152. I Closed my Coworking Space
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Transcription
152. I Closed my Coworking Space
00:00:01 Welcome to the everything coworking podcast where you learn what you need to know about how the world wants to work and now your host, coworking space owner and trend expert Jamie Russo. Welcome Come to the everything coworking podcast. This is Jamie Russo. Thank you for joining me. I have a special and a bit personal episode to share with you today, so hang in there.
00:00:34 I have a couple of announcements to go through. First, the first is that a want, as soon as I get through the third announcement, I will be reopening the doors to my coworking startup school and community manager university. If you are starting a coworking space and are interested in investing in avoiding costly mistakes and stress by getting expert and peer support in a highly facilitated environment,
00:01:03 this is the program for you. We want to make sure you create the right space for you and your target market right from the beginning. We want to make sure you get the business model right so that you're set up for financial sustainability that matched your goals. We'll look at your proforma, help you with your product, mix design, sourcing furniture, working with vendors,
00:01:22 hiring the right team, all the things. So it is perfect for people that want to invest in access to a package that provides the information, resources and support that you need when you need it and in the order that you need it and accompanied by individual access to me, other industry experts and a curated peer group. If this sounds like a good fit for you,
00:01:45 you can learn more@wwwdotcoworkingstartupschool.com and I will also be opening the doors to community manager university, which I have not done since December. We still have our founding members in that group and they are doing amazing work and supporting each other through this time and as you reopened, this is the perfect time to invest in your team and make sure they have access to industry best practices and ongoing professional development.
00:02:13 So it is perfect for new community managers. There's like a bootcamp of training courses in there. And then every month we deliver new resources, coaching calls, Q and a calls and a Slack group. So definitely check that out@wwwdoteverythingcoworking.com forward slash community managers. So the thing that's been keeping me busy and unable to open the doors to those two programs is with my GWA hat on.
00:02:41 We are hosting a global virtual to just about 24 hour conference next week, June 3rd and fourth. So wherever you are in the world, please join us. We actually opened sales for the conference with ticket pricing and we got enough sponsorship to enable us to open it up so it is free of charge. You get access to the recordings for as long as you need them.
00:03:12 So if you can't sit with us for 24 hours, you can access those recordings as you need them. But what I think is unique about this event, and thank you to our sponsors by the way, Yardi systems and sphere mail, and you'll hear more about them during the conference, but we appreciate their support and um, enabling us to open the conference for free to anyone in the world.
00:03:38 This is such a unique opportunity to come together. We're all experiencing the same thing at the same time and can learn so much from each other. And the unique approach to this content is we're taking you through a journey to reimagine your business as little or as much as you'd like to. So we're starting with re-examining the customer. So who's your customer? Have they evolved?
00:04:03 Have they changed? What do they look like? Are they different? Um, and then based on that discussion, does the product that you offer need to change to meet the needs of the new customer? And what does that mean? We're talking about a lot of aspects of what the product is. And then if you're changing the product and talking a little bit differently to your customer,
00:04:27 then we need to update our sales and marketing. So we're doing a whole kind of series on sales and marketing, which is being hosted by our Australia friends. So big thank you to Brad from hub Australia, who is our content partner for the event. And we have a number of local folks from Australia and Asia joining us for the locally live content,
00:04:49 uh, Australia time around 10 in the morning on June 4th for local time. So we can't wait. We're going to have a Facebook group. Oh. And let me mention a DJ. Shout out to Ramsey and I'm a bartender. Shout out to iOS offices who is, uh, has shared their virtual bartender with us. So we're going to have some fun and we're going to talk business and we're going to learn a lot and we're going to connect in a private Facebook group.
00:05:20 So we're experimenting a lot with a format of what virtual can look like and we want to have a good time and help you learn and connect at the same time. So if that sounds good, you can register for free@conference.global workspace.org okay, let's dive in. So I have some news. My coworking space under the brand of interspace is closing at the end of may.
00:05:48 So this is not covert related. I mean they're, you know, it's interwoven into the experience. So started interspace, Palo Alto in June of 2013 which is seven years ago, and it feels like a minute ago for anyone thinking about lease length, it flies by, I'm so thankful that we had seven years. I wish we had 10 because we signed right before commercial real estate just blew up in Silicon Valley and we have been paying below market rate rent for the length of our lease and that time is up and our rent will double.
00:06:33 So we've been sitting in about $35 a square foot and it will go to about $70 a square foot annually. And on a 6,000 square foot space that doesn't work, does not work. So we've known that was coming. We thought, we kept thinking there's going to be a correction in the market, something's going to happen to change the value of real estate and we're going to hang in there and hope that that happens.
00:07:00 And there's some vacant space next to us that has been sitting there for some time. And we kept thinking the landlord's going to want to do a deal and then this happened and still no deal. So, um, it is just a reality. And I'm smiling because I've been digesting this for a long time and I also have one of those personalities that loves change.
00:07:26 I love new things, I love hard things, I love challenges and this is one of them. And I also am, I'm always grateful. So I started this episode and just like could not get started because it was like I could not unsee, get out of my trip down memory lane and like dissecting, you know, my, my life's path,
00:07:50 thinking about how I got here and what that looked like. And um, you know, it's been seven years. I had a space in Chicago for a year before that and about three years was running. Um, so two years I think, overlap of running a space in Chicago and Palo Alto. And so my point today is to share with you the top 10 things that I've learned from running a coworking space.
00:08:17 And I will say that I think these are my 10. I had to force myself to just publish this episode because it's, you know, it's a big milestone and I thought I could sit on this for a long time and think about the 10 things and my students know in my coworking startup school program we dive into all sorts of details. Um, so I'm going to stay pretty high level today.
00:08:42 And one of the things I will say is that most of my learnings, you know, some of them are from running my own space. It's good practice, right? To implement things. But I've been blessed to have this broader industry, my GWA hat. Um, so major macro perspective that I've gotten on the industry. And then when I got into helping other folks start spaces,
00:09:06 now I learned from them. So anybody who gets into my program is learning, not just for me. My superpower is pulling it all together into a framework to help you go through the right process to make the business that is right for you and to make a profitable business. But that comes from lots and lots of exposure to other people's businesses, not just mine,
00:09:30 but I'm very grateful for my firsthand experience for eight years. And so I thought since it's such a milestone and a momentous occasion, I could not just not address it on the podcast. So I'm sharing with you some thoughts. Let's start with number one, which is know your market. And some of you have heard me talk about some of the things on the list before,
00:09:54 but I started with a space in Chicago and then my family moved. It was a mutual decision mostly, but unexpectedly decided, you know, not even a year into having a coworking space in Chicago that we were moving to the Bay area. So I ended up in a place where I didn't know anyone, didn't know anything about the market, but what I knew was that my identity was as a coworking space owner,
00:10:24 a business owner. So I had been on a long path to get there. We won't go through my origin story. That's what I was, you know, my trip down memory lane was really about how I got to that. We can talk about that sometime, but um, you know, it was a long path as it is for most of us.
00:10:43 And my identity was business owner, super engaged in the community. I had finally really felt like I was me, you know, I had done, so I'd gone to business school and I'd worked for a fortune 500 and then I worked for a startup that was pretty dysfunctional and I finally was at a place and I was so happy and I was learning a lot and running into a lot of challenges.
00:11:09 But from an identity perspective, you know, I was really happy and I'd found my tribe in interspace and the people that were there and I was attracting people who I really, um, responded to. And so I was super happy. And then I moved to Palo Alto. I didn't know anyone and I wanted to be in coworking. And so I found an opportunity with a partner to open a space and,
00:11:38 um, they had a space identified it, didn't know anything about the market, nothing. And they had a space. And the thing I knew was right about the space. A few things. One parking for anybody who doesn't have enough parking rule, it's like such a problem. And so my space in Chicago, I made a bajillion mistakes with that space.
00:11:58 Right. Um, and I'll talk about some of those as we go along. So this place had parking and it was a second generation space. So LinkedIn had been in the space and it looked like a coworking space. And so it was like move in ready. We did some construction and we had to buy all the furniture. Um, but it was pretty plugin play and that was beautiful because my Chicago space I had taken from shell condition,
00:12:25 uh, it was a factory, I can't remember what they made there that was redeveloped into commercial office space and did not have electrical or HVAC or any thing. So that was a major project and you know, it was a challenge to make it profitable and to kind of get it up and running. So the second gen space, and I'm kind of jumping ahead,
00:12:48 so I don't want to do that, but know your market. My lesson that I learned. So in Chicago, my market was really like professionals, professional services, recruiters, social media agencies. Um, we had a really great creative agency for awhile. We had business consultants, we had real estate people, um, with some startups, but very few.
00:13:14 So it was really just kind of this mix of professional people and you know, freelancers and small business owners. And so, you know, I knew what they needed and what their product was because I had lived through that enough to get that. So I came to Palo Alto and I saw this space, the second gen space that looked perfect for my Chicago market.
00:13:36 And I did not even think to figure out what was different about this market because there was a location and darn it, I was a coworking space operator, where do I sign? And we got a lease with no personal guarantee and I had a big personal guarantee on the Chicago space. So that was, it was easy to, to pass through the,
00:13:58 uh, the, uh, other side of my financial equation. So the thing about Palo Alto is that it is my immediate customers, we filled up really quickly, but it was startups who had recent funding and second time founders because it's a suburban location, so and so can Valley, not in San Francisco. Um, so they were funded working on initial milestones,
00:14:26 um, and they either would grow out of the space really fast. So we didn't have offices that were big enough to support teams. We would put four people in about 130 square feet, super dense, not social distance qualifying at all whatsoever. But in Palo Alto you could get away with it cause that's what they do at Facebook. That's what they were doing at Google.
00:14:50 And so it fine. So these guys would either like grow up and move out quickly or they would suddenly lose funding and not pay. So it was just like this totally different market. So know what you're getting into, who you're serving. This is the very first module that I teach in the coworking startup school. Understand that every market is different and people will email me all the time.
00:15:14 Somebody emailed me today and said, you know, do I think that single private offices are better or team suites that are designed to be sort of all inclusive and can you know, be socially distance approved if they need to be with their own meeting rooms and phone rooms and open space and offices. And it just always depends on the market, right? It's very hard to give you an answer.
00:15:37 And so what I can help you do is find the sources that will help you get to that answer. But you have to know your market. You cannot just go with like, I am a coworking space owner and this is what I want to open. You have to know what the market needs and, and you know what you're likely to encounter. The second tip is have a plan or the second it's not a tip.
00:16:00 It's something that I learned. You may choose to adopt it or not. I'm not, you know, I think these are tips but you filter. But my second lesson was have a plan. What type of space do you want to open? And I learned this from Casey Godwin and I preach it to my coworking startup school students all the time. We just did a proforma workshop.
00:16:22 And when you go through or perform a process, um, it's super clear your trade off that you're making. So second generation space or are you building from scratch? And the way Casey talks about it is, you know, consider the idea that your first space does not need to be your flagship location. This is not your legacy, right? This is your figure out the business.
00:16:50 Make sure you have it down. Understand how to operate, how to market. Be profitable and then go sell your flagship location to investors who can help you get to that if that's the model you want to pursue. So there is a big difference in terms of profitability and return on a project when you're talking about a shell, a space from shell, which means there's,
00:17:16 you know, a blank, there's, there are walls, there are four walls, that's it in a floor that's not finished in my case. So that was a major, major project. And I'd never run a construction project before. Most of us have not. Right. And if you have, good for you, that's a huge advantage. But even those folks I have,
00:17:36 I have building owners in my coworking startup school. They run into construction challenges all the time. It is not simple. It's not easy and it's expensive and it might be worth it if you own the building, but you better think hard about it if you don't own the building. So Casey, again, Casey's advice, which I repeat as often as I can,
00:17:57 is start with the second generation space. And I will tell you that I was literally in love with my Chicago space. Beautiful. 18 foot brick and timber view of the sky, unlined, all windows, you know, on the looking East. Stunning, you know, but it was expensive to build. I had to add every wall, every outlet,
00:18:20 every wiring, every piece of wire I should say all the things in my Palo Alto space I would describe as not in the least bit sexy that's like this 1970s office building. But it's in a great location and it's tons of parking. And we walked in, put some furniture in, built a few extra offices and we are often running and we were profitable.
00:18:43 Cashflow positive from day one. And the return on that project happened all a lot faster because we just didn't have the upfront costs. And so I will probably be more, you know, romantically in love with my Chicago space than I ever was with my Palo Alto space. But my bank account much, much appreciates the Palo Alto space. So know what you're getting into and whether you're willing to make the trade,
00:19:07 the financial trade off to go for your flagship model early on. But the third lesson that I would pass along is, um, similar to owning a house, make changes early to enjoy the return. If you, and I would say in this environment, if you reopen and you recognize that there has been a shift in demand, move on those changes.
00:19:34 Don't wait it out because seven years is not that long. Five years is nothing. 10 years is not even that long. So you know, you, if you don't have a lot of time left on your lease, move quickly. If it still makes sense and you get a return on making changes if you need offices and you can get the capital,
00:19:54 build them now. So we could sell offices all day long and our open space would fluctuate. And I, you know, in hindsight there are some reasons for that, which I will get to a couple of lessons later, but we waited a long time to add offices. It's hard to do constructions Capitol. Do you want to do it? And finally when we knew that we needed to do it to see if we could make the model work,
00:20:24 we finally did it. And that's on an episode a while ago. Now. It's a good year ago. We added a year and a half ago at this point we added offices using the imagist space product. Um, and the project went very well and the offices turned out great, but we did it too late. We should have done it. He hears before that in order to have the time to appreciate the return.
00:20:48 So if you need to make changes, if you open and you recognize that you, your product mix is off, fix it early, even if it's painful. And even if mentally you feel like, I don't want to spend any more money, look at the numbers, get a business coach, get a mentor, get somebody who's not emotionally attached and isn't,
00:21:10 you know, thinking about sunk costs and all the things that we, you know, do to mess with reality. Get them to look at the numbers. And if the right decision is that you need to make some changes, then do it. And if you can get the capital and there's a return on it, you should do it early. You know,
00:21:27 don't live through two or three years of your lease knowing that, um, you need to do it and, and don't and, but, but you're not doing it. If you own the building, you have some more time to sit on decisions and wait it out and you know, get comfortable with the capital investment and that kind of thing that it's always a decision that you need to make based on your circumstances.
00:21:48 But it's like buying a house and hating the kitchen and not fixing it until you're about to sell. It doesn't make sense. Right. My fourth lesson is a simple one, but as I was preparing the space for our move out, it struck me that commercial grade furniture is a really good investment and we did not go top of the line, but we went with commercial grade furniture from a company called hon,
00:22:15 H. O. N. I'm not sure that they even do that much in, you know, sort of flexible office designs. But we had a local dealer relationship and we used them, and this was seven years ago and coworking was a whole different world back then. But the desks are like in amazing shape and they're commercial grade and they've been used hard for seven years and they're in great shape.
00:22:42 So were most of the chairs, not all, most of the chairs, which we've had cleaned and serviced like a couple times a year. If you don't get your chairs cleaned, please know that you can and you should, especially if they're a color that shows wear and tear. And I mean this stuff could go to a new space. It's amazing.
00:23:01 Not, you know, the soft seating, certainly not that stuff. Know that you're going to have to swap it out. People will spill coffee on it and get pen on it. You name it, it'll happen. So don't overinvest in soft seating and lobby furniture and things like that. But the desks and the chairs, these things live for ever.
00:23:22 We've had them for all seven years. And I, when I started my Chicago space did not do all commercial grade and I felt I just didn't love the quality. I felt like people deserved better quality than what they were using at home. We also upgraded to sit stand desks when we updated our offices and added new offices and those were a huge hit.
00:23:43 So when you can do that, you should do that. But anyway, here's my vote for commercial grade furniture over buying Ikea or a CV too. I bought some stuff from CB too and you know some of the, like West Elm has its own commercial interiors now and it's more expensive to start with, but when you're buying in bulk you can get better deals and you can also buy over time.
00:24:04 You don't have to fill the whole space at once. Okay. Fifth lesson, be intentional about building your community and who you want to serve. And many of you have heard me talk about this before as well. It really matters if you are going to be in this space every day, you want to be with your people. So if you are an owner operator,
00:24:29 meaning maybe you're going to be the community manager, you're going to be really involved, you're gonna have your office there, you're going to spend a lot of time with the members, then they need to be your people or else you're not going to be happy there. And in order to get your people, you need to be intentional because there's a really easy,
00:24:46 who I don't know who says it, you know, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. You need to fill space, you start giving tours. If you aren't super intentional about who you want to attract and who you want in this space, then you will end up with potentially with a mismatch of people who just don't align with who you want to serve.
00:25:09 And this happened to me in Palo Alto not understanding the market and not being at all intentional because I loved my Chicago people so much. And that happened cause I was, you know, well I wasn't that intentional, but I think I was like just attracting people who got what I was trying to create my Chicago space. I was very into wellness. So work well was my tagline.
00:25:35 We had a fitness studio, showers, a full kitchen kind of all the things. So I think in part of that I was attracting people, um, in that way that aligned with who I was and who I wanted the space to be. And I simply did not have those intentions in Palo Alto. And I ended up with lots and lots of male programmers.
00:25:57 And if you are a male programmer and you were listening, it's not that I don't like male programmers, but I don't have anything in common with them. So lots of nice people, but just like not my tribe, you know, and I had a lot going on. I wear a lot of hats, so I was not spending a ton of time in the space.
00:26:14 But if I was, then I would want to be more intentional if I was going when I opened another space. And at some point I will, um, it's a season for me to, we'll talk about that in a minute. But in another season of my life, I will have another space and I will be very intentional about who I attract in that season of my life.
00:26:35 Now on the other hand, if you are looking for maximum profitability and you just want to sort of take the market demand that shows which is kind of what I did and you're not there every day and you're running it as a business, then it can be totally fine. And I will tell you some blocks of my lessons around building community and you certainly can build a community among people that aren't your tribe.
00:26:59 It takes intention and it takes a great community manager. So, um, you can do both of those things, but be intentional. Be think about who you want to attract upfront. And again, we, that's the very first module that we do in our coworking startup school because when you open the doors and you start needing income to cover your rent,
00:27:19 then you will make lots of hasty decisions. So you want to be as intentional as you can beforehand. Lesson six, invest early in your sales funnel, starting with SEO and search rankings. All of this will matter. And if you are going into a market that already has a lot of flexible office coworking, then you already know that you need to come from behind.
00:27:45 You're probably on page two or maybe three. So you need to do the work ahead of time. As soon as you have an address, you can start building your keywords, you know, post, launch your website, do the marketing work ahead of time because it matters and budget for pay-per-click. If you are in a crowded market, if you are new to a market,
00:28:08 you may not need it, but it's be super, super focused on your SEO. It does matter. We were very early in our market, but obviously over seven years things changed and so if we let our took our eye off the ball, we would drop in rankings and need to work on that and all of our review sites, you know, Yelp and Google,
00:28:29 we had times of great focus and times of not great focus and the results reflected that focus and we always had a budget for pay-per-click it, you know, it would fluctuate based on how much we needed to fill the space. We always had a budget to use it when we needed it. Looking at my notes, making sure I'm not missing anything. Lesson number seven,
00:28:55 the community manager matters. Keep him or her busy serving members and marketing do not distract them with side projects. So I will tell you that over the years, over seven years is very clear to me that my business did very well when I had the right community manager in place and I had him or her, always a her for me, laser focused on supporting the community and doing the marketing,
00:29:27 the daily marketing activities, posting to social, working on blog posts, working on getting reviews, sending newsletters, like all the things that are pretty trainable in general for community manager. And when I did not, the results reflected that as well. So if you are not the owner operator and you have other businesses that you run and I had my GWA role that I was doing.
00:29:55 I had, you know, another space in Chicago for awhile. Um, and then eventually I started my coworking startup school. So I had, I did some consulting here and there. I mean I really ha, you know, let my focus go on occasion and I would rope my community managers in sometimes to those other projects. Um, when I felt overwhelmed,
00:30:20 then I would grab them and, and think I, it's as a business owner, I tell me if you can relate to this, you constantly think people can do more in eight hours. I'm sure she has time for side projects. I will tell you, I have, and I've given this to my startup school students and my flight group members literally laid out,
00:30:43 you know, what does a community manager do all day and they're busy if you have them focused on member events and it doesn't even have to be like outside speakers. We never did much of that. Very focused on internal member events and marketing and operations and being efficient and you know, really serving the membership and connecting them and onboarding folks and all those things.
00:31:08 I will tell you when we sent the email to announcing that we were closing, I mean the feedback on the gratitude around the community that we had was incredible. And that is all because of my community manager and my realization that I needed to let her do her job and help her be really focused and give her the tools. And the budget to run,
00:31:37 you know, her community events, I mean she was everything to the space. And while we had a group of folks that were not my tribe, she had built this fantastic community among them and they were not all the same either. We did have a, you know, a diverse membership. They were not all male programmers. So it matters. And there are times when the business did not do well.
00:32:04 And I will tell you that's directly correlated to how much attention the community manager was giving to the business and how supportive I was of that attention. So it's easy to think you can sort of borrow some time and attention. It's risky because what we focus on grows, right? So if you're taking the focus away from your business, you will be challenged.
00:32:32 And I know there are folks out there who, you know, manage spaces that don't have community managers aren't staffed all the time. You can absolutely do that. But just know there's likely a limit to your growth, into your occupancy levels and to the community that you can build community. Some of it happens organically. It needs a facilitator. Generally it needs a facilitator and it needs the leader,
00:33:02 the connector, all those things that the community manager does. It seems simple but it's a lot of little things that add up to make success and so again, filter. You don't have to run the same business that I ran, but for the business that I ran, I am very much in the camp of we're not solving a space problem we're solving.
00:33:25 If you listen to the last episode I did about internal and external problems, to me workspace has always been about internal rewards, feeling more motivated, feeling more professional, feeling more, you know, in in the vibe, feeling more powerful, feeling all of those things. It's not about the space or the amenities, it's a but it is. Those things play a part in the equation of how you feel when you're in the space and the community manager plays a great role in that.
00:33:59 I think so related to flow right into lesson number eight, which is that a great space requires a great deal of attention. I think this is one of the discussions we're having. If you are happened to be a landlord and you're thinking about adding flexibility to your space, it is operationally intensive and it requires attention. So I'm reading Durer, pull legs,
00:34:26 book and I got my highlighter out. You know he talks about, you know, the value in real estate is not in managing a passive asset. It is in managing actively and coworking spaces. It depends, you know, if you're just doing flexible office and a flexible term, not as much for sure. What I'm talking about is a highly serviced high community focused coworking space.
00:34:55 It takes a lot of work and a lot of attention and so if you're not running it as your primary business, be aware that there will be some limitations in what you can accomplish. Now lesson number nine, have a space improvement fund baked into the budget. Things change. This industry changes all the time. We just lived through a big one. Hopefully we are living through it.
00:35:22 Some of us will not. So in seven years, lots of things changed, lots of product offerings changed. What the who the customer is has changed and that will continue. The speed of evolution of our industry is still rolling along really quickly. So be prepared when you signed that seven or 10 or 15 year lease, things will change. You will need to make changes to your space.
00:35:53 You will not get it a hundred percent right when you start. So have a heaven improvement fund, bake it into the budget because if you have investors or you're paying yourself or paying the owners, making changes to you know owner distribution or investor returns is hard. No one wants less money coming out at the end of the month because you want new furniture or you need to make an espresso bar or whatever it is.
00:36:20 So put it in the budget. Assume you will need to do it. I mean I have silly examples like we have these high tables, these high white tables that I thought were brilliant cause it doesn't everybody want to stand and do work. No one used them ever. And I don't know if it's because of where they were located or I still, I really don't know why not.
00:36:42 Because I thought they were great and we should have gotten rid of them and we should have used that space for something else and it was just like never the right time to do it. And we finally did a space refresh and Mara Hauser who's been on the podcast a number of times, her team helped us to do that and it was very budget friendly and it made a big impact with the things that we did.
00:37:02 But we had a plan for it and we had to, you know, kind of get approval for it because we didn't have an improvement budget baked in. So assume there will be change and assume that you want to do some improvements to the space over time every year you'll want to do a little bit of a refresh here and there. So save some budget for that.
00:37:21 Set it aside another kind of simple one. Okay, I'm going to close out with lesson number 10 which is always be learning from others and if you're listening to this podcast and you already have a space, then you're already in that camp. So good for you. We are in the same tribe of always wanting to learn. Join your local groups. You might have a local sort of collective joined them.
00:37:48 Don't worry about competition, hear what they have to say. Find a peer group. I've always had peers that I get together with, meet at conferences, have conference calls with and I learn so much from how they're looking at their business. And again, I don't run the same business that any of them run. We, you know, we all run different businesses but you pick up different things that spark an idea or make you realize that you need to be focusing on something that you weren't focusing on before or here of a resource that you weren't aware of.
00:38:21 You always want to be getting those inputs. Go to conferences. So that virtual conference I talked about next week, sign up for it. Watch as much as you can when we can gather in person. Again, go to conferences every year when I go to um, industry events like juicy and the GWA GWA is my favorite. Of course. It's like my favorite time of the year to get together with industry friends and to learn and to hear what they're up to and just be with likeminded people.
00:38:54 There is nothing better. And don't forget, make sure you have your other sources of inspiration. So I go in waves on this, I'll love to read and then I'm also addicted to work so sometimes I forget to read. We went camping this weekend. Totally socially distanced approved. We used hip camp by the way. Super quick aside, very interesting model.
00:39:18 It's Airbnb for people with property, like acres. We stayed on a ranch, a 400 acre ranch. There was no one in sight. And I read a whole book in like a minute. I read fast company, I started the Durer polling book. It was so good and my brain was on fire, you know, just with, with inputs and ideas and,
00:39:42 and even if not ideas I get directly from them. It just makes my brain work differently. So make sure you always are scanning your environment and looking at both macro trends which you get from conferences and micro inputs. Would you get from your peers, filter the input, make it work for you, but make sure those inputs are always there. So those are my 10 lessons.
00:40:09 If anybody's wondering what I'm up to now that I'm down a coworking space, like I said, it's probably not forever. I will likely do a space, it may not be in the Bay area. We'll see where life takes me and how real estate prices work out. I would love to own a building. I have lots of coworking startup school students who own their buildings and create a coworking space that serves the community.
00:40:32 I feel like I relate really well to that approach. So I would love for that to happen at some point. But as I said, great things come with focus and that has been a challenge for me over the past few years. I am an entrepreneur and I love to serve and I'm always taking on more than I and my, you know, small team that can manage at any one time.
00:40:57 So I am looking forward to the opportunity to serve my people a little bit better. So, um, my coworking startup school students, my flight group members, my community manager, university students, my superpower, like I said at the beginning, is really kind of translating what's happening in the world into frameworks to help people run their business, to first create a business that they love to run and that's profitable and then to learn and grow and connect from that.
00:41:27 So I appreciate the fact that I've had eight years of practical experience and now it's my, my opportunity to sort of scale that experience is to give to the coworking industry and, you know, get more people through the startup school and get more people into the community manager university to connect and leverage those resources. So I'm really passionate about spending some more time serving you in that capacity.
00:41:55 So that is what's next for me. And, um, any thoughts, questions? Certainly reach out Jamie at everything, coworking.com and we will talk next week.
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