Coworking Key Performance Indicators - A Guide to What to Track in your Business
One of the ways we’ve been building our coworking community here at Everything Coworking is through various social media platforms, such as our Facebook group and our private Slack channel. We have great conversations, but during one of those conversations there were a lot of similar questions:
What metrics should I track for my coworking space?
How do I make it easy for my space manager and office staff to track KPIs?
How does tracking KPIs help my business?
How do I track KPIs for potential clients?
How do I track marketing KPIs?
Between Michael Everts from Shared Space in Atlanta and Everything Coworking Founder Jamie Russo, we were able to get these questions and more answered and develop a list of KPIs you should be tracking.
Do I need to track KPIs?
Yes. Think about it this way: you have goals for your business. You have plans in place that you think will get you to those goals. But you can only measure success around those goals if you're tracking your progress. However, tracking success is only helpful if you know how to make changes to improve that success rate, and that means tracking the drivers that impact the outcomes of those goals. Those drivers are your KPIs.
What metrics should I track for my coworking space?
KPI stands for “key performance indicator,” and those indicators extend far beyond tracking finances. It means asking about the number of tours, the number of subscribers on your email list, the effectiveness of your sales funnel, the number direction requests through your Google My Business listing, website analytics, the number of unscheduled tours (which might indicate that your website isn’t capturing the clients it should be), and much more.
You use this data to decide what changes to make in your business practices. For example, if you have a bunch of clients not showing up for a tour and you’re tracking tours, attendance rates, and information from follow up calls with those clients, you might notice patterns. Maybe they all said they forgot about the tour, in which case, your KPI tracking will let you notice there’s a pattern here, and you can implement reminder emails or phone calls.
How do I track KPIs?
You probably already have a space management system and a CRM, which means you likely already have all the data you need to track KPIs using the data you get from those systems. Some platforms have a dashboard already that makes tracking easy, in which case, go ahead and use that. However, other platforms might not have a dashboard like that, in which case, the easiest way to track KPIs is to go back to basics and create an Excel file.
Note: If you don’t have a space open yet, it’s great that you’re thinking about this already. That will help you get started on the right foot. However, this article is really only going to focus on how to track KPIs effectively, not all of the infrastructure (like a CRM) that underpins that tracking. If you want a more comprehensive overview of how to manage all the working pieces of a startup, check out the Coworking Startup School.
How do I track KPIs for potential clients?
The metrics you track for potential clients depend on the questions you’re trying to answer, so be specific about those. For example, if you’re trying to figure out where demand really is so that you can grow to meet it, you want to track KPIs from tours and other potential client interactions. Here are some of the things you might measure:
What do clients ask for when they come in?
When we close with a client, what are the reasons?
When we don’t close, what are the reasons?
What percentage of tours are with clients from companies? What type of companies?
Where are clients in the decision-making process when they come for a tour?
What other places are clients looking at?
Where are potential clients from? What geographic area seems most interested in our space?
What are they looking for in a coworking space?
Who makes the decision about which space they choose?
What are their next steps?
Some of these pieces of data, especially details about your clients, are things you can set your CRM to track. Others may need to be gathered separately, often by staff as they’re giving the tour.
How do I help my office manager and staff track KPIs?
Make sure your spreadsheet is accessible to your staff, and explain how and why you’re using it. Ask them to update it when they do background research on potential clients, when they get feedback, and after talking with a potential client during a tour. Tracking KPIs helps everyone, because it helps you make smart, effective business choices that minimize unnecessary work for everyone in the long run--including your staff.
Asking staff to get to know a potential client before they come in for a tour is a good business practice anyway, KPIs aside. Have your staff look up potential clients on LinkedIn, find out where they’re from, and find things in common that they can bring up during the tour to help it feel more personal.
In addition to making the tour feel more like a relationship and less like a sales pitch, taking a few minutes to do that background data — and then log all of it into your Excel spreadsheet — is an easy way to get staff working to track KPIs as well. You can also have staff log information they gather during the tour as well via a tour tracker (and then make sure all the tour tracker information goes into your spreadsheet). This helps with follow up with that client but also helps you prep better for the next one, know when and how to follow up with clients, and know what types of incentives might be helpful (trial days, etc.)
Go over the spreadsheet with your staff regularly, and talk about trends, what else you can track, and what they’re finding effective. Some of the KPI questions listed in the last section, such as, “What are clients looking for in a coworking space?” are questions that should be part of the tour process anyway, so asking staff to log the answers to these types of questions also helps with accountability.
What marketing KPIs should I track?
Earlier, we mentioned tracking analytics from your Google My Business listing (and if you’ve hung around Everything Coworking for long, you know we tend to talk about this a lot). This is an important marketing KPI to track. While it’s hard to know the overlap between your website and your Google My Business listing, it does give you important information about how often people look for directions to your space as well as how many calls came in.
Tracking the number of calls and the rate at which they’re answered is an important part of tracking KPIs effectively. The Global Workspace Association did a phone survey about a year and a half ago where they called 300 spaces, and half of them did not answer their phone. When they called again, the percentage was something like 25 percent not answering.
This may not be a metric anyone on your staff is really thinking about, and that can make it even more important to track. You don’t want any potential clients to feel they’re being ignored. If you start tracking and find that there’s a low percentage of calls being answered, it may be time for a phone answering service like Da Vinci Virtual Office Solutions, or at the very least a chat box on your website.
Note: If you want a great example of a chat box for a coworking site, check out Shared Space in Atlanta.
Tracking KPIs on your website means tracking clicks and other interactions in order to figure out what it is your clients are looking for. You want that information to be easy to find and for actions (like booking a tour, getting directions, etc.) to be as immediate as possible.
In addition to website and Google listings, make sure you’re tracking the conversion rates of every sales funnel and platform you’re using (including the click rates on the various landing pages). This is especially important with social media marketing, as it’s really easy to spend a lot of time on social media without it being very effective. How much are you spending on each channel? How many clients are responding, booking a tour, and actually converting into clients? If you’re tracking every step of the process, you’ll be able to figure out your cost per client from these various channels and better determine if they’re a worthwhile use of your time and resources.
What other KPIs should I track?
If you use lead generating partners, such as for virtual mail, you’ll want to be sure you’re tracking how those services play into your business growth. You also want to track email open rates (should be at least 20%).
Of course, you also want to track your finances looking not just for bookkeeping type data but also for what services and membership levels are actually making you money. If the data from this type of tracking is surprising, you should ask yourself why (and then set up KPIs that you can track to see if you’ve correctly identified the problem).
You also want to track traditional real estate type KPIs. Focus less on the price per square foot, but do track how often your current clients are using different spaces, including lounge areas and different sized meeting rooms. If you find that people aren’t using a space often enough for it to make business sense, it might be time to revamp that part of the space.