Kontor & Hey Offices

Kontor is one of the UK's leading office brokers. They'd built a strong business on a back-office platform that made their brokers dramatically more efficient — but success created its own problem.

A flood of small 1–10 person companies were taking up disproportionate broker time. Each one needed the same hand-holding as a major client, but the economics didn't work — it was an inefficient use of an expensive, expert team, and no longer matched their ideal customer. They needed a way to serve that segment well without burning human broker hours on it. The catch: building a whole new customer-facing product from scratch would mean months of work and a six-figure spend to rebuild logic they already owned.

The breakthrough wasn't to build something new — it was to **see the product hiding in the platform they already had**. Kontor's back-office held years of inventory, broker logic and operational know-how, all already encoded in software. So rather than start from a blank page, I rebranded and re-pointed that back-office to work as a customer-facing front-end, extended it so leads flowed automatically to office providers, and designed a landing page that made the value proposition land.

The result — Hey Offices — took the best of Kontor (the inventory and broker logic), Rightmove (search and discovery) and Airbnb (browsing and favourites) into one self-serve experience: map-based office search, a natural-language enquiry form, budget and amenity filters, fully responsive. It shipped in versioned releases (v1, v2, v2.1) through a shared product roadmap with the Kontor team.

Hey Offices launched with 1,800+ offices online and a 4.9 Google rating. Small clients who'd been eating broker time could now find, compare and enquire on space themselves, with leads delivered to providers on autopilot — freeing Kontor's brokers to focus on the clients that fit their model. Homepage conversion was continually improved using HotJar behavioural data, and the natural-language enquiry form lifted lead submission to suppliers. The whole new B2C product was delivered without rebuilding the engine — because the engine was already there.

The relationship ran for years, across Kontor's core platform and Hey Offices, and through Kontor's own expansion to New York.

I started working with Kontor back in 2020, on their core back-office platform. So by the time Luke, Polly and Alex brought me Hey Offices, I wasn't a vendor parachuting in — I knew the business and the platform from the inside.

We worked as an embedded product unit: day rate then retainer, a shared Trello product roadmap, design and UX shipped in versioned releases with the dev team, reviewed over Loom and iterated fast. Real product partnership over years, not a project with a start and end date.

The Hey Offices insight is the one I now bring to every client: **the most valuable product a service business can build is often already sitting inside the tools it uses to run itself.** Kontor had spent years encoding their expertise into a back-office. The job wasn't to invent — it was to recognise what that platform could become for a different audience, and to ship it without throwing away the thing that made it valuable. That instinct — finding the product latent in a firm's existing workflows rather than starting from scratch — is exactly what Hello Crossman does for service businesses now.