Henrico Small Business Spotlight: Lost Office Collaborative

Sometimes organizations need a little help to problem-solve and flourish. Lost Office Collaborative – the brainchild of Mark Brown, 49, and Christian Markow, 54 – hopes to deliver in that department by offering intentional spaces and experiences where clients are treated like family.

When Brown and Markow were deep in the world of consulting, they worked with big organizations that wanted to transform themselves from the inside out. But even these big name brands didn’t have access to spaces designed for thinking in “an inspired, energized and creative way,” as Markow puts it. Hotel ballrooms and conference rooms, he added, weren’t going to cut it.

“None of those spaces are designed for specifically what teams need – which is very different from what an individual needs when they're looking for a space to go think and work,” Markow said.

This need became the catalyst for Lost Office Collaborative – a premium space Brown describes as “a fully turnkey team off-site experience.”

“Sometimes we say experience more than space, so they don't get locked in on just the space,” Brown said. “Because the experience is the space, plus our facilitation or team building experiences or things that we program with them while we're here.”

So, what exactly does that mean? For starters, the Lost Office space is designed with science in mind. 

“People that are trying to build co-working spaces, or just ancillary spaces, they tend to look at what I would call the functional needs and then they look at brand and how that comes to life in the space,” Markow said. “So they're looking at the furnishings and the space dimensions.”

While those aspects are important, Markow says, there are other essentials when considering brain function.

“That's everything from the baseline stuff like air quality, temperature of your lighting, access to natural light, plant life. . . And then we go into things like color, the colors that are on the walls, the comfort and texture of the furnishings, the ambient noise that's playing in the background, the food you're putting into your body and your access to water throughout the day,” Markow said. “All of those things are physiologically impacting how your brain works.”

Markow and Brown went through a wide variety of research before finalizing their space design. 

“I want to say easily 80-plus studies from everyone from the NIH to Harvard to Stanford to some of the big architectural firms and furniture manufacturers,” Markow said. “And we used all that and kind of developed our own code for what we felt was important inside the space.”

Take the lighting, for example. Markow says the duo chose a color temperature of 3500 Kelvin (3500K) for lighting products because it strikes a balance between warmer light that could make someone too sleepy and bright, daylight-temperature light that could increase anxiety or stress.

Lost Office also uses layered lighting to add dimensionality to the space – something that helps with “brain processing,” according to Markow.

The heights of the ceilings throughout the space are intentional, as well. Most of the ceilings are high, Markow says, because it helps people be open minded and think exploratorily. There are certain rooms, however, that use lower ceiling heights to promote focus.

Good input often leads to good output. At least that’s the thinking behind the unlimited beverages and food specifically curated to stave off any post-snack mental slumps.

“We try and do protein forward, allergen-free, back off on carbs, but have food that's delicious,” Markow said. “So we're careful about choosing foods and snacks that are actually energizing.”

Even the olfactory system gets special consideration at the Lost Office space. Hence why Markow and Brown created a “scent archive” – a row of bell jars containing different, pure essential oils that guests can interact with by lifting the jars.

“The idea is that when you basically breathe in a scent that is pleasing to you, it activates your creative network in your brain and makes you more open to others’ ideas,” Markow said. “They believe it essentially eases you so that you become more receptive to other people's thinking. 

“And then it triggers what we would call, ironically, in-the-box thinking, which is all of this stuff in your brain that you forgot was there, you know, memories and emotions from the past, and it triggers them and it brings them back up and they become inspiration.”

Everything at Lost Office is thoughtful and customizable – even the offerings. The simplest way to engage with Lost Office is with a “room reservation” or “hosted reservation.” 

“They can take over either one of our large team rooms called The Enclave, or our medium-sized room called The Flat,” Brown said. “And it comes with not just the room itself, but all of the amenities, the hospitality, help with catering, technology, all of that stuff that they would just need to plug and play.”

A step up from those offerings would be a “curated reservation.”

“Imagine it's everything that I just said, but now we're kind of lightly helping them with their day,” Brown explained. “We're not fully custom facilitating their day, but we're looking at their agenda, we're looking at their design, we're making recommendations for how to enhance their day while they're with us.”

Then you have a myriad of options if you want a custom, facilitated day. If there’s a specific issue a company wants to solve, for instance, Lost Office can help design a day or two with all the agendas, tools and activities they would need to be most productive. 

Groups also can add on certain modules or experiences to create the exact type of day their teams are envisioning. A local bank recently came to Lost Office wanting help with a customer experience exploration.

“We set up three different stations and designed materials and an immersive experience,” Markow said, adding that the participants had to engage “with the different types of customer interactions that they have to try and figure out how to create ideas to improve them.”

There are also signature team experiences that Lost Office can provide. Take Bones and Breakthroughs, for example.

This “chemistry-building journey” takes participants into Hollywood Cemetery for three activities designed to help strengthen a team and address what might be holding it back. The four-hour experience ends at Lost Office with a guided discussion about insights and next steps over food and refreshments. 

“We're very intentional in any of the creative activities that we choose,” Markow said. “And we help the team understand why we're doing them because they all have a psychological basis, or an emotional basis, or a strategic basis.”

Markow and Brown even collaborate with coaches, facilitators and creatives outside of Lost Office to bring in other useful expertise. 

“There's plenty of expert people out there that can talk about team leadership development or helping people through high-conflict situations or something like that,” Markow said. “That's not our sweet spot, but we've got great partners that do that.”

One local they’re hoping to partner with in the near future is J. Dontrese Brown – a co-founder of a virtual reality experience called Hidden In Plain Site: Richmond that takes participants to distinct, but often overlooked, sites that illustrate the Black experience throughout history.

Lost Office wants to take teams through the “eye-opening experience” that is HiPS, Brown said, before bringing them back to the Lost Office space to talk about what they learned.

Curious if Lost Office Collaborative might be right for your company or organization? Brown and Markow want people to know they are excited to work with all sorts of clients. Whether that's a Fortune 500 company, a smaller business, a local school or a nonprofit, Lost Office believes it has a place that's perfect – and nonprofit organizations get a discount, Markow added.

“It's been fun for us to be surprised by the companies and the places around town, in Henrico, in Richmond that are finding and using us,” Brown said. “Sure, we love having the big organizations . . . but I'm excited through this to just find more opportunities of folks in Henrico and regionally and nonprofits that we can help and serve.”

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