This week, I head back to episode 89, where I go through a framework for implementing consistent team meetings as a part of your leadership system for running a successful coworking space.
You can have the right location, a gorgeous space and a great community and still have the wheels fall of of your business if you don’t have the right systems in place to ensure that the team is aligned with and accountable to your organizational goals.
Weekly meetings are a great way to ensure a regular check-in against KPIs and also to help develop a strong culture, recognize team wins and provide consistent feedback to enhance performance.
One of the most common questions I hear from coworking space operators today is: I'm having trouble selling my flex desks and dedicated desks. Help! Most coworking space operators can't be profitable without coworking revenue - they designed their product mix and therefore their pro forma, to include significant non-office revenue. They need to sell the open space memberships - maybe 2 or 3x over!
Here's a framework for working through your challenge:
1. Describe your Ideal Community Member in detail. Why do they work away from home? What do they do for work? What type of work space do they need? What problem does coworking solve for them?
2. Out of that group of ideal members, what is the profile of a member that would use mostly open space seating to get their work done?
3. How can you find them? How can you message to them so that they know you have a solution to their problem?
4. What creative ideas might you come up with to frame your open space options to make them more compelling? Can you attract a niche? Can you create more privacy using divider systems?
In this myth or fact session, Mike Abrams dissects questions regarding management agreements and in the process helps us to better understand them.
Looking for the show notes for this episode? www.everythingcoworking.com/episodes/191
Leads are starting to pick up for many parts of the world. Many coworking space owners experienced a LOT of turnover in 2020. Many of the members coming into the space now are brand new to your brand and they might be brand new to coworking.
Our onboarding processes might be a little rusty...or a little informal and inconsistent. Or we might have new team members that haven’t done a lot of onboarding. Make sure you have consistent onboarding processes that are intentional and documented. Make sure you’re training your team on these processes and helping them to understand why they are so important.
This episode is to get you back into the frame of mind that...
First impressions matter.
A great onboarding experience is your best retention strategy.
It’s a lot easier to keep good members than to attract new ones.
I don’t think that we can under-estimate the importance of an intentional onboarding process for coworking space members right now.
Here’s what we’re going to cover in this episode. Get the full show notes here: www.everythingcoworking.com/190
- Why your onboarding process is critical to retention
- Four key elements that your onboarding process should include
Daan Van Rossum, Chief Experience Officer for Dreamplex in Vietnam shares:
- How Dreamplex came to be - a culmination of Daan’s experience at international ad agencies, his commitment to helping others discover self-fulfillment, personal development, and figuring out what we want out of life.
- That work should help employees to pursue meaning, purpose and the ability to be their best selves.
- How Dreamplex’s Gen Z research reflects a desire to go to a place to work that is designed around their wants and needs. How the Vietnamese highly value being able to work away from home - which in their culture, is often not a quiet, productive place to focus.
- How Dreamplex’s reason for being is not so much about building community among members, but giving companies access to an intentional work environment that draws employees in. The Vietnamese culture is more individual. But they want to go to a PLACE to do their work. They don’t want to work in a big open floor plan where they can spend the day encountering strangers.
- Why Vietnam is embracing flexible workspaces.
- What later stage startups are looking for as they grow their teams and build a culture and deliver a really great employee experience - which becomes a big factor in attracting and retaining key talent.
- That Dreamplex’s real competition is companies creating their OWN office space - not other coworking spaces, not market saturation. How the physical product is only one tool in engaging the best people for a company….and how Dreamplex plays a role outside of the physical environment.
- How they use content marketing as a major marketing tool.
Listen to the full episode here: www.everythingcoworking.com/episodes/189
The ability to acquire customers to fill a coworking space to 90-95% capacity, and then replace customers every single month as members inevitably leave, is central to a coworking space operator’s ability to survive.
If you don’t build and optimize a customer acquisition machine, you may not fail, but you will not thrive.
The ability to acquire many individual or small teams as customers every single month, is what differentiates your coworking business from a landlord or a commercial real estate broker.
In this episode, we talk about what the customer acquisition process looks like in a coworking business and how it differs from models like Knotel which just filed for bankruptcy.
Looking for the show notes for this episode? www.everythingcoworking.com/episodes/188
Giovanni Palavicini is one of a handful of professionals in the coworking industry that have a macro view of what's happening in coworking across constituencies. He has deep real estate experience and is the unusual broker that has a deep understanding of the coworking business model.
Giovanni works with landlords and operators on coworking leases, management agreements and other creative deal structures. Avision Young also provides strategic services to enterprise users on integrating flexible office into their real estate portfolio.
Looking for the show notes for this episode? www.everythingcoworking.com/episodes/187
Running a business generally means competing priorities. Focus on sales or get our "back-of-the-house" in order? Sales wins every time, but that can cause some headaches down the road...with the IRS for example.
Ain't nobody got time for that. Braden Drake, lawyer, author, educator, shares his perspective on establishing your business entity, saving for quarterly taxes and, most importantly....paying yourself!
Looking for the show notes for this episode? www.everythingcoworking.com/episodes/186
Trina-K is the Community Manager for ECOMSPACES in Atlanta, GA. She's also a confidence coach, SOP writer, video shoot scheduler, project manager, and more for ECOM members. If you're interested in hearing an out of the box take on the coworking Community Manager role, this episode is for you.
Looking for the show notes for this episode? www.everythingcoworking.com/episodes/185
There was a discussion in the Everything Coworking Facebook Group recently about whether to use "coworking" or "flexible office" as a tagline for a new space under development.
There was a lot of emotional support from the group members to "go with your gut." Bad advice. Go with Google. Using the right organic search terms matter a lot to help your ideal members find you. Use the term they know and they're searching for.
This epsiode talks about the emotional and the data driven aspects to making this decision.
If you’re curious about what a successful community manager profile looks like, how they contribute to the business and how they manage their time, keep the ear buds in, this episode is for you!
Kelsey Sizemore is the Community Manager & Marketing Manager for Forge Birmingham, AL. At the time of this recording, she’s been in the role for three years and has helped the team expand from 7,000 square feet into 13,000 square feet, start a podcast, optimize their marketing mix and more!
Kim Lee didn't take 2020 lying down. She celebrated the addition of new event space the week before the first lockdown. Without missing a beat, she co-founded the Birmingham Coworking Collective, and then launched a podcast.
Kim shares her three-year coworking journey to create a community in which Birmingham's entrepreneurs can thrive. She shares some behind the scenes of her business, including how she balances her business, three kids, two dogs and a husband... how her team is structured, what hats they each wear, and more.
Focusing on what drives your coworking business will be critical in 2021 to set yourself up for office re-entry. What we measure gets focus, what we focus on improves.
KPIs can help you to get objective data on what’s working and what’s not...but they can also keep you focused and disciplined while you’re working on projects that don’t reap immediate financial rewards.
In this episode, we walk through what KPIs are, what to track, and how to set yourself up for success in your measuring and tracking process.
Demand for virtual offices is growing. Building up a competency around marketing and servicing virtual office memberships can add margin to your business and help you to serve a member that doesn’t require much access to physical space. There are operators that build their virtual office business to the point where it pays their rent.
In this episode we discuss three ways to build your virtual office program.
1. What is virtual office?
2. Should a virtual office program include use of our GMB Listing?
3. Three ways to grow your virtual office business:
- Run Google Ads
- Focus on SEO/organic traffic using keyword optimization
- List your offerings with lead-gen partners
Everything Coworking Featured Resources:
Masterclass: 3 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets to Opening a Coworking Space
Creative Coworking Partnerships: How to negotiate and structure management agreements from the landlord and operator perspective
Resources Mentioned in this Podcast:
In this episode we discuss three pricing strategies for tough times:
1. Consider offering more flexibility on your memberships than you typically would, but don’t overwhelm your potential members with too many options. Want evidence? Read the “jam study” here: https://hbr.org/2006/06/more-isnt-always-better
2. Try to avoid offering rock bottom pricing
3. Don't get into a price war with the local competition. Know your strengths and know their weaknesses. If they’re doing ridiculous deals, they may be locked into very long, inflexible agreements. They may be paying for coffee and meeting rooms. Know how to make the apples to apples comparison, but even then, you might lose on price and need to sell on other strengths such as hospitality and community.
Give all deals/COVID accommodations an end date. Frame them as a COVID discount and make them good for 3 months (you can always extend if you need to).
Trevor Hightower started his own coworking brand in the lobby of a multi-family apartment building. He learned a lot about what worked and didn't work in that model and eventually met and joined forces with the founder of Craftwork.
Craftwork enhanced the revenue model and mojo of a coworking space by combining it with an open-to-the public coffee shop. Coffee in the front, coworking in the back.
Craftwork started experimenting on partnering with developers of multi-family apartment buildings to build a Craftwork location into the amenity set. The buildout was paid for, but they still signed a lease.
COVID struck....all coffee shops closed down. The leasing model showed its weaknesses.
Trevor shares his story about how COVID accelerated their pursuit of a stronger model for their business - hospitality as a service...what that looks like and where they're headed.
Are you excited about the huge potential demand for coworking space coming from the "Work from Home" segment?
They are not the same nut to crack as our typical coworking space member.
Let's discuss:
- How the WFH segment is different than our traditional coworking segments, who pays for their memberships, safety and security expectations.
- How they are not solution-aware and require a different marketing approach than our active searchers.
- Which advertising platforms align with different awareness stages.
- Some tactics to use on the solution-unaware segment to get them into the top of our sales funnel.
If you’re curious about what a successful community manager profile looks like, how they contribute to the business and how they manage their time, keep the ear buds in, this episode is for you!
Alex Biddle is the Community Manager for La Suprema Works & Events in Tucson, Arizona. At the time of this recording, she’s been in the role for about a year and during that time, helped the team launch their flagship location during a global pandemic.
This episode’s guests are two power-house C-suite women who met in Tucson and decided they wanted to bring community-focused coworking to downtown Tucson's oldest and most coveted neighborhood.
Gina and Katina were students in our Coworking Startup School. They’re also members of our Flight Group program and their Community Manager, Alex, is in our Community Manager University program.
Gina Catalano is a fractional COO for growth minded entrepreneurs and companies - the CEO's "Swiss Army Knife."
Katina Koller is an EOS Implementer and Vistage Group Chair.
Here’s why I think you’ll enjoy their story: They took on the passion project of re-developing a downtown historical landmark that most called “a teardown.”
- They started their business with an MVP - a 1500 square foot space that allowed them to learn how to attract their ideal members, and how to operationalize their business before building out their flagship location across the street.
- They learned along the way that their Ideal Community Avatar isn’t someone that does a type of work or lives in a certain neighborhood, but that the common thread across their members is more about a value system.
- They hired a rockstar community manager that takes ownership of the space so that they can still run their other businesses
- They have worked together to stay positive and focused even while opening a coworking and events space in the heart of a global pandemic.
- They have also remained intentional and goal-focused during this crisis and sold out all of their offices in less than 60 days.
It’s easy to be really busy all day long in a coworking business and not get the right things done.
It’s even easier to pay your team to be in the space all day and not get the right things done.
What are the right areas of focus?
How much time should you and/or your team focus on them in a given day?
In this podcast episode, we approach this question using the 80/20 rule.
The 80/20 rule was originally called The Pareto principle. The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes (the “vital few”). (source: Wikipedia).
2020 was a year of reaction. It's time to re-focus and take control of our coworking business goals for 2021. In this episode, I go through the 9 step framework that we are going to go through in the Designed to Thrive in 2021 workshop.
- Jonathan’s coworking story: how he started his first space and rapidly expanded to become one of the leading brands in Singapore.
- Balancing risks as an operator: offering flexible terms while maintaining predictable revenue.
- A concept he talks about in his book “consolidating a share of spend - focusing on spend per member.”
- Jonathan’s perspective on the future of the coworking model - how he would approach the real estate model if you were starting today.
Josh Coffy lives in a town of 20,000 near Columbus, OH. He and his wife Kelsey, bought a building downtown and launched a coworking business in it.
Josh shares his experience buying and renovating a building, why he decided that a coworking space was best use for the building, and the “good” and “bad” surprises that he encountered on his journey.
Josh is also a professional marketer and spills the beans on how he’s marketing his coworking space.
As individual operators, you likely don’t have access to data on market recovery. You can only see what you are experiencing in your own market. Coworker.com is a coworking marketplace with over 15,000 member spaces across 172 countries. They have a macro view of the industry trends that can help you get a line of site on what to expect over the coming months.
Madison, the COO, joins me on this episode to share their data and perspective on the recovery trends for coworking spaces.
The coworking model is evolving at a pace more rapid than anyone predicted. The variations on the approach to serving today’s workforce and local communities are becoming more diverse.
The story of Lodgic Everyday Community is one worth following as you’re thinking about how you will serve your members and your community.