In this episode, Tomal Syed-Aguirre, Founder of Soul Spaces, joins us to talk about what it really takes to build a relationship-first commercial real estate business in London. From ditching transactional deal culture to navigating volatile pipelines and experimenting with every marketing channel imaginable, Tomal shares the honest, unfiltered side of running a founder-led business in 2026.
Soul Spaces was built on a simple but powerful idea: bring humanity back to an industry that had lost it. Tomal and his co-founder Joe saw a corporate real estate world that was cold and transactional, and decided to do things differently. In this episode, we go deep on what that actually looks like in practice, from the way they onboard clients and tailor office recommendations, to how they think about long-term contracts versus month-to-month flexibility.
We also get into the real challenges of founder-led branding on LinkedIn, why Tomal deleted Instagram because he could no longer tell what was real, how AI is both exciting and frustratingly hard to implement in a still-manual industry, and why he believes the answer to modern outreach might simply be picking up the phone.
If you are a founder trying to grow a service business, stay authentic in a noisy digital world, and build something that actually lasts, this episode is for you.
Takeaways:
- SEO results take more than a month to properly assess and measure
- Six-month minimums give any partner enough time to prove real value
- Flexible serviced offices suit fast-growing or uncertain businesses best
- Long-term leases offer cheaper and more bespoke solutions for stable companies
- Authentic LinkedIn posts outperform polished or forced thought leadership content
- Diversifying across multiple outreach channels is more reliable than one strategy
- Deal cycles in commercial real estate range from three months to over a year
- Hiring revenue-generating people with strong networks is the fastest growth lever