Are potential members trying to get you to talk about cost per square foot? Shift the conversation to "total cost of occupancy" and compare the total cost of a traditional lease, or even a sublease, to a coworking option.
In this episode:
Resources Mentioned in This Podcast
The Total Cost of Occupancy Blog Post
Everything Coworking Featured Resources:
Masterclass: 3 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets to Opening a Coworking Space
Coworking Startup School - Phase I: Validate
In this episode, we explore one operator’s assumption that organic social media is critical to the success of a coworking business.
We talk about:
Low organic reach (2% - 10%)
The concept that we advertise on Google to get found by active searchers and we show up on social media to interrupt potential customers that may not even know about coworking
Outsourcing social media vs. handling it in-house
Investing in paid ads on either Google or Facebook
Tracking your lead sources so that you can let the numbers tell you where to focus and what to spend money on!
Resources Mentioned in This Podcast
Everything Coworking Featured Resources:
Masterclass: 3 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets to Opening a Coworking Space
The Everything Coworking Academy
This episode focuses on aligning your coworking space size with your goals. It covers topics such as the importance of understanding your business model, considering different goals for your space, diversifying income sources, and understanding the profitability of small spaces.
Highlights:
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
Brian Watson episode on automating small coworking spaces
Everything Coworking Featured Resources:
Masterclass: 3 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets to Opening a Coworking Space
Jen Luby is the founder and CEO of Dayhouse Coworking in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago.
Jen's story might sound familiar....one day, while trying to do deep creative work with a three year old interrupting her every 45 seconds, she thought there must be a better way. Enter Dayhouse. Dayhouse was designed to serve members like Jen who needed a professional, but family-friendly place to get work done.
Jen and her team have experimented with various kid-friendly models and landed on a version where there's an enclosed, kid-friendly area in the space that is often used by therapists who work with kids and gets booked for school-day-off activities and day camps.
Here are some questions that I ask Jen:
Who is your ideal customer? What do they want out of your coworking space?
How do your values align with what your Ideal Customer wants as well as the type of business that you want to run?
What does being family-friendly look like for you? What have you experimented with?
What has worked/not worked?
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
Everything Coworking Featured Resources:
Masterclass: 3 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets to Opening a Coworking Space
The Everything Coworking Academy
Creative Coworking Partnerships: How to negotiate and structure management agreements from the landlord and operator perspective