and then the experience manager. Access to us. So it was you, it was the sales manager, and then the experience manager. Experience manager yep, and then you're kind of filling the other, you're, you're filling for all those three roles as well, right, kind of jack of all trades. Yeah, that's right so that's good man yeah you picked a good guy oh, we're so happy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, we love nick. I think um probably have a couple part time people on that experience team. He might have said this, but, like you know, when you have people who are so many talented like college age students here or just out of college who love, to help serve people.
Speaker 1:Internships, like could be an easy like yeah, click it. You want to do an internship? Click here. Here's the process and this is what I need you to do, right? And then you get to learn from all these businesses and intern, right, that could be a great function.
Speaker 2:Amazing, I mean the connections you get just being serving these members. They're, they're going to undoubtedly be like people like hey, come work for me.
Speaker 1:You know, because he's and one of the biggest challenges we have, and I hear this movement towards, you know, servicing the local community for that. But what ended up happening is people would go there and then they'd leave St George because they couldn't stay here. Our town was gone, you know, the town didn't have enough housing, basically from Jump Street, and our population of 50 years and older is outpacing our younger generation, right. And so, like this is a function you know, you get the college to the, you know, internship to the small business that's kiln, and they can see these businesses operate in ways they might not have ever really even known existed, right.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Or just see this is a track record of success and I have a live in-person example of it. You know what I mean. It'd be such a cool function.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe we do do internships in these college towns that we're already in, so in Provo and in Salt Lake, where people from the U or BYU can go and do internships with Kiln, and we're really looking forward to doing that with Utah Tech and Dixie Tech and kind of creating that pipeline to keep talent in St George. That's the whole point is creating talent and keeping it in St George, and so we're looking forward to working with Utah Tech on that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 2:I had something that just kind of shifts it, but I wanted to kind of point this out.
Speaker 2:One of Nick's main objectives as he and his sales manager that he'll be hiring will be touring people is to switch their view of like office space or anything from oh, this is an expense line on my P&L, I have to go have a place to work. How much did I budget? We're not looking at it that way at all. We are trying to say like, offensively, it's like as a tech company, especially, 90%, roughly, of your expenses as a tech company are your people. You You're hiring programmers, you're hiring all these people to go out and sell Right, and so it's like, if this is 90% of what you're spending money on, how are you going to best ensure that they're getting the best work done? Yeah, cause, like we've all ourselves and worked for teams and companies where you're like there are people that are not like firing on all cylinders, right, they're not like doing anything wrong, where they're not like getting fired, but like what do you think that spectrum is of? Like the best?
Speaker 1:people. Not firing on all cylinders is the best like that's the best way to describe it, bro.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like I just I just sometimes look around and I'm like you have hired these people, you're paying them X amount. They're crucial, obviously, otherwise you wouldn't pay them that. But like, how much do you think you're getting out of them? Are you getting 70% of their best work or getting 80, you're getting 90? And what does that jump? If they're doing 70% of their best work, how much money can they bring? The bottom line? And if they jumped up to 90%, how much would that change the bottom line?
Speaker 2:And you can see when founders or team leaders are thinking that way and they're coming in and they're like my team's going to be excited to come into work every day. They're going to be proud of it. There there's natural light, here there's plants, there's like so much going on, but they can just do 10% better work. That far justifies, uh, the amount of expense of having a you know, a membership at kiln or an office. And then also, just like you know, loyalty is built by being together as a team.
Speaker 2:If you have a fully remote team, they might love it and they appreciate that they can work remotely, but you don't know when they're trying to get someone's trying to poach them and they're doing these other interviews, they don't feel a lot of that same like loyalty to you because they've never really been around you, right, yeah, and so there's so many things that happen that are good. When I'm, when a founder or a team leader is thinking, how do I invest in my biggest investment? Yeah, and that's what we're aiming to be a support for, not just oh, you need a real estate line on your, on your P&L, like somewhere to work. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's that's such an interesting perspective because it's it really is high level thinking, because it's a fundamental business principle that we've learned hundreds of years ago, right, and it's just a new generation of business owners that are trying to figure that out and understand how that works. And it's also evolving because of technology. What it looked like in the manufacturing era of the industry, or agricultural or whatever it might have been, when you were trying to build a business, the relationships with the people that you saw or had the best experience with were the ones you stuck with. That builds that loyalty is all those experiences, and so you know it's just looks different. Just looks different today than it is 100 years ago or whatever.
Speaker 2:I had a team leader come up to me recently and he was like he's at Kiln Lehigh and really smart, cool guy. Like he's at Kiln Lehigh and really smart, cool guy and he was saying that they had spent like two weeks on this conflict with their remote team like trying to figure this out. He comes in but not all of his team does every day and finally he just said you know what? Everyone was having a Zoom call after Zoom call trying to figure it out. He's like everyone show up at Kiln Lehigh on Friday we're going to meet. He's like 20 minutes into it it was solved.
Speaker 1:That's funny, that was a Elon Musk that dramatic. It was like a 3 am 3 am On like a Sunday or something like that. It was some crazy. He tweets out every employee of Twitter must be at the headquarters by like 8 am or something like that.
Speaker 1:Everybody needs to get here right now and he fired everybody who didn't show up crazy because he was like our problem is that everybody's on their own, siloed, you know, uh island, and they only care about their thing. They don't care about anybody else's team. And he's like the sinks, the ship is sinking. Everybody, get here now and we'll solve the problem. And so we don't sink. And they didn't sink.
Speaker 2:It's crazy yeah, it's interesting to hear. I would love to be like a fly on the wall in those meetings and I think we do do it with ours, I think uh, the Isaac.
Speaker 1:his latest uh biography was written by a guy, just his newest one. He was along for the ride. So in that book it covers a lot of like the internal, like conversations, like what happened during that Twitter takeover. It's pretty fascinating. It's pretty fascinating yeah twitter takeover.
Speaker 2:It's pretty fascinating. It's pretty fascinating, yeah, yeah, that would be. I just think that there's funny that it happened to you like yeah, well, it happens all the time it happens all the time.
Speaker 2:I mean, sometimes you picture like, oh, you're gonna go through there's a lot of transparency and kill them in the building because it's glass, like a lot of glass. Right, we don't let anyone who has an office frost their glass because we want to maintain that idea of like transparency. Um, but you'll see, like meeting rooms and teams in there and it's not always just like everyone's smiling and like you have a little frosted glass.
Speaker 1:So there's like a little private. There's a little bit. You have to stand up we don't want.
Speaker 2:after a while everyone would just frost it because they just want privacy, and then it'd feel like a traditional office space.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what I'm saying, so you can see inside Meeting rooms and offices.
Speaker 2:right, people decorate their walls and do all sorts of stuff. It's cool. But my point is is like I love actually walking by a meeting room and seeing a team, you know, behind closed doors. But I can see and you can tell they're getting into it a little bit and they're they're trying to hash something out, and it's not like I want to see people being like you know harmful to each other.
Speaker 2:Mallory, and I know what that it's it happens, it's, it's, it can be constructive and, um, it happens better in person and it gets done quicker. Yeah, um, yeah, I could talk more about that. I do want, I want you to talk more about that. Here's one, here's one idea that I think is actually going to be the future of of co-working in large part.
Speaker 2:Oh my, gosh, that's right, get ready popsicles no, I'm kidding um, arian and lee talked about this a few years ago. I remember when I joined. It's been a year and a half. I didn't know anything about co-working before I came, but this was like when I first heard this. I just like became a fanboy and ran with it.
Speaker 2:It's a product called base camp. Okay, yeah, the idea of base camp is we're not going to a fully remote team and saying like, like you should be in office five days a week. Right, if they decide that, that can be great. The data does show that at least two days, if not three, is ideal in office per week is really the ideal. That's what data is showing right now. There are certain industries like ours, like our team, we're going to be in five days a week because that's what we do.
Speaker 2:But Basecamp is this idea of like a team leader or business owner saying like I don't want to pay for a huge office and it sits empty most of the time. It's pointless and it feels weird. I've also heard team members who will say like, hey, my boss told me I have to come in two days a week, so like I went in today and there was one in person, so I was like nope, turned around and got in my car and went home, and so you're starting to see people who are like, if I'm coming in, like let's do this and have everyone here, let's structure it, but you still have the team leader saying like I don't want to pay for empty office space. So Basecamp is something where we will provide a really nice office. We'll put monitors and everything in, and then you can just have a day or multiple days of the week that are yours. So every Monday you know it's like our team's there.
Speaker 1:You're 100% right. This is the. This is like yeah, it's great I could see this play out in so many different businesses.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is. You're totally onto something. And even like there are like the programmers who probably have a way better setup in their basement with three monitors and blackout curtains, that they love and they just want to be there.
Speaker 1:Steve, if you're listening, you know, I know.
Speaker 2:Is that what your room is?
Speaker 1:Steve, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:So. But they all see as well, Like, hey, I'll come in on Mondays or whatever day my team chooses and we'll get some different work done and then I can have both. But it's nice to have that plug and play thing. They don't want to bring their monitors in and out every day and they don't have that office. Everyone on your team has club member access at any kiln so they can still come and use meeting rooms, use the, the public desks and stuff I have a cool idea, so was it worth the drum roll.
Speaker 1:That was way worth the drum roll, because now I could keep going too. But I want to come back to something I. I want to ask you a question. Yeah, did you relay my message about the bathroom? I did.
Speaker 3:What did they think? They loved it. Yeah, I met with our, our, one of our. Is it too late? It is too late at our location but there's some. It's something that they're going to be looking forward to with the other plans on our location, so they love the idea. Yeah, Dude bathrooms bathrooms.
Speaker 1:It's a battle. It's a bathrooms are a battle yeah there's this.
Speaker 2:What were you saying? I didn't hear this, okay so.
Speaker 3:So when rob was on the tour, we we were going through where st george is unique, with the executive suites, and so it gives you two private suites in a waiting room so you can have like more of a c-suite type appearance.
Speaker 1:Right, these don't have bathrooms so rob was like it's big enough to where. It's like yeah, you got enough people in here. Do they want to walk? Cause we had gotten all the way to that space and I hadn't seen one bathroom yet, and so I leaned over to the girl next to me. I was like, have you seen any bathrooms? And she's like, oh, I don't.
Speaker 3:I think they're back towards the entrance yeah, that's pretty far away and and the whole point of the executive suite is to have a more of a private, intimate experience where it's your space.
Speaker 1:When you think of executive, you're like no, this is like a turnkey spot. You just don't have a front desk maybe, but that's exactly.
Speaker 3:They got a great one back there yeah, and so, yeah, it was actually a really good idea, and our one of our developers, logan he's he's bringing that to to lee's attention and yeah, it's something that we're looking to do, future locations that are going to be built from ground up, because it makes sense. I mean, we'll have enough bathroom space, but just the idea of having it more private, it's a great idea.
Speaker 2:This is actually kind of funny.
Speaker 1:We've been having Will you name it the Rob instead of a John?
Speaker 3:Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1:That's not the John or the Lou Name it the Rob or the loo name it the rob, so are you saying the executive suites have their own bathrooms and they're gonna name it. They're they're thinking about adding it to future ones okay, I had the idea.
Speaker 2:I wanted to clarify for the audience oh, thank you, mallory, you're welcome.
Speaker 1:She's like I'm confused. If I'm confused, everybody's confused. Yeah, yeah, yeah, will you name it the rob, though that's if he puts it in it just say hey, the guy who gave you the idea wants to name your face on your face on every door. That's right, you'll get all the credit. Get off the pot Rob's face is watching you. You don't have to do that. I have one other idea. What do you think of that idea?
Speaker 2:Oh, I think it's great. Yeah, it's too bad, it's kind of too far to this design. We noticed recently too, like we were talking about it, a sometimes the stalls are taken, you know, and I can't get one or something, and we realize like guys are going in there and just scrolling their phones like they're spending three, five times as long as they need to because they're just like taking a break and I can solve a problem for you if you want, please, you put a timer on the light and you make it a little short and then all the lights go off.
Speaker 1:You're like, oh shoot, I gotta get out of here, I gotta gotta get up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, when you have these likes um separate stall like we have, that are fully enclosed, you could definitely do that. We've been coming up with like kind of fun signage that like pokes fun at it and it goes on the inside and just reminds them. So if anyone thinks of a catchy phrase, of what to put, that's good.
Speaker 1:I'm horrible that I would go to chat gpt instantly for that one. I was like my brain doesn't work that way.
Speaker 2:Chat gpt, give me a couple examples. Get your name on the bathrooms. If you don't give us your original idea, I'll think of one.
Speaker 1:I'll try to think of one um so the other. I gave you one other idea, do you remember? Uh, yeah, misters misters on the patio. Yeah, just, you're probably here in st george.
Speaker 3:Honestly, we probably will end up installing those, because what's really cool about the patio that we're going to have and I think it's sick, the view first of all is you can see all of st george in the view it's so beautiful you can see all the way out to where we're at and it's never going to change nope, it'll never change, it's not going to go in front of it exactly so which, so there's one that's.
Speaker 3:The second spot is we're making it so much more functional than other locations where we can host parties out there. We can host a cocktail party, we can host smaller events, intimate events, but the cool thing is we have a retractable awning that's getting built and so it's going to provide shade rather than just sun beating down on you the entire time, and so it's actually really cool where they're going to have it be able to retract back and forth so at night we can retract it back and you can see the stars of saint george, right, yeah, but yeah, the mistress thing that's. I guarantee that's something we'll install, probably gonna happen, because pretty needed.
Speaker 3:You don't want to be out in the 116 degrees, sweating so keep those ideas flowing. I know two for two, I know we're gonna take him on another tour and just keep riding no, no yeah, free maybe. Maybe I'll get an office space over there and then I'll just.
Speaker 1:I'll just pester you all the time with all my ridiculous ideas, because they're endless. Be worth it. If you ask, jeff, I have, and I just spew them out, all the ideas. Yeah, we're not even talking about something. I'll change the subject and be like I just had an idea.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, I remember when we went out to lunch a couple weeks ago, you had a bunch of different ideas of just interesting stuff. Yeah, it didn't have to do with kiln, but I was like, huh, I didn't even think about that for St George's.
Speaker 1:That's a good. That's the pattern. Interrupt right there. Yeah, so what else? Um, you might miss your call. We're, we got some time. What else do you guys want to talk about? I got, I got. We could get a little bit more granular into what what. Some of the features are inside of kiln here. But do you want to talk about anything else? We talked about something yesterday.
Speaker 3:I was like yeah I kind of wanted to talk about the, the networking benefit of kiln okay, where we have all these events, where we go and meet.
Speaker 3:We have rise, we have the chamber that hosts events, we have all these different things that you have to go somewhere to meet.
Speaker 3:Kiln is going to provide just a 24 7 networking hub, which I think is just so cool and we don't have anywhere like that, because personally, I've been meeting out of cafes for the last month and it's so distracting, it's so hard to actually meet with somebody there. Where, at a place like Kiln, it's a 24-7 hub of just incubated ideas and networking opportunity where we can host these networking events. But also you just working in a community desk is going to rub shoulders with somebody that you don't know and an idea that you don't have Right, and so I think that just the networking part of kiln is going to be such a huge benefit for St George, whether or not you're a member or not. We're going to host events, we're going to host networking type things that people can come in, but also you can just be sitting next to somebody just like this and bounce ideas off of each other, which I think is super unique and not something that you have to search for necessarily, but something that we just are going to have for people.
Speaker 1:So are you guys going to create any of your own hosts? Like you would be the host versus like I came to you with an idea like rise, or you know, the chamber puts on rise or housing action, coalition does a forum, is it? You are going to say, hey, we're going to do this thing and then you invite a bunch of people.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, oh, yeah, we're going to do that all the time. If you, if you go onto the kiln socials, you'll see every day something will get posted of some sort of event at a location that kiln is hosting, hosting, and so, whether it's do you have like a schedule?
Speaker 1:is it like 12 months? You're like we got to do something like this, something like this. Is that what you guys kind of do?
Speaker 2:yeah, there's some like um sacred cows. I guess you could call it. Every kiln you're gonna see like a waffle wednesday every month, is that?
Speaker 1:seth godin I think yeah sacred cows purple cow, I don't know.
Speaker 2:Sacred cow is not self good seth godin, I don't know. No, no, not sacred cows.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry, dude, I got sidetracked again, that's all right.
Speaker 2:Seth Godin's brilliant, yeah, he is. But, yeah, waffle Wednesday once a month where Nick's team is going to actually make waffles from scratch and serve it to the members, and we'll even like invite a member to throw on an apron. They don't have to do any work, but like signage up and get to know each other. We're always trying to create collisions like that, where people can naturally meet each other. Um, we do a happy hour that we call apri work once a month where we'll like about three o'clock in the afternoon on a thursday we'll throw out like an incredible charcuterie spread and drinks and there's like a. It's just like we put a lot of money into it.
Speaker 1:It's really beautiful and you don't have to be a kilman kiln member to go to those events. For these you do we do?
Speaker 2:we have recently in provo, we invited the, the larger community, to come out, where we encourage our members to bring a friend. But this is it is for the community. Yeah, kind of like as a thank you from us and also just like, hey, get away from your desk and and do that, and we put out snacks morning and afternoon every day. But, um, it's like an extra special one. Yeah, holiday parties um, we've had cornhole tournaments, like just dumb stuff that members have like mentioned and we do it and have some prizes that we pay for and give out. It's just like encouraging people to take a little break and have fun, um, and get to know each other.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that yeah, and then more often than not, I mean, like we're focusing on this professional development, like can we bring in robert, if someone's trying to like I want to learn how to podcast, like to be able to bring you in and you speak about that, and we tell our members and it's like anyone who wants to learn how to podcast for their business, come on in. And it's like we've paid you or someone to come in or arrange it at least. Yeah. And so it's like people are like man, I wouldn't have been exposed to this if I wasn't at Kiln today. Yeah, I didn't have the membership.
Speaker 1:That's so cool. I that networking, when you think, when you start stacking up the value, there's so many intangible things that will, that can be activators in growing your business that it's almost just like a no brainer to where, if you really think just long enough, when you just take an hour and 20 minutes and think through like this thought, because I think of what we've talked about, we've given so many like really solid value, where how many people can say no to that I don't know. And that's the point.
Speaker 3:It's it's to get people in the space, and then you'll want to be there.
Speaker 3:Right and so and so these tours that we're doing, where we encourage everybody to come, it's getting inside the space and and so we can sit down and talk for a little bit so we can explain exactly what that value holds and where where we can provide value for you, right? It's not the other way around, where we're just trying to sell something. To sell something, it's like how can kill and provide a value for your business and make you grow, versus we're just trying to get money or anything like that I.
Speaker 2:Here's something else I foresee in saint george a lot, because I think you have a lot of remote workers that are really talented. They want to live down here and they've gotten their jobs and have been given permission to work from home. Those companies often either huge corporations, right, people who work for, you know, apple or Microsoft or Airbnb or something We've talked to several but they can get it like a per diem, almost like an allowance for a co-working membership, every month. So you go get like a resident desk at Kiln and it's like I used to work from home, but they're happy to give me this and it actually improves my productivity, yeah, and it's such a big perk, yeah. And the companies are like we want you actually to be able to like improve your quality of work and output, obviously. So I think you'll see a lot of that, because there's not a ton of businesses that are actually headquartered here, but you have more and more remote people who could be a little team or kind of like a solo that would do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I uh, sitting here, even after the tour, I was like, yeah, it's a cool idea, I could see myself doing that, but I wasn't really like sold on. Okay, when my lease is up next, what would it look like? Right, because you're already in a lease, I'm already in an office, and a lot of times those things are connected to other people that care about your business and want to grow your business, and you know they own the space. But we want to replace, you know, put somebody in behind us, right, if need be. So there's always that this office space is providing me a lot of what I need already, but Kiln can also give me another leg up. So this is just me thinking for myself, right In my own businesses, and, um, I can't help but think the club membership is like the perfect function for somebody in that transition time. Is that right? Is that the way to think about it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:What's the club membership Like? What's the cost for that one? I know I said I wasn't going to ask you prices, but yeah, no.
Speaker 3:So so our club membership runs at 275 per month, and so that's on a month to month basis, per individual, per individual Yep. So like, let's say, you have a, get a four person office, you get four club memberships with that, and so the club membership is for somebody that's going to come in and work a couple hours a day, come in and just get emails done, or wants to be part of the network and wants to be part of the community, versus a private office where they're paying X amount of dollars for their private space, right? So a person like that's in a transition period, that's like I'm not ready for that full office yet, but I need somewhere to go and work. So I'm out of my basement, out of my kitchen, where I mean, for example, like myself right now. Obviously kiln's not finished, right?
Speaker 1:So I'm currently working from home.
Speaker 3:I'm going nuts. Like I'm going absolutely crazy and get out on the town as much as I possibly can, but that's why I work my truck.
Speaker 1:Right, I love.
Speaker 3:I love my family, but I can't.
Speaker 3:I can't work from home Exactly, and so and it provides that space for people to get out of their house, right, but it's not a too high of a dollar amount that it doesn't make sense, but also the convenience of what Kiln provides cuts into that dollar amount as well. Like you're not, you're not filling your house with snacks, you're not, you know, paying for. I mean, obviously you're going to have internet at your house, but or going to a cafe where your internet is crap and you can't work off of it, you know. And so that's that's kind of what the club membership is based around. Is those transition periods or those people that are just, I need to get out of my house for a couple hours have a place to sit down and work, cool, cool, and so that's kind of like.
Speaker 1:That's the flexible one, and then the full, solid office space. Do you want to go over prices, just in case we've somebody sticking with us and they're still listening in.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean we can definitely go into into prices, like it all just comes down to how many people you need, right, and so we have office space that's going to be from two people to. We were able to house house 50 people right into our, into our corner office spaces, and so the price is going to range anywhere from $1,100 to yeah.
Speaker 2:We have members that are yeah, they're huge 58 person office, they're paying over 20 K a month and it's like they're, they love it. It's just like that flexibility. Even at that size, our top size office, they could do month to month.
Speaker 2:Rather than going, and signing a 10-year lease or a five-year lease or even a three-year. You don't know where you're going to be and what it's going to be like, what the world will be like. So to have that flexibility and then you know Nick touched on this Like we actually are interested in learning how to like succinctly educate people to like they'll look at a sticker price of like I could work from home free, or like this cafe, or like a you know, like maybe a kind of crappier office versus kiln, and it's like this seems like a big investment. But when you go, think about getting internet, getting furniture, um, turnover with your team, um, all sorts of things, it's, it actually is very equal real plants and then you got to water them.
Speaker 1:make sure somebody keeps watering so many things you don't think of.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly yeah, and it's, it's the, it's the convenience factor as well, where when you're setting up a traditional office space, you you have to do all of that work where Kiln already has a setup for you. Yeah, and it's a lot of people. Time is money right, and if you're just wasting all your time picking out a desk, picking out furniture, finding a person to do your janitorial.
Speaker 1:I'm going to take you off track just real quick. What about that design of furniture and things like that? There's a lot of them that come already built in, is it? All of them are that way? Or, like in the executive suites, would they have a custom set that they wanted to put in there? Is that something that you guys?
Speaker 2:would do like a tenant improvement of sorts. Yeah, so I mean, every office is going to have desks and chairs and we've, like, our custom-made desks. It looks nice in the space, in the space if someone wants to ask us to take it out and they want to bring their own in. Great, some people have a huge L shaped desk that they love and they do it that way. Um, but yeah, there are times when we've, you know, like outfitted certain big offices with, like some nice soft seating right or some art. Um, if people really love it and they'll be like I have no idea what I'm doing and how to design this. Can you help? And we're happy to help a little bit. But yeah, it's, the whole space is so nice looking. I mean, as far as we know, this is the first time in the world that a co-working building has been built for co-working by co-workers. It's almost always a takeover, it's kind of what the building like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those are the words those are so hard to like, and we do that too, and you typically have to go stud to stud and you're like, redo that You're stuck with the roof height and then you do the best you can with what you got.
Speaker 2:I mean, I went to New York recently and toured a bunch of them, some really cool co-working spaces. They're nice people, but you're just like you're in a building that was built in the 20s and the ceilings are where they are. It's really hard unless you put a ton of money into it. So it's like man, I think. I think the design is going to blow people away. We get, we might get a little desensitized to it cause we see it every day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1:We get desensitized to a lot of stuff. What, um, do we want?
Speaker 3:I took you off track a little bit.
Speaker 1:Do you Next? What's the next kiln to be built? Where are you guys going next? Oh, that's a fun question.
Speaker 2:That is a fun question. The next one to open will be in what we call Biltmore, which is like the east side of Phoenix. Okay, we just opened in Gilbert recently, down there a little bit further south, but now Phoenix will be there. We have like eight that are being built right now. We just opened in Littleton, colorado. Okay. We colorado. Okay, we already have one in boulder. Um, we're building in bozeman, montana. We're building in rancho bernardo, which is just kind of by these other locations above san diego that we have, um, we have fort collins, colorado, likely coming up. Um dang bend, oregon.
Speaker 3:Um, take a deep breath for any of this, yeah um vegas.
Speaker 1:Vegas will be opening soon because we can edit anything if after you're like I probably should run that one by. If you want us to bleep a couple out, I'm okay doing that.
Speaker 3:We're taking over a huge event space in Las Vegas. Next month It'll open up and I'm going to have the opportunity to go down and check that out here pretty soon, and going into the Vegas market is actually going to be really cool because Cause we're going- to be taking.
Speaker 1:Can I go with you? I'll just be a fly on the wall.
Speaker 3:I'm going to first week of October.
Speaker 1:You tell me to be quiet. If you want me to say, stop asking questions just come along for the ride. Yeah absolutely.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'll just be down there for a day and a half. And uncommons uh, there was just an article written about it recently, our las vegas location going up.
Speaker 1:But are you in tennessee at all? No, I used to live in nashville. I love it. I'm surprised knoxville's not on the radar.
Speaker 2:I think there's a lot of places that would be good. I think the furthest east we looked at. Right now we're very fortunate because we have a lot of people coming to us saying like build a kiln here. You know, I want you on here.
Speaker 1:I think it sounded like it. You rattled off Like I honestly thought you were going to say water too, and then you were rattling off a bunch. I was like holy cow.
Speaker 2:I think we got 14 open. Now We've got another eight that are in works. Officially, I think probably More east would be Texas, but we'll see Again. Arian and Lee, they did these all over the world, but right now they're like hyper-focused on the western US, nice. That's awesome man, we need Hawaii.
Speaker 1:That's what we need, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:That's where you want to go. We have a lot of volunteers for that one. We'll run that one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they all want to go run it.
Speaker 3:I've heard some fever gets to them a little bit, yeah, yeah and and just the.
Speaker 1:The island culture, too, is just so it's. It's definitely a culture shock for some people. They're like, uh, this is not the kind of community I'm used to, right, I'm uncomfortable. And then they interesting, they come back totally but it's st george a little bit like that it is.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's why we're curating it to this location, to to st george, and that's that's actually one of we can segue into this a little bit that. So I've been with kiln for a month, right, and I've gotten to see every single Utah site. Every single site that I've been to is completely different, completely different culture, completely different vibe. Where you're at really resonates with the community that kiln curates for them, and it's such a cool idea where I can go to the lehigh location and it's just buzzing constantly. There's people moving quickly, there's tons of people in there. Totally different vibe than the park city location, a little bit more laid back, a little bit more relaxed. That's how I kind of think the st george location is going to be too. It's going to be a mix of both. Where we do things a little bit slower in St George, it's more laid back community, more relaxed, which is, I mean, that's a reason, one of the reasons why we live down here, right, yeah.
Speaker 1:And so it's the wellness. It's like the wellness kiln.
Speaker 3:Exactly, and so it's. It's been. It's been super interesting to pop into each, each kiln over this last month and kind of feel out what they do and how they run their spot. And that's actually the really nice thing about kiln is each each is different and each, each director like in my role can kind of mold it to how the community sees it, and I'm excited to get it started here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we kind of covered what your role was with kiln, but I don't think I really understand. No one knows.
Speaker 2:No one knows.
Speaker 1:You're the ninja.
Speaker 2:I, uh, I was going to say real quick and I'd love to tell you, thank you.
Speaker 1:Wes is like I actually didn't want to be on this podcast. No, no, I did.
Speaker 3:I forced him into coming.
Speaker 2:No, I love it. We're very choosy, very picky on who we let be a community director.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean from what I know, Nick, you definitely got a great guy.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, it's amazing. He will have, as they all do, a lot of autonomy to be like. You know our objective. You know, killen, we trust you. We're kind of notorious for taking forever to hire because we just are very choosy and you have a ton of interviews, but, like he will, it'll feel a lot like nick in his background because that's his, we trust his skill set and his approach. Obviously we'll give him a ton of support. But, um, that's what's cool about it. And I do love that park city. You go up there and kristin and katie and steph awesome team, the members love them so much. Um, and this is every site, but like it's, it's very cool and it feels like park city.
Speaker 2:Um, my role so, uh, regional director. So essentially I was a community director of Lehigh and then, um, from there we recently created another layer. So, jeff, um, I guess after a while you get tired of having like 50 people be direct reports to you as a COO. And so we recognized, as we grow, we need to have another layer to be able to support the directors. And so we recognized, as we grow, we need to have another layer to be able to support the directors. And so I'm over the Utah sites.
Speaker 1:Essentially Okay All of Utah, all of Utah. So that's the region, and then you have a couple other regions, because with all those other ones opening, it seems like you're going to have to go another layer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we have three regionals, so I think right now we think that'll carry us a while, but it's in large part because we have really competent directors. It's not like they're like what do I do on this? Right there, we're just checking in and supporting them.
Speaker 1:So yeah, you could get like I think a director could probably do, or like a regional would be like 12. Yeah, that's kind of like max, like when you're thinking about how many? How many people can you manage? I get that from the Bible, by the way. The 12, the 12 disciples.
Speaker 2:If.
Speaker 1:Jesus could do that. What Jesus did with 12 dudes he just picked 12 dudes. Yeah, it's like any company could do anything with 12 people. You have 12 people. You have 12 of the right people.
Speaker 2:You can do whatever you want Deep.
Speaker 1:You heard it here first. Yeah, biblical, you got to listen to my religion and politics. Episode of the of the pod and politics. But what else do you?
Speaker 2:guys want to talk about. This is brave.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you want to talk about that I can talk about that.
Speaker 2:No, what do I want to know? I want to know what you think your listeners are thinking about kiln uh, I think they're going to be excited about kiln, I think.
Speaker 1:I think it's a lot of validation for what you hear in other places, but you can't necessarily see it playing out in like actual businesses coming here, cause you know people I've interviewed the CEO, founder of intergalactic for Zonos. You know some of the biggest companies that are here in Southern Utah and getting an inside glimpse of what they're dealing with is super important. So I hope a lot of the listeners right now that are listening they're getting more validations from what we've heard from past episodes of the podcast. And why I do this podcast is to, you know, see the unique gems that are Southern Utah and like, let's shine a light on those awesome things. And Kiln fits like right into it. You know what I mean and so I think the listeners of this it's gonna be additional validation, the community as a whole.
Speaker 1:I don't know what they think. I think they got we have the what's the other? We workspace here. That's like the tiny work turf, work, turf, and they have a couple of locations, but it's a, it's a mom and pop. I don't know if when they set that up, there was a big pattern of success before that. It's like this is a great idea and we did need it and they saw a need and filled it, but the leveling up right of it.
Speaker 2:That's all. 75% of co-working is mama pop. Yeah, because there's people who, like I, love taking care of people. I love community.
Speaker 1:It's still new enough to where that that segment of the industry right hasn't yet evolved, but you're rapidly bringing it to fruition on a franchise basis, Right?
Speaker 2:You know not that it's franchised but that that idea of that, like there's continuity brand scalable, yeah, but yeah, I mean we're trying to maintain that Like we want you, like those mom and pop co-working spaces are so cool and those communities get really tight, um, and they just they love it. But like there is a benefit to us figuring out how to best do this and then repeating it. Um, but still again, the site levels like kiln. We're not like, um, you know, we actually have every location is its own business, essentially, and we want every single one of them to get their own complete attention. We're not like, oh, we don't really care if this one isn't going great, we'll just cut over it up with the other ones, like they're all their own things and, um, nick is going to put like 110 energy into it and that's why the members are really happy at them because which is cool, because each kiln will have its own vibe.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean. Even if the office space is like, if provo and st george look the identical right when you, when you come here from provo, there's gonna be slight changes, but they're gonnaies right. That's going to be like the types of businesses that are there. The vibe right Of that location is going to feel different right, and so that'll be cool to see it evolve over time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm so excited to see it. I'm excited to see members have milestones and celebrate each other and be like man. I never would have met you if I hadn't been here, right, if I hadn't been here, right. Yeah, that's cool. I'm thinking of, like Marty and killing Lehigh who created the shadow draw app. It's T. It's an app that teaches you how to draw an iPad. Super cool app. But, like he got featured as, like, the app of the day in the Apple app store and we found out in our team.
Speaker 2:we went and bought him a cake that day. Some other members came with us. We gave it to him, took a picture and all saying to him and it's just like he's. That happened right there at that resident desk, right Right by the window. We see Marty every day and it's like people around the world who download that app. They just assume it's some big company somewhere, but it's like the guy who's really smart and cool, who's pushing for it.
Speaker 1:He artists, right, it's like, uh, who was in the room when Beethoven finished, like writing his different opuses and all those different things, like who was in the room? And a lot of times those artists are alone, right, and they don't get that celebration. So like being able to add that community element to those moments. Because I was thinking peter levels. So, lex friedman, I think you'd love this podcast. Okay, but he has all these successes where he's making fifty thousand dollars a week, just him, it's just him. And a computer and a laptop it's not like he has some server engine, you know what I mean just using ai and he's making fifty thousand dollars a week just by himself. There's no community be like whoa way to go, dude, you know what I mean. And that's cool to see, but the, the needs being fulfilled and, man, it's going to be awesome to be a part of that. I think, yeah, I think you guys got a cool job geez, it's a cool job yeah, we do, especially right now job.
Speaker 3:It's a cool business right now spreading the word. It's been, it's been a lot of fun. Definitely. I've met a lot of really cool people over this last last month that I wouldn't normally have connected with if I in the hotel business, you know, and yeah, it's, it's something completely unique for me and something out of my wheelhouse, but it's such an exciting thing and it it keeps you going, definitely, which is which is really cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do you guys? Have you heard of Cody Aiden? Have you met Cody Aiden yet? Yeah, so he has the hospitality podcast. He talks about hospitality, cause that's his business, right.
Speaker 3:Vibrant, vibrant vibrant.
Speaker 1:Uh, I think that'd be a cool conversation, especially with, with guys like lee and arian right, and he comes like a high level hospitality perspective too, where, um, that'd be a cool conversation. You guys should get together for sure next time you come out the the grand opening. Yeah, when do you think the grand opening is gonna be? We're shooting for january.
Speaker 3:January 13th is kind of our tentative date um, but january is tracking right now and so we're on, we're on pace, we're, we're. I mean, you saw the space like it looks completely different since the last time you were in there I was just in there on friday last week and we'll be in there this friday, and so so cool and so like. But yeah, january, january is where we're, where we're looking at opening.
Speaker 1:Cool man. Well, I'll be there.
Speaker 2:That's what I was going to ask. Gotta get you out there.
Speaker 1:I'll be there, it'll be fun.
Speaker 3:We'll have a big opening party. It'll be really cool.
Speaker 1:And a bunch of the community is going to come out and we're, and then we got stuff.
Speaker 2:I want to meet Arian and was a dunk tank and arian sat on it nice yeah, I knocked him in.
Speaker 1:I did dunk tank, we did duck take, we were raising money for, uh, one of our police officers here in st george. We did an event like raising money for him and his family because he has. He was I think he's passed away now, um, but yeah, we raised money for because he got terminal cancer and it was like it you'd be three months, might be six months, and so we did dunk takes so we had camel ride in the park. It was so much fun. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, josh wilson shout out uh, should we wrap it? And then maybe episode two.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that'd be great. You missed your call, dude, I'm sorry. Hey, nowhere, I'd rather be liar.
Speaker 3:Hey, thanks for listening everybody.
Speaker 1:Hope you enjoyed the episode. We'll see you out there. Thanks for listening in. If you enjoyed this, enjoyed the episode, we'll see you out there. Thanks for listening in. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe. Make sure you're following us on all the social media websites. We love your support. We love the dialogue. We want to continue that going. Find us at realestate435.com.
Speaker 3:We'd love to help you find a house here in town or help you get wherever you're going.