205. It's Summer in Coworking. 6 Things You can do to Stay Productive Until your Members Return in the Fall

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205. It's Summer in Coworking. 6 Things You can do to Stay Productive Until your Members Return in the Fall

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 co-working space owner and trend expert. Jamie Russo.<inaudible> Welcome to the everything coworking podcast. This is your host. Jamie Russo. Thank you for joining me. So I was on a call the other day with my flight group members.

00:00:38 We have a special interest group on the traction process, which we follow somewhat loosely. It's an accountability group and we meet weekly. So we were talking about, you know, what's on the list. And one of the members said, it's really quiet here. She lives in the Southern half of the United States, where it is already super toasty. People are busy traveling.

00:01:01 They go places that are cooler. And so she's like, you know, struggling because she feels a little out of control around lead gen. She recently opened and is trying to continue to fill her space. So we were talking through the list of things she's working on over the summer. And I thought this is a great topic for the podcast. So we're going to talk about six things you can do to stay productive this summer,

00:01:27 summer being in north America or the Northern half of the, sorry, the Northern hemisphere. I know our friends in Australia are experiencing winter. So, you know, not as relevant for them, but whenever summer comes around for you, it tends to slow down. Right? Parents have kids home. They're dealing with camp schedules. They're trying to see family members.

00:01:58 I suspect particularly this summer, there is a lot of travel happening. And so folks are pausing memberships. They're certainly not joining coworking spaces if they're not already a member. And so it can be a quiet time for leads and tours and converting new members. So my first tip for getting through the summer is take time off yourself. Yeah. Being an entrepreneur is a lot of work.

00:02:29 It's a lot of stress. It's a lot of everything, right? So you need to recharge. I have. So my daughter has not seen my parents in two years. They don't travel much. And we typically go there once a year. So we happen to be about exactly off cycle. And haven't been since June of 2019. So as soon as school is out next week,

00:02:56 we are on a plane to the east for my upstate New York friends, listening tickets to Syracuse were, were not palatable. So we are flying to Newark and driving to the middle of nowhere in very upstate New York, but we're looking forward to it. And my mom sort of tested me a little bit last week. She said, so are you working while you're here?

00:03:23 And I actually blocked my calendar completely off. No, no zoom meetings that week. And I said, well, I said, I'm probably not going to do no work, but I don't have any meetings scheduled. And she said, well, that's good because the internet is a little questionable these days. She's like, I keep calling them. There's something wrong with the lines.

00:03:45 They haven't fixed it yet. So I'm not sure if you can even do zoom calls. So he said, okay. So I keep getting tempted. When I get meeting requests for that week to say, I will take those meetings because I hate to miss out FOMO so much FOMO when you're an entrepreneur, right? But I'm trying to stick to my guns and say,

00:04:06 no meetings, not even a phone call. They don't even really have cell phone service. I grew up on a farm really in the middle of nowhere. There are no traffic lights in my town. There's a stop sign about 10 minutes away. So this is good. It's good for me to go places where the internet is questionable. So if you have the same personality that's tempted to work with,

00:04:33 even when you're on vacation, try going someplace off the grid, but take time off. It's super important. I'm looking forward to it. It has been awhile. So schedule that in and don't feel guilty because it's quiet. This is what your members are doing. It's the perfect time to be away. But once you're done with your vacation, I have a list of other projects because I know how you are and you want to get things done and you want to stay focused.

00:05:01 So let's get ready September. If you're newer to coworking, September that sort of back to school again for the Northern hemisphere back to school season applies to parents too, right? We get the kids back in school. We get our own routine back. We can leave the house every day. We don't have to worry about the kids being at home or abbreviated camp schedules.

00:05:22 And we want to get ready to just rock it for the rest of the year, right? September to December, lots of things need to need to get done business wise. So coworking decisions definitely get made late August, early September. So you want to lead up to that. So here's some things you can do optimize your website. You know, I've been talking about the website so much lately,

00:05:49 and that is because there's a lot of opportunity for lots of coworking spaces out there. So listen to episode number 2 0 1, which is called the uni, what you're selling, but do your potential customers episode number 194, the importance of walking into your customers, right? Shoes, which walks through kind of how to evaluate, wait your website, not from your perspective,

00:06:15 but from your customer's perspective. And we're going to go back to 1 51, which is a Don Miller inspired episode on internal versus external problems. Which ones do you solve? So if schedule some time to do some website work, maybe schedule a couple hours every week. I love to time block. I block everything out on my calendar because it's not on my calendar is not getting done.

00:06:41 So give yourself some web website, project time, review these web, these episodes as kind of prep work, and then, you know, work through them and do the recommendations. Do the review, get your messaging down, test some messaging and get your website ready because we're going to talk about kind of ads and CRM and some other marketing related things.

00:07:04 But if your website is not ready to go convert, all the other things don't matter. So your website has to be rocking and rolling. So take some time off reset, recharge, and start with your website. The next thing I would probably do, and it depends on the size of your space is set up your CRM. So even if your CRM is a spreadsheet,

00:07:26 have a system in place, because the worst thing you can do is lose leads when they come in or not know who's followed up with them. Or when the last time is that you followed up with them or did they get added to your marketing newsletter or, you know, where are they in your lead up process? Because having a systematic process in place to manage leads is really critical to closing leads,

00:07:55 right? So yeah, so lots of folks, not lots of folks, sometimes segment of your leads will know what they're looking for. They'll come in and they'll be ready to sign up, they're shopping and they're going to make a decision. And then, but they won't that you may not be the decision that they make. If you don't have a professional followup system and stay connected to them,

00:08:17 answer all of their questions, et cetera. If you let an email or a phone call go by without responding, then they may pick another location. Those are your super warm leads. And then you have the folks that are really still exploring, and maybe they're not totally ready to commit. And you want them on your marketing newsletter on a nurture sequence.

00:08:36 We just did a training on that for our community manager university members. You want to help them overcome objections and learn more about coworking and learn more about your membership. And you want to make sure you have a process in place for helping them to do that through a newsletter or a nurture sequence. So you need a way to keep track of all of that.

00:08:56 So again, it can be in a spreadsheet if you have a smaller space and you doesn't make sense for you to set up a, you know, a full on CRM. But if you, if this has been on your list for awhile, then summertime is the perfect time to get it set up and get yourself trained. And your team trained. Just pick one.

00:09:16 I recommend pipe drive. A lot of my flight group members use it and it works really well for our industry. The way it kind of tracks leads through a life cycle. It's pretty intuitive to how our sales cycles work. Get your workflow documented first. So figure out, okay, what do I want to do with the leads? You know, what emails do they get?

00:09:37 What phone calls do they get, et cetera, how do they get tagged in my email system? And then set up your CRM system to follow that workflow? I think that'll kind of simplify it for you. And again, don't spend too much time evaluating systems, just pick one and open pipe drive first, if you don't like it, there's something you don't like about it,

00:09:59 then pick it up for one, but do it quickly. The tech and tools guide, which we've talked about a few times on the podcast has a list of CRMs that are used by coworking spaces. So you can grab that on the website. The next thing you should think about, and we have a podcast coming up on this topic to dive into more detail,

00:10:22 but I think it's a really important concept to start thinking about in front of folks, coming into the space and being ready to sign up in the fall, calculate your customer lifetime value and get super clear on who you want to attract in the fall and how much you want to spend on ads. So again, we're going to do a podcast on this soon to kind of dive into details,

00:10:49 but if you aren't familiar with the concept of customer lifetime value, it's an important metric to be tracking. So it is the value, the sort of the average value in revenue that a customer brings to your business over time. So the way we would calculate this in coworking is average monthly revenue times the number of average tenure of a member. And that would give us that number.

00:11:16 I think for coworking, it makes a lot of sense to break it out by product. So I mean by that, I mean office dedicated desk cut desk because the lifetime value is so different among those products. So an example would be an office if you have an office and it rents for a thousand dollars or not rents, but the membership, the membership fee on an office,

00:11:44 monthly is a thousand dollars and the average member stays for 12 months. Then your customer lifetime value to really simplify it is $12,000, a thousand dollars times 12, right? So if you think about it that way, if you have an office open or five offices open and it might cost you $500 in Google ads to acquire one customer, that's probably a very high number for an office acquisition.

00:12:14 But just for example, if it costs you $500, then your simplified profit on that is still $12,000 minus the $500. It costs you to acquire that customer, which is $11,500. So I see a resistance in operators to running ads. And if it's quiet for you in the summer, and you have some offices open or some dedicated desks open, then the,

00:12:42 you know, going into fall like mid August maybe would be a good time to be ramping up some Google ads depending on the type of market you're in. But if Google ads make sense for your market, you should run them. If you have open inventory, the ROI may be more challenging for open seats because of the customer, the lifetime value and the acquisition costs,

00:13:03 but you could test them, but knowing your customer lifetime value is a good way to get comfortable with spending that money upfront because it feels like a cost, right? It feels like, okay, it costs me money to run Google ads or Facebook ads, but it's really an investment. And there is a huge return on that investment in our industry. There are some industries where you spend thousands of dollars to acquire a customer and in our industry is generally not the case,

00:13:35 right? Markets can be different and can be very specific. But again, if the average tenure of one of your members is about a year, which is industry average for an office and you only spend 500 or even a thousand dollars to acquire them, that may be a painful spend upfront, but you have to look at the return and the business model overall,

00:13:58 don't look at, you know, one individual payment that you're making for ads. You have to look at the return on that. So the first step in getting comfortable with that is knowing your customer lifetime value. So get that down and then use that to create a customer acquisition plan for August, September, which is my fifth suggestion for ways to help yourself feel productive and get ready for the fall.

00:14:25 In episode number 135, Kevin Whelan shares a five-step framework to crafting a strategic marketing plan for your coworking business. That's a great place to start in terms of an overall marketing plan. He also did an episode on Google ads. I think it's number 97, 1 of our most popular episodes. And once you know that customer lifetime value number, think about running ads.

00:14:50 Ruben Lau was on the podcast a few episodes ago and talked about SEO and running ads. He will do an assessment of your market and your business and let you know if there's a return for you on running ads. He's an excellent resource. A number of my flight group members are working with him. So if you're getting ready to run ads, you can go to the show notes and find his contact info and,

00:15:14 you know, get ready to acquire customers in a very intentional invested way versus relying entirely on organic methods. Although there, you may know what works for your business and some of those things may be organic. Is it a referral program? Do you find that those work really well for you? I find that they can be a little bit tricky to get people to actually bring in a friend.

00:15:40 So one thing you might do is ask members for emails. Hey, do you have some friends that are traveling for the summer, but you know, have a small business or need to get out of the house in the fall? Can I have their email and can I invite them in for a day pass or, you know, a member event, et cetera,

00:15:56 but be intentional and plan ahead start. Now you can use this downtime after you take your time off and recharge and plan a customer acquisition strategy for August and September, make a plan and be intentional. My sixth suggestion is to map out a customer success journey and put those systems in place to execute when you bring on new members in September. So one of the concepts around customer lifetime value is that that value increases as a customer stays in your business longer,

00:16:31 which makes complete sense. And so if we can have a customer success journey and have systematic, intentional touch points throughout their customer journey, that helps them to stay longer than that increases their value. And as their value increases, the ROI on that ad spend also goes up. And so it's just a huge win. So episode 190 is about onboarding new members with intention for retention.

00:17:01 So if your onboarding process needs a little refresh, that might be some good inspiration episode. Number 133 is a five step framework for developing your member events calendar outside of office members. I suspect that your open space and use this back to the here open space members are there for different reasons, right? They don't just need a place to make phone calls or do zoom calls.

00:17:27 They want to be a part of something. And they may not exactly know that when they join, but that's really what retains the flex desk members, maybe even dedicated desk members, right, is those connections that they make events that they attend. And so start being intentional about the, you know, sort of end of year event calendar and the five step framework walks you through how to think about what types of events to host that are relevant and meaningful for your members versus just kind of guessing and during spaghetti at the wall.

00:18:01 And in terms of KPI tracking, try to get a sense for what does matter to your members. What does retain them? We're going to talk more about that in that customer lifetime value podcast coming up, but you probably have a sense if you've been operating for a while, what are things that, you know, if a member does in your space helps them to stay in in your team can have input on this,

00:18:27 but track those things with your team and intentionally and systematically add those to your customer success journey. So is it that they meet two members in the first few weeks, you know, and how do they do that as an introduction by your team? Do they attend an event? Is there a mentor or a buddy in the space that helps them do that,

00:18:48 takes them out to lunch, et cetera. So what are the things that tend to make people happy and sticky in, within your community and how can you make sure those things happen so that you're increasing that member tenure and increasing that customer lifetime value. So a lot here, I'm going to run back through my list of six, take time off, optimize your website,

00:19:14 set up your CRM, calculate your customer lifetime value, create a customer acquisition plan for August, September, and map out your customer success journey and put systems in place to execute that plan so that you can retain those new members. So we're kind of revisiting some topics we've talked about. It's kind of an, an implementation episode rather than a talk about something new episode,

00:19:41 which I think is a great way to approach some downtime in the summer. So hope you're all well, and I hope you're getting some rest and recharge or a fun family adventure since we've been a long time without those, we'd love to hear what you're up to make sure we'd love to hear in the Facebook group, what you're going to spend your summer focusing on everything coworking club,

00:20:06 or you can just search for the, everything co-working under groups on Facebook. We'd love to see you in there so hope you are all well, and we'll see you next week for another interview with a special guest.

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