200. Mara Hauser on How Operators Can Align Design With What Members Want Post-COVID19
Resources Mentioned in this Podcast:
Other episodes related to this topic:
80. The Design Process for Coworking Spaces
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
TRANSCRIPTION
200. Mara Hauser on How Operators Can Align Design With What Members Want Post-COVID19
00:00:01 Welcome to the everything co-working 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 co-working podcast. This is episode number 200. Can you believe it? So I would just scrolling through Apple podcasts to try to figure out when I recorded the very first podcast.
00:00:43 I can't figure it out because I think Apple only keeps a hundred episodes. So they're all on the website. If you're curious, if you type in everything co-working dot com forward slash episodes Ford slash a number like one, you can get all the back episodes that you ever wanted to listen to. And I don't know if you listened to the podcast, but huge shout out to Jeff<inaudible>,
00:01:08 who is still a coworking dear friend of mine, and was the very first interview that I did on the podcast. I think it was 2016. It might've been 2015. It was a long time ago. And for my pod-casters out there and the early days I was not consistent about posting episodes and I'm like the mailman now, you know, rain, sleet,
00:01:35 hail, snow, whatever it is, I'm putting up an episode every week because consistency is super important. So for those of you starting podcasts, know that you gotta be consistent to keep your listeners engaged. So thank you to Jeff. Thank you. Huge, huge, huge. Thank you for many of you that have probably been listening since day one.
00:02:00 We are 200 episodes in so 200 times of walking, the dogs are driving around in the car. I appreciate you, even though I don't know all of you, many of you are in my flight group program or, you know, went through coworking startup school with me. And I value all of those relationships very much because that's why I do this because I want to know you in person.
00:02:25 I mean, I do it partly because I love educating and coaching and I love helping people avoid the many mistakes that I made, but I also really love when I get to interact with you in person. So I'm not great at fanfare, but here's what I thought we could do. If you've been a long time listener, shoot me a DM on Instagram,
00:02:46 say happy anniversary. And tell me what your favorite episode is. If there's one that's top of mind or jump in the Facebook group, we'll do a little fanfare in the Facebook group, the everything coworking Facebook group for episode number 200. But I would love to hear from you personally, or say happy anniversary with a review. And speaking of which thank you to Brent from Nebraska who posted a review at the beginning of April,
00:03:11 that I haven't gotten to upbeat, informative and helpful. He says with a nice description. So Brent, great to hear from you. Thank you for leaving that review. So episode number 200 is my favorite milestone guest Mara Hauser. She's the CEO of 25 North co-working with locations outside of Chicago, two of them, one in Frisco, Texas, one soon coming in Texas and Alexandria,
00:03:38 Virginia. She's also principal at workplace studio, which is a commercial interiors design firm. She has a really unique perspective in our industry of being an interior design expert and a co-working space owner with multiple locations. So I love to tap into her perspective periodically to share with you what's new, what's evolving what she's thinking about. So today the focus is on evaluating your current offerings to determine what you might need to adjust as we get into full entry post COVID-19.
00:04:11 And thank goodness we're talking about full re-entry, right? So we talk about a few things. One Mara shares the framework that she uses for reviewing her current offering and determining what you might need to adjust. And she shares some tweaks that she's made that aren't a huge investment, but are helping her sell her dedicated desks in particular. So if you're struggling with those,
00:04:36 make sure you stay tuned in. She talks about opportunities to upsell things to our members that they need and value and are happy to pay for. So I love that conversation and she says, share some creative ideas for reframing and marketing spaces that you aren't selling yet, like team offices. So lots of practical discussion here before we dive into my discussion with Mara,
00:05:03 I've been talking about this over the last few episodes, a few episodes go, we did a deep dive into the co-working tech and tools for 2021. If you haven't grabbed the guide yet, go to everything. coworking.com forward slash tech and tools 2021. We'll link that up in the show notes we'll link. We always link resources in the show notes. Also,
00:05:23 if you're not used to going to the website and grabbing the show notes to get links willing tomorrow, we'll link to her on LinkedIn we'll link to 25 North coworking workplace studio and the tech and tools guide. So if you haven't grabbed the guide yet, it's based on Results from respondents of a survey, the members of my programs, we divide the tech and tools into easy to consume buckets,
00:05:44 such as marketing member, billing, conference room reservations, mail client lead, gen partners, et cetera. So grab that if you haven't and enjoy episode 200, my conversation with Maura Hauser, Maura, how's there. Thank you for joining me for episode 200. I can barely believe it. So Mara has been on a number of our milestone episodes and Mara.
00:06:08 I feel like you probably don't really need to introducing to some of our regular listeners, but Michael Abrams calls you a unicorn in coworking because which I totally agree with. You have this really unique perspective in that you are the CEO of a coworking brand of your own, and you run a design studio. And so we were just talking about in our pre-chat you not only have access to what you're doing in your spaces,
00:06:36 operationally design wise, but what your clients are doing. And so you kind of have a broader perspective outside of your own little world. And so, and do you do management agreements? You kind of do all the things and have this really great wealth of expertise and experience. So we're thrilled to have you on again, thank you for joining me for this exciting episode.
00:06:58 We're totally celebrating. So Mara, you're joining us from Geneva, Illinois outside of Chicago. I am, and it's a kind of a cloudy Spring day, but getting excited for the better weather turning around the corner and all the newness that the new season is bringing for us, you know, so it'll be really nice. And then you are hopping on a plane tomorrow.
00:07:21 So give us a quick update of what your portfolio looks like today. You're actually hopping on a plane tonight. Oh, tonight. Okay. If you've got tomorrow. So we have two locations in the Chicago area and working on a couple others, which is very exciting and we are expanding our footprint in Texas as well, soon to be announced our location under construction,
00:07:45 but one that is we're celebrating tomorrow. Our two year anniversary is first go Texas. And that's where I'll be going tomorrow to join my partner, Megan there. So that'll be really nice. And then we actually opened during COVID two locations in Alexandria, Virginia, which are called the loop and they're powered by 25 North coworking. So we have five and growing locations currently.
00:08:11 So yeah, really exciting. Yeah. And so Mara, while I call you a unicorn, you have not been without your challenges over the last year. So I know lots of folks listening have opened. I talked to so many people who will say, well, I opened in January, 2020 or February, 2020, and I was super optimistic. And then COVID, so you've also managed and managed spaces through COVID and opened locations through COVID.
00:08:37 So yeah, We are very fortunate that we actually expanded during COVID and we did not have to lay anyone off and we actually were hiring during COVID as well. So we've done very well, and I'm very proud of our team who really dug in. And we were able to, I think we talked about on a podcast earlier, like what we had to do during COVID to get our spaces ready.
00:08:57 And we worked really quickly on that. And as an essential business, we're able to prove to our members that we were a safe place that they could come to. You know, our meeting business was obviously non-existent, but at the same time, we were providing a healthy, safe, productive environment for our members who chose to commute, to chose, to come in and use our space.
00:09:19 And, you know, it's obviously in Illinois and Texas and Virginia, so three different kinds of roles to follow and guidelines and different counties. Even our two locations in Illinois are in two different counties and they had different guidelines. So, you know, just really keeping up with what we needed to do to create that environment that people felt like they could come to.
00:09:41 And even still you're in Texas where no masks required and yet operating into other markets that are more conservative. And so I know Mara has been offering kind of her experience and guidance around, you know, how do you sort of manage that transition and, you know, handle employees and set policy and all of those things. So Mara you're also, you know,
00:10:03 always thinking, you know, what's next? How do we respond to what's happening in the marketplace? And you've written some thought pieces recently, and one of them we'll put in the show notes, she was featured in the Texas CEO magazine talking about kind of the future of workplace in a post COVID world. And Mara, you're going to share some of your insights,
00:10:23 what you've been doing in your spaces, what you're helping clients with in terms of like, what's happening now, what do people want? What are people using? What selling and how do we adapt our spaces? So I'm going to let you dive in and I'll kinda, I'll, I'll interject my questions as you, as you go. Yeah, That sounds good.
00:10:43 Make sure it's like, we're having a conversation. I like those, those assets. So, you know, some of the, you know, obviously as a designer and a thought leader in workplace strategy, it's really important to me that we do research and we understand what the needs are and we survey and ask a million questions. So some of the data that,
00:11:02 you know, I look to is, you know, what do people want? No, I ask even people who are calling in, like, what are they asking for? What are their needs? What are they searching for? But a couple of different things. I'll just give some insight to, like, for example, in May, 2020 Stanford Institute for economic policy,
00:11:20 did some research asking what people wanted and perhaps 25% wanted remote full-time, but 20% wanted in the office. Full-time which is, I think very interesting, but there's a balance of whether it's one, two, three, or even four days of being remote. And most likely if we follow a bell curve of some sort, it will be two to three days,
00:11:45 you know, with remote. So normally what you would think of, if you were a corporate corporate real estate executive, you would think, okay, well this is significantly going to impact my space requirements. So could it be something like a 10 to 30% reduction, but studies show that what you're going to be doing is providing a different kind of environment and those environments like collaborative space or a place for people to gather,
00:12:09 take up more square foot than just a workspace might. So it might not be that they're giving back a whole lot of space, but they will be reevaluating their portfolios, which is all in right now. But we, as kind of what I want to do is I want to help my coworking friends out there in the real estate community to understand, not just,
00:12:29 if you're going to build a new space, what do you have to do for designing and creating that great environment? But if you have an existing space, how do we modify it? Like, what are we going to focus on when we're making decisions? What to do? So these are some of the questions I ask myself is like, okay, what is not good enough?
00:12:48 Like when you walk through your space, what isn't working, what isn't good enough, that type of a thing. And before, right. But all of a sudden we have to kind of look at it with fresh eyes. Yeah. What are people not using? Because it doesn't work or fit their needs. I mean, it's wasting valuable real estate or square footage.
00:13:04 So if it's not going to work and it's not being occupied, you have to change it. What are customers saying? You know, obviously that's huge. So they, they like something, they don't like something. And by the way, it's not what they verbally say only, but like, where are they sitting? Yes, I was, I was totally thinking like they vote with their butts.
00:13:25 Right? Like what exactly is everybody sitting in the booth is anyone using, you know, that cool chair you put in the, you know, in the lobby. Yeah. So yeah, of course. And then like, what are like, what are new technologies that you could be using that you might not have done before? So maybe it's an investment in some tech,
00:13:45 you know, measuring air quality, measuring temperature, measuring these other things. People had, you know, every plan, you probably have them between sanitizing stations and all these other things. And of course, new CDC guidelines that came out within the last couple of weeks say, it's not like you have to use all these sanitation wipes all over, but it is still your hands,
00:14:04 your face and it's in the air. So there's a lot of things Like the regular flu, right? If hopefully we're developing habits that will serve us no matter what. And I would say to Mara, you might talk about some things that you, so you and I love to talk about, like, who do you serve and how do you design?
00:14:22 I mean, that's a big part of your process. And when I help folks start spaces, same thing, which, you know, feeds into design and space. And so some of the suggestions, you know, you may not take on because the folks that you serve or your model or your pricing or whatever, doesn't allow for it. But there are things that folks are doing like Kane Welmont.
00:14:43 We both know Kane. He is the CEO of IQ offices. He posted to LinkedIn the other day, he installed air sensors that like have digital displays. You know, it's a really transparent way to show people what the air quality looks like. Right. And I was like, Oh wow. But he's serving an enterprise, you know, audience primarily.
00:15:04 And so I think he thought, okay, this is an indicator. That's going to be really important to them. I'm going to do it. Not everyone would make that investment, but for him, it made sense to, for his audience And you have to know your building. So can you get fresh air into the totally. Right. And what are the sensors going to say?
00:15:20 Do you have any control over, in a sense There's going to be negative all the time. Like, it's not helpful to show that. So like, you really have to look at the quality that comes to your space and where it's coming from and what evaluation you have to have from there. So there's lots of different things, you know, we could do around that for sure.
00:15:39 The other thing that I want to talk about is like, are there companies that can help you figure this out and are there third-party standards that you can rely on to do different things? Like maybe there's a company who comes in and provides like sanitation stations or, or plants even you'll plants help clean the air. And maybe there's a plant company that you could bring in because yet,
00:15:58 although you love, we had this from our team today. Everyone loves plants, but no one likes to take care of them and we don't want them dying all the time. Like who's watering them all. So those are just some simple things that, you know, we really need to think of not only who we serve, you know, but what are we as owners and operators going to focus on to help us get to that next step anyway,
00:16:19 you know, what's kind of changed or what are we doing with existing spaces and how can we make those changes? So knowing about how people come into the office and how they use the office. Another really interesting thing that I was reading about and thought I would share is Salesforce just published a study about their workforce because they've slowly been entering people back into their office.
00:16:43 Like they had essential workers there before, but now they're starting to open up their offices. And they had this one saying that I thought this is just spot on because I don't know. We do KPI. We do studies all the time of like our membership and our attendance in spaces. But they said, Thursday is the new Monday. So no one is coming into the office at the beginning of the week.
00:17:02 Basically the collaboration space or open spaces aren't really used them, but Wednesdays and Thursdays, it jumps up to 80%. So when you think of that as an operator, like what can you do to encourage people to come in on maybe the slower days, can you have a specials or promotions or events on the days when maybe people aren't coming in to use the space and or what can you do with this space configuration wise to make it more adaptable during peak times or non-peak times?
00:17:30 And like, I want to like really talk about what Salesforce also says was that 64% of their collaboration spaces like lounges in conference rooms were utilized, whereas only 24% of desk space was utilized. So employees, when they're working out of the office, want to come in to connect socially with colleagues or, you know, do things that they can't do working from home.
00:17:56 So a lot of their head down space and what they're going to do is going to be at home. So if you pick the two, three, like our bell curve, two, three days a week, they're going to come in, well, it's probably not going to be only sitting at their desks. So yes, these are statistics that come from a Salesforce or come from corporate offices.
00:18:12 But how do we apply that to what we can offer as a coworking space or that third space that they're also going to come to knowing that that might be the trends of what we see in our space. And I don't know Jamie in some of your surveys in the past, but we usually had an average of two to three days a week when flex members came in the space.
00:18:33 Cause they were out on sales calls or traveling or doing different things, people in the private offices or ones who came in more frequently and use them all the time. But flex was something that was really flex. So I really feel like that's gonna exasperate and that's going to be, you know, not only true from what it was before, but we'll have a higher volume of that.
00:18:52 Yeah. I think it's important to start measuring that because as you start to see trends to your point, if your meeting room demand is all, you know, Wednesday, Thursday, and if you're a lot of folks are starting to do the private office share, what if everyone wants Wednesday there, you know, just start trying to figure out, right.
00:19:09 How do we make, you know, Monday, Tuesday, Friday, more compelling? Or what does that mean for right how we configure our space, for sure. Measuring is good and being really aware. And if you're listening and you're an owner and not in the space, have your team make sure they're, you know, noting either in your management system or,
00:19:25 you know, on a notebook at the front desk, who's there, what are they up to? How are they using the space and, and look, look at those trends to be Well, they make decisions for sure. So what is the future of the furniture mix in co-working spaces? So I think that's really important for us to think about and what changes can we make or adapt to our current inventory of furniture?
00:19:47 We'll call it an inventory. So flexible furniture, I call them furniture kits or a kit of parts. So what we like to do, and what I recommend is having a standard. This is our standard desk side. This is our standard finished color. So no matter where you need that desk, you can move it. Is it a dedicated desk,
00:20:08 is a private office desk. Is it something you could use in a training room? How can you make sure that as you allocate or move things around, it's easy to do. And maybe some of you've had this too, but like there are people who come in and say, Oh, I want this office that you had five desks in. Cause that's another thing too.
00:20:24 So we're not, we are recommending to all of our workplace. You do have clients that we don't designate this as a five person room or a 10 person room or a two person room. This is a medium, small, extra large, this is a room that has capacity for one to five or two to seven or whatever you might want to say.
00:20:47 Because as we know, also densities is changing. So we're not as dense as we were before pre COVID. So anyway, with these furniture kits, can you are all the pedestals or storage, pedestals, mobile, everyone doesn't even need all the storage pedestals. So what does that look like? Whether it's shelving or chairs and or if you want to tag chairs for different things,
00:21:08 maybe have a different back color for chairs that go on private offices than what's in the open space, but make sure they all blend and you can move one from one area to another because you know, that obviously will happen. The other thing is how easy are they to move? Can, you know, to have your community people pick them up and move them around,
00:21:27 not do have a Dolly. Do you have to bring a whole moving team in, you know, how do, how do you make that happen? And then when you have extra furniture, where are you putting it? So I think that's The hardest, that's a biggest challenge for co-working space operators, because nobody wants to commit real estate to storage, but maybe it's an offsite store or maybe it's somewhere else in the building or something,
00:21:48 As long as you have, I understand you have this kit of product and you know, you can move them anywhere around. Maybe you don't have to order a hundred percent, that's shown on your floor plan. You know, I'm a big, big advocate of maybe you need 70% of the desks. Maybe you need 50% of the storage pedestals. So like,
00:22:05 just really think about what you need, because if it's a standard, you can always add more, but you're able to move them from one place to another. So yeah, I love the flexibility. I always tell people, look, a room is just walls. It can be an office. It can be a meeting room. You have some other suggestions for how to use those spaces that we'll talk about it.
00:22:23 But yes, in our Palo Alto space, we had a meeting room table that, right. I don't even know how did we get it out the door. It was very not flexible. It was enormous and heavy. And I love the flexibility of even doing meeting room tables, you know, as tables that can be moved around and set up in a training configuration depends on the room,
00:22:45 but lots of flexibility is good. So the other thing that I want us to think about is flexible power sources. So making sure that there's power everywhere in anywhere. So may, you know, when you're rearranging furniture and moving around, you want to make sure you have that. We're getting into some of these power cords that you can pop down from the ceilings,
00:23:03 some old manufacturing locations. You can see if they're on tracks and you can like pull them down or pop them back up, maybe in your old science labs in college or high school, you had some of these things, but those are just amazing. And how can you just pop in and move things as people need? So that would be one easy thing besides being,
00:23:22 you know, wireless and wifi and all that. The other thing that we want to adapt to is indoor outdoor spaces. Like, do you have access to outdoor? Can you get access and or permission to use outdoor space? Whether it's a roof deck, a sidewalk area, maybe it's a little deck I'm going to call them porches. It's one of my favorite things like people want the ability to convert either parking spaces or sidewalk areas to outdoor meeting areas.
00:23:53 I think we've all grown very fond of the ability to be outside, get some fresh air and it's healthier. It feels better. And it's a good break of the day. So what happens on these porches? You know, collaborative some alone space, some like go work, grab your laptop, make sure wifi goes out there and make sure you have power out there.
00:24:12 Again, some indoor outdoor furniture, that type of thing. The other thing we can add to is our technology stack. Maybe we have it, we can enhance it. So indoor air quality lighting, noise and temperature. I think those are all very important things we learned about touchless. What can you do? That's touchless and how do you make sure that that's still is going to be a big piece of things and using anti-microbial materials still will be something for the future because germs,
00:24:40 no matter what, that's kind of, one of the references I have is, you know, no one really liked before putting their hand in the M and M jar, but they're even going to less like putting their hand in the M and M jar now, excuse me. But you know, what does that mean when you think about, you know,
00:24:55 what kind of services or amenities or snacks or how you're serving, you know, it's our mind. So you're using the, I can't remember what the antiseptic. Yes, yes. And if you are, those need to be replaced at some point, right? 90 days, every 90 days every night, yes. I walked into a space that I was visiting a little while ago and they were all worn off.
00:25:16 It was like, sort of still there, like, Oh, we're done with those, but to your point, know your audience because maybe you're not. And we can still right. Prevent people from getting, everybody's going to be comfortable if things are nice and clean and sanitized all the time. So It's just kind of like a little summary of just kind of what to think about with,
00:25:36 you know, your product product mix, how you do that in what you can do. So it's really important to be adaptable with that. So if you took that desk and then you moved it to a dedicated desk area, can you add screens to it? Can you add snap on power to it? Can you add storage, vertical storage as well as under counter storage?
00:25:56 How do you create different kinds of product solutions with that same solution? So I can use an example for my own case. You know, I'm a very big dedicated desk user, and you know, where they're coming back slowly, you know, private offices are definitely the highest priority and flex is actually a big need, but in the dedicated desk areas that we designed,
00:26:20 our first dedicated desks were actually in a big open area. And, you know, that's not as desirable during the, you know, post COVID or in the COVID era. How do we make those, you know, into more private semi-private or people feel comfortable in those spaces? So we did a, a study in our Frisco location where we had five dedicated desks in a row and none of them were selling.
00:26:47 So this is about know where people sit. So we're like, okay, like I said, we're just getting ready for our two year opening, but it's about time someone bought these desks. And I wonder why, so what we did is we put dividers, but we didn't do you know how everyone and bought those acrylic dividers. And that of we didn't do that.
00:27:02 We bought an intentional separation of space to make them semi-private it had a whiteboard, it had like attackable surface. So it comes off of the work surface on the sides, but it comes out a little bit further too, so that, you know, these have some sense of privacy and it looked good. It wasn't just like a band-aid I'll call it,
00:27:23 but something that, you know, everyone's like, Oh, and literally the day after we installed them, people started buying them and the next tour and within a month they were all sold. So that's just really interesting How far apart they were from each other. No, You just put the dividers up and kind of made the divider usable and yeah. Yeah.
00:27:43 I mean, there were acetic, it was functional and it wasn't just to keep you healthy, you know, is more like making them more similar credit, but people recognize that visually and mentally, you know, these were separated and more functional and had more features. So that was really great. And then what we did similar in like a bigger zone,
00:28:04 you know, dedicated desk area. So just recently we did the same thing to enhance our dedicated desks in Arlington Heights and there's pictures of it on our website, you know, kind of how we had it before. And we had, you know, seated privacy storage, and we had privacy between 18 inches between the front and back. But when you walk into the room and you look at the room,
00:28:25 it was still pretty open. So we I'll give next podcast, I'll fill you in on the details, but we just placed our order. But simply for $5,000 for the product, we have 25 desks and we're going to create kind of the same impact that we did in our first go location to just provide a little bit more of separation and some semi privacy.
00:28:47 So Just a quick note about that investment folks may feel like, Oh, you know, post COVID, I just want revenue. I don't, you know, I don't have the funds to invest in this space. I think the trick is really paying attention to your point, like, okay, it's been two years, nobody's buying these desks. What can we do?
00:29:07 Because there may not be a right. It might be a product fit versus a demand fit. Maybe the demand is out there. And so even just testing a couple to start with, and then expanding like you did, you know, it's better to make the investment than to let them sit idle and never sell. Sure. And we probably would have made the investment sooner,
00:29:26 but we were kind of on pause, you know, during the day, I'm sure everybody listening is thinking the same thing. Of course you, weren't going to do that, you know, until things until you really start seeing folks come back in. Yeah. But the other thing that we see is like when our private offices are sold out, you know,
00:29:41 the dedicated desks fill up more. And so we, we are sold out in our locations for our private offices again. And so we're looking for people to, you know, and we do have occupancy there and we are doing very, very well for, but I like 90% give Me totally, exactly. You know, And plus we just want to make it better for people and feel comfortable.
00:30:00 So I don't want it to sound like, you know, Oh, we're not selling those, but it would just, how do we enhance what we have to make people more comfortable? So that's really important to do is to evaluate that and know when people do come in, if they are going to have dedicated desk, you know, where they're going to pay for that,
00:30:15 like, that's just something very appealing. But what Did you increase in Arlington Heights? Will you increase the dedicated desk price or is that just the new offerings? Well, we had some promotions actually during COVID getting people back in and we will probably go back up or we're inching at that to go back to our base price, original price where we were at,
00:30:37 but we haven't really had problems with pricing. I think people were just more hesitant on just one big wide open space. And then they say, if I'm going to do that, I'll just be in the flux. So we have more flex members than we've ever had before. So maybe that's some, I've been talking a lot of co-working, you know,
00:30:56 people and that's common. So anyway, another thing that we want to talk, I want to talk to you guys about is does some of the new products, solutions or things that people are asking for that we can adapt for in furniture or room layouts in our spaces. And one of which is called a project room. Interestingly enough, there are a lot of the third party vendors who talk about what the needs are and what people are calling or asking for what is being searched in project rooms are one of them.
00:31:29 So you all might already have what you would call a project room. It's not a meeting room or not an office, but what kind of furniture would a project room need? So if you think about it, if people are going to do their dedicated work at home, and then they want to come together to not just socialize, but work collectively or in a collaboration with their workmates,
00:31:51 like, what is it that they're going to do? They're going to brainstorm. They're going to ideate. So we need marker walls or mobile marker boards. We need tables or desks that can move around and they can configure them. However they want to, if they want to sit, you know, altogether in a circle, in a circle, if they want to sit like classroom style,
00:32:08 if they want to do brainstorming and put some lounge furniture in there, how do you make a room that is like a brainstorming room kind of thing. So working collectively on projects, writeable surfaces, as all of the studies shows 64% of collaborative spaces are being used in the Sydney Salesforce office versus 24% at desks. Let's make sure we're providing that. I mean,
00:32:32 you don't have to, you could take a team room and turn it into a project room. Maybe your team rooms, big rooms aren't selling. I love that Because that is one of the most common challenges I'm hearing from my members and students is we have the team rooms. They're not moving yet. I mean, some of them are starting to look ahead to maybe end of summer,
00:32:55 but it's a right. What do you do with that space? And The project rooms think about it. You could rent them for a couple hours or they could be just a couple of day project, or it could be a three week project. So it might not be the long-term solution that you want. You might want the recurring revenue for an office,
00:33:10 but can we just, it's just a great idea for us to do with our existing space. Yep. But I love, I think, so you mentioned data that people are searching that term. So that's great. Look at your Google analytics and see, you know, is anybody looking at your site and then show them that you serve that need, because people may look at meeting rooms that you have posted on an hourly rate.
00:33:32 I that's, the other thing we've been talking about a lot in our flight groups is, you know, showing people use cases like people need to see what what's possible because they don't necessarily know, Oh, can I use it in that way? So show them a photo of a, you know, of a project room, Go make it up yourself,
00:33:51 go bring your own team in there and totally Right on your Rocks, work on your 30 day goals. And like, what does it look like up in the room and just think of how you and your team would need the space. Yeah. And just take a photo, put it on your website, put it on social media. Because I think for folks,
00:34:07 because also I think this user we're going to have our typical like preneurs, you know, professional services folks, they're going to probably keep using the space similarly. Right. So we've got that sort of core member, but you're describing, you know, maybe a new member that we didn't have before that needs that space. And so how do we sh you know,
00:34:26 connect the dots for them that, Oh, you can do that here. You know, you don't have to go to the corporate campus or you don't have to like sit at Starbucks and pick up, you know, a whole table. You can do that here. And that's a great use case. So another thing people are, I mean, zoom is not going away.
00:34:41 So let's just say, it's not going quick, but in person meeting is coming back, but there will still be people that won't be traveling. So let's just say, you know, Jamie, you and I live across the country from each other, and maybe I'm going to have a couple of people, but we want you in our meeting. You're not going to get on a plane to come see me,
00:35:00 but we can zoom you in. So I call these video casting rooms. So basically it would be a room that's set up to accommodate in-person and remote connection. So how do we set that up? So zoom rooms are very expensive, but you know, having the ability to cast your, you know, up on your led monitor, what's going on,
00:35:22 maybe on your laptop sharing or monitoring and having some cameras or something else that you could do, but you want the ability in your meeting rooms to maybe it's a conference phone, those come back without everyone turning on and off there a mute button whenever, when someone's going to talk. So is it a conference phone? Is it a camera that you need?
00:35:46 How can you adapt to the need of these meetings? It will happen in all different sizes, you know, in a video casting way, obviously podcasts in video casting, everyone's getting, you know, has podcasts needs. We have a couple, we have podcasts rooms actually in our Alexandria location. And we have sometimes two podcasts going on at the same time.
00:36:08 So we converted a meeting room to be a studio. So it has a meeting area and a lounge area with the ability to do podcasts. Plus we have a podcast studio. I love that those have been really popular. So On the video casting, one of my flight group members, I will give a shout out to Amy at Rowan tree invested in a tool.
00:36:29 Well, it's not really a tool it's called an owl. So it can like it senses who's in the room and who's talking, it's very cute. It looks like an owl, like the bird. And it sits, I think it sits in the middle of the room, but somehow it knows it's designed to support the folks who are not in the room.
00:36:48 Right. There's and it's more affordable than outfitting a zoom room, right? Yeah. But it accomplishes that function. So, you know, investing in some of those things and marketing the room as right. A video casting room, again, making sure it's super clear, like, Hey, you can do this year. The room's designed for that For sure.
00:37:07 The other thing that is, if we think about all these corporations or companies who are deciding to give up a corporate or leased office, what is it that they normally have in their space? So, you know, you have a list, okay. 2000 square feet is what someone is coming from. And if you take it, you know, division of 200 square foot per person,
00:37:29 that's really like a 10 person team room. But what went into the 2000 square feet that does not fit into a 10% team room, and that would be some storage. So there is a, there's a need for these businesses who are coming to co-work or we'll set that up. If they don't have like a flex suite or, you know, they're independent spec suites,
00:37:51 what would they need? So, you know, lockers, that's something that we've all had. Are we telling everyone we have lockers that we don't have lockers? Are you charging for them or not, but in people's offices. So I always talk about things you need throughout the day need to be in your office. Things that you use like monthly or regularly could be outside your office,
00:38:13 but then things that you need like on an occasion could be in another storage. So we're really fortunate that we have lockers at all of our locations, but we also have cages at several of our locations. And so we rent out these cages for, you know, customer kits, you know, like if you have customer samples, sales kits, promotional materials,
00:38:33 yes. People still use stationary, you know, do mailers, things like that. What is it that people really need to store? I mean, even in my home office, I have piles of different things, you know, that I like to reference or even, you know, books or something like that. So how do we need to monetize on that?
00:38:51 So, you know, I'm going to suggest rentable storage. So what is it that you have that you could turn into revenue for? So working with a client with a file cabinet, you can get a bank of vertical file chemist or a member in the old offices. There were banks and banks of file drawers. Well, you know, they come where you can lock one cabinet or you can have individual locks for each interesting.
00:39:16 So you could like sell a drawer for that drawer. Right? So lots of different things we want to think about again, And that solution over the mobile pen, honestly, because Jerome Chang always talks about, do you know what people put in those pets gum and paper clips, right? Files are people who are used to working in bigger. They may have stuff,
00:39:39 manuals and training things and great things they need to reference to your point. That's it? I like that idea have sort of a wall where you can rent a drawer instead of having it sitting into your desk. Thank you. Yeah. So I mean, just some things that, you know, to think about, but rentable storage and having storage is something that,
00:39:56 you know, everyone needs to kind of think about as a full solution. If you're going to be a full solution for a company, what do they need? Like if you Love it, what are, you said, you're a designer, You went to their old office and you thought, okay, I have to get all of that into like, how can we accommodate that?
00:40:12 Right. So those are the kinds of things that, you know, obviously Workday studio does with its clients, but at the same time, like here we are, we have to offer something to people coming in the door. So that's just another kind of idea besides, you know, creating the on demand space. But in addition to that, there's a lot of things that people might need that you,
00:40:36 as an owner can offer and get additional revenue for. And, you know, maybe they're non-essential to the workplace and not included in their regular package, but there are things that you could add on revenue for as aside whether they buy them and bring them in themselves, or if you charge a flat fee or even like a monthly fee for them, you know,
00:40:58 many of us have voice over IP phones that we do. We have mail service that we do, but there's lots of little elements that someone might want. Like, let's say someone wants a height adjustable desk. It's not your standard offering, but you could charge them, you know, an extra $40 a month for something like that with a year contract or however you might decide,
00:41:17 you know, well, how you offer that. There's so many different solutions for sit, stand there's stands. You could put on a desktop, but that will raise the monitor. There's just a monitor stand conversion type things. There's search. Maybe they want those storage cabinets in their office. You're willing to get it for them, but then you just add it to their monthly amount.
00:41:37 You know, they don't need to make the investment, you know, upfront to buy it and bring it in. They don't have to own it if they don't want to, but you, as the coworking operator could provide them solutions on a sell sheet. Now here's just some options. If you want, like here, we can upgrade anything you'd like,
00:41:53 and we'll just add up the charge to you. And you still have that. You could start with the things that you can easily order that you don't have to inventory. Right. Cause I think that's the challenge as well. I don't know what people will buy. I don't want to have things on hand that I've purchased that people don't use. And I love just making that offer because I think sometimes we assume if we don't want something or,
00:42:14 you know, if our previous members never would have, you know, paid for an upgrade, well, we have new users coming in and some of them are used to being in a corporate environment. And of course they have a sit-stand desk and of course I'm not going to work without a sit-stand desk. So yes, I will pay for it. That's no problem.
00:42:29 And I love the idea of just thinking about what, what else might they want and are they willing to pay for it? And don't, don't be afraid to ask because I think we are in this mindset of all-inclusive. And I think that is important to an extent we don't want to nickel and dime people. Usually that's our model, right? We don't want to charge them for coffee.
00:42:49 We want the coffee to be included. But for the upgrades, you know, there's always a segment of folks who are willing to pay more, but oftentimes we don't ask. So I love that you're bringing that up. Well, the thing too is like everyone's been working at home and been comfortable, whether they're comfortable or not. Maybe they aren't obviously home or lonely are two different things,
00:43:08 but they kind of set it up. They wanted it. So if we want people to stay at a coworking space, we want them to set it up where they want to come. So we want them to be comfortable. The more they personalize it, the more they set it up, I think the longer they'll stay, Oh wait, who just shared that?
00:43:23 Somebody just shared that stat with me, that they, who was that team. I brought it up on a call. I was on recently and they said they have data that shows that right. If they, if someone customizes their office, then right, they stay much longer, a lot longer. And they pay for it. They pay for the service.
00:43:47 Oh, would they want to pay too? So whiteboards mobile whiteboards and Mt. Then and logos, people want their logos. So whether, you know, they put that, we have a standard that we say you can have a logo. It cost X amount of dollars. It's vinyl. We put it on the glass. So it's easy to take down if they leave,
00:44:06 you know, or not, but they just have to follow certain rules, but people might want that, you know, and just eating And a rug or hang things on their wall. And of course it should be approved tomorrow. I know you have a request form. So nobody goes wild with what they put in their office. But right. If it's more than that,
00:44:22 The command strips are like key and also make sure you have them move in, move out checklists. Because when people move in, what condition is it? And when they move out what condition it is. So when they sign a contract with us, they know if there's any damage left, if they do hang things that it's up to them with their security deposit,
00:44:40 that they're going to be paying for that for any damage left, just like you would in an apartment or any other officer's something like that. It's just business. So making sure everyone understands that, and there is an official formal walkthrough at the start and end of a contract. Yep. I love that. Yeah. So those are just some ideas. Maybe someone wants to personalize it with lounge furniture,
00:45:01 aside chairs or tables. And basically you probably have those in the space, but they should not be included as standard. So what do you want to, you know, what do they, are they willing to pay to have that extra? Or if they're allowed to bring it in, you know, what is your policy for them to bring it in?
00:45:14 So, But I think right. Think through it, one of the, I think challenges that we have is we like to say yes, so don't say yes, immediately. Think about, okay, what can I do to accommodate that? And how much should I charge? You're happy to get it for them. And you're happy to, you know,
00:45:30 move it in and move it out. So you could walk in the door, we'll take care of it, but you know, it's a cost to you. That doesn't mean you can't pass it on. Yep. So just another thing to think about is what does flexible mean for an office? So for a private longer term private office versus maybe something that's shorter term,
00:45:53 and, you know, we talked about semi-private to private. We talked about kit of parts, but you know, right now, if you're having a hard time selling those larger team rooms, or if you are having requests for people who want to come in only sometime, could you share an office with someone, could there be two different members who someone uses it Monday,
00:46:13 Wednesday, Friday, someone uses it Tuesday, Thursday, so they could share the cost of it. And it's not really hoteling it's, but it's kind of like your flex desk, but a flex office, but you have permanent users. And what would you have to do different to accommodate that? You know, maybe they have their own storage pedestal, you know,
00:46:32 maybe they don't need that, but okay. Can lock a bowl that could be in there. That can be yep. So just something to think about, you know, what that means. Yeah. The private and you know what I just, I remembered who mentioned the design and that people stay longer. Carl from Australia, I was in a call with Australia last week.
00:46:51 They invited me, there's an Australian co-working group and they invited me to come chat. And Carl Sullivan was sharing that tip on design. And he also mentioned he's renting his team rooms by the day and having success with that. And of course, right, the flexibility, we don't love, we like recurring revenue, but right. How do you get people to use it now?
00:47:10 And I love the project room idea that you suggested. Thank you. Those are some of those are some of the things I wanted to share with everyone today. Yeah. I think this is a time of being like really influx. I love, you know, you mentioned right at the beginning, like, look, we're always watching, we're learning, we're looking to see what are people searching for?
00:47:30 What are they asking for? What are they using with their butts and how do we adjust? And sometimes, you know, I think the trick with our, our model is, well, if you're stuck, if you're finding like, well, everyone wants a private office, you can't necessarily go build 20 more private offices. You know, that's not part of the model and not part of an investment you can make,
00:47:53 but what can you do to make small changes that make people feel more comfortable because in our business look, every little thing matters, right? Even, you know, even increasing, you know, the average, they talk about this in the fitness industry and I've been talking about it like average revenue per member. Well, what if everybody was paying a little extra for a sit-stand desk or for storage or for,
00:48:13 you know, that would make a difference on the monthly P and L or if you're selling a couple more dedicated desks because you made some tweaks and made that investment. So you've shared a lot to think about. And I think that's kind of the thing we're always in that with our, with our business, because it's evolving, but it's certainly, you know,
00:48:30 the evolution has accelerated with COVID and we're seeing a lot of change. So it's great to have somebody come. And I think we can be married to the way we did it this way. When we started, we have to really, really understand that, you know, in serving our members, you know, their needs change too. So how are we going to change and adapt to that?
00:48:52 And, you know, if we can make some subtle changes or if we can make some enhancements that people feel like it's, it's refreshed and that we care and, Oh, isn't this fabulous make the, maybe they're willing to pay for that too. You know, we'll into your point, Even just willing to, you know, leave the home office because so many folks have gotten comfortable there and we don't want them to be,
00:49:15 we want them to, you know, come in at least for the time and use our space. So Mara, we'll put your links in the show notes. Do you have a preferred way for people to find you online? We'll link to twenty-five North and workplace studio. If folks want to learn more about your design services and your business, what's the best way to get in touch?
00:49:35 Just email me@maramaraattwentyfivencoworking.com. Awesome. Mara, thank you for joining us for episode number 200. We look forward to having you back at the next time. We'll have to start planning a number two 50. Perfect. Thanks Mara.
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