273. Event Business in Coworking Spaces is Hot
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TRANSCRIPTION
273. Event Business in Coworking Spaces is Hot
00:00:02 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 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.
00:00:45 Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast. This is your host, Jamie Russo. I hope you're doing well today. I'll tell you what's happening on my Monday while I record this. I for sure should be at a Coworking space. I still have not found the right local option for me. There's one opening in a few weeks, so I'm gonna check that out.
00:01:04 We have plumbing work being done. We had a significant plumbing project done. My husband gets annoyed when I talk about our plumbing issues in public. They had to dig up the floor in our, one of our bathrooms. Fortunately, I did not cover the, I didn't re-tile only because I haven't gotten to it yet because I've had so many other things going on.
00:01:27 I went to the tile store and they were like, Oh, you probably also need to redo the shower tile. So I had to start over and was not ready to make those decisions. So that did not get done. And we had a leak in our radiant heat pipe. We have radiant heat pipe, I might have mentioned this before. So the guy came to fix that leak and said,
00:01:45 You have another leak? And I was like, We don't have another leak. He said, You have another leak. So we did a bunch of testing and found it in the bathroom where they had dug my whole plumbing project. So they had to come back today and drill up the concrete again to fix the hole in our radiant heat pipe so, loud.
00:02:06 It's been very loud. And then I have two dogs who go crazy with all the noises. So one of them is hiding under the couch in my office and one is sitting under my chair. And we'll hope that we can get this done without tons of other noise. So we're gonna make this work. So I hope your fall is off to a good start.
00:02:25 We are going to talk today about one of the themes that I heard from attendees at the GWA conference. Giovanni and I did a deep dive debrief on the conference over on the Flex Uncensored podcast, that launched. That'll be out by the time you hear this. So you can go over and listen to that. But I like to dig into the details.
00:02:49 Gio and I are kind of bigger picture. I like to get into a couple of like practical takeaways. So I'm gonna do that in a minute. Let me first recognize our latest certified community managers. And this is so fun. Our Community Manager group gets more fun by the moment. So Becky, and I'm not sure I can say the last name.
00:03:09 We've got some tricky last names here. It's B O T T J E R at Altspace Coworking in Bansko, Bulgaria. Congratulations. Becky, you are Coworking. Community, Manager certified. And then Jessica Carpinella. She is with Falmouth Shared Space in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Congrats to both of you. Super exciting. We've had a lot of new folks join the program.
00:03:34 We have training coming up in two days, our monthly training. So looking forward to that. Okay, we're diving in. So what I wanna talk about today, a theme that I was picking up from conversations I had at the GWA conference is the fact that Coworking event space is hot. So I've talked about this a couple of times in other contexts,
00:03:58 but I wanted to just really pull it out as a theme to think about. I recognize that you may not in your current space have a setup that is conducive to hosting events and went by events, I don't mean member events, I mean events for big meetings. So not just comp little conferences or meetings, but larger gatherings for other companies. So let me give you some examples.
00:04:24 And not all need to be large, but I'm not talking about our like two-person meeting room. That was not a big part of the discussion. It was more around training rooms, offsite rooms. Hey, we'll be right back. I just wanna share a couple of opportunities from our show sponsors. As a Coworking space owner, you are always looking to provide more resources and programming for your members,
00:04:58 right? How about access to financial education and even investment opportunities? Well, Noumena is the number one community for freelancers and founders looking to grow their businesses. So Noumena and Coworking spaces go together like peanut butter and jelly. We found that over 75% of our community already work in or are seeking out a Coworking space. We'd like to help our members connect with you and find your space anywhere in the world.
00:05:32 So join our Coworking space directory to be featured in our community and give your members access to a whole library of entrepreneurial resources and financial education programming all at no cost to you. By the way, visit noumena.pro/ Coworking to fill out an interest form. That's N O U M E N A pro slash Coworking. We will include that link in the show notes for anybody who's walking around and doesn't have time to write it down.
00:06:08 You can find it in the show notes for this episode at Everything Coworking dot com. Noumena financing the Future of work. The amount of opportunity in the Coworking industry is absolutely mind-blowing. It's projected to grow by 13 billion in the next five years. Just staggering numbers. Now you've probably seen Success Magazine. It's hugely popular and focuses on professional development, personal development and business coaching while they're branching out with their own franchised Coworking business called Success Space.
00:06:48 It's actually a brilliant franchise model with three revenue streams recurring and on-demand revenue from Coworking memberships, a full-service cafe and success-certified business coaching for small business owners to executives. To learn more about this exciting new Coworking business opportunity, check it out at successcowork.space. That's success cowork.space. We will link that up in the show notes as well. So let me talk about a few of the use cases.
00:07:22 So I've heard this from some of our members on our calls, so I'm not gonna share details cuz what happens in our academy calls stays in our academy calls. And also side conversations I've had with folks. But we have some folks doing some very significant revenue in dedicated meeting space. And when I say dedicated, they compete with hotels to some extent. So I'll give you an example that came from the conference.
00:07:50 I hosted a panel that was on marketing and about knowing your end consumer. It was an excellent panel. I wish that it had been recorded because it was so good. I would love to share it with you since most of you weren't there. But Morgan Burn, who's the director of marketing from Rome Coworking, they're in the Atlanta market and they are just opening in Frisco.
00:08:13 Rob Archer, who is the CEO for Code Base Coworking in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Javier, hold on. I always get, Javier has a long name. Javier Garcia Iza who is the CEO of iOS offices. They have I think 40 locations in Mexico. It was a very exciting panel. So one of the things that Morgan brought up is that they have been seeing a big increase in demand from local companies that are gathering using their spaces,
00:08:44 gathering space. So they're not going to HQ to have their meetings. So Atlanta has, you know, Home Depot, Chick-fil-A, who else did she mention? Some big, those are probably Fortune 100 companies that get budget for meeting space. And instead of going to the local hotel, they're looking at a solution like Rome, which has significant meeting space options.
00:09:07 If you go to their website to book a meeting, you can pick a meeting that varies in size greatly. So any kind of meeting you wanna host, Rome can host you. And they do catering, they do all sorts of things. So they, hold on, let me read what her website says. Okay, meeting spaces crafted to inspire and engage.
00:09:30 I love that tagline. And when's the last time you were at a corporate meeting that inspired you or engaged you? It's probably been a long time for some of us who are entrepreneurs. I remember my corporate days and I remember meetings being painful. This is probably had a unique situation, but I worked for what used to be craft foods and they owned all processed food brands that are terrible for you.
00:09:54 And so all of our meetings had to come from the craft kitchens, Deno pizza with craft salad dressing, all stuff that was not good for you. So our meetings, a, the catering was terrible and another meeting where was at Windows, it was just they were not inspiring, we're engaging. So now the choice is with the person organizing the meeting,
00:10:18 right? They get to pick their meeting space. It does not have to be at HQ, it can be at a Rome location that's most convenient to the people showing up to the meeting and Rome can accommodate their needs. And Rome has beautiful coffee bars and places to work. So they said they're getting a lot of direct leads for that business and it's,
00:10:37 they're converting folks into memberships when they come in and can give them a tour and that kind of thing. But I thought that was very interesting. Again, if you look at Rome's website, you will say yes, we are not probably set up for that type of space because it's a significant commitment to real estate to set up that much meeting room space.
00:10:56 But I think more than ever in this makes sense, Post pandemic that is happening, 25 North posted a happy hour for us in Frisco. I think I mentioned that on the podcast already. Their team was amazing and we hosted it in their sort of multifunction event space. Awesome. Like a beautiful kitchen, really moveable walls. They are hosting church groups, they're hosting all sorts of folks and they can open up that space and they can expand kind of into the flex space to make it bigger.
00:11:29 So they've designed the space to be really flexible and multi-purpose. It can be a training room, it can be, you know, we used it for happy hour. It can be a number different things. And they have all sorts of groups that are coming in. They did mention there's a lot of work for their staff to be moving that furniture around all the time,
00:11:45 but they're also doing significant monthly revenue on their meeting room space. So, and again, that's like the, the bigger groups, not just their smaller ones, Z two Z, not that they're not, that just wasn't the focus of the conversations that I was having. And I've heard this, I've mentioned this a few times on the podcast, that the difference today is that folks are equipped with budgets to use and they're just becoming more aware that Coworking spaces are a place,
00:12:14 an option for them. Like church groups, like actual service, I guess a service using it for service, using it for bible studies. Super interesting. I have two groups in my Coworking Startup school that are working on Coworking spaces to, you know, multipurpose in that function. So I know there are folks out there that work with churches to convert the space that they have into Coworking,
00:12:37 but also folks that don't have space where they wanna offer services can use Coworking spaces to do that and they don't have to build their own facilities. Hey, I just wanted to jump in really quickly before we continue with our discussion. If you're working on opening a Coworking space, I wanna invite you to join me for my free masterclass. Three behind the scene Secrets to opening a Coworking Space.
00:13:01 If you're working on opening a Coworking space, I wanna 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 slash masterclass. If you already have a Coworking space,
00:13:24 I wanna 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, sales and marketing, finance and leadership.
00:13:53 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 Manager can work through any challenges that they're having or opportunities get ideas from other community managers,
00:14:22 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. So you know, that's the thing that you have to host. But lots of interesting use cases depending on what you're willing to host on the Flex Uncensored podcast. We interviewed Grant Barnhill,
00:14:46 one of my favorite interviews. He's so interesting. And what they're doing with hospitality is very, very compelling. They are starting to do significant events. We're talking like weddings. They have a really beautiful sort of boutique hotel lobby feel and they're doing really, really well hosting sort of personal events, not business events, but those things are starting to happen.
00:15:06 One other thing that I kind of wanted to mention that's been on my mind is one of the, the other kind of data points that kept coming up was, you know, nobody's going to the office on Monday or Friday and that makes sense. And I continue to see people posting free Coworking Friday, and I think we're pr, that's probably like running on a hamster wheel.
00:15:27 Like is that gonna work? People wanna stay home and get their stuff done or spend time with their kids, or they just don't want to, They don't wanna go outta the house on Friday and Monday maybe is like meeting day and you just do that at home cuz you don't need to go to the Coworking space to do that. So I wonder, even if you don't have ideal event space in your current space,
00:15:48 if you could do something with opening up the space to bigger events or meetings on a Monday or Friday. Like might we get to the point, I could be totally wrong about this, but might we get to the point where your memberships only include Friday access for office members? So if you rent a private office, you can get access to your office anytime you want,
00:16:10 but the membership doesn't include Fridays because no one comes on Fridays. And why if you, well, you could just not staff on Fridays and wouldn't you be an amazing employer if you could give your team Friday off, or you make it reservable for off sites and generate revenue. So I think this is one of those opportunities where you might just sort of like start thinking about what's changing and what's possible and what makes the most sense for your space,
00:16:40 for your business model. What are the opportunities to monetize? If you're thinking about a second location, maybe do some, you know, extra research and due diligence on what that looks like. We've definitely talked about the idea that that, you know, dedicated events might be the way to make smaller locations work. And again, I wonder if you sell a membership that doesn't guarantee access.
00:17:03 Maybe there's a caveat in the membership terms that says, here's your super inexpensive flex membership that you know does not make help my business to survive. You know, we reserve the right to host events in the space, offsite workshops, whatever it is. And on those days you won't have access and we'll give you notice ahead of time. So I think we're just gonna start seeing things shift and looking at ways to do things differently.
00:17:31 And we're not always gonna optimize for revenue, but thinking about if that is one of your goals and you just want your space to be useful and to have sort of a business model that's gonna continue to grow with the changing environment, the standard, you know, Monday through Friday, like office use may not be the model that works best moving forward. So just some food for thought.
00:17:56 That's it for today. So I'm gonna put the link to Rome in the show notes. If I can think of any other kind of meeting-driven spaces. We have a couple in our membership that I'll throw in there. We'll do that. And I am also, I have on the schedule for our Everything Coworking Academy doing how I did this around building meeting room revenue to kind of do a deep dive on that.
00:18:18 So stay tuned for that and we'll see you next week with an interview with an operator that's gone from 4,000 square feet to I think 22,000 square feet. So stay tuned for that. We'll see you next week. 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.
00:18:43 It makes a huge difference in helping others like you find us. If you 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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