“What are you guys?”

It’s a question the leadership team at Lost Office Collaborative sometimes hears, maybe unsurprising given the multifaceted nature of the Rocketts Landing business founded by longtime Richmonders Mark Brown and Christian Markow.

Is Lost Office a consultancy? “Not really,” Markow muses. “Sometimes.”

Is it a space for offsite meetings? “Yeah,” Markow says. “But more.”

In truth, these answers barely scratch the surface of all the ways Markow and Brown aim to help organizations from Richmond and beyond build better team culture. Their innovative venture, which opened its doors in January 2024, boasts a well-appointed coffee bar, a boardroom with connected social space, a reconfigurable 1,600-square-foot room designed for larger groups and, perhaps most remarkably, a songwriting workshop designed to bring colleagues closer together.

Searching for inspiration

For better or worse, breaking out in song is frowned upon in most workplaces. But thanks to the Lost Office offering, the Giving Notes Project, organizations from Richmond can tap into the transformative power of songwriting to honor individuals and build team chemistry. Giving Notes was devised by Mark Brown, who has lived in Richmond for 20 years, and who has been on a singular journey to discover where music fits in his own life.

Brown started playing guitar in college. In the years that followed, like a lot of musicians, he lived a double life to support his passion. “From college up until about my mid-30s was all about being corporate guy by day — Accenture, Capital One, Cap Tech — but loving, playing and writing music in bands at night,” he says.

Brown went on to release a full-length album in 2009 that was recorded at Sound of Music Studios. While writing music and gigging around Richmond and Northern Virginia scratched the creative itch, he struggled to reconcile the two halves of his life. “There was always this tension between day-corporate Mark [and] my love of creativity and music making.”

In his first attempt at aligning his days and nights, Brown quit his job and moved to Nashville to become a professional songwriter. He returned after a year, eyes open to the intense dedication it takes to make it in Music City. Rather than redoubling his efforts, a new question began to crystallize: “What would it look like,” he remembers asking, “instead of writing songs about myself or my observations, [to] get out of my own ego to enter into other people’s stories in the most empathetic, real way possible?”

A lyrical gift

Brown began collecting songwriting prompts and giving the resulting songs away for free. Nearly a decade later, he has a team of more than 10 songwriters he can call upon to lead Giving Notes sessions. Some are pro bono, in keeping with the project’s original model, which others are packaged with a Lost Office experience. But all of them start with a healthy dose of listening; a group discussion followed by individual interviews between participants and the songwriter leading the session.

Among the musical facilitators is singer-songwriter Jonathan Vassar, who was one of the first Brown looped in once inspiration for Giving Notes struck, and who helped Brown build his bench of Giving Notes songwriters. Vassar is embedded deeply in the recent history of Richmond’s music scene; he has released several of his own albums of reverent and observant folk music, and he organized an influential series of listening room concerts beginning in the late 2000s. “He was always kind of like a Richmond idol of mine, in terms of his songwriting,” Brown says.

Lyrical snippets are culled from initial discussions and interviews, and the songwriter then distills the group’s dynamic into a composition and shares the finished product with participants. Whether the big reveal happens over Zoom or in person, the song’s debut performance can be emotionally affecting.

“I think back to one where we played the song live on a Zoom [and] one guy stood up and literally just started dancing to the song on the Zoom call,” Brown recalls. “One that we did [was] for a woman and her mom — the story of her rescuing her mom from Ukraine… They get to the end, and the both the mom and her daughter [were in] tears, hugging.”

Other sessions focus on individuals — a team or community member who is being singled out for celebration or encouragement. Giving Notes has partnered multiple times with Sheltering Arms Institute, the local network of rehabilitation centers, giving patients a musical boost and giving nurses well-earned recognition. In another instance, a group of coworkers teamed up with facilitating songwriter Emily Roig to honor an especially joyful member of their team.

“You see the girl get the song immediately,” Brown remembers. “She picked up the hook in the chorus, you see the whole team start singing it and they get to the end [and] come around and freaking hug her. It was beautiful.”

A team of their own

Mark Brown and Christian Markow have spent the better part of their careers considering how team culture comes together. Markow has 20 years of experience in brand, creative and experience strategy. After leading projects all over the world for a consultancy called Prophet, Markow and a colleague left to found Joe Smith, a Richmond-based brand growth outfit. At the urging of his colleague, Brown — then at Capital One — became the new company’s first hire.

“The reason that Mark worked for us back then, and same reason why Mark and I are such great partners now is that he had such a desire to change how people came together and saw each other,” Markow says. “More empathy, more vulnerability — all of the benchmark things which make really great teams.”

Brown and Markow ran countless workshops for Joe Smith, though two points of frustration lingered. First, corporate campuses, even well-designed ones, naturally produce distractions, given that business as usual rarely lets up. Second, venues for offsite meetings — hotel conference rooms, golf course banquet halls, side rooms at museums — can be retrofitted, but they’re never just what you need. In 2020, Brown and Markow began looking for a space where they could engineer more purposeful, more productive team experiences. “Everything that’s inside of the space is driven on neuroscience,” Markow emphasizes.

Plants are one example, from the large potted ones inside Lost Office’s Old Main Street entrance to the long, creeping ones descending from the tops of tall bookcases in the space dubbed the Library. They’re there to impact cortisol levels, which can increase in spaces without vegetation. “There are studies that demonstrate that being in a higher volume of plant life will actually reduce your stress levels by like 10%, increase your focus by about the same,” Markow says. “Scent, sound, light — everything in here has a story like that.”

Motivated in part by his own journey with ADHD, Markow is well versed in the relationship between sound and focus. Lost Office is wired to provide a variety of auditory environments tailored to fit its workshops, which can range from single-day engagements focused on developing new work habits to multi-day team resets and multi-week coaching modules facilitated by a partner consultancy, Greenhouse Coaching.

“We’ve got ambient sound that basically uses pentatonic scales, rhythms and beats,” Markow says. “Maybe there’s a little bit of like binaural or isochronic sound going on, but it’s all designed to [be] quietly in the backdrop, instead of it just being white noise, which, depending upon the frequency, can actually be destructive to your ability to focus and think.”

Serving a need

So much about life in 2025 infringes on the ability to lock in. Device notifications. Political chaos. Add the fact that COVID-19 produced a once-in-a-generation shift in how work happens, including the surging prevalence of working from home and increased expectations on the part of those asked to return to office life. Markow sees this as the moment when spaces like Lost Office are most needed.

“Collaboration has always been tough, even before the pandemic,” he says. “People [are] scrambling to figure out the next technology, and they’re having to work harder and faster, and everyone’s getting in their own little worlds … Human beings are moving away from each other, and we feel like right now is the most important time for a place like this to exist.”

Mark Brown sees an especially significant shift for younger members of the workforce.

“There is an expectation and a desire to have work mean something different in the way that they treat each other, in the way that they act and way that they work in general to be their most productive selves,” he concludes. “[That shift] is already here and only going to continue.”

It’s a song as old as rhyme, yet worth singing time and time again.

For more information about the Giving Notes project, visit thegivingnotesproject.com. For more information about Lost Office Collaborative, visit lostoffice.co.