The soft edges of business success

Anouk Darling is the CEO of Scape Australia. As I prepared to interview her for my podcast, StoryWork, I quickly learned that Scape was a very serious business indeed.

It is part of The Living Company, which has more than $17 billion in funds under management and ambitions to become a $100 billion business. Under the Scape student accommodation brand, Anouk and her team manage around 20,000 student apartments.

On the face of it, this is an extremely grown-up property company: buildings, capital, leases, development, security systems, operating platforms and institutional investors. But as soon as we sat down, I realised Anouk doesn’t talk about the business as if its only job is to construct buildings and fill bedrooms efficiently.

She talks about belonging, community, safety, human experiences and what she calls the “hello effect”: the idea that social cohesion and community do not happen by accident, and that people often need help making the first move towards connection.

At first glance, this fascination with belonging and “hellos” sounds exactly the sort of thing a hard-headed founder might roll their eyes at. Warm, worthy, purposefully do-gooding perhaps, but where’s the business case? Where’s the investor-ready data on the return on hello?

Anouk has both the conviction and the results to answer those questions and, as we talked, I realised Scape was a near-perfect example of the soft edge of business success in action.

A warm welcome

In his book The Soft Edge, Rich Karlgaard gave a name to the hard-to-define bundle of intangible things (like design, story, taste, culture, emotion, aesthetics and experiences) that founders and leaders instinctively know matter but often struggle to codify or quantify. As a result, they tend to make one of three mistakes:

They dismiss the soft edge as fluffy because it is hard to define or measure. They treat it as optional because investors are assumed to care more about strategy, operations and the efficient machinery that spits out cash. Or, perhaps most dangerously, they value it but tell themselves they will get to it later, once the serious commercial and operational foundations are in place.

The problem with that last seductive idea is that by the time “later” arrives, the business may already have scaled the wrong behaviours, the wrong standards and the wrong customer experiences.

Anouk believes the business case for the soft edge is found in the experience itself.

She says Scape’s investors can feel the difference the instant they walk into the buildings. Staff pause conversations to say hello. Residents acknowledge each other and new visitors. The feeling is one of warmth, welcome and substance.

And because that experience is real and repeated, she can trace it through to outcomes that are not remotely soft: residents stay longer, talk about Scape more favourably, convert at higher rates and help keep acquisition costs low. As Anouk put it, “the experience we deliver is what differentiates us”.

That is the bit founders often miss. The soft edge is not what you add after the machine works; it can be the thing that makes the machine work in the first place.

Anouk is explicit that the “customer experience is the brand”, and equally explicit about where the brand actually lives. It doesn’t live purely within the marketing team sitting in head office, but with the people at the Scape coalface interacting with residents every day. Frontline staff, she says, “are the most important touch point of any business”.

Once you believe that, you build the business differently.

Scape has its own wellness and hygiene teams rather than treating cleaning as a purely outsourced function. Anouk points out that those staff often see students more frequently than anyone else in the building, so they are trained in mental-health first aid and awareness and are treated as part of the company’s communication loop.

Facilities staff are similarly integrated because going into someone’s room to fix a shower head or change a lightbulb is not merely maintenance but a human interaction inside someone’s home.

The soft edge, in other words, is not a garnish on the operating model. It changes the operating model.

Just reflect on how easy it would be for a hard-edged business to outsource cleaning or maintenance in the name of efficiency, then return the savings to residents or reinvest them in something more obviously impressive, like a fancier gym. Scape has decided these functions are too close to the human experience to be treated as generic inputs.

That sense of non-negotiability is one of the great advantages a genuinely brand-led business can give you. We felt it repeatedly at Four Pillars Gin. There were always cheaper, easier or more scalable ways to do things. The harder question was whether doing them would slowly make us less ourselves.

Designing for connection

The same mindset appears in the physical design of Scape environments. Anouk talks about “collider zones”, spaces intentionally designed to create social collisions.

Laundries are not hidden in basements but sit near ping-pong tables, gaming spaces and communal areas because doing the washing is one of those mundane moments when people are already moving through the building and can bump into each other.

Scape buildings have music studios, karaoke rooms and, in one Redfern building, a “glam room” with mirrors, lights and Dyson hairdryers because the team noticed people like getting ready to go out together.

My father was a civil engineer and often talked about designing solutions that “increase the surface area for serendipity”. That is what Scape is doing architecturally. In its world, belonging is not something you hope will somehow emerge from a mission statement; instead, you design and create the conditions in which it becomes more likely.

But just because the soft edge has “soft” in the name doesn’t mean committing to it is all warmth and fuzziness. In fact, if you believe it matters commercially, you have to be relentlessly hard about protecting it.

This is where taste comes in, along with the persistence and stubbornness to keep applying it. Anouk talked about how much design capability Scape keeps inside the business, how closely its founders and internal teams remain involved in every building, and how particular they are about materials, lighting, layout and aesthetic expression.

External experts are brought in, but judgement is never outsourced.

“All of it is your brand expression,” she said, “right down to the flooring, joinery and lighting”.

I put it to Anouk that the best brands are often painful to work with because they know themselves better than any external partner can hope to know them. Strong brands have taste and judgement of their own, which means they sometimes reject perfectly competent work because it is not right for them.

Her response was immediate:

“Absolutely. And we are passionate and probably painful about what we believe is right.”

That painfulness is not a bug. It is the cost of maintaining standards on the soft edge.

Soft-edged differentiation is incredibly easy to erode as a business grows because every individual compromise can be made to look reasonable in isolation.

Do we really need that level of training? Do we need that headcount? Does the space really need to be designed quite so carefully? Surely we could save money here? Do we really need this many events? Surely we could outsource some of this?

Anouk says those questions did come from investors early on, but over time the economic logic became harder to dismiss because they could see and feel the results.

That “feel it” point matters. Not everything valuable begins life as a neat metric. Sometimes leaders need enough conviction to protect something before the spreadsheet can fully prove it, while still being disciplined enough to explain how the soft edge connects to hard commercial logic.

I think of this as a theory of brand growth, and Anouk is particularly good at articulating hers.

A resident feels seen, safe and welcome; because of that, they feel more connected and at home; because of that, community becomes stronger; because of that, the experience of others improves; because of that, people stay longer and become advocates for Scape; because of that, conversion improves and acquisition costs fall; because of that, raising more capital and opening more buildings becomes easier and less risky.

Because, because, because.

That is how soft edges survive hard conversations.

Culture cannot be installed later

All this helps explain why the third founder mistake I talked about earlier – assuming the soft edge can be installed later- is so dangerous. The standards a business tolerates early become the habits it later has to unlearn.

Anouk’s point about culture is blunt: Culture is never just “words on a page”. It is how people conduct themselves, how they take carriage of issues, who they hire, how they train and reward them, how they decide, improvise and prioritise, and how they behave when nobody senior is watching.

There is a parallel universe in which Scape built a large, efficient property machine and then decorated it with the appearance of community, belonging and care. We have all stayed in hotels that have attempted to place a similar brand fig leaf over an entirely corporatised, value-engineered experience.

But in this universe, Scape baked those soft-edge advantages into the ways the business operates, how its people are trained, how its buildings are designed and how frontline staff are expected to behave. Then it scaled them.

My conversation with Anouk was the final episode of the first season of StoryWork. In many ways, it was a fitting full stop on ten conversations I wanted to use to explore how stories help things grow, whether the thing is a $17 billion property business, a start-up or a career.

The hard-edged parts of any business are easy to recognise and prioritise because they come with familiar labels: product, finance, operations, technology, distribution and sales. The soft edge is harder because it lives in taste, instincts, feelings, standards, decisions, behaviours, stories and culture.

But often that soft edge is the source of the differentiation the hard machinery exists to scale. Far from being the thing that comes after the foundations have been put in place, sometimes it is the foundation for all the business success to come.

• The StoryWork podcast with Matt Jones, exploring the role of story in building brands, businesses, movements, and ideas, is available on Spotify, Apple, Youtube and Substack. 

Matt is a keynote speaker and brand growth adviser at Think Story Experience.