Our CPTO James Shannon joined Hector Kolonas as guest co-host on This Week in Coworking (Week 28). Here’s what they covered — and why the meeting-room revenue gap kept coming up.

Ask an operator how busy their meeting rooms are and the answer is 80, 90%. Ask how much of that demand converts to revenue and the number collapses — often barely above 10%. Phone booths, meeting rooms, bookable spaces: the parts of the building members fight over are the parts the P&L barely sees.

The cause isn’t laziness or bad pricing. It’s a structural trade-off. Locking rooms protects revenue but breaks the member experience — nobody wants to call the community manager to get into a room they’ve booked. Leaving rooms open keeps members happy while bookings quietly leak. CFOs respond by wanting fewer meeting rooms and more offices; members respond by complaining they can never get a room. Both are right, and both are losing.

Closing the gap without the trade-off

This is the problem elumo was built for: booking and access converged into one product. Members tap-to-book and open the door with Apple Wallet — under half a second, door open. It works in front of whatever booking platform you already run: OfficeRnD, Nexudus, Yardi Kube, essensys Operate.

On the episode, James shared two key elumo updates:

Simpler pricing. Per-credential pricing never suited an industry defined by moves, adds and changes, so elumo now costs a fixed price per room, per month — with an OpEx-only option that builds the hardware into the subscription, and wireless handles that retrofit onto existing doors without major works. The ROI test is deliberately conservative: capture one extra booked hour per room per month and elumo has paid for itself.

Proof coming. With sites now live across Australia, the UK and the US, we’re tracking revenue capture from installation day onwards — and Hector has publicly challenged us to bring the uplift numbers. We intend to.

We also recently launched new integrations and wireless locks – more here.

The wider episode: one credential, whole buildings, and the cost of lost context

The rest of the conversation kept circling the same direction of travel.

Full-building flex arrives in Europe. Thousand Satellites’ new Berlin project follows a model popularised in Australia: the operator doesn’t just take a floor, it takes over operating the entire building — amenities, concierge, meeting rooms, existing tenants included. As these models spread, member expectations shift with them: a street-to-seat experience on a single credential, not one fob for the turnstile, another for the suite and a third for the meeting room. That convergence of access layers is exactly where elumo sits.

Sixteen years of Hoxton Mix. The London virtual-office pioneer passed 100,000 businesses served — much of it through partner distribution via accountants, fintechs and challenger banks rather than direct acquisition. Proof that a long-established workspace product can scale like software when automation is applied well.

Vibe coding, honestly assessed. Every operator boardroom is asking whether AI-built tools can replace bought software. James’s view from running engineering at essensys: vibe coding is a superb prototyping and communication tool — our own product owners prototype ideas and hand them straight to engineering — but the moment a vibe-coded tool enters your business, you become its product owner, support team and database maintainer. Build versus buy didn’t go away; it got more tempting to get wrong.

Context debt. Hector’s newsletter essay struck a chord: as AI accelerates output, the why behind decisions — pricing exceptions, vendor choices, architecture calls — evaporates faster than ever. At essensys, every meeting’s decisions are now captured and archived, and actions become tickets, because the why is what bites you two years later.

What’s next

We’re busy working hard on new improvements across elumo, essensys Platform and Operate, which we’ll be launching in the coming months — we’ll save the details for a later date. In the meantime, if your meeting rooms are full but the revenue line doesn’t show it:

See how elumo works →