San Francisco · Workplace & Operations

Half-empty offices and vendor spend no one has audited. I fix both.

Ten years running the physical foundation growing companies stand on: Santa Clara HQ operations at DataStax, inside the workplace team supporting a six-location portfolio across six countries, held steady through the IBM acquisition. Before that, a workplace function built from a bare floor at Fisker, and service standards learned at Morrison & Foerster and Dechert.

Book a 30-minute diagnostic call See the outcomes

The intro is a working session, not a pitch. You leave with at least one fix you can action this week.

Ten years operating inside DataStax Fisker Morrison & Foerster Dechert UCSF

6

Countries run as one portfolio, one owner

$5.5M

Global workplace program supported as part of the team

500+

People supported through an acquisition, office steady throughout

+30%

Voluntary office attendance, no mandate

2-3

Team sprints hosted at HQ in a single week, at peak

$2.8M

Annual HQ spend reconciled with FP&A to the penny

Selected work

Operator outcomes that don't need a footnote.

6×6Portfolio · DataStax

Six locations, six countries, one workplace team.

A 426-seat Santa Clara headquarters, leased offices in London and Tokyo, and flexible sites in Singapore, Sydney, and Paris, translated from headcount projections into a single property strategy. Full lease lifecycle with an institutional landlord, including a 39-month headquarters lease transition and an international office wind-down closed out cleanly.

The satellite sites were the proof: stood up, serviced, and held to headquarters standards without me on the ground, because the playbook traveled even when I didn't.

SteadyOperations held through the IBM acquisition

500+ people re-onboarded mid-acquisition. Nobody noticed.

When IBM acquired DataStax, every employee had to move onto new systems, new contracts, new badges, new everything, while the $5.5M workplace program kept running. Franz's part was visibility and steadiness: Finance got the full picture of vendor contracts, points of contact, and spend, and the Santa Clara office held its standard while much of the support organization wound down on termed contracts.

The best compliment I got was that nobody noticed anything had changed.

300People · 3 days · one kickoff

Events, produced not procured.

A 300-person, three-day company kickoff produced end to end on a 146-task workback plan and a $165K vendor budget I owned myself: venue, staging, logistics, and the on-site execution. The kickoff anchored a standing cadence produced in-house at HQ: the annual sales kickoff, quarterly context meetings, monthly cultural events, and a steady drumbeat of team sprints, sometimes two or three different teams in the same week.

+30%Attendance · no mandate

An office people chose.

A half-empty office and no appetite for an RTO mandate. The answer was hospitality: daily catered lunches that reflected the team rather than the procurement default, curated coffee, monthly cultural celebrations, and an Envoy-based arrival experience that treated every visitor like a guest. Average weekly attendance rose 30% with no mandate. People came in because the space was worth showing up for.

0→1Function build · Fisker

A workplace function from a bare floor.

Hypergrowth, no vendors, no playbooks. I wrote the playbook that didn't exist, stood up every vendor relationship, configured access and security from scratch, and led build-outs of engineering and prototype lab spaces with external construction crews and internal hardware teams. Incident response got 25% faster and overhead dropped 12%.

Earlier work in top-tier law (Morrison & Foerster, Dechert) and academic healthcare (UCSF) is where the service standards came from: white-glove hospitality, HIPAA-grade rigor, executive-level discretion. Same instincts, scaled into modern tech operations.

About

Franz Nathaniel Tan

The operator behind the outcomes.

I'm Franz Tan, a workplace and operations leader in San Francisco. At DataStax I ran the Santa Clara headquarters, leading a four-person on-site team and partnering with workplace colleagues across five more offices in five countries, a mix of in-house staff and contracted crews. Before that I built Fisker's workplace function from zero, and before that I learned what real service standards look like inside Morrison & Foerster, Dechert, and UCSF.

I'm EMT-trained, so workplace safety, compliance, and emergency preparedness sit inside the function rather than bolted on. And AI is my force multiplier: Claude and Gemini let a lean operation deliver at a scope that used to take a team.

The method

Diagnose. Build. Earn.

One system behind every engagement. It is how the workplace function gets run the way it will be run in 2030.

01Diagnose

Probability-first decisions.

Every vendor RFP scored on a model, not a gut. Every budget call documented with explicit assumptions. Every new vendor earns its contract through a structured proof of concept before I sign, which is how Envoy earned its place in my stack. Leaders change their minds when you remove the downside, and I build the cases that get there.

02Build

AI as a force multiplier.

Claude and Gemini in the daily loop for vendor analysis, budget modeling, operational playbooks, and the translation between fuzzy leadership intent and structured action with owners and timelines. The reporting layer maintains itself, so the hours go to leases and people.

03Earn

Hospitality, not real estate.

Offices win when they feel like venues people choose to walk into. RTO mandates lose because they punish people for the building instead of fixing the building for the people. I design for attendance that earns itself.

Safety is owned, not outsourced. I'm EMT-trained (certificate, City College of San Francisco) and run the preparedness work to match: annual fire and earthquake drills quarterbacked with property managers, incident response, an AED program under contract, and access-control stand-ups of Envoy, Avigilon, and Brivo.

How we start

A short path to a clear yes.

1

Thirty-minute intro

We diagnose one real friction live. You leave with something you can action, whether or not we go further.

2

Fixed-scope engagement

Diagnostic, Sprint, Audit, or an event. Fixed scope, fixed fee, clear deliverables, a finish line.

3

Roadmap, then optional retainer

You keep the roadmap and the number. If it helps, I stay on as a fractional operator, month to month.

This is for you if

  • You own the workplace function personally and it runs on you.
  • Your vendor contracts have not been audited in a while.
  • You want RTO attendance without a mandate that backfires.
  • You need senior workplace-operations thinking before a full-time hire makes sense.

Questions

Before the call.

What actually happens on the intro call?+

A thirty-minute working session, not a sales pitch. We pick one real friction (a vendor line, an attendance problem, an office move) and I walk you through how I would approach it. You leave with at least one thing you can action this week.

How long is a Diagnostic?+

Two weeks, fixed scope. Week one is the baseline (vendor stack, budget, RTO posture). Week two is a prioritized roadmap plus a unit-economics model on your top three vendor lines. It is the low-risk front door to the Sprint and the Audit.

Do you work alongside our internal team?+

Yes. I embed with whoever already touches the workplace (People, IT, Finance, an office manager) and hand back systems your team can run without me. The goal is to make the function stronger, not to make it depend on me.

Remote or onsite?+

I'm based in San Francisco and work onsite across the Bay Area, with remote work in between. For a build-out, a move, an event, or an RTO rollout, I'm in the room when it counts.

Are engagements fixed-fee?+

Yes. Every engagement is fixed scope and fixed fee, so there is no open-ended meter running. An ongoing fractional retainer, if you want one, is month to month.

Writing

Frameworks, lessons, observations.

Essays in the works on AI-augmented workplace operations, vendor lifecycle, and the operating cadence behind low-disruption integrations. If you'd like the first pieces when they ship, email me and I'll put you on the list myself.

Book a 30-minute diagnostic call