Even when technology is central to a company’s value proposition, it isn’t all they do. No company is solely a tech company. Ultimately, every product or service is intended for people’s use: to save us time or money, to make our lives better or easier.

At the same time, businesses whose core value propositions aren’t inherently technical still rely on technology for sales, marketing, operations, finance, and more. At my company, for instance, we’re revolutionizing the property management business by using technology to optimize rates and improve operational efficiency. Thinking like a tech company — regardless of your value proposition — can set you up for success with customers and investors.

Here are three pieces of advice for building a strong business, whether you’re focused on tech or not:

Assess Your Co-Founder(s)

We recommend making sure that at least one of your co-founders has a strong background in software development. This early investment in technical expertise establishes you as a tech company, regardless of your product or service, and ensures that decision-makers are well-versed in technical challenges and solutions. Also, you’re going to start vetting outside vendors sooner than you think, and you’ll need someone at the executive level who can make a realistic assessment of the costs and advantages of those offerings.

What if you are the technical co-founder? Be honest about your ability (and your bandwidth) to handle the other responsibilities of leadership. Can you build relationships, reach out to investors, identify customers, map your buyer’s journey, create a marketing strategy, support sales efforts, and establish operational processes? If not, find someone who can — even if they’ve never written a line of code in their life.

The key is to write a strong story for both sides: the technical and the operational. It’s tempting to emphasize one side over the other when appealing to different audiences, but the truth is that no business is entirely technical or purely operational. Your company will intertwine the two, using technology to support operations and vice versa. Co-founders who reflect this intertwined approach will make a powerful team.

Invest in Technology Early

Just as it’s important to find a co-founder with some technical prowess, it pays to invest in a strong technical team at every level. Whenever you can, hire employees rather than contractors as your engineers, developers and analysts. A substantial and early investment in technology (in human capital as well as tools) will help you scale effectively.

Because we don’t sell software, we buck the traditional definition of a tech company. However, we’ve always employed many talented software developers and invested heavily in both out-of-the-box and purpose-built software solutions to meet our evolving needs. And even though we’re vacation rental property managers, technology is at the core of our value proposition. It only makes sense that we would make such consistent and significant investments in it.

Consider Building Instead of Buying

Our company went from using no external software services to using many external solutions. This evolution happened naturally, as a consequence of our rapid growth. As our business model became more advanced — and as our needs became more complex and more narrowly defined — we realized we needed a more diverse toolset.

Eventually, however, we became a “build” company, using our own purpose-built property management system. We simply couldn’t find an out-of-the-box solution that could keep pace with our unprecedented growth and swiftly evolving business needs. Which brings us back to the importance of investing in technology, from the technical co-founder to the development team: If you have these experts in place, you can properly assess your company’s technical needs at every stage.

Every company is a tech company. The more you think about technology and its essential role in your business, the more successful you’ll be.

In my view, these companies aren’t around yet because although the technology computational power is at a stage where AI can be harnessed for large-scale impact, data scientists are a rare find and are in high demand. They’re rare because data science requires a blend of various skills: statistical modelling, programming and business savviness. It’s hard enough to find people who are experts in any one of the above individually, let alone find someone who has mastered all three. 

How to Take Advantage of Data Science (Without Hiring a Data Scientist) 

There are two main approaches for how you can spice up your current projects with data science. One is to license data science technology from another company. The problem with this approach is that AI technology has not sufficiently matured to be generic enough for broad use, though there are a few startups doing great work in this field.

The second approach is what we adopted at 12 Labs. It was to build an in-house data science team. When we started, we didn’t have any data scientists. But within a year, we built several data science products that even established companies in the fitness space have not been able to build.

Here are the steps we took to build our from-scratch data science team:

1. Find an engineer who is a hustler with a good product sense. Aspiring product managers in your team might be a good fit, as frequently such people work on developing a good product sense while they are still working as an engineer.
2. Hire someone with a statistics background. I don’t mean a data scientist. You need a pure statistician because your engineer will need pointers from someone who is strongly grounded in statistics and machine learning. As I understand it, even a strong data scientist can’t tell you which approach or algorithm is the right one without trying several approaches first. So, if you have someone willing to try out several approaches (in this case, the engineer above), the statistician can point them in the right direction.
3. Use Python. There are many online courses about machine learning and data science in several other languages such as R, Octave, etc. However, Python has the most vibrant data science community, with a large number of open-source libraries. If you use Python, you’ll future-proof yourself against any closed platform traps.
4. Don’t wait for perfection. The quickest way to make your product perfect is to ship it. So, when we first launched our meal recommendation technology, it was far from being production grade. But — with the data we had — it was the best could do. We could have waited until we had collected more user data, but decided to ship sooner as users are often more tolerant with something that is novel and cool. Gradually, our meal recommendation technology has become state of the art.

Data science is here to stay and it is going to disrupt every field. It’s just a matter of time before your competitors adopt it, and then you’ll be left behind because technology usually favors the first to move on it. So, it’s imperative for startups to make a move sooner rather than later. Luckily, you can start even without a data scientist.

After consulting with my two friends who were working in the industry — my co-founders Jonathan and Justin — everyone confirmed my sentiment: commercial real estate was tech-averse and disjointed. We launched TheSquareFoot as an office listing platform, and later became a brokerage to help clients secure deals.

Since we launched, tech has become more prominent, information more accessible, and spaces more democratized. These changes lower the barrier to entry for working out of an office. An office legitimizes a business and means you can hire more people — for the sheer fact that you have more space. Sharing a single office space, as is popular today, allows for collaborative environments with numerous networking opportunities.

Here are three of the most significant trends to be aware of — whether you’re a growing business considering office space, a commercial real estate company, or run a startup capitalizing on the ways technology is changing workspaces.

The Sharing Economy Will Continue to Grow

The startup craze has ignited a fire in office sharing. In 2015, devoted co-working spaces like The Yard and WeWork became increasingly popular, and so did other options for co-working: desk-sharing via PivotDesk, office spaces by the hour through sites like Breather, and space rental for events through Splacer.

Young companies don’t have the resources to lease an entire office but might consider renting out a few desks or a place in a co-working space for the interim. The well-established company can then take advantage of this demand by leasing out their unused space. Not only will this counterbalance costs, but it will also encourage collaboration beyond the confines of your business.

There Will Be a Greater Demand for the Internet of Things (IoT) 

IoT encompasses any hardware that is connected to the Internet, from Web-ready television sets to doors that lock automatically via an app. If you have IoT-enabled audiovisual systems, for example, you can easily host a meeting between all your global offices. Beyond that, you can integrate the physical world with the digital world, for example, by controlling the climate or lighting of an office remotely.

As the workplace decentralizes, the need for transparent information about different locations grows. With IoT connectivity, monitoring and managing this information becomes simple because it allows an administrator to view and manage all this information about every location, from anywhere in the world.

Not only will the options for IoT technology become more plentiful, but the tech to make and implement these features will also become more viable for offices. For developers of IoT technology, commercial real estate is the perfect industry to tackle because it promises enterprise-level contracts, and many businesses are of yet are technologically inept.

Despite demand for IoT, it will likely not become commonplace right away due to buildings not yet being able to support it. There are some simple IoT technologies that don’t require extra credentials, but if startups want to go full high-tech, they’ll have to find a special property and pay a premium. However, they may recoup this extra investment in savings since IoT tech is typically more energy-efficient than traditional tech.

As with any new technology, one of the challenges of IoT tech is maintenance, and any startup that uses IoT tech for essential processes — like lighting or security — should also have fail-safes in case of emergency.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Could Sneak Into Real Estate

Virtual reality (VR) is a means of viewing a digital 3D world that does not exist in the physical landscape, while augmented reality (AR) is a means of viewing the real world, with digital components overlaid onto the physical landscape. These allow for remote office tours, office redesigns and a greater understanding of architectural concepts.

Businesses should care about the convergence of VR into office leasing because it means greater and more realistic foresight into their offices in the future, which will allow these businesses to effectively map out the trajectory of their in-office growth. For example, Sage Realty Corp. has been offering VR tours for a building currently under renovation, which won’t be ready for physical tours until later this year.

The ability to visualize the workplace also provides an element of insurance against workplace issues like fire hazards or connectivity problems. To take advantage of these changes, companies should start requesting VR and AR mockups along with 3D designs when contracting office changes. This demand will drive the industry to make changes that will ultimately help all businesses plan.

Augmented reality poses some exciting potential too: imagine standing in your current office, putting on a headset and watching it morph into a design concept before your eyes. Being able to visualize things through a 3D headset will allow the viewer to imagine the transition and not just the final product.

Technology will continue to have a huge impact on commercial real estate and the office leasing process. Even as the co-working concept grows, technology will be there to help it grow faster. For startups considering moving into a new office, take into account these trends. By encouraging more connectivity between people, objects and visualizations, you will ultimately make your business stronger.