228. The New Rules of Engagement for Coworking Spaces - Who You Serve
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TRANSCRIPTION
228. The New Rules of Engagement for Coworking Spaces - Who You Serve
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 co-working space owner and trend expert. Jamie Russo. Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast. This is your host. Jamie Russo. Thank you for joining me. So we're in the middle of a series talking about the new rules of engagement for coworking spaces.
00:00:40 And we should have started with this topic instead, I started with what you sell, but the fundamental question that one asks before, one decides what to sell is who you serve, who is your ideal member, or rather your ideal member, community avatar. So you're not going to have just one profile that makes up your ideal member. Usually you're going to have a,
00:01:11 maybe a mindset or a, you know, sort of a type of person that's going to be drawn to your space for various reasons. So who do those folks look like? What did they do for work? Why do they leave their house? Why do they need space? What do they want to get out of the space that makes you and your brand?
00:01:33 And maybe not you personally, but your team, your brand, your space, the best solution for them. So this is one of the big questions we need to ask ourselves post COVID or wherever we are in relation to COVID because many of you lost your memberships and are really rebuilding post COVID. So we need to ask who do we serve? And then we answer all of the questions around what we sell and who,
00:02:04 how we market to those folks. So the, I would say in general, the potential membership for Coworking has really evolved over the last few years and particularly has been accelerated due to COVID. So Coworking started as a solution, primarily for freelancers and solo preneurs. They wanted to get out of the house. They wanted to network, they wanted to be productive.
00:02:32 They wanted something better than the coffee shop. They wanted to find, you know, their people, their community. It's also evolved as a solution for professional service professionals that need small private offices. Over time. It has started to grow into a flexible option for tech, startups, and small businesses that want the benefits of, you know, large company amenities and really nice places to work and a service environment so that they don't have to worry about all the details of running an office space and with the flexibility that allows them to avoid signing long-term leases,
00:03:12 because they don't know how much space they need in the short term or the longterm and post COVID. We know flex is starting to be ideal for remote workers and teams that don't want to go to headquarters, you know, every day, who might want solutions for their teams or individuals outside of the corporate office. So how coworking space operators need to think about who they serve is art,
00:03:40 who are they serving post COVID has that changed? And then what do they need to adjust based on who they're serving? So if you, so you can ask the self, your question, this question, if you're starting a new space, if you are rebuilding your current location, or if you are looking to expand. So if you have a current location,
00:04:01 do you need to adjust who you serve in order to fill back up? And hopefully many of you are already filling back up. If you're struggling to fill back up, it may be because you need to revisit who your ideal member is and how you're talking to them, how you're finding them and maybe what you're selling. So, one example that I hear folks struggling a little bit with is attorneys.
00:04:25 So attorneys used to be maybe not so much for Coworking, but a great executive suite member and someone that needed an office, right? Attorneys go to an office, their files, that there are at the office there, computers at the office, like this is what they do. They go to the office and they need space near courthouses. And, you know,
00:04:46 they were pretty predictable in terms of being great flexible office clients today, you know, during COVID they all went home and they all learned the technology. They need to learn to work at home. They figured out how to deal with their files. They figured out how to meet with clients from a home office, probably attorneys have reasonably nice homes with big home offices.
00:05:10 So they got comfortable there and it may be harder to lure them back out of their homes. So if they used to be an ideal client that may have changed, and many of you are probably not serving attorneys, but sell them. You certainly are. Are there other folks that left and maybe we're happy to remove Coworking from their budget because they don't,
00:05:33 you know, need it. The creative industry it's prob probably falls into that category. They don't need to go to a coworking space unless they have a team, an agency they need to see clients. They may have removed those barriers during COVID and you know, they're comfortably at home. So again, we have to speak to them differently and we, them back in or focus on a different member segment that requires,
00:06:02 you know, has a higher need for joining a coworking space than the creative group. And again, I'm absolutely not saying no creative joined co-working spaces anymore, but the barriers, little higher, right. To bring them back in now that everybody got really used to being at home. If you're in this situation, where is the low-hanging fruit demand wise? So that's going to be really market specific,
00:06:29 right? This is where we want to really have the systems in place. Look at your tour data. Who's coming in. What do they do for work? Why are they telling you they need to leave their house? We are, how are they finding you? So we had this discussion on our Community Manager call this week. And one of our Community Manager members said,
00:06:52 he asked every single person who walks in the door. How did you find us? And he said, if they say something vague, like online, he says, look, I'm, we're a small business. And it's really important to us to know where our potential members come from. Can you give me a little more detail? Did you search on Google?
00:07:10 Did you, you know, he kind of probes a little bit and he said, most of the folks who are coming in, they totally relate to the fact that you want to get an ROI on your paid advertising and you need to know that answer. So he said, they'll kind of dig through the memory files and help them out. So how are folks finding you?
00:07:28 Why, why are they looking for space? What do they do for work? And if there's a trend to there, consider trying to find more of those types of folks. And again, they don't all have to do the same job. You know, I mentioned lawyers is sort of a, an industry of people who do the same job, but it could be a mindset.
00:07:45 It could be, you know, right. People with teams, people who really want to support the downtown area, like whatever it is, that's luring people out of their home to make them actively pursue a coworking space. How can you find more of them if you're seeing a trend? Hey, I just wanted to jump in really quickly before we continue with our discussion.
00:08:07 If you're working on opening a coworking space, I want to invite you to join me for my free masterclass three behind the scenes secrets to opening a co-working space. If you're working on opening a coworking space, I want to share the three decisions that I've seen successful operators make when they're creating their Coworking business. The masterclass is totally free. It's about an hour and include some Q and a.
00:08:31 If you'd like to join me, you can register at Everything. Coworking dot com forward slash masterclass. If you already have a coworking space, I want to make sure you know, about Community Manager, University, Community Manager, University is a training and development platform for community managers. And it can be for owner operators. It has content training resources, templates from day one to general manager.
00:08:58 The platform includes many courses that cover the major buckets of the Community Manager role from community management, operations, sales, and marketing, finance, and leadership. The content is laid out in a graduated learning path. So the Community Manager can identify what content is most relevant to them, depending on their experience and kind of jump in from there. We provide a live brand new training every single month for the Community Manager group.
00:09:26 We also host a live Q and a call every single month so that the community managers can work through any challenges that they're having or opportunities get ideas from other community managers build their own peer network. We also have a private slack group for the group. So if you're interested in learning more, you can go to Everything. Coworking dot com forward slash Community Manager.
00:09:50 If you need to adjust who you serve, will you need to adjust your physical space in order to attract them. So this can be challenging cause adjusting our physical space cost money and is an investment that we need to make, right? But it's something you might need to consider figuring out how to do. So if you have folks coming in that are looking for private space,
00:10:16 and if you're going through your tour data, and you're saying, look, almost everybody who comes in wants private space and we don't have enough. That's full. You may need to find a way to add offices or to create more privacy around your dedicated desks. Can you add privacy screens? Can you separate the PRI the dedicated desk a little bit more?
00:10:37 Can you do dedicated offices that have dedicated desks in them? Can you add more phone booths? One of our Flight Group members mentioned that he added new phone booths in his space and he said he literally could just see the difference in the tourist that he was given for open space memberships. They could see those phone booths. They underst you know, they could see that they were plentiful and believed that there would be an option for them when they needed to take a phone call.
00:11:03 So maybe they didn't need a full-time office, but they needed to have access to a place to make a phone call. And he said, the phone booths are busy all the time, but it's useful for his members and they are, he's selling more dedicated desks and hot desk because of them. Do you need to elevate anything due to a shift in who you're trying to attract?
00:11:23 Do you need to elevate your technology? Do you need different door access? Do you need to make it easier for folks to book meeting rooms? For example, do you need different furniture? You'll have to question a lot of things. If you have to shift who you're serving, but you want to be honest with yourself about this and maybe do this exercise with someone else,
00:11:44 because if you are not getting back to capacity and you can't sort of identify what the issue is may just be that you need to focus on serving someone else. And you have to make sure that all the aspects of your business align with who that ideal member is. And who's actively searching for space. If you're thinking about expanding. So maybe your space is full and you're getting a sense of like,
00:12:10 look, these are the people who are coming in and booking memberships. You may want to do more of that. Or you may say, okay, I'm going to expand. Who do I want to serve in this expansion space that we know is becoming a broader demand sector. So do you want to serve the enterprise audience by expanding within your building, through our partnership with your landlord?
00:12:32 And in the final episode of this series, I'm doing a conversation with Mike Abrams. Who's been on the podcast before to talk about shifting real estate structures. So do you want to get into a creative partnership with your landlord and expand within the building or a landlord on the other side of town and do larger teams suites and do it on a management agreement model so that you're not the one investing and sometimes teams suites can require fewer private spaces making them easier to implement.
00:13:04 Do you want to look at the HQ model? So similar to team suites, but a little, maybe a little more customization, maybe a larger seat requirement. So you could attract sort of bigger small businesses or enterprise clients. And you could do that with a landlord partnership as well. So you might want to be looking at serving different markets that you simply can't serve in your space today because you don't have the capacity,
00:13:29 but if you expanded, then you could design a space. That's more suited to serving the new demand that we see coming in as teams are moving out of their headquarters, as small businesses are giving up leases. And again, this is happening over time. So it's not going to be an overnight thing, but if you're going to sign a lease, you know,
00:13:48 in a year and over the next couple of years, after that, you're going to be looking to fill up that space and make it a sustainable business. You're going to have, you know, we're going to start seeing these leases being given up. And these enterprise companies starting to shift into their hybrid work models. So there's a lot to consider, but this is the time.
00:14:10 And it's a great as things start to quiet down in December and your members, you know, start to kind of go off on their holidays to take a look at your data. And if you're not capturing this data, this is a great time to be thinking about implementing a CRM and making sure that you're capturing data on who's coming in for a tour.
00:14:30 At the very least, you should use a spreadsheet. So create a tour spreadsheet that that requires your Community Manager. Whoever's giving the tours to document, you know, where these folks come from, what they do, why they need a space, who the decision-maker is when they're going to decide all those things and really mine that data for insights about what's going on,
00:14:50 because probably you're in one of the camps of you're not filling up fast enough. So you're trying to figure that out or you're full and you're looking to capitalize on the opportunity and what's happening in your market and expand. And so who do you serve as you, as you expand? So on the next episode, we're going to talk about how you can align your lead sources with who you're serving.
00:15:15 So again, who you're serving kind of drives everything and your lead sources might shift depending on who you're trying to attract. So we will talk about that. On the next episode, this one was short and sweet, by the way, I'll leave you with a tidbit. I was just reading a book on instructional design while I was eating lunch, a little zoom break in the middle of the day.
00:15:36 And so the book is instructional design is basically how you teach people. So I do a lot of teaching in my programs for both operators and community managers. And the book said that there's a lot of new research on how the brain processes new information and the research shows that sleep is really important for retaining new information and that you should sleep within three hours of learning something new and important that you want to retain.
00:16:05 Because if you have a bunch of distractions between learning and sleep, then your brain won't synthesize it correctly, and it won't be as easily accessible in the future. So next time you listen to a podcast that's super insightful, and there are things in there that you really want to synthesize and be able to access. Make sure you take a nap within three hours of listening to the podcast.
00:16:30 So I will leave you with that. And we will be back next week with the new rules of engagement, how you mark it, I'll see you then. Hey there, thanks for sticking with us through the end of the episode, don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast player. And if you were enjoying the podcast, please go leave us a review.
00:16:53 It helps other folks find the podcast who are thinking about starting a coworking space or already operating a coworking space and are looking to stay up to speed on tips and trends. And we started a YouTube channel. We'd love to have you catch us on video. You can join us for podcast, videos, and Q and a videos and other things that we post to the channel.
00:17:17 We'd love to see you there.
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