232. Ten Coworking Flight Group Tips from 2021

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232. Ten Coworking Flight Group Tips from 2021

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 today. I am recording this in the second to last week of December in 2021.

00:00:40 I usually try to work ahead and batch ahead, but here we are, it's been a little bit of hustle mode getting ready for the holidays. So I don't know if you guys are traveling for the holidays. We don't travel to see family. We did a quick trip for Thanksgiving to see family and we have no family nearby. So we go to lake Tahoe to ski,

00:01:04 which is my absolute favorite way to spend Christmas or the holidays, whatever you celebrate. Doesn't have to be, obviously Christmas could be just celebrating the new year, but we it's like moving all of this stuff that we have to take with us for two weeks. All the ski gear does the ski gear fit. Do we have everything we need where I sent some ski stuff with a friend of mine who lives in Truckee,

00:01:33 which is a town on the north side of lake Tahoe and forgot that I'd sent her stuff. So I was giving my husband a hard time cause he went to the storage space and said it wasn't there. And I was like, of course it's there. It's the Tahoe bin. You know? So I went back to the storage and it's not there.

00:01:50 So anyway, it's been a bit of a thing I put in, you know, a big target order and all the prep for the holidays. So I'm looking forward to getting there and then it's storming. It's about to storm. So we get zero rain in Northern California from like March until November. That takes some getting used to, if this is not where you grew up,

00:02:12 it feels very, very strange. And then it rains like crazy, like absolute craziness when it rains. So we are getting lots of rain, which means lots of snows. We have to figure out when we're driving. I think we're going to move our arrival by a day or two so that we don't get stuck in a blizzard going over the mountain pass.

00:02:31 So lots going on, but here we are. So if you're on a road trip or putting your headphones into escape, some crazy relatives or the holiday, or just taking some downtime or, you know, I listened to podcasts nonstop. When I walked the dogs, I thought I would create a top 10 list, not even a really top 10 list,

00:02:55 but a list of 10 nuggets from our Flight Group members from 2021. So I don't talk a lot about our Flight Group program. I am actually adjusting that program. We're going to offer a new membership in 2022. So keep, keep your email open. We will send some details on that. I've been kind of finalizing it and getting the details ready and making sure it's all set up because I've mentioned it a couple of times,

00:03:21 but that we'll be launching in January. And the Flight Group is a program. I run for operators who have maybe gone through my a startup school or not, and they want to learn from others and they want to get some help with what they're working through. So I run several cohorts of them every month and we get lots and lots of nuggets. And generally our rule is what happens in Flight Group stays in Flight Group.

00:03:52 So I'm just sharing a few of the nuggets that we've talked about over the year, but I thought it would be good food for thought, as you're thinking about 2022 planning 2022 and what you want to try and test in your business. So these are in no particular order. Although the first one I did move up to because it's timely and I could probably do an entire podcast episode about most of these individually.

00:04:20 So I'm just going to make a couple of comments on each one and we'll go through these pretty quickly and you know, I'll post them also in our Facebook group, we have a great group in our Facebook group. If you're looking to connect, please join us there. You can just search for Everything. Coworking under groups and Facebook or our URL is Everything.

00:04:39 Coworking club.com and that'll take you straight there. Okay. So the first tip is close for the full week between Christmas, whether you celebrate it or not and new year's. So this came up the topic of kind of burnout and how to give team members time off, how to give owners time off comes up a lot, the sort of sustainability of running a business that is,

00:05:06 you know, open often and the challenges of not being open. If you manage a mail program, you still have to deal with male, et cetera. So how, you know, how do we give folks a break to kind of reset, especially in a role that is pretty forward-facing if it's you or your community managers that are spending time, you know,

00:05:27 in this space interfacing with members a lot. So I have a number of members who just really drew a line in the sand and said, we're closing, we're closing for the full week. Some of them closed starting on the 23rd through new years. So just know if you're thinking about this, thinking about how to handle it and thinking you wish you had some more time off,

00:05:51 others are doing it right. So I think this is really a mindset piece where we think we a hospitality company and we have to be open, you know, essentially 24 7. So during this period, of course, your members can still come in that have 24 7 access, but set an expectation that your staff won't be there, that they need to bring their own coffee or make their own coffee.

00:06:13 You can pre grind, coffee and leave the instructions. You can leave the curate gun. You, you know, there are lots of creative solutions, which is what I found my Flight Group members were figuring out. You could have folks, you know, run through and process the mail one time a day on a rotating schedule, or you could simply notify your members that,

00:06:32 Hey, you know, we're processing mail, you know, once or twice in these two weeks, if there's something important you're expecting, let us know. Oftentimes we put barriers in the way and sort of make up expectations that others have of us that, that are not necessarily true, right? So it's a good opportunity. Most people are taking some time away.

00:06:53 Certainly folks with kids, I'm definitely in the camp. My daughter has two weeks off from school. So this week's kind of a modified week. And the next week we're, you know, I have one day of meetings with my one-on-one folks. So that is tip number one that came out of our Flight Group discussions. The second one charge setup fees,

00:07:14 again, no particular order, kind of a random note to make, but this is another one of those things that people don't do until they hear that others are doing it right. I think it's pretty common in the, you know, executive suite model. It's just, it's pretty normal that you would charge a setup fee because it takes your team time to set up members.

00:07:34 Certainly if there are a number of teams, I had one, I have one member that I think was onboarding 70. She's a big space, 75 new members over the course of a couple of days, the folks who have that many members and you probably do not, you probably, you know, get one or two at a time, but they know that it takes time.

00:07:54 And there, there were zero people generally react to a setup fee. And if they do, then you can have a setup fee promotion and you can wave it. But most people will not. Now I find that when I bring this up, this is a little bit of a philosophical thing. Some folks say absolutely not. I'm not going to charge setup fees.

00:08:14 I don't want to nickel and dime. I want it to all be included. That's totally fine. You can operate that way, but do know that as we're looking for opportunities to manage margin and make sure we're covering costs and hitting an appropriate margin with the business, that is one opportunity that you have that most folks won't think twice about. You might only do it for your office members.

00:08:37 You may not do it for your open space members. That's pretty common, but you would make it a generally a per person set up fee once you get to the offices. Okay. So that was number two, tip number three from our Flight Group program, put urgency, your email promotions. So some of these, I just get from watching my Flight Group members and being on their email lists or you know,

00:09:03 little side conversations we have here in there. But one of our Flight Group members does a great job at promoting things. And this might be, you know, I don't love price discounting and you know, things like that, but she does a great job. She does a BOGO offer, a buy one, get one free offer at the beginning of the summer.

00:09:21 And she puts a lot of urgency around it. And she said, she gets a lot of folks. Who've redeemed that offer. On the last day side note, I was listening to one of the podcasts I listened to is called no stupid questions. It's the same. I think it's Stephen Dubner unless he's the other guy, Steven, something from Freakonomics also does this podcast with Angela Duckworth called no stupid questions.

00:09:48 And recently they talked about why people wait until the last minute to do things they just do. So, you know, they talked about reasons why that may be the case, but I thought, oh, this is totally true of signing up for things over email. Some people will do it right away and some people will wait till the last second. So when you're running a promo,

00:10:07 be super clear about the deadline and send a reminder email right before the deadline. And you'll see those redemptions come in, tip number four, invest in your team. This is another topic that comes up constantly in the Flight Group program. You know how to recruit, how to retain, how to get the right people in the right seats, how to support this role.

00:10:35 That simply cannot be remote. When they're working in a world of, you know, members who can work anywhere, they want folks in the Flight Group get really creative about how to support their team. So some of the things they do are some of them do flexible hours. So this is folks typically who have more than one person on their team. And they can,

00:10:57 you know, allow a little bit of flexing up or down on when folks start in the morning or start at the end of the day. Some folks we have, actually, this is a Community Manager role. They are doing a, I think they're working on a five hour day. So she and the owner each do five hours, but they flex.

00:11:19 And that is five hours at the front desk, not only five hours period. So the other time might be spent having coffee with a member, working on a special project or working on, you know, it depends, but looking for ways to some folks are job sharing. So they're splitting the role into two part-time roles, which I've often said can be really challenging.

00:11:43 I've done that like literally split the role in half before I did that in my Chicago location, I found sort of the mailman effect in that case to be really challenging. But these days it's folks are looking for more flexibility that can help. And also, you know, having the, one of the things that we did in our Palo Alto space was have someone come in in the morning and work sort of that morning shift the set up,

00:12:11 do the mail, set the space, make the coffee. And then our other team member would come in from about 10 to five. So that was a little bit of a shorter day, but allowed her to have her mornings for other projects that she loved to work on. And I will mention this, I think it's a longer podcast, but one of the things that came up in our Community Manager program recently is that lots of community managers have side hustles and things that they do in addition to their work.

00:12:40 It might be that they're pursuing a degree. It might be that they have another small business that they're running, but look for ways to support those things. I think that can go a really long way in terms of retention. The other thing I'll mention, and this is totally self-serving for me, but also for your community managers is that many of my Flight Group members have their community managers in our Community Manager University program,

00:13:05 which I love because I know their space as well. And so I know the team and I know the context of their business, but they're also investing in their team and investing in their teams, professional development education, and also giving them a community, which I think is really important. So you can still enroll in Community Manager University any time tip number five from our Flight Group program use interns.

00:13:30 So we actually did an intern training program for our Community Manager University in November and Kim, we a huge shout out to Kim Lee and Andrea Howell. They both contributed to the content because I have never run an intern program before, but I wanted to do the training. We have some Flight Group members who run training intern programs and do really well with them in terms of making time for their team to work on special projects,

00:14:00 it can help with front desk coverage. It can help with mail processing. It can help with other special projects. I think it takes some work and some commitment to get started with an intern program, but it can really pay off over time. So we have a number of Flight Group members that have really successful intern programs, tip number six, steal my Community Manager,

00:14:26 pay me a finder's fee. So I love this one too. I bet this has happened to a number of you. It has come to me in my Chicago space. You have a great Community Manager who gets to know your members really well. And one of your members decides to try to Leeward them away and hire them. So I am in the camp that look,

00:14:47 if you're Community Manager really wants to go, you don't want to keep someone who would prefer to be working in another role, right? That's not a win-win, but you spent a lot of time and effort finding this Community Manager. And so the hiring company should pay a finder's fee for recruiting your Community Manager. So you want to put that in your member agreement,

00:15:14 put a clause in there, have your attorney, you know, help you with the paragraph, which should not be a huge investment, but can really pay off if that happens. And that has been a common question that comes up in our Flight Group. Unfortunately it happens more often than we would like, Hey, I just wanted to jump in really quickly before we continue with our discussion.

00:15:35 If you're working on opening a co-working space, I want to invite you to join me for my free masterclass three behind the scenes secrets to opening a coworking 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 includes some Q and a.

00:15:59 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.

00:16:26 The platform includes mini 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.

00:16:54 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.

00:17:20 Number seven, tip the seventh tip from our Flight Group members. We have a number of Flight Group members that have the owl. I will link to that in the show notes. So it is kind of an alternative to the zoom room. So if you looked at the zoom room set up, the, you know, all in set up on the zoom room can be really expensive.

00:17:41 So this is an alternative it's called an owl and it kind of looks like an owl. And it basically follows the speaker in the room on both audio and video, which can be a really positive experience. So the members who have purchased the owl are basically including it as an add on to their meeting room rental for an additional fee, not a huge additional fee,

00:18:07 but a small additional fee. And it's a huge value if they're trying to create the type of experience where they want everyone to feel like they're in the same room, but doesn't have to be a zoom room, tip number eight, have a team office that you can't sell, make it a shared private office have dedicated desks. I will have to say I was a little skeptical of this approach.

00:18:31 I think I even posted in the Facebook group, Hey, does anyone do this? Because it might've been one of my startup school students who mentioned it first and said he was creating these rooms. And then we started talking about on the Flight Group and there are folks who are doing really well with this approach, because it seems as though there's kind of this segment that maybe we never explored pre pandemic,

00:18:54 or maybe they exist because of the pandemic that don't want an office, or maybe don't have the budget for an office, but also don't want to be in the open space. But what they don't mind is a private desk that is in an office. So in a room. So if you've a team suite of five seats or eight seats, if you get much bigger than that,

00:19:15 it may not feel is sort of like knuckle, like for lack of better term. But I think sort of that five to eight, or maybe even 10 size where folks sort of are in a shared private space. So maybe they have a key. So they know that they, you know, they know their office mates and probably the office mates are not all there at the same time.

00:19:41 So it's, it's an alternative to a dedicated desk that has some added privacy to it. And if you're struggling, you know, those five person offices, sometimes we get to those sizes that we think there will be demand for, or maybe that was just what, what made sense in our layout. And they just don't sell and you have to get creative about what to do with them.

00:20:02 So trying that maybe a great idea, because you can just move existing furniture into that room and start offering it. And if you've had folks come in for open space tours that didn't take that didn't end up converting into members, maybe email them this offer and see if that's interesting to them. Tip number nine from my freight Flight Group members focus on building your virtual office and digital mail programs.

00:20:32 So this is one of the sort of threads of success. I see for my Flight Group members. It's not that this works in every single geography, but most of the time when you focus on building up a virtual office and digital mail program, and you make sure you are experimenting with the aggregators or lead gen partners that we talk about a long time,

00:20:58 often you will start to build up a successful program. You'll sell them organically and you'll sell those memberships through lead generation or aggregator partners like a DaVinci or an I postal or in any time or a cloud VO. So if you don't have a strong virtual office or mail program, start thinking about that for 2022, we have a virtual office mail training program that I will put in the show notes that you can access that walks you through.

00:21:29 Step-by-step how to set this up. I will quickly mention for our Canadian friends, this comes up a lot and huge shout out if I haven't done this yet to Mark Eaton, who was a guest presenter on our Community Manager University training about around virtual mail. And we specifically, we have a lot of Community Manager members from Canada and they often ask specific questions about mail.

00:21:54 There's no form 1583 in Canada. So mark was our guest presenter and walked us through how he handles his mail program in Canada and how he gets around some of the things that we, some of the systems we have in place in the U S to verify identity and whatnot. So if you're Canadian and are trying to figure out the answer to some of these things,

00:22:16 shoot us an email and we can let you know, and thank you to mark for being such a, an amazing contributor to the Coworking community. Okay. Number 10, we're already at number 10, this is kind of a short one. So the other success thread that I see running through the Flight Group members is that they test things. They try new things pretty often.

00:22:39 And I think that's one of the reasons they really valued the Flight Group program is because they're always trying to figure out the best way to do something new or to try something new and they want input, or they want to know how others have done it, but they're always thinking about how to do something better or add something new or tweak something. So I,

00:23:01 if I could recommend a mindset for 2022, it would be to test things and they might fail. And that's totally fine because there are a million cliches out there like you miss, you know, a hundred percent of the shots that you don't take. And they're not testing all the time, wildly expensive initiatives. Although we did have folks test direct mail this year,

00:23:24 and some other things that were, did require an investment, but sometimes they're just testing little things like how they package things or how they word things or how they communicate or frame things. So have that mode of being in test mode, try new things, and don't be afraid if they don't work, move on. Okay, I'm going to run you through our 10 tips from our Flight Group members that I pulled from our meeting notes from 2021,

00:23:51 number one, consider closing for the full week between Christmas and new years or the 23rd or the 25th. If Christmas is not a word that you relate, do we'll just call it a date on the calendar charge, setup fees. Number three, put urgency behind your email promotions, put a deadline and make sure you email often to remind people of that deadline.

00:24:13 Number four, invest in your team. And three, think creatively about how you can support them and be a compelling employer. Number five, use interns start an internship program in 2022, number six, steal my Community Manager, pay a finder's fee, put that in your member agreement. Number seven, look at the owl for use in your meeting rooms.

00:24:35 And we'll put a link to that in the show notes, have a team office. You can't sell, make it a shared private office of dedicated desks. Number nine, focus on building your virtual office and digital mail programs. And number two, have a mindset of trying stuff. Quick note about the show notes. You can find that on the website,

00:24:54 but we also link to them. If you are listening, at least on I have an iPhone. So I really only know apple podcasts very well, but if you click on the details of the show on your phone, you, we link to that in those details. So we'll link to the show notes there. So that's an easy spot to pull up the show notes for any episode,

00:25:12 just go to your phone and kind of click into the details of the episode and you'll see our links there. If you're looking for something while you're listing, okay, that is it for today. So please join us next week for the last episode of the new year. And then we will see you in the new year. Hey there, thanks for sticking with us through the end of the episode,

00:25:34 don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast player. And if you were enjoying the podcast, please go leave us a review. It helps other folks find the podcast who are thinking about starting a co-working 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.

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