 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering Smart Sheet Engaged 2019. Brought to you by Smart Sheet. Welcome back everyone, you are watching theCUBE and we are here in Seattle, Washington at Smart Sheet Engaged 2019. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We're joined by Mark Klein, he is the principal at Populist. Thank you so much for coming on the show. My pleasure, thank you. So, you have a very cool job. Tell our viewers a little bit about Populist and about what you do. Sure, so Populist is actually an architect firm. Our main focus is architecture. We're one of the largest sports architecture firms in the world, so we build stadiums and arenas and convention centers and airports and places that people gather is our bread and butter. There's over 500 worldwide employees that work on that. But we have an event office out of Denver, Colorado where we take our architectural principles and apply them to major gatherings of people in the sporting world and other areas. And these sporting events include the MC2A Final Four. Include the Final Four and the Olympics and all of your NFL major events that are not a regular season game, all of your NHL events that happen in stadiums, outdoors, all-star games, things like that. Any major event that's a non-standard event, they really call on us to help make sure that that goes off without a hitch. All right, so talk a little bit about what it was like before you used Smartsheet and answered the headaches and the problems and now what life is like now. Sure, so a little more than 10 years ago when I joined the firm, we had a good stable of events and events were still kind of just operating off spreadsheets and back and napkins and drawings and things like that. As security in 9-11 was actually a major factor in kind of the growth of our industry where events now had to be planned a little more, with more scrutiny, we needed a way to better pull our information together and get everybody to collaborate on one set of drawings, one schedule, who's doing what and when and Smartsheet has become that prime resource for all of our event planning. And for an event, there's so many outside contractors that you guys have to orchestrate with whether it be the teams and the associations and the security and the venue and the concessions, the list goes on, transportation on and on and on. So to be able to bring outsiders into your project plan. And it's a new set every year with every event. So you think of the Final Four, we're going to a new city every year. So I have literally eight months to work with the team to plan a major event that's going to be seen by hundreds of millions of people and then I got to pick up and do it again in another city and then another and we're doing that across dozens of events across our team every year. So we may have a vendor that touches the system once. We may have someone who sees this once every third year. So within our environment, we have extremely high turnover of people. We have very short period to get them up to speed and working with us. So Smartsheet has been really, really a big part of, hey, I need you to get in here, get your information in, work with the tool, get us the information and guess what? You're going to get some feedback on this one too so that it benefits them. Right. It's just interesting to me that the level of granularity and detail, we go to a lot of events, obviously. There's so much minutiae that you have to keep track of from printing on the napkins to signage, et cetera. But at the same time, especially in the sporting world, there can be huge changes, especially in the same player. Who wins a game changes the venue, right? So how do you use a tool to manage the boat? The tremendous detail when you have the opportunity to plan versus the change of plan, we got to shift gears. Well, so we use a lot of the tools that Smartsheet has built into it for automation. So for example, at the Final Four, we don't know our teams until Sunday night. And that Monday, we have decor going up, team specific decor. So locker room assignments, as soon as the game is final, we send out notifications in Smartsheet to the decor printers that you're printing. This graphic, this size, these are locker room assignments. These are the bus assignments. So all of that is queued up and ready to go. So a lot of those last minute things that you may think of, we've thought through them and are ready to trigger as many as we can. You're never 100%. But if we can get that 80%, 90% triggered and out the door, as soon as the decision is made or the team has decided, that lets us deal with those others that are a little less planned. But those are ones where you, those are sort of the known unknowns. What about when you have the unknown unknowns? Things like bad weather can affect an event. Or I mean, how do you use Smartsheet into change on a dime when that happens? So we plan and we plan and we plan. So for example, bad weather is something we have multiple plans for. But where Smartsheet comes into play is I have real time scheduling information sitting on my screen in a control room at an event. So if we have a weather event, we have two or three options that we can pick from. But I'm now looking at the real time Smartsheet schedule going, all right, if we select option one, be aware we're going to affect these items. If we go with option two, these are the items. So it's the information that has been gathered through that planning phase and everybody's put their information in. So I know what our action is going to cause and the ripple effects of those. And then- You might want to get the smart, the choose your own adventures. When you were a kid, reading those choose your own adventures. Right, you don't just want to open a door and guess what's there. I want to open a door of a decision and know that this is the follow on effect and I can look at the schedule and the vendors involved of who I'm about to impact with my decision. Right. And you have the comms and all that stuff dialed in there as well. Correct, yeah, so we're on radio and at these events we run control centers. So there's eight or nine of us sitting in a control room. I send Mark Mater a picture every year of my Smartsheet screen with some field of play behind it, be it a football or a basketball field and go, Mark we're ready to go, keep it up, keep it running for the next few hours. So yeah, it's a fairly intense time when we open doors or we turn on the cameras at those events because let's face it there's 70,000 people sitting there and there's usually triple digit, 100 millions of people watching on television. So it has to go right. It's a lot of pressure. Yes. How do you deal with it? I mean, how does your team deal with it? I mean, you're used to it of course, but is there? It's the confidence in the plan. I think that has really shaped how we get to that point and don't overreact or get too caught up in the moment. So what we do within the planning of our events and with our staff and as we put everybody's tasks in Smartsheet of course, so my tunnel captain only has to focus on the 40 things that he or she is responsible for. So he may be standing in a team tunnel and we've extracted from the schedule, all right Austin, here are your 40 items. Don't worry about all the chaos going around you because I've got 40 other people out working those items. So we filter schedules by either location or staff member so that they can put their blinders on and stay focused on their tasks. And that's really how people can focus and stay in the moment. What's coming next? What do I need to worry about? Because there's 4,000 light items in that schedule. I can't have him trying to figure out what are his at that moment. Mark, I want to shift gears a little bit because you guys came from an architectural, the company's architectural background and building venues and stadiums. We just had the new Chase venue, just got finished in San Francisco, beautiful new facility. As the way you guys think about, it's kind of people centric. It's venues for people and it's events for people. What are some of the guiding principles that make for a good event, a good venue from the people experiencing its point of view? So there's really multiple sets of customers that I look at at every venue. Obviously we always started the field to play. You got to get that right. It's got to be a hundred yards long. It's got to be. I thought they broke that rule the other day. Well, we won't go there. So field to play out. So you've got your competitors, your spectators, and then your operators. All three of those, we focus on all of them equally because if one piece of that triad doesn't work, then the overall experience doesn't work. So obviously the field to play honestly is the easiest part to deal with but it's an important part. So you look at how a team is going to arrive at a venue, bus, whatever the case may be, so that they get to their locker room, get to their services and out to their field and back and forth to media obligation. So you don't want to put a media workroom halfway across the stadium because then they're making a long trek. So little things like that in the team component. Spectators, obviously there's could be 50 to, if it's a baseball park, 50,000 up to 70,000 in a stadium, we want to ensure that they're going to fully enjoy their two to four hours in that building. So we work on scheduling with our vendor. One of the biggest things we found in that area is we have really engaged with our contractors, the concessions folks, because they were kind of operating on their own, so engaging concessions to say, don't be moving product when there are people in the building, no one the time outs are. We'll call you from control based on the schedule so that we're synchronizing building operations so that the customers aren't running out of water. Well we didn't run out of water, we couldn't get it to you. So things like that are really important to our planning. And then the group that really gets overlooked that I spend a lot of time on is the people that help build and get the building ready. Because if my vendors are having a rough time getting their things in the building or building the platform I've asked for or setting up a stage, they're just not going to be in a good frame of mind when the lights turn on. And I want everybody to be, yeah, let's go. We've had a great experience in the five days leading up to this event, whatever it may be, I'm ready now to put on a show. So we use Smartsheet so much with our vendors to help guide them through the build process, scheduling, deliveries, getting their credentials, where they're going to park, where do I take my breaks? Everything is there at their fingertips so even the mom and pop vendors that I deal with and there are quite a few of them from city to city feel like they're as important as my AV company. So they're excited, they do their load in, they're like, hey, this was a great experience and now they're here to help support the event. And then when I call and go, guess what, we have a problem, I need your help. They're going to be sure, Mark, what can we do? They're enthusiastic and they didn't feel like I beat them up during that load in. Well, it goes back to the people centric but you're talking about it, it's treating people like people, not just that they are some cog in the wheel that they are expected to execute this task, right? No, happy staff deliver happy events. So what's next in terms of broader adoption, in terms of more improvements that you're seeing on the pipeline? So I'm really excited about the collaboration component that was announced today at the keynote. We're an architect firm, so the base of all of our events is a set of drawings. Drawings that show what we need, where it is, when it's going to happen. So all of our non-drawing material has lived in Smartsheet for 10 years. I'm now going to be able to bring those drawings in and get the collaborative information, the feedback. So we take a drawing, we'll send it to CBS and say, please mark up how you think we've drawn your broadcast compound. That has all been emailed. Now with this collaboration tool, it's going to live in Smartsheet. So I cannot tell you how excited I am about the collaboration component. It's going to really streamline how we do our business. I'm kind of at loss for words to get in there and try it. My staff is going to probably go, Mark, you can't go to any more conferences, but I think it's really going to be a great addition to our work process. The other one that has been a personal part of mine, personal goal that I've seen is the adoption by our staff for the day-to-day work process. I listen in the office, I have a big open work plan space and I listen for my staff going, I got to put this plan together, attract this and I go, I literally will stand up and walk over, have you thought about using Smartsheet? And half of the time they haven't. And I will say, let me help you through it. Let me get you started and see if it works for you. So that organic growth of Smartsheet is the big step that we're doing on a day-to-day basis. To get staff introduced to a new way to work and be more collaborative of how they manage your information. So just that kind of growth is ongoing. But after I've been to the conference, I can say, I got a little more knowledge about it. Let me help you out a little bit and get you to use it. So. Right, right, right. And you're even finding ways to use it in your personal life, you said? Sure, I use it for home tasks. We plan our kids' birthday celebrations in it. So my wife and I will share a sheet about who's visiting for a graduation. My daughter's high school graduation is coming up. We actually post a form on Smartsheet. Who's coming, where are they staying? The tag that I put up on the wall over there is people think I work for Smartsheet with how much we use it. So yes, it bleeds into the personal life, but why not? Right, exactly. The work shall fix it. That's right, Mark. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a lot of fun talking to you. My pleasure, thank you both. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. Stay tuned for more of Engage 2019 here in Seattle. You're watching theCUBE.