SME Member Spotlight | MindFolio

Who are MindFolio?

MindFolio is a real estate consultancy that seeks to invigorate the property market using creativity and deep analytics. Our real strength lies in linking and leveraging Visioning & Analytics to challenge conventional mind-sets and create forward-looking, evidence-based solutions.

We employ a bespoke system of propriety thinking models and technologies to provide outcomes that help our clients tackle their most complex challenges. Our customer base is diverse and spread worldwide. We are proud to have worked alongside some of the most ambitious real estate actors in the industry, e.g. Lendlease, Grosvenor, British Land, AXA, Land Securities, Quintain, Hammerson, London Borough of Barnet, Peabody, McWhinney / Denver, GGP / Chicago, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), Aldar and Dubai Holdings.

What are your biggest achievements to date?

We love that we have earned the right to influence some of the world’s most ambitious developments including the redevelopment of London’s Euston Station, the regeneration of Slough’s City Centre and Oxford’s retail and leisure hub, Westgate. Further afield, we have been instrumental in developing three new master-planned communities in Texas and the first walkable mixed-use city centre in Dubai.

A particularly rewarding project involved the Municipality of Billund in Denmark. MindFolio invented the vision to turn a small town into the internationally recognised ‘Capital of Children’. The visionary concept was honoured in the Danish Design Prize in 2016 and it continues to shape the region’s urban development and socio-economic prosperity.

One of our most recent achievements has been the launch of LociLab, our digital community engagement and inspiration platform, which provides deep consumer insights to shape the development of the public realm. This product allows us to merge our creative processes in a user-friendly technological platform. We aim to continue to evolve LociLab in order to develop new ways to engage with people and extract crunchier insights for our clients.

How is the growth of the digital economy shaping your business?

In a myriad of ways, but especially the ability to access consumer data speedily and yet control its quality almost simultaneously. This enables us to spend more time on what really matters to our clients: to deliver deep and meaningful insights based on evidence rather than endless charts and slides.

Big data is useful at identifying overarching issues within a locality, but a bespoke layer of consumer data is of course necessary to extract more impactful insights. So while we routinely use big and localised data, we merge such findings with proprietary and ‘live’ consumer data to analyse and understand their behaviours, ambitions and trade-offs.  

What advice would you give to a start-up consultancy today?

Focus. The temptation is to pursue too many avenues at once. Beware of the ‘busy fool’ comfort…

Burn rate realism. The first 18 months are the hardest for getting orders!