261. Fiona Mayor on SEO Magic, Driving Meeting Room Revenue and Starting an Industry Association
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261. Fiona Mayor on SEO Magic, Driving Meeting Room Revenue and Starting an Industry Association
00:00:03 Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast, where every week I keep you updated on the latest trends and how tos in Coworking. I owned and operated coworking spaces for eight years, and then served as the executive director of the global workspace association for five years. And today I work with hundreds of operators and community managers every month, allowing me to bring you thought provoking operator,
00:00:29 case studies and inspirational interviews with industry thought leaders to help you confidently stay on top of what's important and what you can apply to your own role in the Coworking industry. Welcome to the podcast. I am so glad you're here with me for those of you in north America. I hope you are having a fabulous summer. I say that because today's guest is not in north America and it was not summer for her.
00:00:57 She is in Melbourne Australia. So Fiona Mayor is my guest today. She and I connected during COVID. We kind of talk about that on the podcast. She's the co-chair person of flexible workspace Australia, which is a huge undertaking to get set up. And I'm so impressed by what they've done. I've been involved with the global workspace association for a long time.
00:01:22 We did not do Australia a great service because of the time zone. So they wanted to start their own association and they've done that. And it's fantastic. So she talks about that work. She is also the founder of the Thrive Network and a director of pop media, which is a website, web design and social media agency. So Fiona has a lot going on.
00:01:49 She also has kids and a dog, all the things, someone recently, Karen Tate just pointed out recently that I say all the things all the time, and that is one of those like verbal ticks. I did not actually realize I was doing so now I'm overly aware of saying that after I say it. So before we get started with my conversation with Fiona,
00:02:08 which by the way, she just some highlights about what we talk about. So she's a marketer. I always love talking to marketers that run co-working spaces because they always have some really good insights to share. So we talk about where she gets her leads from what she's selling most of today, her focus on meeting room revenue. She talks about how much time she does or does not spend on social media,
00:02:29 even though she's a social media strategist. She also shares some interesting things about government support for Melbourne's 15 minutes, either 15 or 20 minute city initiative. So you're going to love my conversation with Fiona. Before we dive in really quickly, we are hosting a how I did this session, how and why to buy a building for your coworking space. So I've been hosting this,
00:02:56 we did a, how I did this on choosing your CRM a couple months ago, last month we did one just for our Everything Coworking academy members on scaling into multiple locations, which was awesome. We're going to open this one back to the public. If you are a member of the academy, you have access to the recording in your everything academy hub.
00:03:19 So we have some awesome folks joining us. It's really what drove. This is, you know, owning the building that your co-working space in is in, you know, not always, but often is a really great opportunity. And I would say probably half of the folks that go through my Coworking Startup School own the building, that their co-working spaces in,
00:03:42 and they're starting a business and I'm not talking about institutional owners. I'm talking about regular people like you guys listening, who invest in a building and are building wealth alongside an operating business. So all the folks that we have to women by the way, which I think is super important. So we have 2, 4, 5, 6 folks who are going to sit on the panel all over the us,
00:04:06 and they're going to share kind of why and what it looked like, how they funded their investment, et cetera. So they're going to dive into the details. So if you're curious, have ever thought about it or just kind of want to listen in and see what the process is like and what the benefits are. This panel is on Thursday, July 21st,
00:04:26 you have to register for it. It's a webinar style. So to do that, oh, you're going to have to go to the show notes. I did not make a short link before I recorded this. Oops. You know what? Hold on. I'll put it up at Everything. Coworking dot com forward slash building, and you can register there.
00:04:45 And it will also be in the show notes. If you need to grab the link. So Everything Coworking dot com forward slash building. If you want to join us for that session, it's July 21st. If you can't make it, join us in the academy and you get all of the recordings. Plus mastermind calls every month, plus expert trainings and lots of other things we have going on in there.
00:05:04 So you can find information on that at Everything Coworking dot com forward slash academy. Okay? Now let's dive into my conversation with Fiona. I am here with Fiona Mayor. She is the founder at the Thrive Network. She is also the director of pop media, which does web design and social media management. She is also the coach person of flexible workspace Australia,
00:05:31 which is fairly new since we last talked at least. So I can't wait to dive into that. Fiona. It's so great to connect and catch up. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you for asking me. I brought a friend as well. If you're not looking to sit On my lap, he's a lap warmer today. Wait, what is his or her name?
00:05:50 And this is scat. No scout. Okay. And what's the other one on the Couch. I've got another little one copay Bear. He's down on the floor. He's on a cushion. They're very spoiled. Adorable. So we were, I love that. Those are very like Doug, like names. We, no, My, my partner wants to get a dog and call it Wayne or Sharon so that in the park he can just yell out.
00:06:15 Wow. Well, so I told you in our preached yet, we're getting a puppy on Tuesday and we had a name picked out. We do JEVS names. So our dog is Louie. Our dog that we lost last year was miles. And so we wanted to do Ella. Yes. Perfect. We're getting a mini golden doodle. So the breeder named her to Lula,
00:06:38 which we think is a very funding. So we're attempting to keep it, but Cholula, there was a brother left with Cholula and the brother's name was Todd. I'm like, wait, that was my Todd. Yeah. It's like when you're in the park yelling at the dog's name, you're yelling for a child. It's fantastic. Yeah. So we thought that was really funny.
00:07:03 Really? Like somebody needs to pick a more dog-like name when they adopt. Okay. So tell us where you are. So you're in Melbourne, Australia. It's morning for you. It's five o'clock for me. It's it's Morning Over for us. It's the middle of winter. It's about 12 degrees. It's very gray outside. Yes. So I'm in Melbourne.
00:07:24 I'm actually working from home today because, and anyone who wants a coworking space will appreciate this, is that when I want to get some work done and I'm not working in the coworking space, if I'm just there to sit at a desk, I can't get anything done because everybody, everybody wants to chat. They want to ask me questions. You know what?
00:07:42 My stuff will come up to me. So it's actually, I can't work in a coworking space. I have to work from home. So I'm just putting my background up today. So you feel like I'm in the coworking space, that's the kitchen behind me For anybody who's new to Coworking and listening. If they haven't figured this out yet, that it's a thing I've heard.
00:08:02 Some people say they get memberships at other people's spaces, A hundred percent. I always say that to the other people in FWA. I'm just going to come and work at your space for the day because I can work in mine. And I, in fact did have Danielle who's our treasurer for FWA turned up the other day saying, can I work here for the day?
00:08:23 It's so fun. Unless you're willing to take an office, which, you know, makes it non-revenue generating. So most people are not. Okay. So tell us about you, your Coworking story. How did you get into Coworking? You're what did you do? Pre Coworking set the stage. So I have a social media management and web design agency,
00:08:43 which I've had for a long time, probably 16, 17 years now. So it was always working in that. And I started using a coworking space in Footscray called the idea collective run by Leanna, who is a member of FWA. He's amazing. And it was such a beautiful space. And I really enjoyed going in there and I kept talking about it to my partner and he's,
00:09:07 we have another business which is project management and construction. So he's an engineer. And he was like, oh, if we did it, we could do this, this and this. Then I come home and go, you know, if we did it, we could do this, this and this. So it was one of those things we wanted to build a space really that we would be really happy to work out of.
00:09:23 So a space that was just a really professional space button, relaxed with a good community. And, and anyway, so eventually we just made this sort of pipe dream into reality. We started looking at properties and, you know, I thought we were going to start with something small that was maybe gonna feed about 20 people in that was quite manageable. And we ended up building thrive,
00:09:46 which is about a thousand square meters over two levels. And that can sort of fit probably about 150 people. So, you know, my idea of 20 people quickly became 150 people once my partner got his hands on the idea. So yeah, we found this building and we, it was just a shell. So we completely fitted it out and off.
00:10:07 We went and that was back in 2018, we opened at the beginning of 2018, and I was not prepared in any way, shape or form for what Coworking entailed Like as a member, you were like, yeah, I engineered that. I can do that all day long, Highly, highly. And I thought I was just going to be wandering around having coffees with people and,
00:10:38 you know, chatting to them. It was, I couldn't have been more unprepared if I'd tried, but it sort of blossomed pretty quickly. It was so much work. I was really exhausted for the first year. Like I just Running your agency, I was still running my agency. My poli just started our other business. I think my son had just started year seven.
00:11:00 My oldest son had just started at university. Like, it was just crazy. It's almost like it's not a bad dream, but it's just this sort of thing that happened in somebody else's life. Like I, it was really hard work and I'm super glad that we did it. But if I did it again, I, there are so many things I would do differently in just so many ways.
00:11:23 But anyway, Sorry, I feel like that is life. As you get older, do you not think how did someone not make a handbook? So I don't mess this up. I know so many Things. I was speaking of the puppy. I was at a, we have a friend, we have friends we're at their house for dinner last week.
00:11:41 They just got a puppy, the puppy pooped on the carpet and I'm like, it's a nice rug. And I was like, my OCD is like, oh my God. Oh my God. He whips out her like Bissell stain remover thing. And she's like, oh, my friend sent this over. She was like, you had to have this.
00:11:58 And I was like, how do we not know? We need to have this like kids and dogs, you know, many later. And we don't know, like, don't, you know, just Always think Things should be here and they're not, but Y but in a way, there's, you can learn some really good lessons in that baptism by fire,
00:12:18 you learn the hard way, but you learned the lesson really well, but you only ever make the mistake once. Right. So a lot of the mistakes were probably mistakes that were not customer facing, you know, like nobody would have noticed except me just like dying inside. But I don't think that any, anybody else would really have noticed I've seen the behind the scenes,
00:12:40 which is lucky and important. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. So your partner does construction and project management. Is he involved in the operations? Was he, No, not anymore. He was early on, but he's that business that we have has really grown exponentially in the last sort of three years. So he's, we've got two other partners now and another couple of employees there,
00:13:04 and he's just so busy with that. He just needs to focus on that. So he's not involved in the day-to-day running anymore. He has his office. Like if that, that business has an office, but yeah, not really, unless I say to him, Hey, you know, the air conditioning, right. This doesn't work. And can you,
00:13:21 can you go and have a look that, yeah, he, he doesn't really do anything. So you have a thousand square meters, which is roughly 10,000 square feet. Yeah. How did you go from, you know, 20 people to 150 people? Well, that was really my partner working out. The sun was going, we're not going to make any money with 20 paid.
00:13:41 We needed might be speaker. We need to be able to scale. He basically said we have to be able to scale, or we're just going to reach like critical mass really, really quickly. And all that we're going to be able to do is basically pay our rent and maybe cover our overheads Without paying yourselves, Without paying ourselves. And it's not going to be a profit making.
00:13:58 It's not actually going to be a business with just kind of buying a sales, a job, and we already had jobs, so we didn't need to do that. So we did have it early on in our mind that we wanted to be able to scale. So we had a pretty great business plan that put us into profit with no more than 80% occupancy,
00:14:17 you know, and it sort of 40% we were breaking even. And so it was a, it was a quite plan and it was going really well. I think any new business, it probably takes you, I chain months, 200% Fraud, right? Like wouldn't under no illusions that we were going to start, you know, making it rhyme with cash in the first six months.
00:14:40 So I tell you, mounts came along, we were doing really well. We're really on track to almost full. We had a lot of external meeting rooms cause we've got a couple of big boardrooms and some other meeting rooms. So Brent Hauser, I remember you saying that's always been fairly Yeah. Meeting rhymes by always say to people, meeting rooms are the best revenue it's so high margin,
00:15:01 low resource. It's fantastic. So that was going really well. And then COVID, so we'd literally just, just like reach the peak. And we were like, this is really going where we want it to go now. And I remember looking at my meeting room calendar for March, 2020, which was bang on two years of us opening and it was full.
00:15:24 There was no more space. There's no more meeting rooms to be had, you know, as pushing people into the next month we were taking forward bookings. And then I just saw people started to ring up and they were canceling and they were black removing themselves in the calendar, just became emptier and emptier and emptier. And I was like, it's happening.
00:15:43 So it was a nasty shock. So tell me about your meeting rooms. Not everyone does really well with meeting rooms, but some people do really well. So you have a professional space, is it, do you have parking? No. So we, what I would call CBD free. So probably that we're about to two Ks out of central Melbourne.
00:16:06 We're in south Melbourne, there's parking in the area it's paid parking. We have a, like a very limited number of spaces underneath that building that permanent members have taken up. But otherwise, yeah, it's kind of just pop what you can. We're very close to transport those. So we're very close to the tram network. We're very close to major freeways.
00:16:28 So it's easy for people to access to space and meeting rooms. I've always pushed because you know, people come in, we have a boardroom that holds sort of 20, 24 people and that can be divided into two rooms. So two rooms of 10, we have another six person, two and two other six person rooms and a four person meeting room. And it's just great revenue.
00:16:51 People can hire it for half an hour. They can hire it for a full day. And we found with the bigger boardrooms, certainly pre COVID. We were getting a lot of companies come in and have their IGMs or a lot of offsite meetings. So we're luckily in an area where there's some office buildings like right next door to us. And a lot of those companies,
00:17:12 the directors or the CFOs would come in and they would rent a meeting room for a day because they wanted to have meetings outside of their own office. So they weren't interrupted. And it's just fantastic because if you rent a meeting room for say a thousand dollars for a full day, that's a keen to sort of two permanent desks for a month. And all they've done is that piece of meeting room.
00:17:33 They've had a few coffees, you've got them some water they've used the system and then they've gone home. So it's brilliant. It's just fantastic. So I spend most of my time marketing for meeting rooms. That's super interesting. No love that conversation because, and probably one of those things you didn't think about ahead of time, not your point, like the margin,
00:17:56 like that's, you know, an office office revenue on a day or two dedicated desks or yeah, Exactly. And so even with the smaller meeting rooms, you know, it's perfect for people coming in and just having one-on-ones or just three or four people want to come in and have a strategy day or something like that. And I look, we have a staff member at the front desk,
00:18:16 so they're fully sort of service. You know, we do provide that service of looking after them. They can bring catering in, we'll serve it to them. We've got fully equipped kitchen. So it makes it, we've tried to make it really easy for them. And we get a lot of repeat business that way, because people come in, they basically sit down and they don't have to do anything else and they can,
00:18:36 they can do their work for the day. So, yeah, I'd always recommend if you've got space to build a meeting room, build a meeting room and start marketing. It we'd be surprised how many people just want to have a meeting room for a couple of hours or a day. So I see one of the other advantages to having almost 10,000 ish square feet and multiple meeting rooms.
00:18:57 Right. So I think the other thing somebody said this to me early on, it was Lauren from Pacific workplaces. He is also the CEO of CloudVO, which is they? Yeah. So he had said their data shows that if you have multiple meeting rooms, you're more likely to get more bookings because people, you can service a two person or four.
00:19:18 So to your point, if somebody comes in and uses a room, they see you have plenty of options, no matter what size their meeting is, they can do a big meeting. So you have a lot of, and you have some flexibility with your large room and not a lot of spaces. We'll do, we'll have a 24 person room. So it's like,
00:19:37 well, do you want to commit to that? You know, that space, it's a bet to make, but allowing it to be divided also makes it flexible. So I think that that's probably the key that was, that was probably pretty clever of us. And we didn't know it at the time was to make that room into a divided room because you writing on it,
00:19:55 not everyone's going to come in and want 20 or 24 people at once, but they might want eight or they might want 10. So if you can divide your room up and we've got, they're called Losha stores. So they literally just are on tracks top and bottom. Yep. And then I just slide back and slide forward. And they're actually white boards on either side.
00:20:14 So when they're closed, you've got a whole wall of whiteboard for someone to use as well. So is there a lot of sound transfer? Like if you had one group and no, They're, they're acoustically sealed at the top and bottom, and then they're very, very thick and heavy. Like I think each panel weighs about 200 kilos, so they're yeah.
00:20:32 They're pretty solid. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I love that insight. So meeting rooms, what is the mix of the rest of your space look like in terms of, Yep. So we've got two levels. So level two, which is where our reception is and the meeting rooms, and then that opens out into open space and you can see my background here.
00:20:50 That's our kitchen space and they're all open desks, but they're in banks of four with partitions. So they can be used as hot desks. Or we will have companies come in and go take safe four desks or maybe eight desks. And their team can all be in a little sort of section of their own. There's 40 desks downstairs and it's quite a long building and there's also little atrium and there's a,
00:21:16 you know, there's a couple of private phone booths as well in there. And then upstairs is levels free, which is a private members only area. So whereas on level two, we'd have hot desks and meeting rooms and whatever level three is only for permanent members, there's 16 desks up there and 12 offices as well as another meeting room and a full kitchen and some open collaborative space and lounge space.
00:21:39 Yeah. How are you doing post COVID with the dedicated and flex desks? Terrible. I don't know. It's really interesting. And I, I hear this from everybody. So our office sweeps are doing pretty well. So our level three is pretty much full with our permanent members and office suites. And we've been lucky that we have got ASX listed companies.
00:22:05 So that's a bit like, I guess a fortune 500 company they're listed on the stock exchange. They've been with us for years. They're permanent, you know, they, they must have a physical address and they've kept, they kept their offices all the way through COVID, which was amazing. And yeah, so level three is great, but downstairs on level two where it's open,
00:22:25 it's just like ghost town. So we had some bigger companies in there which, which grew into the space. And then, and I know a lot of other people understand this, what happens is you get a company and that starts relatively small. They get bigger. And then they got taken over. They got bought out by bigger companies and called to the head office.
00:22:43 So they just kind of move out whole of bolus. You lose like 18 people at, right. Yeah. So it's just hard. Like it's hard to get a hot desk or for love or money at the moment. So, you know, we've done all sorts of promotions. I think what COVID has done is we've developed a habit of working from home over two years.
00:23:05 And once you develop a habit, it's hard to break that Melbourne specifically had the world's longest and harshest lockdown. And so people are, they're just not coming out. And it's winter now here as well. We've had a really bad flu season. You know, our COVID cases hover around five to 10,000 a day. So I think people are still a little bit afraid.
00:23:29 They don't want to get sick, but also they're used to working from home now, you know, and they like it and they've set themselves up and, you know, petrol is expensive. Inflation's gone up like it's, if you were doing a big commute every day, it's, you know, it's, it cost you a lot of money to drive in and park and go to the office and employers and our heaters from a lot of employers,
00:23:50 they're struggling to get people back to the office and it's an employee market. They can't force people to come in because people will just resign and then they can't replace them because the talent pool isn't there. So it's seeps still a really interesting situation. And Melbourne is different to the other capital cities in Australia because the other capital cities didn't have the same COVID restrictions that we did.
00:24:13 So occupancy levels are low across Melbourne, but I think it is changing. Like there's a general air of change. It's just moving slowly. Hey, I just wanted to jump in really quickly before we continue with our discussion. 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.
00:24:40 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. 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,
00:25:03 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. The platform includes many courses that cover the major buckets of the Community Manager role from community management, operations,
00:25:28 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. 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.
00:26:03 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. So you lease your space. Yes. Yeah. Since you're in the construction business, will you think about adding more private space or is that off the table? Yeah. Well, look,
00:26:26 we've talked about it. You know, we've talked about we'll. Do we use some of the open desk space and change that into offices? Or do we add another couple of meeting rooms? Yeah. So it's an ongoing conversation, I guess at this point, because we've had two years of COVID is not good for anybody's bottom line it's we need to balance up like how much money do we want to spend on these as opposed to what is the return going to be in and when is that return going to happen?
00:26:55 Yeah, still some unknowns. Okay. Circling back to your meeting room, who said you focus on marketing those, how do you market your meeting rooms? So I generally use Google, so I use Google AdWords, but I'm also because I run a social media and web design agency. I do a lot of social media and I'm also really, really on top of my SEO for my website.
00:27:19 So I'm constantly looking at my website and how I can improve it. I look at my competitors websites. I see what they're writing about their meeting rooms. I do SEO audits all the time, see how I can rank, how can I get keywords to move up all of that kind of stuff, because most people find us through Google. I asked them,
00:27:37 how did you find us or just a Google search? So I'm like, well, I got to make sure that we're coming up when people are searching. So that's really my main marketing at the moment. Look, it's hard for individual spaces because we don't have the big marketing budgets that perhaps some of the multi-site spaces have and any independent operator would understand is so we can't compete with paid advertising.
00:28:02 There's just no way I can compete with that cost per click, you know, a Google ad words. But what I can do is make sure that the SEO on my website is working. Do you do your own audit? Is that something you do for clients or did you yeah. Yeah. Okay. I do. Yeah. I use a couple of different things,
00:28:18 so there's some great tools out there. The same SEMrush, Uber suggest is really great. So I use those regularly. I subscribed to the SEMrush newsletters and I put them in like a folder of like, oh my God, I need to read that. I do that to do that too. But I guess the benefit for me is I'm constantly doing it for clients site.
00:28:39 So it's always kind of up. So then I'll just do minus at the same time, Uber suggest I've been using a lot lately. I find that a really good, a really good system to use. And they have this really great little Chrome extension. And so when you Google search something, so if you're going to Google search a competitor, what will happen at ease,
00:28:58 it will actually come up and tell you what your competitor's domain authorities, what keywords they're using, how they're ranking for those. So you can have a look and think, oh, well, they've, they're getting much higher up than me. What are they doing? You know? So yeah. A little bit of sneaky, sneaky. Yeah. The scenes approach.
00:29:18 It's interesting though. Cause I think about this for my own business. It's like, it can be really hard to force yourself to focus on the basics. Right. Versus always looking for like, should I sell something new? Should I write, do construction? Should I like just the simple I need to show up and day, I'm going to do a little something to make sure I show up.
00:29:39 Absolutely. And you know, sometimes forget about those things as well. Like it's always think global. I do a promotion for this. Well, I do a promotion for that. But the reality is if people can't find you on Google, they're not going to find your promotion. Like it's got to sort of stick to those basics. I think it's really,
00:29:56 really important. And I think he found, and we talk about meeting rooms when people come in and I say, how'd you find us? We did a Google search. And then generally people that are relatively local, like I'm not pulling people in that are 40, 50 kilometers away. What they want is they want to, they want to find a space.
00:30:14 They want to be able to book the space easily. They want to be able to come in and they wanna be able to run their meeting and they don't care about anything else. They don't care about your flashy promotion. They're there to get their work done. So just make it as easy as possible for them to fund you, book the space, come in and start working.
00:30:32 Yeah. I love that. So as someone who does social media for a living, how do you think about how that fits into your marketing mix and like how much time you spend on it, do you do it? Does your team do it? I do it and I don't do enough of it because I'm always, I'm busy doing other people's. Yeah.
00:30:52 I looked at your grid. You have your grid, like a website. I was like, no one's grid looks So particular about it. So I have, what's called a jigsaw greed. And it basically, when you look at an individual posts, you might go, oh, there's like a weird line through that or something. But when you look at the whole grid,
00:31:11 it all matches up into like one big sort of image basically. And I do that because I really like doing it. I don't get to do that a lot for other people and a little bit of a sort of design challenge for me. Yeah. So what I do is I tend to do 18 posts at once. So I do 18 posts in my grade and I work on that.
00:31:34 So it's like three weeks in advance or a month in advance and I just schedule them all in and I go, I don't think that we get, actually, I do know we don't get a lot of business from Instagram for instance, but we do get business from Facebook and we do from LinkedIn. I like to use all three just because I think it's important.
00:31:57 And I think Instagram is much more sort of business facing than people think it is now. So I like to have those going because it adds to our website. It adds to your SEO. If you're doing it properly, all of those things add to your SEO. So we will be coming up in Google if we've got those things going. So that's really where I'm at with that.
00:32:17 Although I looked at the grid the other day and went on posted for two weeks, which is like Cardinal scene, but I just run out of time sometimes. So yeah. I need to sit down this week and get another month's worth. Yeah. I also noticed on your website, you have the Google review plugin. Yes. That's fabulous. I mean,
00:32:37 your Google reviews are gorgeous, but it's so eye catching and yeah, It's what we call social proof. So it means that people can come to your website and they can say from other people that your site is really good because most websites, it's just you talking about your business and you're only going to say good things. So if you can put some social proof on there,
00:32:58 which is the Google widget plugin, and it's a free plugin, anyone that's running their website on WordPress, there's a number of them that you can choose. And it just scrolls through your Google reviews and you can set the layout up, however you like, but it's great. That's the other thing that I do with marketing is I spend time asking people for Google reviews.
00:33:19 So I think we've got about 45 star reviews. And what I do is if I have someone new that's coming from meeting room, I'll ask them for some feedback and they'll say like fantastic and blah, blah. And I'm like we as a small business, really rely on Google reviews. Here's the link. If you can take five minutes to do a review,
00:33:40 when your review is published, I'll send you a 15% discount code for your next meeting and then bang. But it's another five-star Google review. And the other thing I do is I'll, we'll regularly email our members find out who hasn't reviewed us and just ask them to do a review. And I will also always say at the bottom of the email, if you think your review is anything less than five stars,
00:34:04 please contact me personally. So I can work through any issues with you because I don't want a full star review. I don't want my writing to, I know I Noticed that I Was like, I don't want a full point. It's five full stars, your average. I was like, how is that possible? Yeah. I have to ask people,
00:34:22 you got to ask people for reviews and you've just got to tell them, you know, I'm a small business, I'm rely on this. And most people are fantastic at doing it And they want to do it. Yeah. I understand. The 15% off for the meeting rooms is a nice little incentive. Cause that's probably enough where they might want to do it anyway.
00:34:42 And then they think, Ooh, yeah, I'm coming back. I'll I'll do it. You've got to review and another booking. Yeah. So yeah. So you mentioned, and this is a super challenging, you know, human behavior. You talked about the habit of people not coming in, who, who is coming in, what do they look like?
00:35:02 Why are they coming? Yeah, it's an interesting mix. So as I said earlier, we've got some ASX listed companies. So they continue to come in. We have a couple of smaller businesses, so I sort of eight person business and they have worked out. They'd probably come in around three days a week. They have a permanent space, but they're usually in three to four days a week,
00:35:22 never on a Friday. I don't know if you noticed this phenomenon and nobody comes in on a Friday. Friday's the day that my Community Manager goes around and just like, does all the spot cleaning and the, you know, restocking and all that stuff. Cause there's nobody there. So we've got some smaller businesses. We find that it's really the smaller businesses and perhaps individuals that are running their own businesses are the ones that are,
00:35:44 that are really coming in. I think it's employees of bigger companies that that's, who's not coming in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the smaller businesses have sort of anywhere between two to say eight to 10 people they're coming in and that's who we've got in our office space and our permanent desks. Yeah. So with the last time we talked, you were trying to figure out how to create an organization to support the spaces in Australia.
00:36:14 And it has launched. Can you tell us kind of, you know, what's the why behind creating it? Who's in it? What are its goals? Yeah, we started, it was back in sort of about 2019. I think I was approached by lovely lady, Suzanne Vail, who had a small space in Collingwood and she wanted to do something for Victorian co-working spaces.
00:36:38 So it was called Coworking Victoria. And it was just a group of us that got together and talked about all the things you talk about as a Coworking owner, like wherever all the forks gone, why do I have to keep pushing in chairs, all that sort of stuff. And just, you know, different things that we did in our spaces. And it was a bit,
00:36:53 it was probably quite social. And then I had said to her, as I got to know a few more people, could we expand these to sort of Australia wide? Cause I knew a couple of people into state and she was like, yeah, it's a great idea. And then we found that people were really wanting to be together and we were all independent operators.
00:37:16 So we found that people just wanted to be together. They wanted to have someone to bounce off and they wanted to have other people to talk to in the same industry, we got together a lot during COVID and you came, you did a presentation for us during COVID. We were meeting sort of every fortnight. And it was basically a support card because we were all just like,
00:37:37 what is happening with the world. And then that developed into independent Coworking Australia. So ICA and myself and Danielle from Eastern innovation business center and some other people, you know, Richard Taylor who had the travel hub and Kyle Sullivan and Sydney and Lauren and a whole host of other people were really keen to make something happen. And then we were sort of approached by some of the biggest biases.
00:38:06 So Brad Prescott from the hub came to see me and Michael Benson from workspace 365. And they said, look, we want to get in on this. We want an association. We can see you're almost there. We can see the work that you've done. It's been tried a few times, but no, one's got it off the ground. Can we all do this together?
00:38:25 And it's funny because initially we were just a group of independent spaces and we weren't really sure about having some of the bigger multi-site spaces, come on board, wondering if would be dwarfed. But honestly I've got to say the generosity and the knowledge and just the constant giving from these guys has been incredible. So yeah, that's sort of how we started and we have a board of directors,
00:38:53 so it's myself and Brad, who are the co-chairs. We have Michael Benson on the board, Danielle with Clive Dale from biome in Sydney, we have tight does I'll note two has three regional spaces in new south Wales, Joe from work tank. She's another independent operator. So we're a really nice mix of people throughout the industry, not just space owners and not just sort of multi-site owners as well.
00:39:19 So yeah, we got together, we did a lot of hard work that we didn't realize how much hard work it was going to be to set up company and to, you know, be directors and to have this constitution and all of those things. And I clearly remember at one point Brad saying rot, I think it's just six weeks of hard work.
00:39:39 And then it'll, you know, things will start to, even out that was in like January 20, 21. So here we are still having a board meeting every two weeks, you know, feeling a bit of overwhelm, but it's come together really well. And we now represent over 265 spaces, Australia wash. We have a whole host of fantastic sponsors, including people like desk pass Office RnD,
00:40:06 Saulteaux for Peerless Jean, you know, really like after all the paperwork, exactly census like it's on our website, which is flex.org. Did I, you, I know I've forgotten a couple of sponsors, so please have a look. I said, I don't want to play favorites. We'll link up them. That'd be bright. So we've got some fantastic sponsors and we've got some fantastic members and people who have volunteered in committees to organize events and to do the marketing and comms and membership.
00:40:38 So look, it's been a real whirlwind and in a way COVID was a blessing because it gave us time to get it organized. COVID hadn't happened. And we were all running businesses. It never would have happened. We would have been too busy, but a lot of us are sitting there going well, we're closed. A lot of us were closed for sort of three,
00:40:56 four months at a time. So in that way it was a bit of a blessing to get it organized. So really our goals for the organization are to support flexible workspaces around Australia. So that includes multi-site spaces, regional spaces, independent spaces, council run spaces it's to provide a voice to government for spaces. Because what we discovered during COVID was that we really weren't an industry category.
00:41:22 And a lot of us were trying to discover when we were trying to access grants or government funding that we wouldn't actually anything. And there was no voice to say to government, Hey, what about us over here? You know, we take up this percentage of net lettable space in the country, but no one's no one knows who we are, what we do.
00:41:44 So that was really one of our key issues is providing a voice to government for flexible workspaces around the country and to be able to lobby on behalf of them and also education. We want it to be able to provide education to space operators. We know how hard it is to do all the things, right? Like it's just a constant grind every day.
00:42:04 So to be able to provide education and maybe as well to help spaces that were opening, not make the same mistakes that we made. So I talked earlier about all of the mistakes that we made. It's great to be able to talk to up and coming spaces and go, hi, this is what we<inaudible>. And you know, I'd probably recommend doing it this way next time because of IB and say,
00:42:25 yeah, so it's great. And again, just as a support and a social relief for people to, So what does your programming look like? Will you do a conference? Yes, we are. We doing conference in September in Sydney. So I've actually partnered with rework and we're doing a future of work conference conference. So if WWI has a stream for flexible workspace,
00:42:48 which is exciting. So we, I think that's on day two or three of the conference and that'll all be around flexible workspace and the future of work. So we're really excited about that, that September 7th and eight in Sydney, that's on our website and we'll be hosting a dinner that night as well. So that'll be our first real conference. And we felt like it was,
00:43:12 we weren't ready to do one on our own completely. So we didn't have the resources and necessarily the funds to make that happen. So being able to partner with someone else and getting a stream for flexible space in their conference has been a really, really great thing. I love that it's such a chicken or egg problem to fund conferences are really expensive when you need Very,
00:43:35 very, very expensive. I'm not sure that people who go to conferences realize They don't know. I know somebody asks me this Bright Haven, you know, it's not even a money-making exercise. I'm really lucky to break even. So Somebody Can about that. Yeah. The ticket price to the GWA conference. And I said, I have to tell you like the conference we'll break,
00:43:55 even on tickets, just fixed costs are so high to run a conference. So it's really challenging. And to start an association and be in the event business, which is often how associations stay afloat, right. Is to host those events and get sponsored. You have to be able to get sponsorship otherwise, right? You don't make any money. Yeah,
00:44:18 it's a lot. It is a lot. And I think we want to be really careful with people's money as well because they're paying a membership to FWA. We want to make sure we're giving them really great value. We understand that it's been a really difficult financial time over the last two years for everybody. So we're very cautious about wasting money or how the money is used For the organization to make sure that the members are getting all the benefit from that.
00:44:43 But at the same time, we still need to have revenue to keep the organization going, because there are fixed costs that come along with an organization, there are legal costs. We have, you know, an association administrator that does a lot of work that needs to be paid. There are things that you have to buy, right? Like you've got to pay for a website.
00:45:00 You you've got to pay for all of these, all of these things. So between our sponsors and the members, we want to make sure that we're doing the right thing by them. And we actually committed to providing free events for the first 12 months for our members. So this year alone we've run 14 events. Wow. And those events have range from social events to online or hybrid events.
00:45:23 You know, they could be anything from, we actually did a fantastic Jean tastings, four pillars, Jean as a social event the other night, it was just a great fun thing for the members to come and do that. We also do things like productive workspace design, and you know how to make the most out of your marketing and so on and so forth.
00:45:40 So all of those events have been free and we feel like that's really good value for the money that people have made to join, to be able to offer them these things. And so moving forward into the next financial sort of year, we will need to charge a certain amount for events because we need to keep the association going. So it's not so much about making a profit.
00:46:04 It's about keeping the associate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean the Y sounds really strong and it sounds like your engagement level is really high as well, which is, I mean, which is what you need. Do you need people to be, yeah. I mean, I'm always amazed when people commit their time,
00:46:25 you know, like you said, you had it, but still it was an opportunity cost and it's a lot of time and still ongoing. Yes. A lot of time. Like if I build all the time, we'd be broke by now. We went, we always, but we wanted to do it because we really believe in the industry. We're really committed to the industry.
00:46:44 We really feel very strongly about supporting the people in the, in this industry. And I think it shows by how many people have joined that everybody else feels the same way. So it's been a fantastic thing to do. It's been a huge learning curve and it's been very tiring, but it's also been really rewarding. Yeah, exactly. Those things that are really rewarding are often a lot of work.
00:47:11 That's how it goes. I just followed the association on Instagram so I can keep up with that. And I had no idea. I wonder if this is an Australian thing, one of your sponsors is a Nespresso professional. I didn't know that they had a professional line. I wonder if that's an Australian product. Do you think that Maybe I'm not sure.
00:47:33 I didn't realize that it wouldn't be everywhere. I'll have To. I said, people want it. If you want to talk about being a sponsorship guru and getting sponsors, you need to talk to Brad because Brad, He's the guy, Brad is the man too. He organized. Or he was, you know, he was on the sponsorship committee. He organized all of the sponsors.
00:47:51 Like he's just amazing. Yeah. Fantastic. Oh, I saw him in may at juicy, you know? Yes, that man is. So I'm not surprised that he came to you and it was like, no, this is important. We want to be involved because yet so committed. I mean, BP is He really, he's such a great guy.
00:48:11 We have a really good time. I feel like Brad, he's a great collaborator. He's a really great person. He's a lot of fun. We did a round table together. So we did this series of events for FWA, where we committed to going to every state and doing a round table with local operators. And so the It's just so hard and not scalable,
00:48:31 like, yeah, at some point maybe it's scalp. We struggle with getting, you know, local and we're trying to create a chapter program and which is also a heavy lift and it is challenged local. Yeah. I think we wanted to find out as well. What different regions, because Australia is a big country and each, each it's huge. And each state is completely different.
00:48:55 And each state also experienced COVID completely differently. And we wanted to really find out what our members from each state needed and what they wanted. And we wanted to find out what crossovers there were. It was like almost like a research tour. So that board members committed to which state so they could go to. And Brad and I went to Hobart. I,
00:49:13 God, we had such a fun day and people were so nice. And it was really hilarious. Cause it was, this is back in March of this year, Tasmania was barely touched by COVID because they're a little island. They just shut their borders straight away. Right. No one Could come in, we'll Stay in, you stay out. And no one would get government And well done them because when we were talking to the coworking operators,
00:49:37 they were all like, yeah, we're about 95% capacity in our spaces. If we could get more space, we would, their problem was they couldn't get more space. And Brad and I both sat there going, oh, I know it's such a fresh kind of flavor. I'm going to go back to my, you know, 30% full space. And they SKUs a lot 95%,
00:49:59 a hundred percent full, which is fantastic Testament to how it worked for them and the work that they're doing because the great operators, but you know, it was a really interesting day. We came away a bit to<inaudible> situation, but yeah, it's great to fund all of that stuff out about other regions. What are you most excited about for the association for the next year?
00:50:23 I'm excited about the conference and saying how many people will turn up and want to come and make a contribution to that. I'm excited about the association growing and doing more education and really helping a lot of people to maximize their spaces. I'm starting a new stream of events within FWI. That's just independent or single site operators. So it's really going to be things that we just talked about,
00:50:51 like maximizing your SEO and how you should use Google, my business and how to get extra revenue using virtual mail and all of those things that as a small business operator, you've got to do everything yourself and these aren't events that are necessarily applicable to some of the multi-site operators because they have, they have teams of people already do that stuff. Yeah. So we're,
00:51:12 I'm really excited about developing that stream of resources. We're excited about moving the association forward in terms of a lot of people have asked for an accreditation system. We're not sure how that could work at the moment, but it's something that we're talking about. And I'm excited about having more of a say in government policy for Coworking and flexible space throughout the country.
00:51:40 Yeah. Yeah. I didn't ask you about this, but when we talked last time, you had mentioned there were some government interest in supporting like the 15 minutes city. Is that still? And that was one of the things you were like, we need to organize, we need to have a voice. We need to be able to be efficient. Initially,
00:51:59 a lot of credit goes to Danielle's story. Who's our treasurer on the board. She is on a couple of government committees and task forces. And we did, what's called a boosting Coworking bachelor program. So during COVID the Victorian government did a regional travel voucher program. So you could jump online and apply for a travel voucher. Let's say it was $400.
00:52:23 And if you spent, you had to spend that amount again, but then you got $400 back from the government. So it was just, it was a scheme to get people to travel regionally again, which worked really, really well. And I'd said to Danielle, we need to do something like that for Coworking. So we, so people can try Coworking and it's funded for them because there's still that education piece that needs to be done where people don't really understand what it is.
00:52:46 So we kind of put this together. Danielle went and spoke to a few people and lo and behold, next thing I know Danielle comes back and she goes, we've got funding from the state government to run a boosting Coworking bachelor program in the Eastern metropolitan region. So we put this plan together, we headed up, it was run through flexible workspace Australia.
00:53:06 So we managed it all. We had it on our website. People could register, we went around and asked spaces in that region if they were interested in, in being involved in it. And you could register on the site and say, yeah, I want to try Coworking. I want to work here. And you could choose from a list of spaces and you're given a hundred dollars to do that.
00:53:26 And that could be used for anything that wasn't all paid. So you couldn't go into a coworking space. It's been a hundred dollars on printing, but you could hire a meeting room or you could hire a desk for the day, or you could, you know, you have your team in for the day, whatever it was. And so it was,
00:53:42 it was a way to get people, to try a space without any outlay for them. And it was also to get them to try spaces that were within their local area. So these 15 minute or 20 minutes city that the government talks about is for communities to live, work and play within 20 minutes of their home. Because we know when people go to co-working spaces,
00:54:04 they spend a certain amount of money within that community. So if you have a coworking space in a regional center, for instance, the cafes in that regional center benefit, you know, the printing place in that regional center, benefits, restaurants benefit everybody benefits because you're working in that space. You're living in that space and you're spending your money in that space.
00:54:25 So the whole community can benefit from that. So that's what the 20 minutes cities about. And the government were really keen for us to do that. So we've rolled it out that program's finished out on Eastern Metro, but we think we're going to be able to roll it out and do a regional test as well now for another program, which has fantastic.
00:54:43 It's super exciting. And it's something that just can't get done unless there's an organizing like central body to do it. So, yeah, Exactly. Yeah. And we had a great team of people helping us, Sam from Skyway, You Sam. So Sam was managing it for us. You know, Lauren from business, Alex did a lot of work for the website.
00:55:03 Like it's a team of people, right? Like it takes like a whole village to make these things happen. So it's not just me going, oh, the board of FWA did this. There are so many people working behind the scenes to make all of these things happen. Yeah. Coworking community. Yeah, absolutely. Fiona, thank you for sharing your story and for telling us more about the association,
00:55:27 we will link to the association in the show notes. I'm the link to your website, your beautiful Instagram grid. So that again, Yeah. Look at my creation. I'm so proud of it. Yeah. Well, it was great to catch up and great to learn more about the association and more about your backstory and how things are going. And yeah.
00:55:50 Thank you for having me. Everyone was very excited when I said, Hey guys, I'm going to be on Jamie's podcast. So yeah. They'll be excited. Well, it was fun to have Carl on because I didn't know Carl's story very well either. And he has such a great story. It was so much fun, like sitting in his garage with his,
00:56:08 like, I, it was hilarious. It was super fun. Fantastic. Really, really good. Well, if you need any guest ideas, let me know. We've got a lot of people in Coworking in Australia that are super keen. And actually, I always say to people, I met someone the other day. Oh, she's from a regional space in Victoria.
00:56:28 And she was looking for resources. And I said, are you on the Everything Coworking Facebook group? And she said, no, what's that? And I went, hang on. I said, what do you mean? What's that? So I'm constantly sending people your way going. You got to get onto this. You got to listen to Jamie's podcast.
00:56:46 You've got to get onto all the information she shares. So thank you for all the good work you do. Oh, gosh. Yes. Well, thank you. Okay. We'll keep us posted. Thanks Fiona. Thank you. See you. Bye. Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you like, what you heard, tell a friend, hit that subscribe button and leave us a rating and review.
00:57:10 It makes a huge difference in helping others. Like you find us. If you'd like to learn more about our education and coaching programs, head over to Everything. Coworking dot com. We'll see you next week.
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