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Welcome to Nexus, a newsletter and podcast for smart people applying smart building technology—hosted by James Dice. If you’re new to Nexus, you might want to start here.
The Nexus podcast (Apple | Spotify | YouTube | Other apps) is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest in our industry—together. The project is directly funded by listeners like you who have joined the Nexus Pro membership community.
You can join Nexus Pro to get a weekly-ish deep dive, access to the Nexus Vendor Landscape, and invites to exclusive events with a community of smart buildings nerds.
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Learn more about the Smart Building Strategist Course and the Nexus Courses Platform.
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Learn more about Nexus Partnership Opportunities.
Episode 161 is a Nexus Labs update with James Dice.
Episode 161 is a Nexus Labs Update featuring James Dice speaking on the shifts in focus of Nexus Labs. Enjoy!
Introduction (0:49)
Shift in Focus (1:21)
Content Approach (6:29)
Partner Program (8:31)
Free Vendor Shortlisting (9:25)
How we’re sharing information (19:44)
NexusCon (20:45)
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S537178-16073.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
[00:00:00] Hey, friends. If you like the Nexus Podcast, the best way to continue the learning is to join our community. There are 3 ways to do that. First, you can join the Nexus Pro membership. It's our global community of smart building professionals.
We have monthly events, paywall deep dive content, and a private chat room, and it's just 35 dollars a month. Second, you can upgrade from the pro membership to our courses offering. It's headlined by our flagship course, the Smart Building Strategist, and we're building a catalog of courses taught by world leading experts on each topic under the Smart Buildings umbrella. Third and finally, our marketplace is how we connect leading vendors with buyers looking for their solutions. The links are below in the show notes.
And now let's go on to the podcast. Hey, friends. We know a lot of you keep up with the smart buildings industry using this podcast. Maybe you're walking the dog, commuting, or if you're like me, you're listening while you run. [00:01:00] And maybe that's all you have time for, meaning you miss all or some of our written content and announcements.
So we wanted to start a regular podcast series that catches you up on what's happening at Nexus Labs. And if you like this, please let me know on LinkedIn. Um, and if you hate this, please also let me know on LinkedIn, but be nice about it because I'm sensitive. So what I wanna tell you about in this episode it's a shift in focus for Nexus Labs and 5 ways we're putting that shift into action to serve you better. So I'm James Dice, if you didn't know that already.
And when I started the company, the name Nexus meant the nexus of the physical and digital worlds. That's what our tech stack is. We talk about that in almost every piece of content that we produce. Um, and it was really quite an elegant name, really, I think. Um, sort of patting myself on the back over here.
But now so today in 20 24, there's there's sort of a new dual meaning to it. We now also mean the nexus of buyers and sellers. [00:02:00] We think there's a vital role for us to play in accelerating our industry by making the marketplace more transparent. That includes, um, really helping out buyers and buyers consultants. Because 1 of the unfortunate truths holding back the smart billings industry is that buying technology takes so much work that it could almost be a full time job or it should be a full time job.
And to make this even more difficult, it often requires working together across at least 3 departments, operations, sustainability, and IT. And yet there are very few full time buyers out there. We've interviewed directors of sustainability. We've interviewed we're the VPs of operations. We've interviewed, um, managers of operational technology, all these, like, core roles to what we do.
And it's clear that buying new technology for their smart buildings programs is just 1 sliver, 1 really small sliver of their responsibilities. And when you're integrating technology into an industry that has always [00:03:00] run without technology, there's not really a way around this vendor research and engagement piece that takes so much time. And with with 6000000 buildings in the in the US alone, it it really needs to be easier to buy smart building technology for this concept to really take off and and scale up and become more mainstream. And 1 of the opportunities for acceleration is in that researching new technologies, that vendor engagement phase. And at this stage, buyers really need to engage with the marketplace to determine the capabilities they need.
They need to shortlist vendors that have those capabilities, and then they need to perform due diligence on those vendors to determine, you know, which ones to engage with further. This due diligence process is it's really difficult and made more difficult by the fragmentation in our marketplace. There are dozens of vendors in each category, all saying similar things but using different buzzwords [00:04:00] to convey the same concepts. Um, we got we got an email a couple weeks ago from Charles who works, uh, for the largest developer of industrial buildings in the US, and he told us that this is the main reason he sees that buyers do not move forward with technology purchases in our industry. He said the market is not only fragmented, but sadly, most of the companies and their staff on the vendor side need to better understand how to tell their story to buyers and their unique businesses and business models.
And today, there aren't really any viable resources this is for wading through the vendor swamp, as we like to call it. Google search helps, but it results in apples to oranges comparisons. Consultants are vital in this process. Not gonna deny that. But there often aren't enough of them, and they can be too expensive for most of that 6000000 building market.
Asking your peers is also a great option until they actually hold back details or they don't share with you what you need to know because you're their competition. So my vision is that [00:05:00] having us in the middle in the nexus helps them get the info they need with less time invested. On the flip side of the equation, the vendors also need help educating the buyers on what they're doing. Vendors need help validating their category and that it's better than the status quo. Vendors need help standing out in all of the noise.
And buyers are hard to get ahold of and and don't always trust vendors. That's probably an understatement. So having us in the middle helps the vendor side. Basically, we we remove the salesiness and allow buyers to get the facts from a neutral resource. And the buyer's consultants, we don't wanna leave them out as well.
So for all you consultants out there, I think we we've learned and we've heard from a lot of you that keeping up with the shifting marketplace it's often a full time job for your team. Right? Um, you think about FTEs, think about the number of people on your team dedicated to smart buildings. It's often a full time job just to understand, like, and and engage with the vendors. So we can take that work off your [00:06:00] plate and and hopefully increase margins on your projects.
And finally, if you think about these 3 different stakeholders that I just laid out, the role we can also play for each of these is it's helping them think beyond point solutions. That's something we've done since the beginning of of Nexus Labs and really help them think about their technology stack more holistically. So that's the kind of the shift that, you know, we're thinking about and we're really in in the middle of implementing here at Nexus Labs. And the first thing we're doing at the heart of that shift is shifting our content approach. So we've created a new type of webinar.
We call this our buyer's guide webinar series, we provide a vendor agnostic overview of a technology category fueled by interviews with past buyers. And then we allow vendors in that category to provide a 3 minute presentation on their special or unique approach to that category. And then we keep them on for q and a. And these have been a really big hit. We've done FCD.
We've done HVAC [00:07:00] control, IoT sensors, the network layer, the data layer, and supervisory control. And the next 1 we're working on is for energy management software. And so if you take this series as a whole, this series is really teaching buyers how to think about constructing their smart building stack. The next thing we've done on the on the content side is is we've done a series of case studies designed to share lessons learned from buyer to buyer. You've heard these here on the podcast from the likes of, um, we've done Clockworks Analytics and the University of Iowa, we've done, um, Facilio and Limbach.
We've done Code Labs and the Empire State Building, Altura and University of California Irvine, we've done VUE and Bento Green Oak or BGO, and we've done BrainBox AI and Sleep Country. And then we've also been publishing written versions of those on our website so people can easily share them and digest them further after the episode goes live. And then lastly, we've done an interview [00:08:00] series, um, with buyers on their buying processes. So we've done about 30 closed door interviews with buyers, and we're publishing our learnings in the Nexus newsletter. So as an example here, you can check out our newsletters on category first buyers or vendor first buyers?
And just to give you all a hint if you haven't read that series, uh, category first is much, much better. So if you're a buyer out there listening to this, you need to categorize yourself on the newsletter. Go check it out, and we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Besides shifting our content, the second way we're putting this shift into action is really doubling down on our partner program. This program started in March 20 23, so it's a little less than a year old.
It's it's really hit its stride recently, and we've really solidified the offering as we've brought more and more partners on. We have a whopping 30 partners now and and lots of different marketplace categories. And we help these partners stand out in the marketplace by getting to know what they do, [00:09:00] verifying that they're legit, and telling their stories through case studies that we just talked about and and much, much more. And we're very transparent about who these partners are. You can find them on our website, on the marketplace page.
And this fills a huge need for marketers in our industry who they might work for really great vendors, but they don't necessarily have the resources to create and publish stories that tell the world about their successful projects. The third way we're putting this into action is offering free vendor shortlisting to buyers and buyers consultants, the industry desperately needs more transparency in the marketplace. And so we're really trying to make it easier for buyers to shortlist vendors, um, help them make faster decisions and make that that process require fewer resources to get to a decision point. And so how it works is we've been interviewing, you know, like I said, we've been interviewing buyers on which technology category they need and their requirements, and then we create [00:10:00] just basically, we create simple vendor request documents, including a pricing exercise, engage with those vendors and and get them to respond to those with with those documents and create a shortlist for the buyer based on their requirements. And then the last step, which really doesn't exist anywhere else in the industry because, um, no one's really in the same position that we are, is we're sharing what we've learned.
Um, and it's really time for more sharing so we can create to start to create these feedback loops where, you know, when lessons learned are on 1 project, we can start to share those from project to project and buyer to buyer. Um, so if you are a buyer or a buyer's consultant, reach out to us to participate in this process. Like I said, it's free. It takes about a month, and it really helps, um, you know, leverage the the small time you have to get to a point where you can move your smart buildings program forward and I should say that we're not a consulting firm. Um, so if if buyers require more more hands [00:11:00] on help from, um, smart buildings experts, we'll be making referrals to our marketplace partners whenever the buyer needs more help than the simple process that I've outlined.
And so I wanna give an example of the type of information that we've been collecting and then sharing through these processes, we were asked to help select occupancy counting or people counting renders for 2 different buyers recently. The first buyer is an office REIT in Canada that owns 5000000 square feet. The second buyer is a corporate owner occupier with 450 global facilities and each of these buyers was concerned or is concerned with counting people in their offices, but there are different use cases. So they they care about this for different reasons. Use case 1 is the office REIT.
They're they're focused more on energy savings. So they were hoping to, um, do zone level occupancy counting. So HVAC zone level and lighting zone level occupancy counting. And then, [00:12:00] um, basically count people and then tie that back to the zones in the HVAC and lighting control systems. So that's use case 1.
Use case 2 was just basically space utilization. So this this corporation has open office collaboration areas. These are about 200 square feet, and they really wanna know how many people use them and whether they should build more or remove them. So they're really hoping to make a, um, space use and space management decision. And both of these buyers were were interesting that they had similar requirements.
They were hoping for, um, buying a sensor and the data. They weren't necessarily hoping for SaaS software, which is interesting when you look at this category and the vendors in this category, they were hoping to use existing PoE infrastructure. Um, they had a desire to avoid Wi Fi based people counting. So that kind of they they kind of narrowed it down on their [00:13:00] own by not wanting a mini category of people counting solutions, and they wanted to mitigate cybersecurity and privacy risk, um, neither had really a hard budget in mind, but we're really looking at using the pilot to validate that there is a good return on investment, and that's vital to them to move forward, and both planned and had budget for a pilot project to start earlier this year, 1 interesting piece of this is they were really looking at each of them looking at 1 use case. Whereas, as we talked about on this podcast many times before and on on the blog many times before, occupancy data can enable a bunch of different use cases.
And so the solution needed to be flexible for future use cases, but they weren't necessarily concerned with those future use cases right now. And then crucially, both buyers sort of needed this information to move their smart buildings program forward. Neither of them had time to sort of wade into [00:14:00] and through the vendor swap. And when they reached out to us, we 1 of the things that we we kind of wanted to, like, let everyone know is we we have a lot of people that reach out to us and say, give me your top 3 in this category, or tell me who's the best in this category. And at this at this point in our industry, there are very few technology categories where we could make a really 1 size fits all sort of recommendation.
Meaning we couldn't just respond to these buyers and say, here's your shortlist. Good luck. Um, I think we hope to get there soon, and we'll talk about that in just a hint, but we're not there yet. So we used our, um, what what was formerly called our our vendor landscape, which we're sort of morphing into our marketplace tool, which I'll talk about in just a second, to select about 40 occupancy counting vendors that might be interested and capable of including these 2 projects. So we sent them 2 forms to fill out, and then we asked them to submit a budgetary proposal [00:15:00] for a sample floor plan.
And from that outreach, um, you know, we had people that, you know, didn't respond, declined the opportunity, or submitted, um, incomplete responses. Um, but from that list, we provided a basically, a of the ones that responded, a simple comparison of all those ones that responded and then, um, you know, provided our recommendation on who they should move forward with to each of those buyers. And so let me share the big picture takeaways from those 2 projects. This gives a good showing of the information that we think would be good to start sharing with the marketplace, we'd love some feedback on this. So takeaway number 1 is that that these buyers made their selections based on the business model and the integration capabilities of these sensors, but they didn't really care about the intricacies between the different types of sensors.
So in other words, they weren't making the decision based off of sensor technology. Um, and once you filtered the [00:16:00] responses of all these vendors for their requirements, which were, again, optional SaaS, local integration options, it only left a few vendors left standing, which I thought was super interesting, and it caused us to say, like, you know, we'd love to hear more from the marketplace on and are there more options for local integration? Are there more options for optional SaaS, um, in the sensor world? And we've been getting some good some good feedback from from the people out in the marketplace there. Takeaway number 2 is these buyers also selected based on price, but not on price alone.
They're basically on on the other options that I just talked about but that said, the pricing exercise was really eye opening. There was a huge range in prices here. And there were a lot of different business models and pricing models that made it difficult to compare apples to apples on the pricing side. None of you, uh, on the buyer side are are surprised right now, uh, because you're used to this all [00:17:00] the time. But it's it's really difficult to compare apples to apples when when pricing comes in from different vendors because they all have chosen to price their their, um, hardware and software and services differently.
And I'd really challenge you all on the vendor side out there to get with your competitors, honestly. Get with your competitors and come up with a standard pricing model for your category. Um, when we think about the things we buy in our personal lives, they're generally the same sorts of pricing models. If you're comparing your, um, Netflix to Disney plus to what are the other ones? Um, it doesn't matter.
Um, Peacock, Paramount plus. If you're comparing all these, they don't have different pricing models. They're all just a subscription that we pay. And so you guys need to come up with that same thing for your categories out there. In our spreadsheet comparing the vendors that responded to this, um, I think there was 1 that had 1 of these projects had 14 [00:18:00] vendors that responded.
I think there were 6 different pricing models that we had to compare. So we chose to normalize this on a 3 year total cost of ownership, um, and the 3 year cost for 1 of these projects range from 290000 to 1300000.0. So you can see there's a massive range and the pricing and that was super eye opening for us. Takeaway number 3 is is very related, but most of these occupancy counting vendors are too expensive to have a legitimate ROI with only 1 use case. They you really need to have multiple varied use cases to make the business case work.
And so the challenge for them in these 2 projects that we did was that their high price sort of rules them out when a buyer is just trying a pilot with 1 use case as was the case with both of these buyers. So those are those are 3 of our takeaways. We did write a a deeper dive into this analysis that [00:19:00] Nexus pro members can go check out at the link in the show notes. And it talks about how we compared the different technical solutions and how we actually compared pricing, and we actually shared some pricing ranges for for people to check out. We also wrote another article about how that first use case, which was integrating occupancy counting with HVAC, is actually far more difficult than it should be and super complex.
And we we we have some recommendations around what buyers and vendors can do to make it easier, and let that use case really take off like a lot of us think it should, um, and so we'll link to that piece in the show notes as well. So this leads us to our fourth way that we're shifting our focus here at Nexus Labs. Um, and that's really how we're gonna share the information we're gathering in these vendor selections. So we're building out a database of smart buildings technology vendors, including which categories exist in the marketplace, what each category means, and which [00:20:00] vendors are in each category, and and much, much more. And so Brad Bonavita is a Nexus pro member that has been keeping this database updated, adding about 30 new vendors to it every single month for the last year or so, before he was on it, I was doing that for the last 3 or 4 years.
So there's up to, like, 800 or 900 vendors in the database at this point. And as of February first of 20 24, we've hired Brad full time, which is amazing, as our head of products to focus on making this information available for future buyers as a marketplace software application, and we'll have more to share about that soon if you wanna get on the wait list to use this product, reach out to us. We will have the first version ready in the next few months. Finally, the fifth way we're putting this shift into action is NexisCon. So we've been convening the change makers of the smart billings industry for 4 years now, and this year on September thirtieth, please mark your calendars.
It's time [00:21:00] to finally meet up in person at the very first NexusCon in Denver, Colorado. We're super excited about this, and yet our our first conference is more than just a meetup for our online and our podcast and our newsletter community, the smart billings industry deserves a different sort of conference. We've heard from you guys. We did many surveys about this, and less than 30 percent of you out there are satisfied with existing conference options. When we hear from buyers, we hear that they wanna learn more, and they tell us that this sort of pay to play content hurts the educational experience.
And they feel that there's not enough expert level content, everything is sort of surface level. And we've heard a similar thing from vendors. They they wish they could learn more as well. Um, but they also wish they they met more interested potential customers. So they want vendor to buyer introductions and vendor to buyer interactions.
And when we think about our industry, it really lags behind most others in terms of [00:22:00] technology adoption, and it's also an industry that really needs to rapidly adopt technology and rapidly decarbonize. So it's really time for a conference that reflects the urgency required to break through our status quo. And while we know how difficult it is to plan the event and we have lots of respect for the other conference organizers, we love going to our conferences. Um, um, it just feels like we as as a Nexus team and as a Nexus community, we really gotta try to shake things up because of that urgency. And I don't have time here to tell you everything we have in store for people that attend our conference, but I do wanna announce a few things.
First, we have limited space in this conference because we're curating the attendees so it has the right balance. We don't, for example, want too many vendors. Um, we want the the balance between buyers and vendors to be good. Um, so if you're sitting here in February and you're planning out your conferences for the year, we really need you to check, uh, this conference [00:23:00] out at the link in the show notes and let us know if you wanna come as soon as possible, um, and we'll give you the details. Second, if you wanna speak, we've released a call for abstracts, and we'll link to that in the show notes too.
We're building an educational curriculum using a sponsor free and community driven and transparent process. So we wanna we wanna hear your abstracts. We wanna read your abstracts. Um, these abstracts will will be reviewed, scored, and ranked based on the following criteria. We're looking for relevance to our conference themes.
Our themes are, um, the real ROI is theme number 1. Um, so we're really looking to get into case studies and the details around how the business case was made for smart buildings technology, so that's theme number 1. Theme number 2 is the digitization and decarbonization nexus so we're really looking to dig into projects where, um, people are moving their [00:24:00] decarbonization program forward, and at the same time, moving their smart buildings program forward. So really that overlap between the 2 of them. And third, the third theme is no BS.
So we're really looking for speakers and educational content and really the culture of the conference. We're really looking for people that want to be vulnerable and honest and not just act like they have everything figured out, but really talk about where we as an industry need to move forward and and where we can improve and what we're learning on our projects out there. So that's the first criteria. We wanna see proposals for, um, presentations that are relevant to those 3 conference themes, the second, um, criterion is, um, originality and innovativeness. So we really want to, um, um, keep pushing things forward, um, clarity of presentation, significance of the findings that you're presenting or the that contribution to the industry, um, we're looking for diversity of speakers.
We're looking for diversity of topics, [00:25:00] and we're looking for diversity of different building types. So we want the conference to be a good place for professionals from the offices and higher ed and multifamily and etcetera, we really wanna come at this from, um, a bunch of different angles rather than having this just be a conference for 1 type of building. And then finally, we're looking for buyers to be up on the stage. And so we don't want, um, vendors only doing presentations, we don't want vendors only on a panel. We're really looking for these, um, abstracts that involve a, um, vendor buyer duo or just a team of buyers, that kind of thing.
So that that we we'd love to see people's abstracts. We'll also put a link to the abstracts form, um, in the show notes as well. And third, we're keeping the the conference website up to date with who will be there. So if you're a vendor, and you really wanna meet buyers, well, we're gonna publish that list for you. Here are the buyers that are gonna be there so you can [00:26:00] meet them.
We won't let anyone be salesy, of course. So if you're on the buyer side, like, uh, worried about vendor salespeople, um, 1 of the, like, basically, the vibes of this conference is that just like our all of our online events and our online community, we don't let people be salesy. That's not part of this group, and so you don't need to worry about that. And as of now, if you think look go look at our site, we're we're gonna basically have representation on the buyer side from higher ed institutions like Dartmouth College and Colorado University, um, commercial real estate like Kilroy Realty, BGO, QuadReal, Maestroich, RMR Group, and then corporates like Lockheed Martin, LinkedIn, Goldman Sachs, and Google. So we'll continue to, um, recruit buyers, um, so that buyers can learn from each other and so that buyers can interact with vendors, we'll continue to put them up on the website.
Um, so check back in as we go. And 1 technology manager from 1 of those companies that I [00:27:00] just listed, he told me that they're they're prioritizing this conference as the only place their story will be told this year. And so that's kind of the vibe we're going for is is I want people on the buyer side especially to feel comfortable that this is the place where they can go share their story, um, teach other people what they've gone through, but also learn from others as well. And if you're a buyer and you wanna meet vendors and or consultants, we'll have them there too. So those tickets are invite only.
And basically, just so that we can make sure the vendors are legit and won't be salesy, like I said. And we'll have our partners there too. So those 30 partners I mentioned, we'll basically be inviting them plus all the right service provider players to round out the rest of the ecosystem. So that's what we do here at Nexus the Slabs is we bring everyone together from all these different positions in the ecosystem. And so that's it for now, folks.
I I hope you now feel up to date and, um, um, included in everything going on at Nexus [00:28:00] Labs, um, we'll we'll throw the links in the show notes that I mentioned. And if you wanna stay up to date on a weekly basis, the best way to do that and keep up with all of this is to subscribe subscribe to our newsletter and follow the Nexus Labs on LinkedIn. And as always, please reach out to us with questions and ideas on how we can accelerate our wonderful industry together Alright. Thanks, friends. Okay, friends.
Thank you for listening to this episode. As we continue to grow our global community of change makers, we need your help. For the next couple of months, we're challenging our listeners to share a link to their favorite Nexus on LinkedIn with a short post about why you listen. It would really, really help us out. Make sure to tag us in the post so we can see it.
Have a good one.
Welcome to Nexus, a newsletter and podcast for smart people applying smart building technology—hosted by James Dice. If you’re new to Nexus, you might want to start here.
The Nexus podcast (Apple | Spotify | YouTube | Other apps) is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest in our industry—together. The project is directly funded by listeners like you who have joined the Nexus Pro membership community.
You can join Nexus Pro to get a weekly-ish deep dive, access to the Nexus Vendor Landscape, and invites to exclusive events with a community of smart buildings nerds.
Sign-up (or refer a friend!) to the Nexus Newsletter.
Learn more about the Smart Building Strategist Course and the Nexus Courses Platform.
Check out the Nexus Labs Marketplace.
Learn more about Nexus Partnership Opportunities.
Episode 161 is a Nexus Labs update with James Dice.
Episode 161 is a Nexus Labs Update featuring James Dice speaking on the shifts in focus of Nexus Labs. Enjoy!
Introduction (0:49)
Shift in Focus (1:21)
Content Approach (6:29)
Partner Program (8:31)
Free Vendor Shortlisting (9:25)
How we’re sharing information (19:44)
NexusCon (20:45)
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S537178-16073.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
[00:00:00] Hey, friends. If you like the Nexus Podcast, the best way to continue the learning is to join our community. There are 3 ways to do that. First, you can join the Nexus Pro membership. It's our global community of smart building professionals.
We have monthly events, paywall deep dive content, and a private chat room, and it's just 35 dollars a month. Second, you can upgrade from the pro membership to our courses offering. It's headlined by our flagship course, the Smart Building Strategist, and we're building a catalog of courses taught by world leading experts on each topic under the Smart Buildings umbrella. Third and finally, our marketplace is how we connect leading vendors with buyers looking for their solutions. The links are below in the show notes.
And now let's go on to the podcast. Hey, friends. We know a lot of you keep up with the smart buildings industry using this podcast. Maybe you're walking the dog, commuting, or if you're like me, you're listening while you run. [00:01:00] And maybe that's all you have time for, meaning you miss all or some of our written content and announcements.
So we wanted to start a regular podcast series that catches you up on what's happening at Nexus Labs. And if you like this, please let me know on LinkedIn. Um, and if you hate this, please also let me know on LinkedIn, but be nice about it because I'm sensitive. So what I wanna tell you about in this episode it's a shift in focus for Nexus Labs and 5 ways we're putting that shift into action to serve you better. So I'm James Dice, if you didn't know that already.
And when I started the company, the name Nexus meant the nexus of the physical and digital worlds. That's what our tech stack is. We talk about that in almost every piece of content that we produce. Um, and it was really quite an elegant name, really, I think. Um, sort of patting myself on the back over here.
But now so today in 20 24, there's there's sort of a new dual meaning to it. We now also mean the nexus of buyers and sellers. [00:02:00] We think there's a vital role for us to play in accelerating our industry by making the marketplace more transparent. That includes, um, really helping out buyers and buyers consultants. Because 1 of the unfortunate truths holding back the smart billings industry is that buying technology takes so much work that it could almost be a full time job or it should be a full time job.
And to make this even more difficult, it often requires working together across at least 3 departments, operations, sustainability, and IT. And yet there are very few full time buyers out there. We've interviewed directors of sustainability. We've interviewed we're the VPs of operations. We've interviewed, um, managers of operational technology, all these, like, core roles to what we do.
And it's clear that buying new technology for their smart buildings programs is just 1 sliver, 1 really small sliver of their responsibilities. And when you're integrating technology into an industry that has always [00:03:00] run without technology, there's not really a way around this vendor research and engagement piece that takes so much time. And with with 6000000 buildings in the in the US alone, it it really needs to be easier to buy smart building technology for this concept to really take off and and scale up and become more mainstream. And 1 of the opportunities for acceleration is in that researching new technologies, that vendor engagement phase. And at this stage, buyers really need to engage with the marketplace to determine the capabilities they need.
They need to shortlist vendors that have those capabilities, and then they need to perform due diligence on those vendors to determine, you know, which ones to engage with further. This due diligence process is it's really difficult and made more difficult by the fragmentation in our marketplace. There are dozens of vendors in each category, all saying similar things but using different buzzwords [00:04:00] to convey the same concepts. Um, we got we got an email a couple weeks ago from Charles who works, uh, for the largest developer of industrial buildings in the US, and he told us that this is the main reason he sees that buyers do not move forward with technology purchases in our industry. He said the market is not only fragmented, but sadly, most of the companies and their staff on the vendor side need to better understand how to tell their story to buyers and their unique businesses and business models.
And today, there aren't really any viable resources this is for wading through the vendor swamp, as we like to call it. Google search helps, but it results in apples to oranges comparisons. Consultants are vital in this process. Not gonna deny that. But there often aren't enough of them, and they can be too expensive for most of that 6000000 building market.
Asking your peers is also a great option until they actually hold back details or they don't share with you what you need to know because you're their competition. So my vision is that [00:05:00] having us in the middle in the nexus helps them get the info they need with less time invested. On the flip side of the equation, the vendors also need help educating the buyers on what they're doing. Vendors need help validating their category and that it's better than the status quo. Vendors need help standing out in all of the noise.
And buyers are hard to get ahold of and and don't always trust vendors. That's probably an understatement. So having us in the middle helps the vendor side. Basically, we we remove the salesiness and allow buyers to get the facts from a neutral resource. And the buyer's consultants, we don't wanna leave them out as well.
So for all you consultants out there, I think we we've learned and we've heard from a lot of you that keeping up with the shifting marketplace it's often a full time job for your team. Right? Um, you think about FTEs, think about the number of people on your team dedicated to smart buildings. It's often a full time job just to understand, like, and and engage with the vendors. So we can take that work off your [00:06:00] plate and and hopefully increase margins on your projects.
And finally, if you think about these 3 different stakeholders that I just laid out, the role we can also play for each of these is it's helping them think beyond point solutions. That's something we've done since the beginning of of Nexus Labs and really help them think about their technology stack more holistically. So that's the kind of the shift that, you know, we're thinking about and we're really in in the middle of implementing here at Nexus Labs. And the first thing we're doing at the heart of that shift is shifting our content approach. So we've created a new type of webinar.
We call this our buyer's guide webinar series, we provide a vendor agnostic overview of a technology category fueled by interviews with past buyers. And then we allow vendors in that category to provide a 3 minute presentation on their special or unique approach to that category. And then we keep them on for q and a. And these have been a really big hit. We've done FCD.
We've done HVAC [00:07:00] control, IoT sensors, the network layer, the data layer, and supervisory control. And the next 1 we're working on is for energy management software. And so if you take this series as a whole, this series is really teaching buyers how to think about constructing their smart building stack. The next thing we've done on the on the content side is is we've done a series of case studies designed to share lessons learned from buyer to buyer. You've heard these here on the podcast from the likes of, um, we've done Clockworks Analytics and the University of Iowa, we've done, um, Facilio and Limbach.
We've done Code Labs and the Empire State Building, Altura and University of California Irvine, we've done VUE and Bento Green Oak or BGO, and we've done BrainBox AI and Sleep Country. And then we've also been publishing written versions of those on our website so people can easily share them and digest them further after the episode goes live. And then lastly, we've done an interview [00:08:00] series, um, with buyers on their buying processes. So we've done about 30 closed door interviews with buyers, and we're publishing our learnings in the Nexus newsletter. So as an example here, you can check out our newsletters on category first buyers or vendor first buyers?
And just to give you all a hint if you haven't read that series, uh, category first is much, much better. So if you're a buyer out there listening to this, you need to categorize yourself on the newsletter. Go check it out, and we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Besides shifting our content, the second way we're putting this shift into action is really doubling down on our partner program. This program started in March 20 23, so it's a little less than a year old.
It's it's really hit its stride recently, and we've really solidified the offering as we've brought more and more partners on. We have a whopping 30 partners now and and lots of different marketplace categories. And we help these partners stand out in the marketplace by getting to know what they do, [00:09:00] verifying that they're legit, and telling their stories through case studies that we just talked about and and much, much more. And we're very transparent about who these partners are. You can find them on our website, on the marketplace page.
And this fills a huge need for marketers in our industry who they might work for really great vendors, but they don't necessarily have the resources to create and publish stories that tell the world about their successful projects. The third way we're putting this into action is offering free vendor shortlisting to buyers and buyers consultants, the industry desperately needs more transparency in the marketplace. And so we're really trying to make it easier for buyers to shortlist vendors, um, help them make faster decisions and make that that process require fewer resources to get to a decision point. And so how it works is we've been interviewing, you know, like I said, we've been interviewing buyers on which technology category they need and their requirements, and then we create [00:10:00] just basically, we create simple vendor request documents, including a pricing exercise, engage with those vendors and and get them to respond to those with with those documents and create a shortlist for the buyer based on their requirements. And then the last step, which really doesn't exist anywhere else in the industry because, um, no one's really in the same position that we are, is we're sharing what we've learned.
Um, and it's really time for more sharing so we can create to start to create these feedback loops where, you know, when lessons learned are on 1 project, we can start to share those from project to project and buyer to buyer. Um, so if you are a buyer or a buyer's consultant, reach out to us to participate in this process. Like I said, it's free. It takes about a month, and it really helps, um, you know, leverage the the small time you have to get to a point where you can move your smart buildings program forward and I should say that we're not a consulting firm. Um, so if if buyers require more more hands [00:11:00] on help from, um, smart buildings experts, we'll be making referrals to our marketplace partners whenever the buyer needs more help than the simple process that I've outlined.
And so I wanna give an example of the type of information that we've been collecting and then sharing through these processes, we were asked to help select occupancy counting or people counting renders for 2 different buyers recently. The first buyer is an office REIT in Canada that owns 5000000 square feet. The second buyer is a corporate owner occupier with 450 global facilities and each of these buyers was concerned or is concerned with counting people in their offices, but there are different use cases. So they they care about this for different reasons. Use case 1 is the office REIT.
They're they're focused more on energy savings. So they were hoping to, um, do zone level occupancy counting. So HVAC zone level and lighting zone level occupancy counting. And then, [00:12:00] um, basically count people and then tie that back to the zones in the HVAC and lighting control systems. So that's use case 1.
Use case 2 was just basically space utilization. So this this corporation has open office collaboration areas. These are about 200 square feet, and they really wanna know how many people use them and whether they should build more or remove them. So they're really hoping to make a, um, space use and space management decision. And both of these buyers were were interesting that they had similar requirements.
They were hoping for, um, buying a sensor and the data. They weren't necessarily hoping for SaaS software, which is interesting when you look at this category and the vendors in this category, they were hoping to use existing PoE infrastructure. Um, they had a desire to avoid Wi Fi based people counting. So that kind of they they kind of narrowed it down on their [00:13:00] own by not wanting a mini category of people counting solutions, and they wanted to mitigate cybersecurity and privacy risk, um, neither had really a hard budget in mind, but we're really looking at using the pilot to validate that there is a good return on investment, and that's vital to them to move forward, and both planned and had budget for a pilot project to start earlier this year, 1 interesting piece of this is they were really looking at each of them looking at 1 use case. Whereas, as we talked about on this podcast many times before and on on the blog many times before, occupancy data can enable a bunch of different use cases.
And so the solution needed to be flexible for future use cases, but they weren't necessarily concerned with those future use cases right now. And then crucially, both buyers sort of needed this information to move their smart buildings program forward. Neither of them had time to sort of wade into [00:14:00] and through the vendor swap. And when they reached out to us, we 1 of the things that we we kind of wanted to, like, let everyone know is we we have a lot of people that reach out to us and say, give me your top 3 in this category, or tell me who's the best in this category. And at this at this point in our industry, there are very few technology categories where we could make a really 1 size fits all sort of recommendation.
Meaning we couldn't just respond to these buyers and say, here's your shortlist. Good luck. Um, I think we hope to get there soon, and we'll talk about that in just a hint, but we're not there yet. So we used our, um, what what was formerly called our our vendor landscape, which we're sort of morphing into our marketplace tool, which I'll talk about in just a second, to select about 40 occupancy counting vendors that might be interested and capable of including these 2 projects. So we sent them 2 forms to fill out, and then we asked them to submit a budgetary proposal [00:15:00] for a sample floor plan.
And from that outreach, um, you know, we had people that, you know, didn't respond, declined the opportunity, or submitted, um, incomplete responses. Um, but from that list, we provided a basically, a of the ones that responded, a simple comparison of all those ones that responded and then, um, you know, provided our recommendation on who they should move forward with to each of those buyers. And so let me share the big picture takeaways from those 2 projects. This gives a good showing of the information that we think would be good to start sharing with the marketplace, we'd love some feedback on this. So takeaway number 1 is that that these buyers made their selections based on the business model and the integration capabilities of these sensors, but they didn't really care about the intricacies between the different types of sensors.
So in other words, they weren't making the decision based off of sensor technology. Um, and once you filtered the [00:16:00] responses of all these vendors for their requirements, which were, again, optional SaaS, local integration options, it only left a few vendors left standing, which I thought was super interesting, and it caused us to say, like, you know, we'd love to hear more from the marketplace on and are there more options for local integration? Are there more options for optional SaaS, um, in the sensor world? And we've been getting some good some good feedback from from the people out in the marketplace there. Takeaway number 2 is these buyers also selected based on price, but not on price alone.
They're basically on on the other options that I just talked about but that said, the pricing exercise was really eye opening. There was a huge range in prices here. And there were a lot of different business models and pricing models that made it difficult to compare apples to apples on the pricing side. None of you, uh, on the buyer side are are surprised right now, uh, because you're used to this all [00:17:00] the time. But it's it's really difficult to compare apples to apples when when pricing comes in from different vendors because they all have chosen to price their their, um, hardware and software and services differently.
And I'd really challenge you all on the vendor side out there to get with your competitors, honestly. Get with your competitors and come up with a standard pricing model for your category. Um, when we think about the things we buy in our personal lives, they're generally the same sorts of pricing models. If you're comparing your, um, Netflix to Disney plus to what are the other ones? Um, it doesn't matter.
Um, Peacock, Paramount plus. If you're comparing all these, they don't have different pricing models. They're all just a subscription that we pay. And so you guys need to come up with that same thing for your categories out there. In our spreadsheet comparing the vendors that responded to this, um, I think there was 1 that had 1 of these projects had 14 [00:18:00] vendors that responded.
I think there were 6 different pricing models that we had to compare. So we chose to normalize this on a 3 year total cost of ownership, um, and the 3 year cost for 1 of these projects range from 290000 to 1300000.0. So you can see there's a massive range and the pricing and that was super eye opening for us. Takeaway number 3 is is very related, but most of these occupancy counting vendors are too expensive to have a legitimate ROI with only 1 use case. They you really need to have multiple varied use cases to make the business case work.
And so the challenge for them in these 2 projects that we did was that their high price sort of rules them out when a buyer is just trying a pilot with 1 use case as was the case with both of these buyers. So those are those are 3 of our takeaways. We did write a a deeper dive into this analysis that [00:19:00] Nexus pro members can go check out at the link in the show notes. And it talks about how we compared the different technical solutions and how we actually compared pricing, and we actually shared some pricing ranges for for people to check out. We also wrote another article about how that first use case, which was integrating occupancy counting with HVAC, is actually far more difficult than it should be and super complex.
And we we we have some recommendations around what buyers and vendors can do to make it easier, and let that use case really take off like a lot of us think it should, um, and so we'll link to that piece in the show notes as well. So this leads us to our fourth way that we're shifting our focus here at Nexus Labs. Um, and that's really how we're gonna share the information we're gathering in these vendor selections. So we're building out a database of smart buildings technology vendors, including which categories exist in the marketplace, what each category means, and which [00:20:00] vendors are in each category, and and much, much more. And so Brad Bonavita is a Nexus pro member that has been keeping this database updated, adding about 30 new vendors to it every single month for the last year or so, before he was on it, I was doing that for the last 3 or 4 years.
So there's up to, like, 800 or 900 vendors in the database at this point. And as of February first of 20 24, we've hired Brad full time, which is amazing, as our head of products to focus on making this information available for future buyers as a marketplace software application, and we'll have more to share about that soon if you wanna get on the wait list to use this product, reach out to us. We will have the first version ready in the next few months. Finally, the fifth way we're putting this shift into action is NexisCon. So we've been convening the change makers of the smart billings industry for 4 years now, and this year on September thirtieth, please mark your calendars.
It's time [00:21:00] to finally meet up in person at the very first NexusCon in Denver, Colorado. We're super excited about this, and yet our our first conference is more than just a meetup for our online and our podcast and our newsletter community, the smart billings industry deserves a different sort of conference. We've heard from you guys. We did many surveys about this, and less than 30 percent of you out there are satisfied with existing conference options. When we hear from buyers, we hear that they wanna learn more, and they tell us that this sort of pay to play content hurts the educational experience.
And they feel that there's not enough expert level content, everything is sort of surface level. And we've heard a similar thing from vendors. They they wish they could learn more as well. Um, but they also wish they they met more interested potential customers. So they want vendor to buyer introductions and vendor to buyer interactions.
And when we think about our industry, it really lags behind most others in terms of [00:22:00] technology adoption, and it's also an industry that really needs to rapidly adopt technology and rapidly decarbonize. So it's really time for a conference that reflects the urgency required to break through our status quo. And while we know how difficult it is to plan the event and we have lots of respect for the other conference organizers, we love going to our conferences. Um, um, it just feels like we as as a Nexus team and as a Nexus community, we really gotta try to shake things up because of that urgency. And I don't have time here to tell you everything we have in store for people that attend our conference, but I do wanna announce a few things.
First, we have limited space in this conference because we're curating the attendees so it has the right balance. We don't, for example, want too many vendors. Um, we want the the balance between buyers and vendors to be good. Um, so if you're sitting here in February and you're planning out your conferences for the year, we really need you to check, uh, this conference [00:23:00] out at the link in the show notes and let us know if you wanna come as soon as possible, um, and we'll give you the details. Second, if you wanna speak, we've released a call for abstracts, and we'll link to that in the show notes too.
We're building an educational curriculum using a sponsor free and community driven and transparent process. So we wanna we wanna hear your abstracts. We wanna read your abstracts. Um, these abstracts will will be reviewed, scored, and ranked based on the following criteria. We're looking for relevance to our conference themes.
Our themes are, um, the real ROI is theme number 1. Um, so we're really looking to get into case studies and the details around how the business case was made for smart buildings technology, so that's theme number 1. Theme number 2 is the digitization and decarbonization nexus so we're really looking to dig into projects where, um, people are moving their [00:24:00] decarbonization program forward, and at the same time, moving their smart buildings program forward. So really that overlap between the 2 of them. And third, the third theme is no BS.
So we're really looking for speakers and educational content and really the culture of the conference. We're really looking for people that want to be vulnerable and honest and not just act like they have everything figured out, but really talk about where we as an industry need to move forward and and where we can improve and what we're learning on our projects out there. So that's the first criteria. We wanna see proposals for, um, presentations that are relevant to those 3 conference themes, the second, um, criterion is, um, originality and innovativeness. So we really want to, um, um, keep pushing things forward, um, clarity of presentation, significance of the findings that you're presenting or the that contribution to the industry, um, we're looking for diversity of speakers.
We're looking for diversity of topics, [00:25:00] and we're looking for diversity of different building types. So we want the conference to be a good place for professionals from the offices and higher ed and multifamily and etcetera, we really wanna come at this from, um, a bunch of different angles rather than having this just be a conference for 1 type of building. And then finally, we're looking for buyers to be up on the stage. And so we don't want, um, vendors only doing presentations, we don't want vendors only on a panel. We're really looking for these, um, abstracts that involve a, um, vendor buyer duo or just a team of buyers, that kind of thing.
So that that we we'd love to see people's abstracts. We'll also put a link to the abstracts form, um, in the show notes as well. And third, we're keeping the the conference website up to date with who will be there. So if you're a vendor, and you really wanna meet buyers, well, we're gonna publish that list for you. Here are the buyers that are gonna be there so you can [00:26:00] meet them.
We won't let anyone be salesy, of course. So if you're on the buyer side, like, uh, worried about vendor salespeople, um, 1 of the, like, basically, the vibes of this conference is that just like our all of our online events and our online community, we don't let people be salesy. That's not part of this group, and so you don't need to worry about that. And as of now, if you think look go look at our site, we're we're gonna basically have representation on the buyer side from higher ed institutions like Dartmouth College and Colorado University, um, commercial real estate like Kilroy Realty, BGO, QuadReal, Maestroich, RMR Group, and then corporates like Lockheed Martin, LinkedIn, Goldman Sachs, and Google. So we'll continue to, um, recruit buyers, um, so that buyers can learn from each other and so that buyers can interact with vendors, we'll continue to put them up on the website.
Um, so check back in as we go. And 1 technology manager from 1 of those companies that I [00:27:00] just listed, he told me that they're they're prioritizing this conference as the only place their story will be told this year. And so that's kind of the vibe we're going for is is I want people on the buyer side especially to feel comfortable that this is the place where they can go share their story, um, teach other people what they've gone through, but also learn from others as well. And if you're a buyer and you wanna meet vendors and or consultants, we'll have them there too. So those tickets are invite only.
And basically, just so that we can make sure the vendors are legit and won't be salesy, like I said. And we'll have our partners there too. So those 30 partners I mentioned, we'll basically be inviting them plus all the right service provider players to round out the rest of the ecosystem. So that's what we do here at Nexus the Slabs is we bring everyone together from all these different positions in the ecosystem. And so that's it for now, folks.
I I hope you now feel up to date and, um, um, included in everything going on at Nexus [00:28:00] Labs, um, we'll we'll throw the links in the show notes that I mentioned. And if you wanna stay up to date on a weekly basis, the best way to do that and keep up with all of this is to subscribe subscribe to our newsletter and follow the Nexus Labs on LinkedIn. And as always, please reach out to us with questions and ideas on how we can accelerate our wonderful industry together Alright. Thanks, friends. Okay, friends.
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