164. Hiring Top Community Manager Talent to Run your Coworking Space

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164. Hiring Top Community Manager Talent to Run your 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 to the everything coworking podcast. This is Jamie Russo, and this is episode number 164. I'm so glad you're joining me today for anybody that is new to the podcast.

00:00:41 I owned it operated coworking spaces for eight years. I've been the executive director of the global workspace association for the last five years. And today I focus my efforts on helping coworking space owners and community managers create and run coworking spaces that attract and retain their best and most profitable members. And today's episode is important because we are going to talk about hiring your community manager and the community manager is critical to the success of your coworking space.

00:01:17 You can have the most beautiful chairs and the best coffee and the most high tech meeting rooms. And none of that will matter if you don't have a community manager that is helping you to attract and retain members to use those amenities. So we're going to talk about that very important decision today. I have a lot of coworking startup school students that are making those hiring decisions.

00:01:42 And for those of you that don't know, I launched community manager university last December and have been adding folks to that program over time. It's a monthly membership. And so I get to spend some quality time with community managers from all over the world and see what they're thinking about. And I can tell you that good community managers are loved their job and are super invested in the success of their space.

00:02:10 So we're going to share some tips today to hopefully help you attract your own high quality community manager. So let's dive in to our topic. Okay? So today we're going to talk about creating a powerful team and why your team is critical. When it's time to hire what roles you should hire. First, following a sourcing and screening process, trying to avoid mistakes and training and retaining your team.

00:02:47 So I alluded to this at the very beginning. Why is your hiring? Why is hiring the right team so critical? If you've run a coworking space, either you're brand new or you've run one and you, if you've run one, you know the answer to this question, your team really is the success of your business. Like I said, you can make really great decisions about all the other aspects of a coworking space,

00:03:12 but your team drives your business. They really, even if you have a sales person, they own sales at the local level and in effect, they also own retention. So they own attracting members through giving tours and following the sales process that they follow to recruit new members and then retaining those members through how they interact with members every day, how they community build how they run operations,

00:03:41 et cetera. And when it comes down to it, that's what our business is about, right? Attracting and retaining our best and most profitable members. And in the coworking world space is essentially a commodity, right? Especially today as coworking space operators become more savvy landlords of all sizes start to get into the game and really invest in beautiful spaces that are designed to fit their perfect community.

00:04:11 The space, of course, there are different flavors of space for everyone, but in the end, we're not really selling workspace. We're selling the transformation that your space creates for a member. We're selling that ability to get out of the house, to feel more professional, to feel more legitimate, to feel more connected, feel more, seen, to feel more a part of something,

00:04:38 right? All those things we can't do at home. We're also, you know, buying flexibility and all those good things. But what we'd like to say is that members come for the space, but they stay for the people or the service or whatever aspect of your community and culture that is uniquely you. And it's your team that delivers that. And community generally doesn't happen just by putting people in the same space.

00:05:05 Community grows over time. I like to say one part organically and one part miracle grow. And the miracle grow is your team, the people on the ground, interacting with your members. And I'll give you a quick example. I was on the phone with one of my new coworking startup school students today. And she made this excellent point. If you are listening and you already have a coworking space,

00:05:30 listen carefully because I don't want this to be your situation. And if you're opening a new coworking space, you want to hire and make sure that this doesn't happen to you either. She said she was sort of shopping a space nearby and she booked it. You were online. And she went in and she toured the space. And she said, you know,

00:05:53 the community manager was not really my style. And she's in terms of hiring and how she wants her community manager to interact. She said, you know, she was really kind of laid back or really low key, which can be fine if that fits your culture and the member that you're trying to attract, but this is the problem. She said, the community manager did not take her contact details.

00:06:16 So she said she didn't think the community manager had any way to follow up with her. She said, when she requested it to her online, so maybe they had her email address through that process. She said, it took a week and a half for that community manager to respond to that lead. And this is what we're still managing through a global pandemic.

00:06:37 And give me a heck. Yeah. If you're thrilled to get leads in the door and aren't waiting a week and a half to respond to them. And she said she didn't take any additional information from her during the tour and never followed up. So our community manager does a lot of heavy lifting for us. And one of those is running the sales process,

00:07:00 giving the tours and doing the right followup. So they're super important on the ground. If they aren't following those sales processes that we put into place, then we aren't with it. Then we're losing leads all over the place. Somebody would have to be really, really interested in, basically sign up on the spot in order to join that space. And it may be that the existing members really like that person's style and the way they interact and maybe they're amazing at community building.

00:07:26 But the reality is we need community managers that are really good at both the sales process, the attracting members and retaining them through, through community building. So just a quick story. Um, and this is a total tangent. We're not going to go down today, but this is why having systems with your team is so critical because you need to know who comes through the door.

00:07:50 What the followup process has been, what the status is of leads. And you want to have those meetings every single week with your team so that you make sure they're following a process, don't assume that they know what to do, and that they're actually taking those steps unless you are interacting with them really consistently, and also helping them to know where to focus their time.

00:08:12 Right? I've had to have this conversation with my community managers in the past, helping them sort of reorient depending on the life cycle of the business, whether they should be focusing more on sales followup and prioritizing that or more on community building, it can be hard for them to manage that in their day to day business, their day to day schedule. So you have to help them prioritize.

00:08:36 Okay. So backing up these, the next little discussion here is for folks that are just hiring their first manager. So if you already have a space, hang in there when to hire, when you're working capital or cash flow can support it. So I see a lot of people that want to hire right away. Um, but your staff costs are second in line to your rent or your mortgage if you own the building.

00:09:02 So, um, it's a big expense and you want to make sure that you are ramping up and make sure you have working capital to support hiring somebody. Maybe you bring somebody on part time until you can support it. Remember that you are not going to open to a full space, you're going to ramp up over time. Um, so starting someone part time can be a way to manage that cashflow.

00:09:26 On the other hand, again, we're talking about how this is one of the most critical aspects of your business. So if you have the working capital to hire that community manager, have them, um, be invested and be a part of the ramp up process of your space, help to design processes. It can take a big load off of your plate.

00:09:47 If you have other things that you're working on and can help that person to really get up to speed and really add value to the space, if you bring them on before you even have opened. Um, so when to hire, when you can afford it, when the business has grown into the need. So I was talking to somebody today who has a 12,000 square foot space.

00:10:07 And I said, look, eventually you're going to need two community managers, maybe one and a half. It'll depend on kind of traffic through the space, et cetera, just start with one. You know, don't go straight into one and a half because again, you're not gonna open to a full space. So ramp up as you can. And then the other aspect of hiring is don't hire until you have a clear job description,

00:10:28 a clear sense of what that role looks like. And we're going to talk about that. And, um, I'm sharing with you. If you want to download my swipe file of community manager, job descriptions, you can get that by going to the podcast page on the website and clicking on this episode, which is number one 64. So go to everything.

00:10:49 coworking.com find episode one 64. The direct URL is everything coworking.com forward slash episodes four slash one 64. So when to hire, we're gonna talk now about who to hire. So common first roles, typically a community manager, or, um, if you're going to add multiple both roles at once an operations manager or community associate, and if you're going to hire multiple folks at once to start,

00:11:19 then you want to make sure that you have a clear delineation of their roles. Cause one of the most common challenges I hear is we don't know who's responsible for what so making sure it's very clear, who's taking care of the sales process. Who's in charge of cleaning meeting rooms after someone's in them who makes the coffee in the morning, make sure it is super,

00:11:42 super clear. I will share really quickly because I found this to be really helpful and something I never occurred to me. And didn't discover until the end of my cycle of owning coworking spaces. We ended up at the end, having two community managers, one came in in the morning and set the space, made the coffee process male. And usually it was male that came in at the end of the previous day,

00:12:05 which was totally fine and worked for our cycle. And that would take a couple of hours. And so it was very clear what her role was. And then the second community manager would come in from like 10 to five and handle all tours and all member interaction, all sort of, you know, CRM, sales, follow up onboarding, offboarding members,

00:12:26 community building, et cetera. But she didn't have to set the space in the morning, which takes fair amount of time. And she didn't have to handle mail. And they knew exactly who was in charge of what, and they could, you know, use each other and enjoy each other's company when they had their, um, we had them have like a half hour of overlap time,

00:12:47 but their responsibilities were really clear, which was great for everybody. What does a community manager do all day? Do you know what else I'll include? I have this somewhere else. I think there, I think I have an episode a day in the life of the community manager. I should know all of my episodes, but I have a sample sort of daily schedule.

00:13:07 And I'm going to put that as a download in the show notes for this episode also, which is again one 64. So what does a community manager do all day? The fewer, the members, the less there is to do in this space? So, um, at the beginning, you're probably doing more outside of the space, more sales and marketing,

00:13:27 right? Because the focus when you're opening is on filling the space and getting members, and then once you're open, then more of a focus on what's happening in the space, retaining members, community building, et cetera. Um, well, who do we tend to hire next? So these may be part time or outsourced roles. And so this is a little,

00:13:51 um, off a side note, um, around the community manager, just because people kind of think about this, a community manager can wear a lot of hats, but the challenge is we expect our community manager to wear many of them and not every community. Manager's going to be as strong with all the hats as we may need them to be. And so if you get a community manager that's really strong in the areas that are important to you and important to your business and this phase of your life cycle,

00:14:24 then you may need to outsource some of the hats that they aren't as strong in or don't have time to do. So I think we tend to err on the side of giving them a lots of hats, especially smaller spaces where we don't have a centralized marketing group and finance group and a sales team. And so we give our community manager a lot of hats.

00:14:43 And as a matter of fact, in my community manager university program, we break out the content by the hats that I see are most common for community managers, which are, you know, operations, community, building sales and marketing, finance, and then leadership for community managers that have some direct reports, maybe a group that has multiple locations. So you might supplement your community manager with,

00:15:08 uh, someone to help you with marketing someone who's focused on writing SEO focused blogs. For example, maybe our community manager happens to be a strong writer and can figure out how to write for search engine optimization. And maybe that's not one of their strengths and we want to take that off their plate and make sure that gets done consistently. So I would say,

00:15:30 just be honest with you and your team about where the strengths are internally and where you need to outsource and make sure that that the role that needs to be filled still gets done. Right? So if the community manager is not going to write the blog or not going to do the social media, someone needs to do it. We can't just not do it.

00:15:50 Digital marketing expert to run Google and Facebook ads. Again, we sometimes want to do these things internally, unless you are well trained. You can make a lot of mistakes running ads on your own. A quick side note, even with Facebook ads, which look simple on the surface and are inexpensive, it leads to take a course or have your manager take a course on how to run Facebook ads because there is art and science to it.

00:16:17 And if you understand the bigger picture, it will give you a lot more strategic capability to run them and a better ROI on your ad spend bookkeeper website, developer, graphic designer, all things that you may outsource. Graphic design, lots of community managers do really well with Canva. Um, we have a Slack group for the community manager university group, and a lot of them can have trade templates.

00:16:44 We post a lot of templates that folks can use in Canva. There's a free version of it. It's excellent bookkeeping. Some of the like accounts receivable invoicing can be done by the community manager. Sometimes you want to outsource, you know, the QuickBooks work, et cetera. Um, and then other common next roles as you grow across multiple locations may be a regional community manager,

00:17:08 a general manager that manages multiple spaces, centralized sales and marketing, sometimes a construction manager. Okay. So let's talk about the actual hiring of your community manager. And one of my coworking startup school students said the other day on one of our Q and a calls, he said, well, I'm going to get help hiring my community manager because the problem I have is that I want to like everyone,

00:17:33 I can see the good in all the candidates and I am totally related to that. I am one of those people that when I see someone, especially earlier in their career, I can see myself a lot of times that I want to support them. And I want to make them fit that role and help them grow, even if that's not exactly the right decision for the business.

00:17:53 So I totally fall into that camp. And I have a suggestion for that later on, but I'm with you. You don't have to hire an expensive consultant to get some help with it, but get somebody who can at least screen some candidates for you in so that you are not. Um, so by the time you get to the last few candidates that your screening,

00:18:15 you are down to a group that would be a good fit for their role. And you're not going to let your bias of wanting to help someone who's not a good fit, um, make some progress in their career. Okay. So I would suggest again, getting help with the screening process, which we'll talk a little bit more about in a minute,

00:18:35 but also use a tool that can help you assess whether someone is a good fit for the community manager role in general. And we'll sort of talk about what those factors look like. So I use a tool called the PI index and some people use strength, finders, et cetera, legally, you're not allowed to use them as a decision making tool, uh,

00:18:56 but you can use them to help in the process. So you can't, you can't base your decision on these tools alone, but you can use them to help inform the process. So the PI index in particular, and I'll put a link in the show notes to the PI index. So you can take a look at that. Um, it's specific specifically for the workplace,

00:19:21 which is one of the reasons I like it. And they talk about four behavioral factors and they sort of put people on a spectrum of these factors, dominance, extroversion, patience, and formality. And you can already sort of see how this might relate to the community manager role. So dominance is the drive to exert one's influence on people and events, extroversion the drive for social interaction,

00:19:47 with other people, patients the drive for consistency and stability, and then formality the drive to conform, to rules and structure. So dominance, if it's low, then the person is cooperative, harmony seeking collaborative. If they're high on the dominant scale, then they tend to be independent, competitive, and autonomous. So, uh, we're going to talk about this in the minute,

00:20:14 but you might start to think about what combination of, of, um, these behavioral factors tends to line up with a good community manager and one that's a good fit for the role extroversion if low introspective, matter of fact, reflective pensive, probably not the, um, behavioral factors we want to see in our community manager, if high outgoing, people-centered empathetic,

00:20:42 stimulating patients, if low inpatients high, strong rushed intense does not describe any successful community manager that I've ever interacted with. If high on the patient's scale, steady patient calm and agreeable. And the reason I like these factors is because like my coworking startup school student wants to see the good in any everybody. So you could be tempted to find someone who's impatient and you know,

00:21:13 lots of entrepreneurs are impatient, right? So we could like that characteristic or want to support that characteristic or feel like, Oh, that's like me. I like people like me, but that characteristic does not make for a good community manager. So if we know in advance what we're looking for and kind of where we want people to fall on these spectrums,

00:21:34 it can help us to say, okay, is this person a likely fit or not? So what combination of these factors is a good fit for a community manager? The important thing to know is of course there's no perfect profile, but a community manager is more likely to be collaborative, cooperative, outgoing people, oriented patient, calm, flexible tolerant of uncertainty, 00:21:58 less likely to be assertive, competitive introspective, task oriented, high-strung impatient, serious or cautious. And this may seem obvious when you see these kind of lined up, but these are hard to get at in the interview environment, right? So having a tool that you can use that kind of unearths these factors for you is really helpful. And then, um,

00:22:24 on the formality preference, I didn't include that because I think that's really culture dependent, you know, so low formality may be exactly what the woman I mentioned saw when she went into her to space and the community manager was super low key. Didn't take any more contact details. Um, so those folks may be low on the formality, um, spectrum tolerant of uncertainty,

00:22:51 spontaneous nonconforming, casual, uh, high informality is diligent, thorough, precise, and organized. And sometimes that's a bit of a cultural preference, um, versus, um, you know, a behavioral profile preference. Okay. So we're going to talk a little bit more about details, where are the best sources for candidates? So a lot of folks like indeed for full time,

00:23:19 um, tends to give you some good options. You can include screening questions. Um, it's a good interface for sorting. If you get a lot of candidates, I have had some luck for part time on Craigslist. Doesn't usually yield the, um, highest quality candidates for full time, but I find for part time, that's where people tend to go look and it may depend on your market,

00:23:44 how well that gets used. And then I also love referrals. Um, I always say avoid family members and members of friends and family, because if your community manager doesn't work out, you need to let them go and you need to do that pretty quickly. So the whole hire slowly fire fast approach holds true here because that person drives your business. You cannot have the wrong fit.

00:24:09 And if you have hired a family member, they're very hard to get rid of. And just because they're your family member does not mean they make a good community manager. That being said, I have several coworking startup school members who have hired family members and it's going very well. And they're in my community manager university program and I know them and they are a great fit for the role.

00:24:30 So, um, make your own decision there. But I like to say hiring someone, you know, is comfortable until it's not so post a detailed job description. Again, I have a swipe file that you can grab. If you go to everything, coworking.com and find episode one 64 of the podcast, you can grab the link there, post a detailed job description.

00:24:52 I like to include a trick to weed out most of the candidates. And my trick is that somewhere in that job description, I will say you are required to submit a cover letter and it must be assigned to, it must be addressed to my name. So I say, uh, and I'll even say, because people don't know whether I'm a male or a female.

00:25:14 I say ms. Jamie Verso needs to be, uh, addressed to that person. And most of the candidates will not bother to read the job description well enough to see that detail, but we need our community managers to be detail oriented. And so we want to make sure they pass that screening test. And I did have one startup school member tell me that she had only one candidate that managed to pass that test.

00:25:40 And she hired that person, uh, because of that. And then have someone else review resumes and screen five to seven candidates for you. So again, this goes back to the, you know, if you tend to like everyone, then have someone else screen using your screening questions, narrow down the candidates they think are best and give you three final candidates that you meet in person three candidates that would be appropriate for the job.

00:26:10 And so it doesn't matter what your biases are towards toured and well, it biases of course matter in the interview process. But I mean, the, I like everyone, um, problem that we talked about earlier. So screening questions use these to filter out candidates that don't fit, um, or to confirm that they, uh, not to confirm that they're all great choices.

00:26:37 You really want to use screening questions to narrow down your pool of candidate and not rush through the process. So if you don't get candidates that go through the screening process and make the final round, you want to keep going, keep getting candidates into the funnel until you find those that really are a good fit and three that you can interview in person. Then here's an example of a problem solving.

00:27:04 One of the screeners that we use, which is focused on problem solving because it's a sort of a good behavioral interview question. And it asks them to think about a scenario, um, that they might encounter. And sometimes our community managers are by themselves, or they have a partner in crime. That's that's with them, but maybe it's busy handling, you know,

00:27:28 tours or doing other things in this space. And so they have to be able to think on their feet and handle things that come up and that in the space or with clients or potential members or conference room rentals or whatever it may be quickly. So the problem solving screener we use is coffee is very important. It's a very important part of our members day.

00:27:47 Many of them depend on it all day long. Tell me your approach to this scenario. It's 8:30 AM. You are just making your second pot of coffee, you know, that you will need to make at least two more pots around 10:00 AM. Suddenly the beam grinder stops working. What do you do? So we use that as a behavioral interview question to help see how they'll respond to that,

00:28:15 can they think on their feet? And can they actually think of what a solution might be? And if they're, you know, totally unfamiliar with the role, and then they might take a little bit to think through it, but give them that time and see how they respond. And that's, that's a good, um, we'd like that sort of a good reality test compensation.

00:28:36 So a couple of notes here, make sure you're looking, you're doing some research on, um, local rates. Certainly if you are able to provide benefits, that's going to give you, um, uh, help you recruit quality candidates that may not have access to benefits. Otherwise, uh, the global workspace association has a relationship with Tri-Net and tri net can provide benefits to your team.

00:29:02 Um, we used Tri-Net, uh, for offering benefits to our team and many other operators do the global workspace association also has a salary survey that, um, they've run in the past that can help you get a sense of salary rates. A couple of important things, make sure that even if your community manager is part time, they are a w two employee.

00:29:28 They're not a 10 99 employee. So you are specifying that they need to work certain hours in a certain location, which is falls under the definition of an employee. And so you could find yourself in a lawsuit if you go the 10 99 route. So be careful about that, um, make sure that your community manager is taking breaks. And if you have hourly employees,

00:29:53 make sure, um, even if they're not full time, don't burn them out. Kevin community managers work a full day and do events at night, et cetera is a lot. So if you're going to be heavy on events or after hours, Mmm Events and activities in the space, then you're going to want to have somebody part time who comes in and takes those over,

00:30:15 or find a way to stagger the schedules of your full time employees. Okay. Couple of pitfalls to avoid hiring too soon, have a clear need and a clear job description and a clear outcome for the role before you hire, make sure you're not hiring the wrong profile, just because you like someone doesn't mean they're right for the role. Uh, this has happened to me many times.

00:30:40 I'm sure you've if you're a long time podcast listener, you've, you've heard me share these stories before don't hire out of desperation. Try to wait. Being impatient, never ends well. And in today's economy, it's probably easier to find quality folks out there who are looking for a meaningful purpose driven role that gives them a great empowerment authority and transferable skills.

00:31:05 It's a really great role for a lot of folks, but, um, we've been in a very competitive market and sometimes you can be in a place where it's hard to find good candidates that want to do this job, but it never ends well when you hire, because you're impatient to not be the one at the front desk, if you're in a jam.

00:31:25 And if you're attempted to hire friends and family, make sure you play out the worst case scenario before you do that. So just a couple of quick notes about training your team before we wrap up here, make sure, and this is can be one of the advantages of hiring your team before you even open. It's a big undertaking to get all your processes and procedures in place.

00:31:50 Um, you really want to create all your playbooks for your space as you're opening so that you can train other folks to run your processes. And if you're thinking about doing multiple locations, then you want to be prepared for that and documenting everything upfront as you're going, can be a great way to do that. Certainly wait until you're sure that these are the processes that you want to follow.

00:32:12 It's said sometimes we're experimenting a little bit and figuring things out, but it can be easier just to do it while you're going and having a community manager do that. Things like taking screen, share videos of how to onboard a new member with your software. So in my community manager university, we provide a lot of operational support, like, um, opening and closing checklist,

00:32:36 onboarding and offboarding checklist, all sorts of good that can give you a really great headstart on your playbook, but then you're going to have things really specific to your space, like, um, how you manage your, your member portal. Um, you know, you may have special things that you do in your onboarding process that you want to customize, et cetera.

00:32:55 So you want to document those things and then remember that starting this job is like drinking out of a fire hose, probably how you felt opening your space if you're new. So you want to train in a graduated learning approach. So train across domains. This is what I do in my community manager university, cute. Think about the buckets of community, building operations,

00:33:19 sales, and marketing, finance, and leadership, but don't, you know, try to do it all at once in the first week, build knowledge and skills over time and provide ongoing training and professional development opportunities, which can be challenging for single location or even multi location spaces to do because you probably don't have an HR team yet. And that was one of the reasons I created community manager university because community managers need their own network.

00:33:48 They need ongoing training and development. They need access to best practices and, you know, continuous ideas for ways they can improve their internal approaches to these domain buckets. And so we provide that in the community manager university, but certainly that's something you can develop on your own to a powerful team, just to wrap up can really make a difference in your business and can really help to drive retention,

00:34:20 attraction and retention of your best members. So be careful with your hiring, be intentional use tools that help you to find the right folks and find the right fit, and then make sure you allocate time or budget for the community manager university to onboard them and to get them up to speed, and then make sure you have the systems in place to do a weekly meeting with them and help them focus on the things that are really critical to the business.

00:34:56 So again, we have the job description and the day in the life downloads under the show notes for the podcast at episode one 64, uh, at everything coworking.com. And if you're interested in learning more about community manager university, you can find some details@everythingcoworking.com forward slash community managers.

For the full show notes of this episode, click here.

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