A Chat with Karl Breeze, CEO at Desk & Meeting Booking Software Company: Matrix Booking

We are a workplace technology company, developing solutions to help businesses make the most out of their bookable resources – whether that is desks, meeting rooms, car parking spaces, hardware or even services, such as catering and cleaning.

Our mission is to ensure organisations have the right amount of space that is managed effectively. That’s why we have created solutions that allow businesses to track and understand how exactly their real estate is being used. We provide empirical evidence that can back their decision-making when it comes to downsizing, considering investment in larger premises, or simply wanting to ensure that they have the right property strategy to succeed, to attract and retain talent, and remain competitive

We have customers across the private and public sector, including the UK Government and the NHS, through to enterprise corporates and SMEs.
 
 
Desk Booking Software and Workplace Management | Matrix Booking
 

What were the company’s origins?

 
Matrix Booking was initially developed back in 2013 by Keytree Ltd, a leading SAP consultancy with an in-house product portfolio of specialist software. Since then, we have been continually growing in terms of our product portfolio, in-house expertise, and customer base.

In 2020 Matrix Booking was separated from Keytree and set up as an employee ownership trust. It was a planned move well before the pandemic but has enabled us to truly hit our stride.

Today we work with over 150 organisations worldwide and this is growing daily.
 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
Before the pandemic, we knew it was possible for companies to work in a completely digital and decentralised way, but little did we know the huge and instant changes it would bring to the way we work. Suddenly our work lives changed so radically, in a way that no one could have predicted, and we quickly started to build a proposition focussed on the future workplace moving forward.

One thing that we are particularly proud of is our new flow management solution. This was developed as a direct result of one of our virtual roundtables with property professionals who pointed out to us that scheduling a coordinated, safe and self-directed flow into office buildings was a concern as people started returning to their offices.

Within a month of the roundtable we finished beta testing and had the new system up and running, addressing these concerns. We’ve made it easy for office workers to schedule their arrival time, desk and meeting rooms via a mobile app before they even leave the comfort of their home. This in turn allows workplace professionals to manage the flow of people to and through buildings, avoiding overcrowding and enabling physical distancing in communal areas in their buildings or campuses.
 

 

What can we hope to see from Matrix Booking in the future?

 
Listening to and learning from those who run and work in the physical office space will be absolutely key in the coming months. We want to raise the bar for the future workplace. For us, the future workplace is not just about making sure you have the right number of desks or meeting rooms.

We want to help organisations create spaces that encourage work to be done in the best way possible and nurture the workplace culture. This includes providing business intelligence that goes beyond occupancy levels, so that company boards understand how their real-estate is used and what changes might be needed.

We are also looking at growing our Admin as a Service (AaaS) for Cross-Organisation sharing of workspaces, which we see already as trend in the public sector and as an emerging focus in other sectors in the near future.