#22 - Tom Robins: Shaping the Future of Living Spaces with Data Insights and Switchee

Tom Robins - CEO - Switchee

Founded in 2015 by Adam Fudakowski (CEO) and Ian Napier (CCO), they believed that internet-connected technology could be applied to help social landlords better manage their stock and reduce residents' fuel bills. The solution: a smart thermostat designed specifically for landlords with a dashboard providing real-time data and insights, including some of the environmental conditions within the home.

Following Ian’s death in tragic circumstances in 2019, Adam and the team resolved to continue growing the business in his memory.

In 2020 Tom came into the business and a year later promoted to CEO. Under his stewardship, the business has continued to grow.

Tom has spent his career in scale-up leadership roles; Manufacturing Consulting with Newton, Financial Services Analytics with BIPB, A Board Decision Platform with Board Intelligence and Telecommunications with Community Fibre.

He has been working with the Housing Sector since 2015 and believes in
the power of technology to improve the quality of life for residents while transforming the operating model for providers.

Tom is a real people-focused leader with a track record in building and motivating teams. He also has a technical background, with a master's in chemical engineering from the University of Cambridge.

I have followed Switchee’s journey from its early days and have been fascinated by the passion of the people in it and its mission-led approach to data from the built environment. I was intrigued to chat with Tom about Switchee’s lived experience of translating data in a meaningful way, that they genuinely try to answer important questions in the sector and how that potential can be unlocked.

As more and more of the spaces we occupy provide meaningful data about the environment around us, the lessons companies like Switcee are learning could be valuable insight for others.

Moreover, Tom can paint a picture of what scale-up in this space looks like and the potential it holds.

Tom Robins - Linkedin
Switchee 

Transcript

Simon: 0:15

Welcome to Air Quality Matters and this is a conversation with Tom Robbins, the CEO of Switchy. Founded in 2015 by Adam Fudikowski and Ian Napier, they believed that internet-connected technology could be applied to help social landlords better manage their stock and reduce fuel bills for residents. The solution was a smart thermostat designed specifically for landlords with a dashboard providing real-time data and insights, including some environmental conditions within the home. Following Ian's death in tragic circumstances in 2019, adam and the team resolved to continue growing the business in his memory and in 2020, tom came into the business and a year later, promoted to CEO. Under Tom's stewardship, the business has continued to grow.

Simon: 1:10

Tom has spent his career in scale-up leadership roles manufacturing consulting with Newton, financial services, analytics with BIPB, a board decision platform with Board Intelligence, and telecommunications with community fibre. Tom has been working in the housing sector since 2015 and believes in the power of technology to improve the quality of life for residents while transforming the operating model for providers. Tom is a real people-focused leader with a track record in building and motivating teams. Real people-focused leader with a track record in building and motivating teams, but also a technical background with a master's in chemical engineering from the University of Cambridge.

Simon: 1:52

I've been following Switch's journey from its early days and have been fascinated by the passion of its people and its mission-led approach to data from the built environment mission-led approach to data from the built environment. I was intrigued to chat to Tom about Switch's lived experience of translating data in a meaningful way and that genuinely tries to answer important questions in the sector and how that potential can be unlocked. As more and more of the spaces we occupy provide meaningful data about the environment around us, the lessons companies like Switchy are learning could be a valuable insight for others and, importantly, tom is able to paint a picture of what scale up in this space looks like and the potential it holds. Thanks for listening. As always, this is a conversation with Tom Robbins. What do we really mean when we talk about actionable insights? Fundamentally, because it's something that's often spoken and, I think, very difficult to realize. And it really moves to this how do we translate actionable insight into success for customers?

Tom: 3:07

and I think switch has been in a really unique position in that sector to probably understand that more deeply than many others yeah, I think for a long time we thought an actionable insight was some, was a piece of data that you could do something about. Right, there was a real focus that and that meant that we wanted to give people as many pieces of data as we possibly could, in the assumption that they would then take that data and do something about it. We've taken a bit of a step back and we've been a bit of a journey and really understanding that an actionable insight is not just about the piece of data. It's about so much more. It's about the whole journey that then follows. It's about the ability of that person to understand it and interpret that data.

Tom: 3:53

Maybe they've not got a data background. It's the way they engage with it. Then you're looking at the resources within their organization then to be what then can be applied. Then you're looking at the priorities that sit within those resources and then at the end of it, you're looking about whether they actually understand whether that resource that's been applied has made a difference and has actually delivered something. So when we talk about actionable insights, for a long time I think we've been too data orientated and thinking much more around the broader process that's the capability of the organization, the driver from regulation, the relationship with the tenant all of those fit in. Whether it's really it's so much more about the actionable than it is about the insight.

Simon: 4:35

Yeah, that's a really good point and it's that kind of not another dashboard syndrome of organizations where there there's huge potential for data, but it's how you practically realize that as an organization trying to leverage it isn't it just really simply, would you like some more problems?

Tom: 4:56

you know, because I've got, I've got some, I've got some real-time problems here for you, right, and for an organizational level? No, probably I wouldn't, probably I wouldn't. Do you want to improve the, the outcomes for, for residents, for tenants? Hell, yes, we absolutely would. But would we like some more problems? No, thank you. And how do we turn data? So it's not a problem, but is an enabler, and I really believe with time is, is the enabler in, in, in enabling that kind of that, that resident-led process. But there's's quite a hump right.

Tom: 5:26

The housing sector has always operated on quite a lag of data, in some cases no data whatsoever. We look back to the heyday of the large proportion of UK housing. That was. That was social housing. You, the, the ratio of uh of humans to to homes in in delivery of the service was was quite high. People were going through, going across the threshold pretty regularly.

Tom: 5:54

Your data collection was understand, with those regular touch points, those relationships, those communities that sat around it over time and salami slicing and changes of government and funding etc. The ratio between the people that are going into the properties and the number of properties has changed 10x, probably more 20x over that time period. You've also separated the people that are going over those over the threshold maybe isn't employed by the same organization that that provides that provides the property. And that kind of separation between those points means we got very used to having very poor data and we take it, take it for granted. We've got very poor data and so we make assumptions and we make generalizations and, worst of all, we just respond to complaints. You know, and we've become a quite an organizer, a whole sort of industry that just gets very good at responding to complaints.

Tom: 6:44

Actually, I think the ombudsman may think slightly differently, but we just are focused around responding to complaints and data changes. All of that Data enables us to move from reactive to proactive. But there's such a hump. There's such a hump between those two points of just, on one hand, only knowing about who shouts the loudest to knowing how big the actual problem is. They're quite fundamentally different. Our data again would suggest it's probably 10x. Would be a good rule of thumb if you know it's only one in 10 of the things that you're aware of is actually what's going on out there, and and crossing that hump is is not something that you can, that you can do it as a one-er, right, it's not something we can do next week. So actually understanding it and making it into bite-sized chunks and making it achievable is something that we we're working really hard with our, with our, with our clients and customers to do?

Simon: 7:36

to speak of overused words. Uh, the only thing that probably tops uh actionable insights in the data world is moving from reactive to proactive. Um, so we, we must come back to that later because that's, that's a.

Tom: 7:53

You know it's a, it's easy, hard to deliver absolutely, and I'm more than happy to be called on the, on the, on the bingo, on that um, but. But I think ultimately it's it right. You can't keep salami slicing a reactive model. You just get to a point where you are completely out of touch with actually what's going on, and I don't think we're that far off that place at the moment.

Simon: 8:21

I mean you speak of dramatic change within housing, which there clearly has been, but I don't get a sense that that pace of change is going to change anytime soon, that it's a sector that's continuing to evolve and change at pace.

Tom: 8:39

I don't think the expectations that have come in are going to change. Particularly. We're seeing a change, quite a material change, in the demographic of people in housing. You know, we're seeing quite a change in those expectations. I was with a housing provider yesterday. That's 18, 19% Gen Z and are seeing a completely different way that the properties are being used. You know, even in the last sort of five years or so in terms of those expectations. So this change is going to keep coming, without a doubt, I would argue to a point. It was long overdue. But yeah, housing is going to be squeezed. We need to build more and we need to deliver housing to a high quality standard.

Simon: 9:23

One of the challenges of that change has been the constant cycling of personnel and the type of organizations that are evolved in housing, and perhaps one of the things that data offers up is a consistency that you may not have got in the older models, where that knowledge was inherent to individuals in the organization that knew estates or householders or or supply chains in the area. Now that that data can hold a level of consistency that wasn't available before, I guess yes, it's a really interesting point.

Tom: 10:04

Actually as well. I was with a leadership team of a pretty decent-sized housing association last week. They, because of the particular demographic that they serve, have got a much higher ratio of people to properties, and one of the things that they found was an area they were looking to build on was, when you've got that number of people, then then the the consistency of estimation becomes quite difficult. You know, you've got the sort of the opinions come into one person's perception of warm, one person's perception of stuffy moldy. You know, as you bring that kind of perception piece, um, that itself can be quite difficult to manage because it gets quite emotive. It's trying to tell one person what warm is, another person what warm is.

Tom: 10:53

You know, I'm a, I'm a professional, I know what warm is um, and the data can be really powerful in that, in just giving a consistent, consistent experience, um, I know we're gonna jump onto it later, um, um, but I'm, I'm very, I'm very skeptical. Our data makes me very skeptical of of epcs, um, and I think it's one of the areas that I'm really passionate that I think the only true answer is in home monitoring is to give a truly consistent expect, to get a truly consistent experience, for for I've been into hundreds of EPC C-grade properties and I know that they all feel different. Some of them feel really warm and some of them really don't feel warm. And that resident experience, I think, was something we try and present in the data so you're able to give that consistency, irrelevant of what the EPC scoring is.

Simon: 11:43

Yeah, and the same can be applied to other indoor environmental conditions as well. I think we assume sometimes that a street of the same archetype is going to be broadly similar and we know from reality they can be extraordinarily different. There could be huge spectrums in outcomes and with seemingly no cause sometimes. But it exists and without that data sometimes you just don't get to see it unless you can get in and out of each individual property so some of it is is perfectly logical.

Tom: 12:16

So we, you know we work with a um, I think with a case study on this with, with with gen 2 uh housing provider in in sunderland.

Tom: 12:23

Uh, they did a big retrofit of a of a tower block, um, and every one of those flats have the same epc score, right, um, but on a tower block if you lived on the north facing side of the block then your heating was on, you know, to get the same temperature in your same epc grade flat, I think I remember I think I think it's 14 or 16% more fuel to the 14 plus 60% higher fuel bill to achieve the same average temperature with the same EPC.

Tom: 12:54

So there's some of this that just feels well. Of course we know that right. Of course it's going to be colder on the north side. Everyone, you know it's going to be warmer on the south side. Of course it's going to be that. But actually turning that into a number, into a real experience, particularly when we're looking to place people in properties and thinking about affordability, now it's one of the reasons and again I'm going to place my list for later in the conversation it's one of the reasons that I really believe that the future is heat. Included within your rent right is that the ownership and the responsibility for providing a warm property solves it puts all the right influence and controls with the right party in my mind.

Tom: 13:40

You are delivering a high quality service to the resident that is consistent with better outcomes, but the risk and the ability to influence that risk is held with the person that has the bigger budget and is able to get the cheaper electricity and it just sits right. So we really believe and I particularly, as a bit of a personal cause of mine is that anything that moves us towards the technology that moves and enables us towards heat, inclusive rent, will change many of the, many of the, the ills and the and the and the sort of the challenges that we see at the moment for tenants yeah, yeah, I'm.

Simon: 14:15

I mean one of the things that I think has always been really interesting about switchy and one of the reasons I've been talking to you guys for so long. Now it must be be coming up over 10 years, I guess, but getting close is that you started this journey out with a real social purpose.

Tom: 14:36

And still do Very clear.

Simon: 14:38

DNA about what you're trying to do, and many organizations in that space may not have that.

Simon: 14:46

But what I think might be interesting to unpack a little bit is is how organized, how an organization that had such a clear social purpose that largely what you are delivering is very similar to what you started out intending to do looking at things like fuel poverty and condensation risk and communication with tenants and all of that and how you found that journey of knowing what you could do, understanding what you thought the actionable insights could be for your product, and how that journey evolved over those years of going. Well, we're giving this information, but it it's either not landing, there, isn't the organizational structure to handle the information. Um, because the pathway that you've trod is a pathway that many sectors in the built environment, I think, are going to have to tread, and that is that we've got something that does something. We're quite clear in what it's capable of doing, but how do we actually create value for the user of that technology or data in a meaningful way? And you've, because you were first to market with this, you had to do the hard miles, I guess.

Tom: 16:06

Look, I've got to put our cards on the table and say I don't think we were first to market on this and it's interesting, you know you go but I wasn't around in switching those very early days. But you talk to the founders and there was three or four products in the market that did broadly what we did and I think we're very lucky to be here, we're very lucky to be here did and I think we're very lucky to be here, we're very lucky to be here today, and I don't think any of them are. In many ways, our journey is a real classic technology adoption journey. Right, you know, you sort of take that kind of classic kind of technology adoption curve In the very early days. You know it really was the kind of crazy innovators that wanted to do this and we wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for a bunch of real visionary innovators and a really good chunk of government grant money. Because that's what gets you going in the early days because nobody actually wanted to buy our product and arguably we didn't have a product right. We, we had a, we had a dream right and and it was a combination of that capability of of being involved in the early in the grant funding and and building up that kind of capability and a bunch of early innovators that that really got us, that got us on the map, um, uh. So we will be forever grateful for those innovators that really got us on the map. So we will be forever grateful for those innovators.

Tom: 17:28

But the funny thing about this and the sort of wonderful thing about those innovators, is they're only with you for a relatively short period of time, because pretty soon afterwards they're like well, that was like last year's news, I want the next cool thing. You were like two years worth of cool thing again. I'm interested. So you never much have to move into the, into the early adopters, and the early adopters have got a different set of, a very different set of requirements. So you know, in the early days we had a, we had a vision of iot and what it was capable of, and the innovators were like yeah, we'll feed it, just give me a spreadsheet, I'll make it work, we'll do some cool stuff. Don't worry, I will fill all of the service gaps because I just believe in this. Right, amazing Innovators very quickly were old news.

Tom: 18:11

You're, then, starting to work with the early adopters. The early adopters want to be cool. They want to try that first thing. They can see the potential, their dreamers, their believers. But they need more. They don't want to do the little um, they don't want to sort of solder it themselves.

Tom: 18:27

Right, they, they, they need you to then start putting more of a service wrap, and so we move from like we'll just give you some data to actually just giving you some data. It isn't enough. We need to turn that data into some form of insight. We need to put a wrap around it, a software wrap that says how do we do this? And if we give you that wrap, you then, as an early adopter, will have the clout within your organization to fill all of the rest of the service gaps. We're installing it a small enough scale here that you know what you can sort of do a few deals internally and make something work. We're still at that kind of charm and kind of space and we spent a couple of years in that kind of space and we improved our offerings. It wasn't just the hardware plus data, it was the hardware plus the data plus the insights.

Simon: 19:12

And that's where you're landing projects and case studies rather than a business relationship per se, you're not building a business case at that stage. It's a let's get this into this estate and make it work for you here.

Tom: 19:27

We're in a pilot place, we're in the classic pilot place and I mean it's an overused joke, but it is like there are more pilots in housing than there is in British Airways, right, because this is where people get stuck right. It is pilot after pilot, after pilot and you know and I think it was you know in the early days, people were like, hey, I want, I'll get five and I'll have a play with them and then I'll get 50 and we'll do a couple of streets and even I'll get 500 and we'll do an estate, but it's still very much a, a pilot. So the standard rules of procurement don't allow the, the standard rules of the way it's got to work through the supply chain. I'd say we can work around that, it's all okay, right, at some point you've got to get into the real world. And I think the real world and the scales that we're at now, which I think is early majority and very much the behavior we're seeing is an early majority behavior there's been sort of two big changes, for that one is that we've just really had to grow up as an organization and and there's a few areas in that one, the the quality of the product.

Tom: 20:36

You know, you don't. People aren't on your side anymore. They're buying an enterprise grade product. So you've got to have your failure rate has got to be less than a boiler, right, if they're buying a boiler, they're buying a switchy. They want to visit the property. They're cool with visiting the property because the boiler's broken. But if they're visiting the property because the switchy's broken, you're not going to make any friends, right, and you're not going to go any further. So there's a whole kind of enterprise quality piece that needs to cross, go across the threshold. And then, secondly, you've got to be working with the supply chain. So in the past it was like, yeah, we'll send you some boxes to your home address right. Now we've got to be available in every city plumbing store Travis Perkins, you know Wolseley. You've got to have all those commercial relationship setups that people deliver into super centers. We've got pallets. We do pallets of switches out to people. How do you stack a pallet right? All of that maturity piece in terms of supply chain that needs to happen.

Tom: 21:30

But the biggest change has been the maturity in the service proposition, because as you move into that early move into that early majority kind of uh, that kind of space, that that the power of the individual personality to to fill gaps disappears. It has to stand up by itself, and so just providing an insight isn't enough. Right, if, if. Because ultimately, if you provide the insight and people do nothing about it, it's not their fault, it's going to look like your fault. We tried switchy really nice loads of great insights, but we didn't do anything with them. So we'll just sort of stop now, right, and you've got to. Ultimately, we have to take responsibility for the, for the, for the change being made, for the insight happening, and that's been quite a big journey. So we're out there. We've built out our customer success team. We're fantastic now, currently led by Kate Roberts. We've built out our analytics team. So we've now got an eight-person data science team and doing custom analytics for our customers.

Tom: 22:20

You want it cut a certain way Fine. You want it cut by a state Fine. Customers. You want it cut a certain way fine. You want it cut by a state fine. You want it cut by archetype fine. That ability to cut and slice and dice so that what's useful can be walked into a meeting with a decision maker to make something else happen. We've had to create those kind of capabilities and we're constantly learning and feeding them back into the software product. But we've had to put a service wrap around that, and probably the biggest service wrap we've put in the not in the recently has been.

Tom: 22:46

Customers are like I need this faster. I just can't do it at the speed I need to do it at the moment. Can you install it for me? You know, back in the early days we were like well, we're never going to do that. We know what's going on now. A third of all switches are installed by our own network of of of contractors and it starts becoming ever closer. You know, what started out as a bit of electronics that became a bit of cloud and insight is now very much becoming. We deliver outcomes for our customers and that's what that kind of early majority wants. So much as to a point, it looks exactly the same. I think we are on the same mission. We are working for the same customers in the same market. To a point, the little box that gets screwed to the wall looks the same, but in terms of what we're delivering, it's really changed materially over that eight-year journey, so that now we've got the breadth and the capability to deliver an enterprise outcome rather than just… some devices and a spreadsheet.

Simon: 23:42

Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned customer success. I get the sense that they've been a really pivotal role in realizing the locked-in potential of those customers, because you are a SaaS model after all, you need sticky customers and if you're going to retain customers long-term, there has to be inherent success in that relationship.

Tom: 24:06

Yeah, there has to be inherent success in that relationship. Yeah, so customer success has been, it's been a, it's been an absolute game changer. Game changer for us really getting under. What does the customer need? How do we adding value? A lot of that comes back into our product team, a lot of come back into our custom analytics team and we're constantly learning.

Tom: 24:21

But our customer, but our customer success team, and we get asked this question ever more. I think I've been asked this question by two execs, two chief execs in the last week like like not, not, will this work? We know this is going to work, we know this is coming. How do we do it best? How do we transform our business best? And that's where our customer success team comes in, sharing the best practice across 130 different housing associations and local authorities. Not sometimes what doesn't work, but what does work. How can you take that best practice and transform your organization? And again, that's that growth of that kind of service proposition. It's not just about how do we do it, but actually how do we have assurance that it's been done?

Simon: 25:07

How does that speed and adaptability as a growing organization, the ability to pivot and adapt quickly? How does that rub up culturally against some of the organizations that you're coming across? Because you're dealing with, at one end of the scale, absolute behemoths of organizations that would have enormously complex and slow-moving governance and management structures within them, to middle-sized organizations that may have come from local authority housing and have very embedded ways of doing things right the way to smaller organizations that might be quite adaptable, the the you're able to move um but ultimately the success of your product is as much in the hands of your customers as it is you, and I'm guessing a lot of what you're doing is around subtle organizational change, management almost with these companies, of putting them in a place to get the benefit of this kind of technology yeah, I think there's um, uh, I think this comes back to being a mission-driven business, right?

Tom: 26:21

what we're trying to do, what we're on a mission to deliver an outcome. We're not on a mission to sell boxes, we're not on a mission to to get subscription numbers, like we're on a mission to deliver outcomes here. And you know it. You know, I see too many um, I see too many small startup technology businesses getting a bit righteous, you know, in a kind of like, you know we're right and if you don't buy it, you're wrong. And I, like housing is littered with the graves of people who are right. Right, it's that being right in housing gets you nowhere.

Tom: 26:57

It's it's about what have you actually changed, what have you actually delivered? And I think that you know, for us, it's making it's, it's it's ultimately being humble and taking responsibility. If we haven't delivered the outcome, then we haven't delivered. And we need to take that look at ourselves and make sure that our services and our capability and what we provide our customers delivers the outcome. And there's been some pretty painful bits on that and we haven't always got it right and in some cases we've got it really wrong, but I'm really proud to say that where we have got it wrong. The relationship we've built with our customers, we've learned and got it right has stood the test of time and ultimately, I think it's got a bit stronger. So, yeah, it's not easy and it requires us ultimately to take responsibility for the outcome, not the implementation.

Simon: 27:42

Without delving into the details necessarily outcome, not the implementation. Without delving into the details, necessarily what? What are the kind of things that you get wrong in that process as a technology deliver and service deliverer, is it dead ends, you find yourself going down or what? What is a wrong outcome for you in that kind of relationship?

Tom: 28:03

let me give you a classic, a classic wrong outcome. And again, like so, we're right, we're, we're a scale-up business. Um, you know, like I'm trying to, we're trying to grow it, we're trying to do more, we're trying to have more impact. So if somebody, let's say, a couple of months before financial year end, they say, hey look, I've got a bit of money left in my budget, um, I, uh, I'd like to purchase a thousand devices, you know, I'd like to. You know, you know what. We're just going to do this. Guys, we're just going to do this. You know, my sales team are going to go ding, ding, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm going to get over. Right, the instinct is to go, yeah, we'll do that. That's fantastic. We'll just sort of do it through a framework. We'll do it around the usual procurement, don't worry about it. Right?

Tom: 28:54

Every single one of those examples hasn't delivered value and I'll tell you what happens classically, time and time again, is one the sort of people that do little back deals around procurement processes with a bit of money at the end of the year. The churn rate of them is quite high. It's quite high. So typically a year later they're not in post right Bit of a correlation and when they're not in post, they haven't connected you with anyone else inside the organization. So you haven't done the proper stakeholder management. You haven't understood what success looks like for the organization and chances are most of those devices are going to be sat on a shelf somewhere still in their boxes, and a customer is going to go.

Tom: 29:34

Why am I working with Switchy? It didn't work. So there's been a real lesson learned for us is that an easy deal is a bad deal, right? You've actually got to stop and say no, no, no, I'm not going to. I appreciate you thinking of us, but we know that this only works if we have a proper stakeholder engagement from the off with the following departments you can't just work around IT right, they have to be on the journey.

Tom: 29:59

You can't just work around the customer team they have to be on the journey. You can't just work around the repairs and the DLO team they have to be on the journey. Because unless all of those people are on the journey together, this is going to be really hard work and probably isn't going to deliver anything for you. And that can be very difficult to have those kinds of conversations and you know, as a small business trying to have an impact, but we know that if you don't get the right state of engagement to start with, if you're not clear about what success looks like, it's going to be almost impossible for you to achieve it.

Simon: 30:29

Isn't that the same with almost any element of anything within business where it requires any kind of change at the organizational level? If you're not having those conversations at the beginning, you're kidding yourself, and that's what I meant to ask. Is it the the typical? There isn't a typical customer journey now, I guess. But, um, because you've got such history behind switchy, in the early days you'd got nothing unless there was a trial and then probably another one, and then some point down the road you managed to size somebody into some kind of multi-annual agreement of some description, but a housing association coming to you these days that there's any number of case studies, any number of housing associations that they could talk to, that probably use your product. What does a good customer journey look like for somebody now that's looking to adopt technology like this into social housing? Does it start with the management team and that defining what good looks like conversation?

Tom: 31:29

absolutely, absolutely. And again, I've had a couple in the last week. You know, in both cases were very uh, just flattered. It was a, it was a chief. There was chief exec level in which it was the. The engagement started um, but there was very much uh, interestingly, in both cases the chief exec was on the board of another housing association that we had a project with. So they there was, it wasn't. They were sort of pre-qualified to a point um, but the, the conversation was very much with the executive team, with all the right stakeholders in the room.

Tom: 32:03

What are the problems that you're trying to solve? What are the particular pain points for you? They are all different, not necessarily in terms of the top 20, but actually when it comes to the priorities. Different parts of the country, different stock levels, different demographics can drive different sets of requirements in that. And then what does success look like? How do we prove? And consistently? The question is not can we prove the technology works?

Tom: 32:26

I think that's largely agreed now. I hope that's a journey that we've been on. The conversations we're having now is from a chief exec mindset. Can my organization do something with this right? I know it's going to come at some point, but if we're not ready now, then I need to understand that and make the changes so that we are ready in future. And so we do a lot of discovery work. We'll do stakeholder engagement with each of the different teams and then come back with a set of success objectives that, at an exec level, that team then agree to and we can work with them on our customer success team, our transformation team and our insights team can then work with them to execute success team, our transformation team and our insights team can then work with them to execute.

Simon: 33:09

So what? What kind of okrs or kpis are organizations looking for to benchmark success of something like this? You know you're a housing associate let's say, middle ranking 15, 20 000 homes. You think right, okay, this is something that's gonna. We might. We might have a damp and mold crisis on our hands. We've got we've got some retrofit funding we're looking at. There's a whole number of reasons we might think to start pulling this kind of data. Um, we're looking to roll this out. We've got a budget for it. How do they? How does somebody in a year's time benchmark that was a successful process with something like this kind of technology?

Tom: 33:48

really what you look at. I think this is a bit of a it's an assurance mindset, right? So how do I identify a problem and know that I fixed it right? It doesn't. It's like mold is a relatively I say straightforward one. It's straightforward in the sense that it doesn't you don't have to look very far to find challenges.

Tom: 34:07

People will typically know there's a proportion of their stock built at a certain time or in a particular location, and what we're looking to do with our customers is, on a sort of simple kind of proof point level what's been identified, has something been done to change that, and do we know that it's subsequently changed and hasn't come back? Now there are some softer metrics. There's a resident engagement through that journey. It's very important. The ombudsman is very important about that. This is resident satisfaction journey. There's making sure that they feel engaged and good about what's happening.

Tom: 34:42

But ultimately, what you're doing here is there's a proportion, there's a proportion of things that you've identified, and then what proportion of things you've identified have you fixed? And then what proportion of things that you fixed have stayed fixed. And that's what I talk about from a switch perspective, on an outcome basis, like that's the measure right, what like. It's not like how many things we've identified isn't good enough. You know, particularly in the current climate, that's really not good enough. Knowing about it and not doing something is really not good enough.

Tom: 35:11

So what do you know about? What have you done? And then how do you know it stayed done? And, to a point, retrofit's kind of the same, isn't it Like? Which properties do you know have got a problem? What have you done about the properties you've got to know in terms of energy performance? And then do you know down the line that that's fixed it right? And I think that's you know. We talk a lot to chief execs about IoT being a really powerful way of cauterizing your problem right. We don't want to show you a whole bunch of problems that more than you can cope with, more than you've got the budget with, you suddenly start having to declare risk registers and downgrade. That's no good journey for anybody. What we want to do is help you really understand that problem such that you can fix it and then know that it stayed fixed. That's the key thing you won't have to go back again and that you'll be able to be dynamically monitoring change of tenants, change of weather conditions, change of whatever, you still know that that's fixed.

Simon: 36:11

Yeah, and validation of spend is such a key metric for housing organizations?

Simon: 36:17

Because there's so much spend everywhere all at once, everywhere all at once.

Simon: 36:29

Starting to define and unpack that question is.

Simon: 36:30

An is one of the most powerful parts of the data from the built environment the, as you, as you point out, the stock condition element of it. It's useful to understand where the problems are, but that's only the starting point. If we were just going to keep all buildings the same forever, you wouldn't need the data, because what the data is about is taking buildings on a journey and understanding where you prioritize resources and evidence the efficacy of the spend you're putting into that process and whether that's, uh, not eliminating dampened mold, but being able to evidence that an intervention that you spent money on had an impact is as powerful as being able to say you've lifted that property out of being a red flag for damp and mold, because a lot of these problems are not fixable with a silver bullet. Therefore, that data is going to be very powerful on this part of the journey we've got to go on of improve putting these buildings on a, on a roadmap it's, and this, I think, is I think it's a really exciting time to be in the industry.

Tom: 37:34

I think we are genuinely going into uncharted territory here, right, because we, like we, we've had epc as a proxy for energy performance for a long time now, but I think there's a general acceptance now it's not good enough and doesn't reflect true performance. How much mold is too much mold, right? What is your measure? I think we're seeing with awab's law and it is a real concern for me I think we're seeing a our ability to respond to complaints is an effective measure of no mould. Well, our experience is that that isn't necessarily a strong correlation, that the amount of mould out there is significantly greater than the amount that's being complained about, particularly in some demographics, particularly in some sub-demographics that are very unlikely to complain about mold and yet still have a really big mold problem. So I think we're in it.

Tom: 38:31

I think it's a really exciting time for housing and and I um you know the way I'd sort of characterize it is I think housing is being, rightly so, considered as a piece of infrastructure.

Tom: 38:43

Now, you know, and I think that housing is a fundamental piece of infrastructure.

Tom: 38:46

Now, you know, and I think that housing is a fundamental piece of infrastructure in the uk, in the same way as the roads and the railways and the airports and the electricity pylons are fundamental to how we operate as a country. And but we we've got measures for performance of railways and we've got safety standards, expectations and definitions that we have for our pylons. But we're on quite a learning journey here in housing, right, and you're seeing that across the board here in terms of consumer standards and expectations, in terms of professionalisms and qualifications within the sector and in terms of the measures and the metrics that we hold ourselves accountable to. It's a very exciting time. This is a journey that many other sectors have been on over time. You know that the railways were a wild wild west for a bit. Everyone's running different gauges, everyone's running different stuff, and it became right no, this is a national infrastructure. We will regulate, we will manage the controls in place and I think it's a very exciting time to be in housing. I think technology is critical to enabling that.

Simon: 39:48

Yeah, and I do want to come on to this idea that you talk about around a digital operating model, but I suppose at the heart of all of that is this shift in focus from housing being an asset to a provision of homes and quality of life for people, a foundation for which people can reach their potential, not an asset to manage its degradation and investment and divestment in and out of when you've got that's the fundamental data on the assets.

Tom: 40:19

Right, we've only got the data on the assets. So we, like you know, I I think, um, yeah, housing is not an asset class. I just, and I think it's quite, it's quite a uniquely british thing and it's something I really get on my I really get on my high horse about like, I don't think you can consider it as an asset class. I think you have to. I think you have to consider it as a fundamental piece of the foundation of infrastructure of society. Right, it's, it's, you know it, it is no housing like this is it's going to get really messy really quickly. And I think we're, I think in places we're starting to see that, um, housing is absolutely, is absolutely critical here and we need to consider it in a broader context.

Tom: 40:55

Now we've been doing a lot of lobbying. I think it's. I think, who knows whether we're going to see a change of government, but it's probably more likely than not we will see a change of government. We've done a lot of lobbying of both parties coming into the election to say someone's got to start joining the dots between housing, healthcare and social care. Right, they are not separate budgets. They cannot have such hard lines drawn between them, you know, because they are fundamentally part of the same thing. You know, and in this and by looking at it as a as a whole, and by understanding how these parts work together, I think ultimately we can deliver something that's better for people.

Tom: 41:37

You know, if you're going to go, if I'm going to, if I can discharge you from hospital and it might be wonderful that you've got some care support at home but if that home's 14 degrees, like there's a, there's a pretty good chance you're going to be back soon, right, and the cost of heating that home to 18 degrees might be a grand a year. The cost of having you overnight in a hospital is going to be two to three grand. So we're sort of lost. I think we've just lost a little bit here, and I think both parties and there's a big, big bit of thinking about this at the moment. But yeah, I couldn't agree more. Housing is part of the fabric of society.

Simon: 42:15

It's not an asset class well, you can imagine you're pushing on open doors with me, tom. Being a air quality and building health person, that I mean you know the indoor environment and air quality is the single biggest environmental risk. Mean you know the indoor environment and air quality is the single biggest environmental risk we face as a human species and it has almost incalculable impacts on society when we get it wrong. And damp and mold is just one small jigsaw piece of how we're getting that wrong.

Simon: 42:41

And I think it's interesting that refocusing of that sector doesn't sit in isolation. That you can imagine as hard as it is, hard as it is in social housing, that's an even harder argument, with all the split incentives of private rented and home ownership to deal with, notwithstanding the non-residential sector, but even the residential sector. There's this fundamental shift in ideas now where we start to understand that so much of our bottom line is wrapped into the health and well-being and productivity of the people that occupy those spaces for social housing. What's interested is housing organizations don't sit in isolation. They're part of communities. Those communities' ability to earn, be healthy, contribute to society is all wrapped up in the security of tenure of the places that they live in and the health and security that they provide, and it would be crazy if we didn't see it in any other way I think you're absolutely bang on, but I you know the whole kind of weird, crazy debate.

Tom: 43:48

I don't think largely we do see it in in in those terms, you know, and I I think for a long time, for a long time now, we we've seen it in quite different terms and it's only relatively recently that we appreciated quite how bad things were.

Tom: 44:04

And I you know there's been a lot of sort of expose or exposes on that and there's some pretty horrible stories that have come out of it.

Tom: 44:10

But there's been a real blindness to this and I think that's one of the things that I'm really passionate about from a technology perspective and we talked about standards, but there is a significant proportion of the population that are that don't interact with other systems and we don't know what's going on and we're not able to help.

Tom: 44:30

I mean, the strange thing that we found with Switchy is that actually the resources to help. We've never run out of our customers having the resources to help right. They've never got to a point where they've gone. Now we don't have any more cold homes vouchers, we don't have any more kitchens that we can replace. That's never been a conversation we've had, but what they're consistently saying is we don't know how to best allocate the resources, we don't know who needs it most, and I think that answering that question is pretty powerful. It's not the one with the best ROI, but in terms of helping you sleep at night, I think it absolutely is. There's a significant silent proportion of the population that could have a better quality of life and I think we've got the resources to do it.

Simon: 45:16

if we can just join the dots and technology is that way and I see this very much in ventilation housing organizations really struggling to define and I see this very much in ventilation housing organizations really struggling to define a bit like the conversations you're having with your type of technology is defining what good actually looks like for them and having the systems and strategies and workflows in place to actually deliver that. When it comes to the provision of good ventilation in homes, because they've always operated on a kind of a replaced light with light model or put that type of a fan in all homes that have a problem, they've never really approached it from a well, what does this home need and how do I evidence that that choice has been effective? And this is this brave new world that we're moving into, which I guess feeds into this digital operating model idea that the, the, the landscape, could be significantly different if viewed for through a different lens, couldn't it?

Tom: 46:16

it could.

Tom: 46:17

But I also, um, I suppose I'm quite excited about how, how close it is to right like so, um, we're working with uh, we've got a little um, we've got a little skunk works project we're doing at the moment with one of the uk's largest um ventilation providers and just the ability to take fan data and feed it back centrally becomes really exciting really quickly.

Tom: 46:43

Right, and you know, the impact of the cost of the fan is maybe a quid, maybe a couple of quid, but you take it from being a dumb device to being a connected device, with people buying what they were going to buy anyway, pretty much on a standard specification. The incremental cost across the whole house is insane five pounds, you know and the net result is that you've actually got quite a smart, capable, understanding bit of model there that is doing some really cool stuff. So like I don't think we are that far from where that's that's also what gets me out of bed in the morning is like we're pretty close, pretty close, all right, but we do need, but it's just really getting us to think about the problem differently yeah, and starting to think about it as provision of housing for a service, or heat as a service, or that kind of digital operating model kind of thing what is the outcome?

Tom: 47:36

we're trying to do? Here, yeah, and for us it's about the quality of life for people living in rented homes and that's more. That is broader than just it being warm, right, that that, that is a that's a much greater kind of understanding. But I think I think that aligns with why everyone got into housing to start with. You know, ultimately we, we are aligned, but that's how do we get some metrics in there?

Simon: 47:55

and we want to be part of that, part of that journey yeah, what are the kind of problems that you're coming up against from a scaling perspective? Because I mean, obviously you've got your own internal challenges from a scaling perspective. Because I mean, obviously you've got your own internal challenges from a scaling perspective, but you're bringing a lot of your customers through a scaling process as well and they're moving from perhaps case studies and projects or certain area deployments to broader scales. It that must be, that must be a very significant challenge for a lot of organizations trying to do that.

Tom: 48:34

Yeah, look, it definitely is. I think one of the key things when I come on to this kind of digital operating model piece is, I think that the skills in housing for a proactive model are quite different from the skills in housing for a reactive model. And I don't talk about that in there and please play a play a bingo with me on this but I don't talk about that particularly in terms of the technology. I do talk about that particularly in terms of the, the, the mindset, the skills within the skills within the team and the ability for process change. I think housing is when you're very good at reactive. You have firefighters that want to get up and deal with an inbox full of difficult things, you know, and you have you know, you have people, you know buzzner. It all feels a bit apprentice, but on the phone dealing with challenges and you know we're listening.

Tom: 49:39

What's come through on the call center today, right, you, there's quite a um and I and I I say this and I've said this before like housing, a bit wants to be needed, right, and as we move from reactive to proactive, we actually have to try and make ourselves not needed, and that that is a different mindset, right, that is, how do I eliminate myself? How do we have no repairs? And, even more controversially, how do we have no ombudsman? How do we move to a place where this isn't about how fast we react to complaints? How do we? Could you run housing lights out? Right Like an Amazon warehouse, right Like an Ocado packing center? Right, that's got to be the mindset.

Tom: 50:31

That's a much more efficient model, but it's quite a big change in mindset that we're trying to put the systems and processes in place to eliminate ourselves. And that becomes about understanding a problem, a capability, particularly on the data front, to understand what the data is required. It becomes, on a process change capability, that we are constantly updating our processes, not every 10 years when a new piece of legislation comes through, maybe every 10 weeks, as we have a better understanding of the key problems that are being faced at the coalfaces. It means that with our DLOs or DLOs, and with our, our outsourcing we don't outsource in a five-year contract that locks us into a particular way of working that actually we start operating much more dynamically.

Tom: 51:14

You know, whether that's an Uber model or you know a Plentific Star model, I wouldn't want to go. I wouldn't want to say but you've got a much more dynamic way of working that's responding to the challenges you know. You look at an American football team. You've got an offensive team and a defensive team. We sort of need a winter team and a summer team. It's so different in the needs and the requirements and the way that kind of is the journey that the vehicle manufacturing went on over the sort of the 60s and the 70s that change from being.

Tom: 51:55

You know, we've just got to do more. We've got to have as many people as possible and react to problems, to how do we eliminate problems, how do we eliminate ourselves, how do we make this thing so it's a high quality service, lights off, and that's a really big change in mindset service lights off and that's a really big change in mindset.

Simon: 52:13

Yeah, and I suppose the the kind of business as a service model has typically been the realm of cutting edge, very reliable products if they're managed and serviced and designed and used properly. You know you, you think of your Rolls Royces and your Apache helicopters and all of the stuff that works as an as-a-service delivery model. But I'm trying to think of a as-a-service business model that starts with something that's fundamentally broken. It's not only got to deliver something efficiently, it's also got to fix it to get it there for it to work efficiently. So you've got two tracks at the same time, uninvested in um to a state where you can have that kind of operating model working like the others do, that is doing this stuff efficiently that doesn't require service and maintenance. That's a huge task. That's a really interesting puzzle.

Tom: 53:20

I think I think it's a really fun journey. I think it's a really really fun journey to be on.

Tom: 53:24

I think what I think is sort of pretty interesting in the market at the moment has been the rise of the for-profit housing providers. This is a real game changer for the sector and I think we're just only at the very early journey of quite how much of a game changer that's going to be. So at the moment you look at the for-profit providers, they've largely bought brand new stock but they've done it. They're very much operating a digital model working with all of them. It's very much a digital first style structure. Now I think in the early days people could have definitely turned their nose up that you don't have legacy stock, you don't have the remains of a large scale stock transfer. It's sort of cheating if you're just doing the easy stuff.

Tom: 54:06

But that narrative is is is changing and I think that they're learning and evolving. They're learning a lot and evolving a lot quicker. They'll openly say they got some stuff wrong in the early days and you know they're learning and evolving. But they're starting to take on a different stock profile. They're starting to take on significantly large pieces of stock profile to change the stock profile. I don't think we're that far from a small, failing housing association being handed over lock stock to one of the for-profit providers and that does become quite interesting. So I do to a point say it's a little bit unfair for them. They get to sort of start with a clean sheet of paper perhaps.

Simon: 54:43

But there is a new model coming in and it is scaling and I do think it is going to be really quite different so if you were to try and describe what this idea of a digital operating model is, how would you kind of concisely frame it, tom, yeah and I I suppose the simplicity, it's sort of back to my lights off factory right, it should just work. Yeah.

Tom: 55:11

Right, it should all just work right and you really consider that any requirement to fix something is, to a point, a failure? And if it is a failure, how do we make it as quick as possible? How do we fix something as early as possible? How do we fix something as early as possible? How do we do our maintenance preventively? How do we stop things from being a problem to start with Very much a kind of real preventative mindset across the whole of the service delivery?

Tom: 55:40

If we don't want there to be mold, how do we solve the problem of mold? Right, so we could monitor it. And the key drivers on there are going to be the ventilation in the property. There's going to be the temperature inside the property. It's going to be the amount of humidity generated by the resident, each of those that we can engage with, so we can look at ventilation that operates automatically and resolve some of the challenges From a heat perspective. We can include it into the cost base. For a resident perspective, how are we engaging and enabling them to understand what the uses are? Do they need a screen on the wall that's telling them when the humidity is too high, so that they can be proactive in it? All of those can stop mold ever happening to start with, and they can happen within technology that already exists, the technology that's largely being bought already.

Tom: 56:25

You know, and you know again, we've got to look at a kind of a lights off housing service. Now that doesn't mean that we never engage with residents. What that means is that when we spend our money, we spend it adding the most value engaging with residents. Right, we're having conversations with residents about improving their outcomes, not fixing their broken stuff, you know, or not repairing their asset and not, you know.

Tom: 56:55

We have two conversations with residents have you paid your rent and tell me about your repair? Like you can't run a relationship like that. But if we solve the problems, we're able to have that conversation much more, much more proactively. So for me it's that real. It's that that's not been a concise summary, and he did ask for a concise summary, so I'll probably have to think of a better, better one afterwards. But as a, as a mindset, it's saying, right, this doesn't break and if it does break, how do we prevent it from breaking? Right, and we have that real kind of proactive, let's fix ahead of time kind of mindset yeah, I think there's an idea that's very concise, tom.

Simon: 57:29

I mean, the only way it becomes more concise is if you give it over to marketing for a couple of weeks to try and put some blurbs around a sentence yeah, exactly, yeah yeah what's the tagline I'm, I'm doing the feedback to be hey look, you know you want this isn't like a.

Tom: 57:46

I'm trying to think like like a, like a. This doesn't mean that residents don't have engagement with the housing association and their local authority. I think it means the complete opposite. I mean it means that the money that we're spending is spent on increasing the and delivering better outcomes, not fixing stuff that could have been fixed two years ago for a fraction of the cost.

Simon: 58:14

And ultimately you are operating in a split incentive environment with a tenant and a landlord, and the landlord is not your only customer here. You're the tenant, the homeowner, real people, real families with real lives. They're also the customer here, aren't they? In these kind of ideas around what good looks like, what a good user experience should be?

Tom: 58:36

you know it's uh, yeah, and that's why, for us, you know, we, um, we, we run our development roadmap in in what we call lockstep, so we're always thinking about the features that will benefit landlords and the features that will benefit tenants.

Tom: 58:50

Because if we, if we lose the relationship with tenants like we might, we, we lose our, we lose our right to operate. You know, we need to earn the right to be inside people's homes and we're very aware of that, and delivering a high quality service to them is, is, is really important. It can't just all be about the landlords, and that's to a point where I just don't believe in little white boxes with red flashing lights placed around the property. I don't think that's a great resident experience, you know, I can see how it can deliver outcomes, but I think you need to be upfront and center and be and have an open, you know, constructive relationship with tenants. Treat them as you would want to be treated, and and now, the way we do that is by being intentionally visible and intentionally adding value perhaps for people that don't know, switchy maybe just describe, because we've been whittling away here now for nearly an hour.

Tom: 59:42

They've hung in for an hour. Well done, yeah, I will.

Simon: 59:45

I will I will introduce you, don't worry, before we start, that's for sure. But again, in one of your classically concise manners, Tom, describe to people what a I'm not sure if you're being ironic Describing what you do. I mean you need to be, I'd say, because you can get lost in explaining the detail in this stuff. But fundamentally, switch is about a certain thing, isn't it?

Tom: 1:00:21

Perhaps describe what it is it's actually trying to do, where it sits in the built environment, as a product, great. So Switch exists to improve the quality of life for people living in rented homes. That's been our mission since day one. It's still very much our mission today.

Tom: 1:00:31

Our belief is that improving the quality of life for people living in rented homes comes from really two things in lockstep. One is about empowering tenants to better understand the environment in which they live, to help them make better decisions about how they consume energy, about how they understand their quality, about how they interact with the home in which they live in. But also help the landlord or help the housing association or help the provider of that home, understand the performance of the property and how the behavior of the resident is interacting with the property, because we all very much interact differently with the property, because we all, you know, we'll very much interact differently. And so we have a, you know, a package of insights, analytics services that helps, helps um landlords do that, and we have a bit of heart, bit of hardware that's installed inside the home that helps the tenant better manage their energy and better understand the environment that they're in. But ultimately the outcome is a better quality of life for people living in rented homes.

Simon: 1:01:28

Yeah, measurably better quality of life. Absolutely yeah, yeah.

Tom: 1:01:34

Yeah, yeah, definitively, measurably. And we want to be at the very much the bleeding edge of defining what those measures are. Right, it has to be measurably, it has to be to a standard, and we want to be part of the journey that gets that out there. It has to be to a standard and we want to be part of the journey that gets that out there.

Simon: 1:01:49

And where do you see your role in Switch's journey? You've been brought on with a very particular goal of bringing it from that startup phase, founders phase, which is just trying to keep it alive and fight and scrap and do all the stuff that poor founders have to do um to maturing the business and bringing it on to this high growth phase. And in fact you know you're now international as well. So like it's a it, it's a, it's a big body of work you've undertaken uh, so to yes, but to a point no.

Tom: 1:02:29

And you said at your start, like that, the mission was there eight years ago, the vision was there eight years ago and, uh, the bit I love, the bit I really love doing, is um is, uh, it's just putting the rocket under something, right, you know, you like I think that all the components were there.

Tom: 1:02:47

Um, any business, there's a significant luck chance. You've got to be in the right place at the right time with the right people. I think I'm very excited that this is the right time. I think we have the right people. We've got some fantastic investors that believe in our mission, not just in our P&L, which does really matter. And then it's just a case about building a great team, and I think the great thing about I've said great a number of times there the exciting thing about a scale-up business is that as you build momentum, you get access to stuff you didn't have before. Right, and in terms of capital, in terms of people, in terms of opportunities, in terms of relationships, and I'm just constantly trying to build the momentum, chase the bottleneck, put the, put the dream team together and, and so far we've been, we're very lucky on that journey.

Simon: 1:03:37

We've got some fantastic people and how many people are now employed in the uk with switchy?

Tom: 1:03:43

I think 87 um when I, when I, when I checked yesterday wowzers.

Simon: 1:03:47

Okay, yeah, that's incredible. And is that pretty well balanced across the departments within, or is it very heavily sales and customer success focused, or do you have a where's the kind of the, the balance of the organization? Shit sit with those numbers because you're not manufacturing. Are you as such?

Tom: 1:04:07

no, we don't. So we we don't have a um, we contract and we contract manufacture here in the UK and we have done since our inception. We've got two partners that manufacture for us, one in High Wycombe and one in South Wales. Those both manufacture to a very high standard and enable us to keep very close to our customers. In terms of the team itself, I only laugh. We've just gone through the budgeting cycle and all I can tell you is everyone would like more people. Everyone would like more people.

Tom: 1:04:35

I think, if you were to look at it sort of roughly, it's about a third of our team are focused on making the product amazing. So that's going to be the technology team devices, cloud, you know, firmware, hardware, you know. It's the product team. They are, you know, working on delivering every month something new to customers, um, whether that's a capability, whether that's a, you know, a particular improvement that's been requested. But there's very much that kind of metronome what's coming out? What's coming out this month?

Tom: 1:05:05

Um, about a third of our teams sit on our customer facing. So that's customer success the account management team, the business development team, the marketing team, and they're out very much having conversations in the market, events, roadshows, doing a lot of listening, a lot of engaging and making sure that feedback comes into the product team. And then the rest of the reigning third of the organization is the sort of the behind the scenes that really makes it tick. So we've got our operations team. That's the people that sort out the logistics and manufacturing and that are training installers, that are, you know, that are making sure it all adds up at the end of the month. You know that kind of capability. So we still do really focus on the development of the product, like we don't think this is a finished article. We are on a constant learning journey from our customers in the market. How do we bring something new every month?

Simon: 1:05:55

Yeah, interesting, and you're also very strong on culture in Switchy. I think that's something that you really get a sense of. Talking to people that work at Switchy. That's something you're quite passionate about, and you're also b corp as well, aren't you?

Tom: 1:06:13

yeah, and I think that really comes from being mission led. You know, like, um, let's just like there is a lot. There is a lot easier things to do right now and when you're taking on brilliant people and you're like, look like like you want to. We want to be a brilliant, but we've got a really hard challenge here. The prize is possibly the greatest prize out there, but it's going to be really hard and it's going to take a long time and you know, and it's not going to be, it's not going to be B2B SaaS. You know it's not going to be flipping fashion, like it's. This is a, this is. This is a fundamentally big challenge. I this is a fundamentally big challenge. I think that excites a particular group of people and it's really great to get those people, get those sort of people on board. You know we we're one of the first B Corp people in in, in in social housing. It was actually very much a team-led initiative. Thankfully, it was supported by investors. They also have a number of other B Corps that they've invested in.

Tom: 1:07:04

You've got to. You've actually got to change your articles right. It's not just about ticking some boxes and putting out a press release. You actually have to rewrite the articles of your organization to make a board-level commitment, not just to your investors. You've actually got to tell your investors they are less important. You've got to come back and say, no, this is about our impact on the planet, this is about our impact on our community, this is about our impact on our employees, this is about our impact on our customers. And you've got to rewrite your articles around that. And that's, yeah, I mean. Thankfully, that was an easy conversation for us because it really aligned both with the investors that we have and the mission that we're on. But no, we're very, very, very proud to be part of the B Corp movement. It very much aligns to what we're looking to do anyway, and to a point, we've talked about measures and bars and standards, but it's really good to have a standard. How do you know that your maternity policy is good? How do you know that it meets good standards? Great, fantastic. B Corp is really great for that and actually I think we'll be announcing some more investments shortly. We're being invested in by b corp right, because that matters to them, and you're starting to see an ever stronger community around this set of standards, you know, around this kind of market around this kind of space, and that's just really exciting to be part of.

Tom: 1:08:22

People are coming to us and saying they want to join us. You know, because that is important to them and I think the next generation particularly really care about that. They want to join us, you know, because that is important to them and I think the next generation particularly really care about that. They want to be part of something. You know, when I came out into the job market, people wanted to go home and tell their mum and dad a brand they'd heard of, right, you know, and I don't think that's the case anymore People want to go back and tell their mum and their dad and their partner and their dog and their cat and their that they've made a difference, right, and I don't think that correlates with a brand that you've heard of, necessarily, yeah, um, and so it's really exciting that people want to come and join us with that.

Tom: 1:08:57

And finally, I think, just most importantly, like we just try and treat everyone like adults. You know my belief and I'm very lucky that the founders align with me and again the board aligns with me is like you, you shouldn't need policies, right, it don't. You should just treat people like adults. So we know we have an unlimited holiday policy, right, because if like it, I just hate when it's 25, when it's 25 days, right, like, and then by the time you've had a couple of broken fridges and you've got to be in for the gas man for something and you're like that's not holiday, right.

Tom: 1:09:31

I think people need a week off every quarter. We're pretty hard and pushing on it. It's a metric that we monitor, just for your own sanity. You need a week off every quarter. Take it plus some extra bits school cover or dog cover, or yeah, you need this. You know we don't just expect a lot from people. Our team expect a lot from themselves. Our team expects a lot from themselves, right, and we've got to provide the support and around that, and that's why we're fully remote working, fully flexible working. I believe it works. Many people are going back into the office. We are absolutely not.

Tom: 1:10:03

No, we are committed to this model and it really works for us.

Simon: 1:10:06

And how have you felt You've started to peer over the precipice of, uh, other markets? Um, how have you found that exercise is a, because obviously the uk social housing such such a big sector that there's been years of work available to you just to get to where you are. Um, but you, you look over into markets like france or belgium or the netherlands and you know all of them have long traditions of social housing. Uh, how have you found that experience as a, as an organization that's, that's mission-led? Looking at other countries?

Tom: 1:10:43

um, I think we've, I think we've learned a lot. Um, uh, absolutely have plans to really make a meaningful impact more broadly in Europe. A couple of things that have come across to that. So one, I think, in terms of the problem that we solve, is absolutely valid in those markets. There's no contest whatsoever. How we go about solving it actually is quite fundamentally different. There's no contest whatsoever. That is absolutely. That's yeah. How we go about solving it actually is quite fundamentally different.

Tom: 1:11:14

And there, you know, I think at some we have a naivety at points that we thought we could just drag and drop the UK model into other markets. We now know that's just not going to work. That said, what we deliver in our outcome is needed by those markets. So I think, you know, as we move into Europe, there are some markets where we may take a version of the UK market. I think in most markets we'll look to either partner resell, acquire a local specific capability that we can then put our wrap on and we can put our learning and we can put our analytics and we can put our scale on. So it definitely has been a a learning journey for us. But we're really excited that what we do and what we can bring is as valid in france, holland, denmark, belgium, canada as it is here in the uk.

Simon: 1:12:06

Yeah, who knew like a fundamental human need of good housing, you know, and, and perhaps even a digital operating model was going to be needed everywhere else. It's just um interested to understand how so is the difference? Is it a? Is it a difference in how you do business, or is it a difference in the fundamentals of how social housing is structured, or is it a bit of everything that makes it different um?

Tom: 1:12:33

I think there's. There's sort of two things to it. One, the um, the archetype of uk social housing is is pretty different from how other people have done it, um, and that's pretty unique in terms of when we built social housing and the specification we built it to. I mean this would be direct like dutch social housing is largely a higher standard than here in the uk and that's a lot of that was because it was built later. It was built to a much, much more standardized. You know you're talking about a smaller geographic area, um, so that that definitely is one change. The heating system isn't as big a change as perhaps we thought it would be. You know there's still a lot of combi boilers out there. There's a lot of heat pumps, a lot of heat networks and that's all really very, very similar. I think the definition of social is quite different. I mean, holland's a really interesting market, for example. So 37% of all Dutch housing is social housing. To be applicable for social housing you've got to have a wage of the national average or below. So it's much, much more social, much broader demographic, much more kind of mixed communities housing provider.

Tom: 1:13:49

It was just after the story we had in the UK where somebody was found dead in their property and the response in the UK was that's horrific. Get the chief exec of the housing association on ITV apologizing. That was very much the mindset. That same conversation in Holland. The Dutch conversation was that's the responsibility of the community. How sad is it that that community, those people that live nearby, the family, let that happen. There's a different sense of responsibility in how things are managed, but there is the same driver towards mould-free homes. There is the same driver towards energy efficiency and understanding the performance of the asset. So there are subtle changes, but the fundamental of a high-quality home is the same for everybody.

Simon: 1:14:39

Yeah, so a lot of it is just framing and perspective. It can be quite subtle but meaningful in its difference. You can't massively meaningful.

Tom: 1:14:48

You can't just translate what we do here in the UK. It is the same as an outcome but very different as a journey.

Simon: 1:14:55

Yeah, really interesting. How did you end up at Switchy Tom? What was your kind of journey to there? You're known now for this kind of scale-ups phase of these types of businesses, I guess yeah, this is the bit.

Tom: 1:15:10

This is the bit I really really in enjoy doing. Um, I was very uh, I'm an engineer. I've actually I'm a, I'm a controls engineer chemical and controls engineer, which is, um, my team don't let me in anywhere near the control um, but it is. It's definitely like it's close to it's close to heart. Control is to, yeah, control systems all the way through uh, uni and summer projects and stuff.

Tom: 1:15:31

But, um, at the university I uh joined a consultancy firm, spent a lot of time in, in manufacturing and and and really improving manufacturing processes, chasing the bottlenecks, high quality controls, standards. It's very much a world I'm really, really care about. Um, but the exciting thing there was I, the business that we that I joined was sort of 12 people when I joined, in, 180 when I left seven years later, and that growth journey was just incredible. I, I just I just absolutely loved it and from then on I sort of committed I'm gonna spend the rest of my career doing that kind of that kind of scale-up piece. So, um, I uh spent a couple of years around my own consultancy in financial services and then spent a bit of time in governance, which was my first sort of interactions with social housing. Then I did another business that did fiber into social housing first, all sort of turnaround kind of scale up kind of stuff. And through that fiber business, my team at that fiber business were like this switch is amazing, this is fantastic. Oh my God, they know everyone, they're switchy, people are amazing.

Tom: 1:16:34

And through that, um, I was uh sort of made introduction to to adam, the chief exec at the time, and just sort of fell in love with the business and the people and the mission and now it was, it was, it was a gamble, um, but you know, it is still my belief and I start with everyone that joins that I think in 10 years time, every social home, I think every rented home in europe will have a bit of technology like ours, you know, and it and, and the challenge for us and that for us is is to make it our technology right. You know we don't have any right for it to be us. There's no requirement for it to be us. We need to be product centered, service centered, outcome centered, so that people choose us.

Simon: 1:17:08

But they're going to choose somebody because this model and this, this, this digital led model, is absolutely coming yeah, and, and you know, I spotted that at the very early stages with switchy, you know, and it's been a soapbox of mine ever since, that I firmly believe there, thank you yeah, well, there isn't, I don't think realistically, there'll be a space that we occupy within the decade that doesn't have some form of data coming out of it about the environment you're in, and absolutely that changes everything.

Simon: 1:17:42

It fundamentally changes all of the conversations that we have about the built environment, and for me, that's what's so fascinating about this it it removes the dark corners to hide behind and it removes the obfuscating and the can kicking that we see in this sector, because you will live and die. Your brand or your organization or your job will hinge on the ongoing performance of the assets that you manage or build or design. It's as simple as that and that, in the same way, many other sectors have had to get around that you know. We look at the automobile sector. It lives and dies by the data that comes out of its sector.

Tom: 1:18:25

Now you know um yeah, I I think you're spot on there. I think housing is going to follow a relatively well-tread journey that we've seen in other sectors. I don't think anything that's going to happen here hasn't happened somewhere else. That doesn't make it easy and that doesn't mean that's going to happen over a short period of time, but I do think the journey that we're treading here is a well-tread journey and we've got a real opportunity now at this stage to define it, to make it happen, to make that a really meaningful change.

Simon: 1:18:57

Yeah, some of it is so analogous to other sectors. It's frightening, actually. When you break it down and frame it in the right way, you go well, that's just like what they did. Frame it in the right way, you go well, that's just like what they did. And one of them is performance, which is a great segue onto this discussion that we were having about this transition from modeling and guessworks to measuring. You've been really heavily involved in that kind of perspective at switch you now for a few years, so I'm just thinking the heat loss transfer coefficient work that you did as part of the studies.

Tom: 1:19:31

Yeah, I think we're like I don't want to, um, I don't, I don't want to undermine the value of the model, right, you know, I think a model is a really valuable thing. I'm running models in my business all the time. You know, at a top level, you need a model to estimate something, um, but the the true performance is what actually happens and validating that model with the real world. And it's the real world, and particularly once we start getting humans involved. You know, it's that whole classic like teaching would be so much better if there's no kids yeah like housing would be so much better if there was no tenants.

Tom: 1:20:10

Oh my god, it's so straightforward. You know, we like the thing would be as you left it. That is, we got it. I think there's too much of that, too much of that mindset, too much of an asset focused mindset that tenants are an inconvenient to inconvenient to a well-maintained asset. We're here for the tenants, for the people. That's why how that's for the tenants, for the people. That's why social housing exists for the people and the outcomes, and so we need to focus the data around that, and I don't think you can do that, ultimately, with a model. I think you have to do that with understanding what's going on.

Tom: 1:20:40

I do want to say, though, that that doesn't mean that we have to censor up every social house like the Starship Enterprise, right? That is not the intent. It's not like suddenly, we've got to put a 20 grand's worth of sensors across every property. It's about saying how can we take the minimum amount of data real world, real time data to deliver the maximum amount of benefit? That's the challenge we constantly have ourselves, because every time we had a sensor, we had had cost, we had failure, we had right.

Tom: 1:21:11

How can we do most of the smart stuff in the algorithm. Yeah, we could put a sensor in every room, but most social homes are, you know, 60, 80 square meters, right, like, surely we can do that smarts in the algorithm. So it's the answer is going to be a bit of a combination of the two, but ultimately I think we need something physically in the home to reconcile that model against, to ensure that we, that we, deliver outcome, and that could be a handful of sensors and a smart meter. That that could be all it is and I think that could get us everywhere we need to go. But it model alone, I really don't believe is enough, particularly where it's enough for an asset but it's not enough for people yeah, what would they say?

Simon: 1:21:49

models are never accurate but sometimes useful. You know it's uh, that absolutely. You know it serves a purpose. You um talking to richard corso last week on on particulate matter and you know they look at three levels really of assessing air quality from a particular matter perspective and the least preferable is the modeling. It serves a purpose because what modeling is very good at is you can remove a child for a week and put one back in, uh, or shrink the size of the house, or that sounds pretty useful, or put it, put it somewhere else in the country. You know, uh, you know, so you can do stuff with models that you can't do in the real world. So they present some use to frame certain questions, but they're not the real world.

Simon: 1:22:35

You know, and I'm working with a big estate just west of dublin at the moment where all 240 homes are massively underventilated it's just a given, but we know the significantly underventilated. Yet there's a huge spectrum and diversity of outcomes within that development. So often what poor performance does doesn't mean a defined outcome. It can mean an amplification of problems or scenarios and that's what data unpacks for you. Is that what you're actually facing? And for housing associations. That's fantastic because they can focus resources more effectively. They may have 240 homes they need to fix at some point in the next five years, but you know what this year they can start over there and not worry about over there. And that's what measurement does for you is that you can't manage. What you don't measure, I suppose, which is a another I've just done a bingo one there of uh I think that's my well done.

Tom: 1:23:40

Yeah, no, I look. I couldn't agree more and I think it's that. It's that. It's that variability of, of of outcomes. Also, for me it's about the, it's about the rate of change. Interesting that that landlord I was the housing association I was chatting to yesterday where they got 18 of um, uh, of gen z. What they're seeing is the rate of change significantly has increased. With gen z, like there are, there's a higher turnover of of partners, there's a higher change of occupancy, there's a high just the rate of patterns. There's a higher just the rate of patterns changing is significantly higher than they've ever seen in the past.

Tom: 1:24:13

And by being able to help them with more of a real-time measurement means that they can react quicker. It might never have been a problem in the future, but it is going to be a problem within a month, right? And how do we get on that and react to that and be dynamic in our understanding? And they've all got EPCC. It's about getting in there and really understanding what's going on. And that's how I think housing will always have a finite resource. There's never going to be some sort of infinite pot here. But if we have a finite resource, we want to spend it on the best possible outcomes and helping the most people. And that doesn't mean reacting to emergency repairs. That means about actually looking at how do we improve life outcomes, and that's what we're really passionate about.

Simon: 1:24:57

And what do you think that means for housing? Then, over the next, in this transition, let's just say within a decade, we're moving to, let's just say, a significant proportion of housing employing some elements of data environmental data and energy data and heating control data. What does that journey look like for housing, do you think, over the next, say, five years?

Tom: 1:25:27

So I think we're seeing some interesting, really good behaviors at the moment. I think we're seeing some, I think, more concerning behaviors. Let's talk about the good stuff. Shdf has been a real journey but there's been a lot of iteration around the SHDF piece and I think that it's been a really powerful in terms of building up a skillset, building up an understanding, building up a capability in retrofit and ever more so, the data element of that has been increasing. I think the Welsh government have been really leading the way on this, doing a fantastic job. Scott's a little bit further behind. Ssgf has been very interesting and you're starting to move. When you meet the people leading that team, they've very much got a vision of bang for your buck retrofit and I just couldn't agree anymore with that. Right, you know it's not about whether I can take a bunch of boxes. It's about is it any different for the person? Right, have we actually changed the outcome here? And I think that's very exciting for shdf and I think that has really created a real momentum and a capability and you know, within the uk and within england and within housing associations to look at what. What's the true impact here, not what boxes are we going to take on retrofit. So I think that's really exciting and I think as shdf rolls out, as the retrofit journey rolls out, we will be backfilling that with data. We will be assuring that with data and we'll be proving over a longer period of time because we're going to be financing over a longer period of time that we have that certainty that we have delivered change. That all feels really great and moving in the right direction.

Tom: 1:26:50

I've probably got more concerns around AWAB's law and some of the pieces coming here. We've been very open about this and respond to the consultation. We absolutely want mold out right, but if we're driving a system that's more orientated about how quickly you respond to complaints, all of our resources will go on. How do we respond faster? How do we react faster rather than how do we solve the problem? To start with, I haven't got any money to solve the problem because I'm reacting. All my resources are going on reacting and we start seeing some difficult things.

Tom: 1:27:20

If I need to react, do something within. Let's say, I have to do something within seven days at the point at which I know there's a problem. I don't want to look at reverse incentives here, but I'm probably going to raise the standard for a problem and I'm probably going to reduce the standard for a something right. And what are we going to end up with? We're going to end up with a much higher threshold for mold to be taken seriously and a lot more mold washes because they can be done quickly.

Tom: 1:27:46

We're not solving the problem. We're not understanding You've got to wait until your mold is worse and then it doesn't get fixed properly and that's just going to drive more and more and more cost into the system. So I think there's two metrics. One, I think that the longer term thinking of SHDF is having a really positive impact and I'm really excited about that flowing across all the way across. I do have some real concerns about ours law and, yes, we're really proactively trying to influence the conversation on this. Let's make those mold measures proactive rather than just being on our ability to react, which is important but can't be the be all and end all. Otherwise we're going to create a bunch of perverse incentives here.

Simon: 1:28:24

Well, as you said at the beginning, it's the start of the journey. You know, the, the stock condition piece, the reacting to a problem is is the start of a building's journey and when it comes to something as complex as moisture balance in buildings, this is not something that you're necessarily going to fix in year one, and my big concern over the, the, the awabs law and and a lot of the, the motivation behind all of that is that we need to solve this problem and the reality is it's a bit like the sustainability journey. This is a 10, 15, 20 year program to sort under-invested housing out and move buildings from a state of being in moisture imbalance to in moisture balance, because it's a complex mix of how people operate their homes, the structures, the ventilation systems, the context that they live in. You know, we've seen this with the fuel poverty crisis and the climate which is changing.

Simon: 1:29:22

Yeah, all of these things have massive bearing on outcomes in that sector and my big concern over this process is that what happens is is that we build an expectation that something's going to change and over next winter and the winter after that and the winter after that, when mold keeps coming back because it will. Because unless you're going to wholesale fix a lot of the problems, you will get some amount of it back. And unless it's there, it's there. Once it's there, it's there and if you've got a fundamental problem, you've got a fundamental problem. The the key is is the data, is that are we making meaningful progress in the right direction?

Simon: 1:30:04

As part of that journey and that was my introduction, ironically, to switchy all those years ago was kind of tems me condensation, damp and mold. You know that famous project back in the day where, yeah, it was a absolutely we can't fix all of these problems in this estate. Now we've got to find a track that holds this problem in a holding pattern for the next decade until we get round to regeneration of this estate. What does that look like? And ironically, it looked like decent control of heating, data acquisition and decent ventilation put a lot of those buildings into a state where you could say well, look, we manage most of it, and if there are still some problems we may have to put extra resources in. But it gets us into a position where we at least got some visibility and we can manage risk.

Tom: 1:30:53

And that's exactly it. This is an assurance piece Like how do we know that we're delivering a great service? And we all want to deliver a great service and we're all behind delivering a great service and we're all behind delivering a great service with a finite budget, and that's why the data is the ultimate assurance piece.

Simon: 1:31:06

Yeah, the budget and that's why that the data is the ultimate assurance piece. Yeah, um, the listeners to this podcast, tom, aren't just from the uk, they're from ireland and and all over the world. If they, if people, want to come in and have a look at the kind of stuff that you're up to, what's the best place for them to go, or the kind of people to reach out to? Because they're, I imagine there'll be quite a bit of interest in both what Switchy is doing at a housing level but this approach to using IoT and data in the built environment, and the kind of lessons you've learned. What's the best?

Tom: 1:31:37

place for you to go On a first level. I think, hopefully, our website's great and gives a good indication of all the case studies and the work that we've done. There's a program of webinars and events that people are both welcome to join, either here in the UK or globally. Please join our socials. We put out a lot of content there in terms of the stuff that we are working on. We do have, I think, two big Switchy Summits. I don't know if we have announced that too early, but we're going to be doing two of the switchy summits, uh, in the next 12 months. That's a great opportunity for just sort of thought leaders and collaborators to come together on on this journey. So, yeah, please do get yourself signed up for our socials, get yourself signed up for a main letter and if there's a bit of the gap or particularly something you want to know about, please do drop me an email tomrobbins at switchycom well, listen, tom.

Simon: 1:32:23

Thanks so much for your time. It's's been brilliant chatting to you. We've managed to eat into an hour and a half without even blinking, as I expected.

Tom: 1:32:31

I knew we would. I knew we would. Thank you so much for inviting me along on the platform. We really appreciate your support really from day one. Simon, we really see you as a thought leader of the space.

Simon: 1:32:42

So, yeah, delighted to be here, brilliant Tom, thanks a million.