What if the amenity your members love most is also the most expensive square footage in your space?
Coffee bars, podcast studios, fitness rooms, kids rooms, and wellness rooms almost always start with a founder’s passion. They feel like differentiators, and nobody builds one expecting it to sit empty. But you pay rent and CAM on every square foot whether it earns or not, and a studio the size of a large team office represents $2,000 to $3,000 a month in office or meeting room revenue you’re choosing not to collect.
In this episode, I walk through how to evaluate every amenity space on your floor plan by asking two questions: does it earn direct revenue, and does its promise sell memberships?
I talk about:
- Why amenity spaces almost always start with a founder’s passion, and why that makes them so hard to remove later
- The story of my 400 square foot fitness studio (and $7,000 shower, in 2012 dollars) in the best corner of my first Chicago space
- How operators like Lucid Private Offices, Pacific Workplaces, and Premier Workspaces optimize revenue per square foot, and what unmonetized square footage costs
- Why an amenity that never gets used can still sell memberships, and how to test whether yours does
- The categories worth questioning: food and beverage, fitness rooms, podcast and photography studios, and kids rooms
- Why wellness rooms are table stakes, even when they’re not directly monetizable
- How to pare an amenity back or turn it into a product, from trainer memberships to a photography studio membership
- How to set a three to six month deadline before converting a space to offices or meeting rooms
If there’s a room on your floor plan you’ve never put a number on, this episode gives you a way to decide whether it stays as it is, gets smaller, or becomes your next office.
Companion Article
How Coworking Operators Can Evaluate The True ROI Of Amenity Spaces
The two questions that tell you whether a coffee bar, fitness room, or podcast studio is earning the square footage it sits on.
