ResEdChat Ep 88: “Why Roompact?” with Paul Gordon Brown

Dustin Ramsdell:
Welcome back, everybody, to another wonderful episode of Roompact’s Res Ed Chat podcast. If you’re new to the show, every other week we feature a variety of topics of interest to hired professionals who work in and with university housing.
So this is a special episode. It’s just me hanging out, a good friend and Roompact counterpart, Paul Gordon Brown. We are talking today why Roompact kind of exploring the secret sauce, I think makes Roompact special. I’ve always kind of had an affinity, a lot of respect for the work that you do and how you do it. So we’re just going to spend a little bit of time, a little bit of a shorter episode today to explore that a little bit. There is, especially nowadays, no shortages of ed tech companies that are working in the education space and higher education. So there’s moments where I think it’s important to really celebrate what I think makes certain ones more special, their approach, and how they work with their partners. So you’ve been with Roompact for a long time. What do you see from your perspective that makes Roompact unique in the ed tech and the residential education space?

Paul Brown:
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Dustin. Happy to be on again, obviously talking about something that I love, which is Roompact. I’ve worked with Roompact now for eight years, which is almost the entire length of the existence of the company. So I’m employee number two. If you’re counting on who is still working at the company in terms of tenure. And some of the things that just about the company itself that even drew me to it that make it unique is it was a company that was started with family funding. It wasn’t venture capital backed, it wasn’t “Let’s grow this big company and then the founders can cash out and sell it off to some other company”, and so that was really appealing because what it does is it really frees you up to say, “We’re here to work with schools, do the best that we can. We’re not here to make a quick buck.”
If you look at some of the other vendors in the higher ed space, but also even the housing space, there’s been a lot of consolidation, people cashing out, and that has ramifications on the software and the service that people provide. I’m just not interested in that, and I don’t think it’s a good model as far as campuses go. So that’s, in part, I think, what makes Roompact just unique as a company. Family owned, B Corp, so we meet standards of social responsibility, we do 1% for student affairs where we give back 1% of our annual revenue to student affairs-related nonprofits, and we can just do things that are good, almost acting in some ways more like a nonprofit would in terms of being values- and mission-driven, even though though we’re a private company. But I think that’s what stands out about us as a company itself.
But the other thing is we’re a Res Ed, Res Life company, meaning we don’t focus on the housing operations pieces. There’s a lot of software out there that does it really, really well. Some people have even asked us, “Will you ever do that?” And our answer is no. Because we believe that by focusing so squarely on Res Ed and Res Life, we can do that really, really well. And there’s really not another company that does that. So if you look at other software companies that maybe have some overlap with us, if you put out that Venn diagram of feature sets and you look at overlap, anyone that has overlap with us also does the housing assignments and other bits. And so for them, that’s the bread and butter, that’s their main thing. That’s what they make the most money on.
But for us, it’s the Res Ed piece. So we squarely focus on that and try to do it deep well. So you could look at some modules that let’s say Star Res has or other features that, let’s say, eRezLife has, and they can overlap with us, but those aren’t their main focus. And so we try to do those pieces with all the bells and whistles, with all the types of analytics, with all the types of things and do them really, really deeply, that if we work with a school that really cares about the Res Ed program and really wants to dig into assessment data and how can we improve it and things like that, we’re really the only company, at least as far as I see out there, that’s doing it at that depth, not just “Oh, this is good enough” or “This will get the work done,” but “This will allow us to really focus on improving things.”

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, that’s what I think about with Roompact, is that you all are a small business. The idea of it’s not a startup, and all those things you are explaining around how companies like this often are funded, the growth targets that they have, and different things like that. So that’s a big differentiator. And then certainly your all’s approach, because I think it’s the idea of… I feel like it would probably be the idea of housing operations and that administrative side. At a certain point it’s… I almost feel like it’s there’s only so well I feel like you could do that with… There’s not maybe necessarily that much room for innovation because it’s just a pretty transactional piece. So it’s like, yeah, where the magic happens and where I think higher education and residential education, the important and complex part to focus on is that interpersonal piece, making sure that there’s positive experiences happening for students, and you can track to make sure that things are happening as they should, and that developmental process that happens in the residence halls and everything.
So yeah, I think those are big differentiators, versus just, “Well, we think we have a slightly better housing operations interface or something” than some other company. Or it might be… Certainly when you see a lot of companies in any space get just very big, like you said, this consolidation, it just gets to a race to the bottom in terms of costs, and just so many parts of the equation just start to get a little out of whack. So in terms of… I think you said, you’ve been on this journey for a long time. I’m sure you’ve seen so many different anecdotes around “Why Roompact?” Why would someone choose to utilize your tool and stick with it and all that. So how would you succinctly answer that question, “Why Roompact?”?

Paul Brown:
I think I’ll go back to some things that I frequently hear from the schools that use our software. One, it’s intuitive and it’s easy, and especially when we have student staff that are doing things, they can figure it out really fast. I get that feedback all the time, and in fact, I even get it when they’re saying, “Oh, we used to use this, and now we’re using Roompact, and it’s just easier as far as student staff.” So that’s a big value proposition, is our software straightforward, easy to use, easy to find. It’s intuitive.
And then I think the second thing is, I work with our campuses every day, and so I worked in residence life for many, many years. I have a doctorate in higher education. I clearly love this work that we do. And so I’m constantly just trying to unlock more value. And so that’s also, I think, too, when we look at our software, it’s really guided by trying to do cool, deep-level things and figure out ways. It doesn’t always come from me. Sometimes clients come back and say, oh, we did this, and I’m like, “Wow, that’s fantastic. I never even thought about that before.” Or I’ll collaborate with them and say, “Oh, I bet you could do this,” and we can plus one it and we go back and forth on things.
And so really what we try to do is just be an overall resource and really allow people to dig things more deeply. And that extends to our blog, that extends to this podcast that we do. We try to provide Res Ed content, both software related, not software related, practice related to everyone that we work with. And I think that’s just what you’re buying into an ecosystem, not just necessarily a piece of software that you use transactionally.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, I think those are pieces that… The true definition I feel like of a partnership or showing that level of commitment to the folks that utilize the tool, but certainly just the field at large through some of the other stuff you mentioned, too, has just always been something that I admire by you all. That idea of donating back and doing those sorts of things. That helps everybody, even folks that don’t use the tool. And then yeah, you’re very collaborative with the folks that utilize the tool and everything. And I think it is something where that feels like it’s definitely much more common, thankfully, nowadays, I think, than it probably was in years past of companies really recognizing that responsibility, I guess, to be transparent and accessible and collaborative and true partners and everything. And I think you’d mentioned, in really getting constructive feedback from customers, I think that’s always a really cool thing to see. Do you have anything that you can think of how customers have helped shape the Roompact experience?

Paul Brown:
Part of it, even as you were saying, goes back to my previous answer about the type of company that we are. The fact that we’re a family-owned small business, there’s only five of us full-time working, six if you count Matt’s wife, our founder’s wife, who does the accounting, she does the backend stuff. It just frees us up to do things that we don’t have to justify a financial bottom line. We’re like, “If this is cool and we think it will help and we want do it, we can just do it.” And that’s so freeing. And that’s also too what helps us work with clients. I’m constantly scanning what schools are doing cool stuff for their software, how can I highlight that, how can I amplify that, how can I help? Or how can they even learn from them?
One of the schools that we work with, Northern Illinois University, Kelly Winters who’s there, I’m just in awe of her. She just took the software and said, “Oh, I did these things and I realized how to integrate in my practice.” And I was like, “Wow, she just does fantastic cool stuff.” I’ve learned a ton from her in doing it. And she really kind of helped, too, about deeper-level stuff. So sometimes there’s things in our software, it’s like, “Wouldn’t it be great if we all had the option to do this?” So I get that feedback all the time. We note it, we figure out when can we start working on these things, but sometimes there’s things that are more forward-looking that aren’t just a tweak to an existing feature, but they’re, say, “Here’s the goal we want to get towards. How can we design tools that help get towards that goal?”
A consistent thing that we got from campuses was working with intentional conversation data. Oftentimes schools will say, “We collect it, but then we don’t know what to do with it,” or “It just sits there,” or “What’s the point of it?” And so slowly iterated our software over time, so that with intentional conversations, you can figure out which students have we met with, but which students haven’t we met with? Which students have we met with the most? Which ones have we met the least? If you’re thinking as a supervisor, what percentage of a floor has a student staff member met with or not? All those different aspects that you can’t recreate with a simple form builder, you need the kind of knowledge that our software has of your residents, your staff, how they fit together, the relationships between them that can just pull up those insights in one click and you can see it in different ways.
So you can slice and dice the data. “I want to look at intentional conversations as a whole.” We’ve got reports that can do that. “I want to look at an individual student and see different things about them.” You can do that. So you can view the data from different places, and it was really our clients and our schools that we worked with that helped guide that. What are the sticking points? I can guarantee you that I have a long list of things that I would like us to do and I wish we could do faster, but we keep iterating and we keep moving towards it and things like that. So those are some of the great things.
I’ve even experimented with University of Tennessee-Martin, which is another great school to work with. They want to develop a curriculum, so I worked with them to help do some curriculum consulting, integrate Roompact, and I said, “Hey, this is going to be useful for other schools. Do you mind if we just experiment and try things and allow me to learn how I can be a better trainer?” So I think that’s the other thing, is a lot of schools are very open to allowing some experimentation and trying things and stuff like that, which just also makes my practice better as someone who’s there to help folks with it, but also gains insight into the campus experience.

Dustin Ramsdell:
It really is a beautiful thing when you’re doing something like that. And certainly it’s not, I guess, completely altruistic of like, “Hey, we want to be able to do this thing. We want this functionality or this or the other.” But then… And I guess it’s also just a magical thing about education, but it’s very… “We’re all in the same team.” I think we recognize that if something like this can help other leaders in education, other professionals, other institutions, there’s not a sense of competitive to the point of “No, well, this needs to be exclusive to us” or something. They may get first dibs or something. It’s like, “Well, yeah, we’re going to build this for you, but then it’s going to become a part of the platform, and then other people down the line will get the benefit from it, too.”
But just the nature of working in this space and working in that way that you mentioned, I think it’s just something where just everybody benefits from the way that you navigate those conversations, and you become a better trainer when you’re able to test things out and that folks know… It’s like, “Yeah, if I can, it helps us and it helps you and it helps everybody else too.” And that’s just good vibes, good energy, just great thing about working and education for sure.
And I think too, what resonates with me from this conversation, too, is like you said, it’s a beautiful thing from a user experience point of view of having something that’s really easy to use and you get good results, but it sounds like folks who have really committed and gotten in-depth with the tool can also get really great results. So it’s like, out of the box, awesome, this is amazing, really helpful. But then if it’s like somebody’s getting really deep and then you’re be like, “Oh my gosh, I never even maybe intended or thought of that as a functionality,” it really rewards just digging in and really committing to the tool too. So always like to hear and see those sorts of things mean. Yeah, these are all the things that I feel like I’m sure anybody in the community listening knows about Roompact, that I know, I’ve observed. And it’s just great to hear straight from the organization, as well. But yeah, it’s great to boost up and I hope I see more examples of organizations like Roompact doing this sort of work because I think it just is for the betterment of higher education as a whole.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, that’s what we try to do. I love working with schools, and I love just making their operation more efficient, allow them to unlock data, allowing them to create new processes that will allow them just to work faster and easier, especially this post-COVID period where people pull back and be like, “Hey, wait a minute, let’s look at how we allocate time and let’s look at how we utilize staff and let’s do that intelligently,” and it helps with that. So I think it’s a big part of that shift we see.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Absolutely. Well, I appreciate you, the work that you’re doing. I appreciate Roompact and that whole team there, just helping to model the way into, I think, just a new way that higher ed tech companies can navigate the world. And I know there’ll be more episodes like that. We’ve done ones about this just talking about the work that Roompact does. So just always excited to help uplift all the great behind-the-scenes stuff here. So appreciate you hanging out to talk all about it.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, thanks so much, Dustin.