Late Payments and Confusion: One Startup’s Struggle to Make Rent Easier

Like many households over the past year, Jose and his family were being squeezed by rising costs. “Everything is going up,” he said. “The food. The cost of day care.” To free up space in their budget, they turned to a company promoted by their apartment complex: Flex. A booming tech startup based in New York City, Flex says it helps consumers “improve cash flow” by splitting their monthly rent into two manageable installments instead of a single, larger payment.

The process was supposed to be simple. Flex offers to pay its customers’ rent—in full—directly to the landlord. For their part, customers pay their rent to Flex in two installments, one due at the beginning of the month and one later in the month. In essence, Flex promises to front a big chunk of the rent, allowing families to spread out one of their largest expenses.

To Jose, this sounded like a good deal. “It was pretty much beyond convenient to split our rent,” he said. “That’s the reason why we used Flex—to make sure we can cover day care and have food in our house.”

But by August, what had started as a lifeline turned into a source of significant financial stress, after Flex issued confusing instructions. At the time, Jose said, his wife was set to receive a direct deposit on the fifth day of the month. The rent was due to their landlord company two days earlier, on the third of the month. But Jose said he was under the impression that Flex would pay the rent so long as funds were available in the family’s account by the fifth.

Jose’s belief was reinforced by a text message from Flex that said, “Please make sure you have funds available for your first payment of $585.25 by the 5th* in order for Flex to help you cover this month’s rent payment.” That message was accompanied by a perplexing caveat: “*disclaimer: if Flex has sent you a specific email stating a different deadline for payment, that email takes precedence.”

It’s unclear if Jose or his wife ever received such an email or why Flex would send that text message to anyone whose payment was actually due before the 5th. Flex’s website at the time left the due date ambiguous, stating that funds to cover the first half customers’ rent “must be available by 1pm EST on the 5th” but that “if you have been notified, you may be required to make the initial payment by the 3rd.”

It soon became apparent that Jose was indeed expected to pay Flex by the 3rd and that, as a result, Flex had not paid his rent. On August 4, Jose and his wife received a letter from their apartment complex informing them that because the rent was past due, they now owed a $50 late fee. The letter threatened the family with eviction if they did not come up with the funds. “If payment is not made as requested, demand is hereby made for you to voluntarily vacate the apartment and return possession to the owner or its agent,” it said.

The late fee was only the beginning of Jose’s troubles. On August 4, a Flex agent told Jose’s wife that because Flex hadn’t detected funds the day before, the family’s account would be deactivated. On August 5, a Flex agent clarified that the text message saying the rent might not be due until the 5th “was sent in error! I do apologize for this,” and that “we needed to detect the funds by the 3rd to cover your August rent.” Jose and his wife would have to scrape together their entire rent, along with the late fee, all at once—rather than the two installments they had budgeted for.

Jose said that although they managed to pay their bill, coming up with the full amount all at once was difficult. “That day was stressful,” he said. “I couldn’t even describe it. It was a bad day for us.”

In emails to Mother Jones, a Flex spokesperson explained that Jose’s problems were related to the fact that his family had been “randomly selected” for a “small test” conducted by the company that month.

“Flex conducted a limited experiment where a small sample of customers were placed on a 3 day (instead of 5 day) first payment window,” the spokesperson explained. “This means they must complete their first payment in the first 3 days of the month for Flex to pay their full rent on time.” She said that Flex “stopped the test after the first month” after realizing it “was not the best customer experience.”

The spokesperson acknowledged that Jose’s family had been “temporarily deactivated” from Flex’s service but added that the family “requested and we approved their immediate reactivation, as we did for all affected customers in this small test.”

“I was raised by old school parents,” Jose told Mother Jones. “They always said, ‘If you have a child, take care of the child. If you live in an apartment, pay your rent.’…When Flex did their thing, I felt kind of embarrassed.”

Jose eventually complained about the company in a series of comments on Flex’s Facebook page. He was not alone. As of last August, Flex had received 52 reviews on Facebook, many of them negative. The company has since disabled customers’ ability to leave reviews on Facebook, and those reviews are no longer visible.

According to the Better Business Bureau, Flex has received more than 500 complaints in the past 12 months, many of which allege that the company took too long to respond to renters’ concerns. Flex acknowledges past customer service problems, telling Mother Jones that the company’s “hyperscaling” due to a pandemic-era “explosion of demand” led to “less than desired response times for our customers.” Last summer, in response to a complaint filed with the New York attorney general’s office, the company explained that one confused renter had been “unable to make contact with us immediately as we were inundated during the first few days of the month.”

Flex’s issues go beyond customer service. Its own website acknowledges that the company is sometimes at fault for failing to pay its customers’ rent on time, mostly because of “technical challenges arising from integrating with dozens of different rent payment systems.” These glitches, the company stated in December, happened “less than 0.4% of the time”—which suggests that as many as 1 in 250 Flex rental payments weren’t making it to landlords by the due date. Flex says it covers customers’ late fees in these cases and that it has since reduced this error rate to just 0.1 percent of payments.

As Flex worked to overcome technological obstacles, it turned to a decidedly low-tech solution—an army of temp workers who, until recently, made many of the rent payments by manually logging into landlords’ payment portals on behalf of Flex customers. That process had a potential flaw: As Flex’s spokesperson acknowledged, it could have been possible for the temps to retain user data on their personal computers. She noted, however, that there is no evidence this ever occurred or was even attempted.

Flex says that beginning in 2022, it spent nearly a year rebuilding its technology. By March 2023, almost all of its rental payments were fully automated and it had stopped employing temps to pay manually—although in “a very small number” of instances, full-time employees still make manual payments. The company says it is working hard to improve customer service. Flex says it plans to once again permit Facebook reviews at some point in the future, and it points to the largely positive ratings for its app in the Apple and Google stores, which it says provide a “far more holistic view of customers’ sentiment” than Better Business Bureau reviews.

“We have made incredible progress in a short period of time as we work to empower as many renters as possible with flexibility over their most significant recurring expense,” Flex’s CEO, Shragie Lichtenstein, said in a statement. “We understand that there is more to be done, and are working hard each day to improve our service and give people more flexibility when it comes to their rent.”

Flex was founded in 2019, but the company truly gained traction after the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020. “We saw an explosion of demand for flexible rent that has still not abated,” the spokesperson said.

With the country in the grip of a severe recession and a federal eviction moratorium on shaky legal footing, millions of consumers turned to “buy now pay later” companies—which the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has described as “a close substitute for credit cards”—to help cover a wide variety of expenses. The need for such services has grown even more as the economy has entered a period of sustained inflation.

The situation in the rental market is particularly stark. Across the country, rental costs have increased dramatically in recent years; according to Redfin, rents in March were 19.9 percent higher than they were at the start of the pandemic.

For Flex, the rental industry offers a unique benefit—a huge pool of consumers with a serious incentive to pay their bill on time. “The rent eats first,” said Ariel Nelson, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. “People will forgo medicine, food, and all sorts of things to pay their rent.”

That’s because the consequences of late or missed rental payments can be catastrophic. They include fees, eviction, and, in Arkansas, even criminal prosecution. According to the Eviction Laws Database, in many states, a tenant only needs to be three days late before a landlord can file an eviction action. While many states regulate the amount that a landlord can charge in late fees, only a few require landlords to wait a specific number of days before charging fees.

Even when consumers prioritize rent, it can be hard to keep up. Rent is typically due around the first of the month, but as the Flex spokesperson explains, “renters—the majority of whom do not have a large amount of excess savings—earn their money throughout the month on unique pay schedules.”

That’s where Flex comes in.

Each month, customers make three separate payments to the company: It collects the first part of the customer’s rent at the beginning of the month; once Flex confirms that those funds are available in the customer’s account, it pays the full rent directly to the landlord. Flex then collects the second part of the rent by the end of the month. It also charges customers a monthly membership fee of up to $14.99 and adds a processing fee to some of the payments.

Flex provided Mother Jones with a list of customers who have had positive experiences with the company. One of them, Janet H., said that Flex had “helped me tremendously.”

“They pay my rent at the first of the month,” she said. “I’ve never been late. I’ve never missed a payment. My credit score has increased.”

Flex estimates that by allowing renters to spread out their payments, it saved customers more than $20 million in late fees last year. But Nelson worries that Flex’s own fees could present difficulties for consumers struggling to afford housing. “They’re charging a monthly subscription fee, but then there are also processing fees,” Nelson said. “So you can see how the fees would add up.”

Flex works with renters whose landlords use rental portals, websites that allow tenants to pay rent online. The company has long described this process as technologically driven. “We automatically make your rent payment directly to your property when it’s due each month,” its website says. Until recently, the site also said that “rent portals are required to use Flex. It’s how our technology works to pay your rent.”

But actually paying rents through those platforms is a surprisingly difficult challenge. “The rent industry is technologically archaic, consisting of a combination of a small number of modern rent platforms and dozens of older payment systems,” said the Flex spokesperson.

When possible, Flex says, the company used automated systems to interface with the portals to pay their customers’ rent. But as the company expanded, it found that a “minority” of payments “could not be processed automatically due to integration limitations” associated with older portals.

So beginning in 2020, Flex turned to a staffing agency to bring in a slew of temp workers.

“Rather than abandon these customers, who might otherwise risk late fees or eviction, we hired contractors to process these payments manually until an automated solution could be devised,” the spokesperson explained. (Asked whether Flex’s long-standing claim that “we automatically make your rent payment” was misleading, she said that the word “automatically” referred to “the expected customer action, not the actions of Flex.” She explained that because “Flex now pays the customer’s rent on their behalf, the customer no longer needs to remember to send a check, or click ‘pay’ in their portal, or…anything else.”)

At one point in 2022, the company was working with roughly 88 temporary “data entry specialists”—a role described in one job posting as “a fully remote position with a schedule of up to 8 hours per day” that would last from “August 31st – September 5th.” Temps had the “potential to be invited back for recurring 6 day periods at the beginning of each month thereafter.” The posting noted that temps would “need to use their own desktop or laptop computer for this assignment.”

While these workers performed a variety of tasks, a number were assigned to pay customers’ rents by individually logging into landlords’ rent portals using those customers’ usernames and passwords—credentials that Flex asks some customers to provide.

This process of manually logging in to the rental portals is described in multiple online postings that purport to belong to former Flex temporary workers. In a LinkedIn profile, a former Flex data entry specialist claimed to “meticulously and quickly work through various portals, completing rental payment transactions.” A different former data entry specialist wrote on LinkedIn that as part of his job with Flex, he would “input and verify customer’s sensitive financial information in order to help the company pay their rent.”

Flex says it undertook substantial security precautions to safeguard customers’ passwords and data, employing encryption measures, strictly limiting permission to access confidential material, and logging each instance in which workers accessed customers’ login credentials. Workers signed an agreement “prohibiting the unauthorized use of confidential and nonpublic information,” the spokesperson said. During 2022, the company also “fully rolled out” a requirement that workers’ computers have antivirus and virtual private network software.

Former temp workers told Mother Jones that Flex’s system presented customers’ passwords in such a way that the individual characters were not visible. Then, the temp workers would use the clipboard feature on their computers to paste the password into the rental portal login page. “At no time was the password revealed to the specialist,” the Flex spokesperson said, adding that “the copy function was also fully automated” while “the paste function would be performed manually.”

“We would be operating out of an incognito [browser] window, the idea being that our laptop would not be saving any personal information from the customer, such as passwords or anything like that,” one former worker said.

This worker said that he had not personally made any attempt to save customer passwords or data on his computer. But he also said it might have been possible for less scrupulous workers to attempt to “copy and paste any information [they] want and put it on a separate document.”

Asked about this worker’s statements, the Flex spokesperson said there was no evidence that any of the workers had improperly retained customer data. She also noted that such a scenario “could no longer occur” now that the company had eliminated manual payments made by temps.

“In the past it could have been feasible for an unscrupulous individual to develop some sort of software to breach Flex manual payment policies,” the spokesperson said. “But Flex has no indication this was ever attempted, let alone occurred. Flex logged every interaction with customer data, so if this were to happen Flex could pinpoint the exact culprit.”

While there’s no evidence that customer credentials were misused, two privacy experts told Mother Jones that the mere act of requesting a customer’s password in such a manner could raise significant concerns. Passwords, they noted, can be extremely valuable to bad actors, in part because consumers frequently reuse the same passwords on different sites.

“If someone’s asking you to spell out your password to an account, that would be something I’d consider a security red flag that really shouldn’t be happening,” said Calli Schroeder, a lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “And if it is happening, there should be follow up questions.”

Bill Budington, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that “the casual way in which they’re asking for your password, and that it’s expected that you give that,” was concerning to him. “Giving a password is a really sensitive thing.”

Flex counters that there’s nothing unusual about collecting customers’ passwords for third-party websites. “This is a common practice,” the spokesperson said, “virtually every consumer finance app that asks you to link to third party accounts has a similar interface.”

Flex says it stopped using temps to log in to customer rental portals in March 2023 and that the portion of payments that are fully automatic increased from 78 percent in April 2022 to 95 percent a year later. In the majority of these cases, Flex’s payments to portals are processed through a “direct integration” that does not require it to obtain renters’ login credentials. But other customers—particularly those whose landlords use less sophisticated portals—still “provide portal credentials for Flex’s automated system to complete the payment on their behalf.”

Of the remaining 5 percent, 4.99 percent of payments aren’t processed by Flex, but by the customer themselves. The company has begun to roll out what it calls a “self submit” system, which allows its customers to borrow rent money from Flex, log in to their own rental portal, and pay their landlord directly. The last 0.01 percent of payments, Flex says, are still processed manually—but by a full-time employee rather than a temp worker, and only “upon a customer’s explicit and direct request.”

In its emails to Mother Jones, Flex repeatedly pointed to its progress in addressing past problems. “Just as Flex dedicated almost all of its resources to improving its rent payment platform in 2022, we are similarly dedicating ourselves to improving the customer experience in 2023,” said the spokesperson.

In the past, Flex customers have leveled a wide range of complaints. One wrote to New York’s Department of Financial Services that someone had fraudulently opened a Flex account in their name, resulting in information incorrectly being included in their credit report. In response, Flex told the state that the company had closed the fraudulent account and had requested that the information be removed from the complainant’s credit report. (The Flex spokesperson told Mother Jones that “Flex’s fraud rates are far below industry norms.”)

Another customer wrote to New York’s attorney general’s office claiming that at the beginning of the month, Flex had charged their account twice—once for half of their rent and a second time for the total amount of the rent—when Flex was only supposed to charge their account once. “This specific complaint related to a one-off technical bug in Flex’s payment system that was Flex’s error,” the Flex spokesperson told Mother Jones. “We patched the bug and gave the customer a full refund.”

When customers do have issues, the main way to contact Flex is through email. The company doesn’t have a direct customer support phone number, according to its website, because “we hate putting you on hold.” Some renters, however, have complained that it is difficult to get help in a timely manner.

One customer, Tiffany, said she began using Flex because she spent approximately $1,900 per month on rent, an amount she struggled to afford. “Right off the bat, I had problems because you can’t get ahold of Flex,” she said. “Everything’s done via email. And they take forever to get back with you. It’s just a pain in the butt.”

On August 1, 2022, Tiffany saw that Flex had withdrawn the first half of her rent but had not yet paid her landlord. She attempted to contact Flex multiple times over the next few days, according to a complaint she filed with the New York AG’s office.

Flex did end up paying Tiffany’s rent on August 3, and she was never charged a late fee. The company said in a letter to the AG that its process had worked as designed and that Tiffany’s complaint stemmed from her own confusion. “This situation arose due to the customer being new to Flex and not understanding the Flex process,” Flex wrote at the time.

Flex told the AG that the company had been “inundated during the first few days of the month” and thus was unable to respond to Tiffany’s query before the 3rd. “​​We have apologized for the delay in response from our team,” the company said.

But there’s another type of complaint that Flex, as a for-profit company, says it simply can’t resolve—no matter how many improvements it makes to its technology. Many customers want “Flex to pay their rent knowing they lack sufficient funds for their first payment,” according to the spokesperson. “A portion of the population that Flex tries to serve struggle to pay their rent on time and also struggle to pay a portion of their rent on time.”

“It’s clearly a difficult problem that hasn’t been solved by anyone else in the rent or tech industries,” she added, “and is probably best solved through public policy and affordable rent.”

The sport of dressage tests rider and horse, with millions of dollars on the line

Dressage is a sport that requires a unique type of concentration between a rider and horse. It is said to be “ballet for horses” and its competitions include memorizing a test where in a rectangle area, the horse performs different movements at each level.

It’s a roll of the dice and millions of dollars.

Most athletes just need a ball and a playing surface to chase their pro dreams. In dressage, riders need an equal equine partner and millions of dollars, to fund a horse, show fees, vet care, farrier (horse shoer), equipment, horse dentist, a training facility, horse athletic trainer, a rider coach (trainer), transportation for the horse, an horse passport, and more.

Anna Buffini, 28-year-old California native, knew she wanted to ride horses since she was small.

Most top riders start early, around age 5. Buffini started later, as she did competitive gymnastics until 9. Gymnastics was her first love, and she competed until her body couldn’t anymore, but she always knew she wanted horses to be in her life.

She turned to riding at 10.

“I always knew I wanted to ride horses, but I didn’t know what discipline. I just happened to walk into a dressage barn first and it was perfect for me because it’s basically the horse version of gymnastics with the perfection and the scoring, it was meant to be,” Buffini said.

Fast forward to 2023, Buffini competed for Team USA at the FEI World Cup in Omaha, Nebraska. This was the second time Buffini competed for the national team and is the youngest rider in history to compete in an FEI World Cup.

Buffini said she doesn’t have the most talented horse in the FEI World Cup, but she’s grateful for the experience to be able to see how she fares against the top in the world.

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“I think being in the atmosphere with the best riders in the world, in general, is so inspiring and exciting and competitive,” she said. “Also, I don't have the fanciest horse here, so we're not going for the top spot but to see what it takes to be at the top and to chase after it, that's incredible. And being around great riders raises your game. I want to be better. I want to be the best one day and I won't stop working till I can hopefully compete with the top riders.”

Bring money - a lot of it

The road to riding on a national team is long and challenging. Riders need some form of outcome income, whether that is from a career, family funds, or having a sponsor. Companies and individuals will sometimes sponsor riders; this means that an individual company or person (ie, Lego, Google, Betsy Juliano, Glock) will buy a rider and a horse, and fund all aspects to be successful.

Simply owning a competition horse is expensive. At any moment, a horse could get injured, during training, to being turned out in a field, to competition.

Hope Cooper, 26-year-old Grand Prix rider, resides on her family farm in Concord, Massachussetts. She has been riding horses since she was six. She knows what it takes to get to the Grand Prix (the highest level in dressage), but she also knows how much money it costs to keep them there.

“I think what it takes is a lot of grit, first of all, it’s such a unique sport. There are a lot of ups and downs and things that don't go well and you have to bounce back from them. I also think, sadly, in this sport, it takes a lot of funds. Which is a little bit unfortunate, and that is something that makes it different from other sports,” Cooper said.

Having the funds to have a Grand Prix horse doesn’t guarantee success in the world of dressage. Grand Prix riders understand how to overcome and survive the highs and lows, and keep competing.

“Funds definitely whether it's your own funds or you find a sponsor or you find a way to make doing what you want to do work,” Cooper said. “ It's kind of stupidly an expensive sport, which is unfortunate. It involves a lot of luck too. A lot of hard work and a lot of luck.

“Because even if you have all the funds and you have the best horses and you have the most talent and you get to, even we just saw it at Omaha, you get to a World Cup and your horse has to have colic surgery, it's horrible. So it's luck, timing, all of those things and then because of those things, you know, trying over and over and over again and having the stamina to do that.”

Cooper is referring Hermes, an 11-year-old stallion who qualified for the World Cup with his rider Dinja Van Liere. Upon landing in Omaha, Hermes got sick and was not fit for competition.

Keeping the horses strong is an ongoing process

Buffini describes her horses as equivalent to NBA or NFL athletes. They work just as hard, if not harder than their riders. to perform all the necessary movements and tests be at the highest level of dressage.

Buffini’s horse, Diva, requires specific recovery protocols to maintain top competitive form.

“Diva has an extreme recovery schedule,” she said. “...So anything you see in an NFL training room is basically what my horse gets. She gets massage therapy, acupuncture, laser treatment, magnetic blankets, she gets the game-ready ice system, she gets iced. She doesn't do this because she's a little crazy about it. But they have treadmills, aqua treadmills, swimming, anything and everything you can think of.

“Recovery is twice as important as the work I think. And a healthy horse is a successful horse. It doesn't matter how fancy they are if they can't work.”

Buffini learned some horses react to treatments better than others, meaning riders have to tailor schedules to the things they enjoy and react to the most. Buffini said that Diva loves acupuncture and laser treatment, while her other horses prefer the icing and magnetic blankets.

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“You just get very specific with what they need and when you're riding them, you can feel where they're tight, where they need a little bit of help,” she said. “And then you pinpoint where they need to be loosened up or get the soreness out of and be very specific.”

For Cooper, ensuring her horses are set up for success in staying healthy is something she takes seriously. She has taken the time to come up with the best recipe for her horses.

“I ice all four legs after every ride,” she said. ”I think the biggest thing is just constantly moving around. I think we run into problems with our horses when we have them in one place for too long. I do a lot of massage therapy. We have a guy named Salve; he was a human masseuse for a long time. And now he does the horses and he is physically like a really big guy so he can almost lift the horses up if he gets underneath him and push their backs up.

“We do a lot of massages like for Flynn (Cooper’s Grand Prix horse). He gets two massages a day during a CDI. For me, it's just the walking around, like a lot of hand walking, a lot of turnout, a lot of icing. We do some lasering too.”

Katie Foster, owner of Canterworks Dressage, in Mason, Michigan takes a different approach to care for her horses. She knows some things work well for her horses, such as having a vet focusing on keeping the horse sound.

When a horse is “lame” that means they walk with a limp and that is usually an indicator that there is an issue with a horse's feet. When a horse isn’t lame they are called “sound”.

“Mine go five days a week, they always get two days off,” Foster said. “I usually have a standing appointment with my lameness vet every month. I have that booked out and I know that I can always cancel it if I have to, but more often than not somebody needs something, even if it's chiropractic or acupuncture. Then we do a lot of things like some of the horses get iced after they're worked. I like the magnetic massage blanket.”

The challenge never stops

Buffin’s background in gymnastics helped prepare her for the difficulty of dressage. The rider is never just passively sitting on the horse, they are athletically working with core strength and balance to maintain effective form.

“People don't think this because we look like we're sitting up there doing nothing, which is actually a compliment,” Buffini said. “It's extremely hard, and for me, in some ways, more physical than gymnastics was in the length of time you have to hold your strength for. Gymnastics is an insane amount of power for 30 seconds to a minute and a half. And then horse riding is an insane amount of strength for about 45 minutes straight with a couple of walk breaks.

“In other sports, you can shoot a basketball a thousand times a day, you can go to the golf course and swing a thousand clubs. You can only ride your horse for 45 minutes a day. We get less practice and we have to be just as good as the top athletes in the world.”

Alice Tarjan, 44-year-old Grand Prix rider from New Jersey, also knows that it's unrealistic to aim for a perfect score on every test. Instead of aiming for perfection, she focuses on the goals of the rider and horse.

“You know, it's dressage; it's hard. It's [the score] never, good enough of course. Like nobody ever gets a hundred percent and for sure it's taken a lot of hard work. I think if you wanna excel at anything in life, you have to work hard and you also have to work smart. And you have to be really realistic about what your abilities are and what your horse's abilities are,” Tarjan said.

The decision: train or buy a Grand Prix horse?

Riders have two options to get to the Grand Prix level. One is to buy a lower-level horse and train it up to Grand Prix. Or skip the training, and buy a horse already at Grand Prix level. Buying is usually only an option for sponsors or people who can afford it. Currently on the low end Grand Prix horses are selling for the mid 5 figures, international horses reach in the millions to tens of millions of dollars.

Maryal Barnett, an FEI C Judge and a riding instructor in Michigan, knows what it costs to be able to afford to buy a Grand Prix horse.

“And if you're gonna get the very best, [horse] it's millions,” Barnett said.

Cooper has had to find creative ways in order to be able to find her upper-level horses, one of the strategies she has found is by trading some of her younger horses for the higher-level horses she currently has in her barn.

“As much as my family is super comfortable financially in the real world; in the horse world, it's not really the case. We've had to get really creative about trading horses. For one of the horses I have now, that's from Isabel Werth; we had to trade two young horses that I got. I had two young horses that were really not what I wanted. And then I found this one. So we traded two horses, plus we had to find a co-owner. We've over time always had to trade horses, which it sounds so sad, to talk about horses that way, but we've often had to trade one horse for another if it doesn't work out,” Cooper said.

Isabel Werth, a German dressage rider who is the most decorated in history, has ridden in six Olympics and has over 10 Olympic medals. For Tarjan, she has found her own way to produce Grand Prix horses, and that is by buying them as foals (babies) and training them herself from Training Level to Grand Prix. This way of training horses offers many advantages because it allows the rider to build an incredibly strong relationship with their horse.

“For me, I wanted to do dressage and the only way for me to do that was the cheapest way I could. For me to get quality [horses] is to go buy a foal and raise it and then put the training on it because I could train it for free,” Tarjan said. “ The training was “free” because it was my work rather than paying somebody else for their training. I think the whole system in the U.S. pushes everybody to try and go buy a trained horse.

“I think it's a little unfortunate and I certainly hope to talk to young trainers out there and kids coming up and say, ‘There's another way to do it. You can go and train your own horses and you can be successful that way, too.’ And it gives you independence and it helps you fund it a little bit because if you can make a horse you can be solid and, and make a good living off doing that.”

Tarjan said if she tried to buy her current Grand Prix horse, Shrimp, at the level she is at now, she wouldn’t be able to afford her. For Tarjan, training horses is the only way she knows she can be successful in the world of dressage.

“I would never be able to afford the horses I have in my barn right now. There's no way I could afford the Grand Prix horses that I got in the barn right now, not even close. So it's the only way that I have of getting my hands right on them is to produce them myself,” Tarjan said.

One of Buffini’s career goals is to offset the cost of riding dressage for rising younger riders. She already started this initiative by donating her top horses to other riders that need them.

“I think first of all a passion I have for this sport is to help figure out ways to do more fundraising, add more programs, add more funding for good riders who need good horses,” Buffini said. “So that's actually a huge passion project of mine for the rest of my career. So hopefully we can start changing that and it will come from the trainers. I've already in my own world led the charge by donating my top horses to good riders and they've become Grand Prix riders and started their own business because of that.

“I think you have to be, you have to do it for other people and you have to start somewhere. It is a very expensive sport and it takes a lot of hard work and you can spend all the money in the world and never make it, which is the hardest part,.”

Meeting Shifting: How The World’s Top 15% Of Teams Unlock Faster And Bolder Collaboration—and Cut Wasteful Meetings

Let's imagine a leadership team meeting with a cost-cutting proposal on the agenda from the Chief Information Officer to increase centralization of shared IT resources. The CIO and their team have prepped the cost efficiencies after a request from the CEO and the Chief Financial Officer. At the meeting, the CIO presents the proposals to frame a discussion. But they have already pre-sold the package to the CFO and brought up many of the likely challenges with the CEO and asked both for their backing before even coming into the room because they expect pushback from business unit leaders against the idea of more central control of IT and loss of customized attention. The CIO’s presentation is a standard report out. Some of the business unit leaders can tell this has already been politically stitched-up with the CFO and CEO and decide not to express their discontent, risks or concerns. Some individuals have clicked into listen mode, don’t believe they really have a dog in the hunt, nor would it matter if they did say anything. Some are unwilling to make recommendations even though their gut tells them there is a better way to do this. Of the 12 people in the room, only four voices are heard. Real candor is noticeably absent. There’s an unspoken belief that it’s best to move to the next agenda item, for now, and try to deal with this outside the meeting. Welcome to an everyday meeting in corporate life anywhere in the world today.

Let me lay out a different scenario. Not an imaginary scenario, but one that happens in the top 15% of truly world-class teams who don’t believe that meetings are the only way to collaborate, and they happen to be the digital native disruptors of most industries who, since school, used the google collaboration software and naturally carried these tools like Google Docs into their early professional life and created collaboration processes that fully leveraged such tools.

World class teams are shifting a whole cycle of thinking, dialogue and collaboration with peers ... [+] before a meeting with a simple high return practice that can free up to 30% of diary time.

In this second scenario, the CEO has framed a north-star understanding that under the current economic climate, there are cost constraints and a need to identify cost reductions. The CIO, in response, creates a quick one-pager in the following format:

The one-pager is shared either in the form of a simple narrative document, or slide. And it could be accompanied by a simple 10 minute video sent in advance. In all cases, the one-pager is accompanied by a group editable spreadsheet with all 12 executive team meeting attendees named in the left-hand column. Along the top row, there are three simple questions for each member of the team to answer:

This is sent out at least a week before the meeting for all teammates to read, giving every contributor serious time to think, consult their teams, and answer those questions before the meeting… and then to read each other's answers. Knowing that in the past, preparatory work before meetings was often not done, use of assigned names on a shared document increases the likelihood of completion because of open accountability among peers with the visibility of the CEO. What we've just done, is Meeting Shifted. There is now a cycle of thinking, dialogue and collaboration—in a shared sheet, a format that everyone can see—prior to the meeting. This, the level of collaboration prior to the meeting has a number of key attributes:

Psychological safety goes up, bolder inputs begin to occur. More importantly, the CIO, witnessing all of this valuable input of challenges and insights and offers of support or help, can recraft the agenda for the meeting that will follow to address the most important dissent that exists among the team or just quickly to land the plane on the critical issues. Rather than two or three rounds of meetings where only four people would have been heard, we have built an entirely more efficient round of collaboration. There is no place for sidebar and shadow conversations lobbying behind the scenes. There’s no lack of transparency. We know that without Meeting Shifting, eventually, the decision would have been made without everybody having full information as to why and the level of buy-in would be significantly lower. In this instance, buy-in is directly proportionate to co-creation, not just for the sake of the patina of getting people involved. The aperture for new ideas is truly being opened up, and everybody has transparency and full information as to why we came to certain conclusions. Finally, we can recognize that not everybody even has to be in this particular meeting. Clearly, when we see everyone's input, we can easily see that certain individuals are just not needed for this conversation, decreasing unnecessary meetings for many. We could find that there is a vital component of this conversation that should happen in the upcoming meeting of 12—and then there are other components that need much smaller groups of individuals to finalize.

What we’ve done is significantly shorten the cycle time of collaboration and getting to the answer. By virtue of having everybody's input, we have not abdicated the responsibility or authority of the CIO, nor diminished the authority of the CFO and the CEO to make the final decision. Decision-making hasn't changed. What we've done is we've opened a much more transparent, bolder, inclusive process that would achieve faster decisions with better, bolder information. This also allows us to reduce our meetings by 30%, which we have seen repeatedly in our research.

This simple practice of shifting collaboration from traditional meeting practices to an asynchronous practice is a critical step on a team's journey to becoming what our research calls world-class hybrid. Our dataset of thousands of teams compiled over decades of working with Fortune 500 businesses, fast-growing unicorns and global brands shows that only 15% approach levels four and five on our five-point hybrid index for leveraging the most innovative practices for collaboration, and decision-making, and innovation. They recognize that the belief that collaboration must start with a meeting is a myth. They also know it's a myth that the broader you get people’s involvement, it thins down and creates consensus and mushy outputs. Those are the myths of old meeting strategies. It’s not the truth of today's powerful best practices for world-class hybrid teams, leveraging the best tools that have been available to us for years.

World-class teams recognize that collaboration happens in a stack and they become uniquely capable of working up and down that Collaboration Stack. The Collaboration Stack has the team starting with asynchronous work then moving to leveraging practices best suited for remote/hybrid meeting efficacy, and then in-person meetings. Each stage of the stack requires its own best practices (describing them all is beyond the scope of this article, but will be covered in my next book). But there's an entire set of asynchronous practices that are incredibly powerful and valuable of which Meeting Shifting, is just one simple example.

When we deal with remote business practices, we show the value of remote/hybrid meetings for transparent sidebar conversations in the chat function and the use of breakout rooms, which also increase psychological safety significantly. Opening a shared document in those breakout rooms allow us to capture insight from everybody in the room, improving the perspective and sense of inclusion and engagement. Unfortunately, most teams moved from boardrooms pre-pandemic into remote meetings that looked exactly like the meeting style of a boardroom. And now we're crawling back into those boardrooms with the same meeting and collaboration structures we always did, fully missing how to leverage valuable collaboration tools. What's even sadder is the recognition that now that we are back in the office, we've dragged people in with resentment to being in the office. They're sitting still alone in cubes on remote and hybrid meetings that they feel they could have done equally as well from home and still been able to eliminate the commute. Organizations have been real estate baiting with better food to get people back to the office to “earn the commute.” In reality, we need to change the way we work so that we engineer when we are together in person, for the most powerful things that we should be doing: wrestling gritty issues, eye to eye, celebrating, playing, serving, bonding, connecting—things on the emotional spectrum should be reserved for the physical times we're collaborating together.

This awakening to faster and bolder ways of collaboration is despite the great laboratory we all had to test remote work during the pandemic when too many of us barely scratched the surface. Our research institute has been studying the field of remote and hybrid work since 2010 and published a series of articles in Harvard Business Review. The lessons and best practices were laid out like a buffet to us if only we were just more curious. These are the ways of working the unicorn companies that are disrupting business models and disrupting ways of working and have been for some time, and it's available to anybody. We ignore them at our peril.