Welcome to Bizly’s Quick Fire Interviews with Industry Leaders and Luminaries! Keep watching our blog to get quick personal and professional insights from various leaders and industry influencers.

We want to launch this series of mini interviews with our Bizly’s CEO, Ron Shah.

Q: What keeps you awake at night?

Ron: Work keeps me up at night! There is an incredible amount of work that still needs to be done to provide the world with a truly seamless experience for organizing meetings. As we begin to crawl out of the Covid era, people are feeling such a social deficit. Getting together has never been more important to feeling satisfied and whole. But the core infrastructure is still not in place on all sides of this problem — “Booking space” doesn’t solve the problem. You have to make all the planning elements seamless- scheduling, communicating, the meeting content, participants, space, virtual, budget. There is so much that needs to be addressed to actually solve the problem.

Q: As CEO what is your top priority for your teams?

Ron: The top priority for my teams is to establish a sense of “extreme focus”, having only one measurable thing you are responsible for at any given time and creating a safe space for the team to experiment, fail, learn and grow. You may have a couple of activities you must oversee to achieve that goal, but it’s gotta be just one thing you’re focused on at a time. In working on startups for many years, this concept of “wearing many hats” creeps in and it leads teams astray. Wearing many hats means that nothing is getting done particularly well and people are getting burned out.

Q: What should the industry be paying attention to, that they are not today?

Ron: Two words for you: “onsite off-sites”. The meetings industry should be paying attention to the transformation of onsite and on-campus locations as the hub for company meetings. The pandemic permanently shifted the share of employees that are remote, however, long-term real estate leases are not as flexible. Companies are not able to change their real estate footprint that quickly. This means you have a huge amount of office space that is vacant. Repurposing this space, making it special, and creating exciting packages that incentivize employees to visit the office and organize meetings and events at the office is going to be critical. The cost savings, efficiency, and reinforcement of company culture are just three of the reasons why this strategy makes so much sense. We at Bizly have developed an entire workflow to make this happen connecting the dots with onsite catering and facilities teams.

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