285. 3 Books That Will Impact Your Coworking Business
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285. 3 Books That Will Impact Your Coworking Business
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. Thank you for joining me. It is not quite yet New Year's or the new year 2023 if you are listening to this right when it comes out, which of course you are, who would miss the podcast when it first airs, but we're getting close and it's the perfect time of year to be inspired and think big picture thoughts and think about how you might impact your business in 2023.
00:01:17 That is what my brain is focusing on. I have lots of ideas for our kind of signature program, our Community, Manager University and our Startup school and we're doing some other projects around educating brokers. Lots of good stuff coming up. So I love inspiration. I also love really great business books and you probably know cuz you're probably, if you're a listener,
00:01:42 you probably also a reader or an audiobook listener that not every business book is a home run. So I have read three fairly recently that made a pretty big impact on me and I wanted to share them with you because I think that there are lots of insights that you can pull from them that might impact your co-working business or just your life in general. So here we go.
00:02:07 I think I have to recommend this one first. I sent it to one of the women who went through my Startup school or I recommended it to her cuz she recommended one of the other books on the list. So I wanted to give her a good one in return. She said she's already sent it to six of her clients. She's also a business coach so she also loved it.
00:02:26 It's called Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Gira and the tagline is The remarkable power of giving people more than they expect. I think hospitality is a huge theme for the co-working industry, for landlords, for anybody in any business really coming out of Covid and going into 2023. People want an experience, people want more than they expect. People want a reason to leave their homes,
00:02:58 so I love thinking about how to weave hospitality into the Coworking shared office, flexible business. We have folks who are doing all sorts of shared models, but if you're a business owner then getting inspired by how to serve people, these examples are pretty incredible. Will was the GM and then owner of 11 Madison, I can't remember the name of the whole name.
00:03:24 11 Madison Park, which is a fine dining restaurant in Manhattan. He came out of the Danny Meyer organization so you can imagine sort of, you know his training ground. Hi, this is Josh Fried, c e o of proximity. When we started proximity, we did it for one reason. We didn't like how hard it was to run our Coworking spaces.
00:03:45 At first we tried testing different space management software on the market and look, we found that we had to use multiple software solutions then we spent way too much time trying to sync them all together and then we spent even more time training our staff and worse yet our members on how to use this overcomplicated solution. We ended up going circles, attempting to manage our software instead of letting software do what it's supposed to,
00:04:08 which is help run our business. Our members were frustrated, we were frustrated, we just didn't think it should be so hard to operate a Coworking space. So we built our own solution to make Coworking spaces easier to manage all packaged up in one, easy to use platform refined by feedback from hundreds of Coworking spaces over the last five years. Proximity software is simple for operators and best of all members and it is backed by our award-winning US-based customer support team.
00:04:38 It's time to stop settling for overcomplicated software, get software that was actually purpose built for Coworking by Coworking Space operators. See it for yourself. Our team is available to chat with Everything Coworking podcast listeners and you can schedule your call today at proximity dos space slash Jamie. Here's what I love about this book. I'm not gonna give you like lots of details and I'm not going to you know,
00:05:02 draw all of my own conclusions. I'll let you do it. It is a must read or a must listen to the author narrates the audio book, which I also love. I really don't like listening to like people who theoretically have good audio voices. I love it when the author reads and this guy has so much energy, it's a true pleasure to listen to.
00:05:23 I'm gonna listen to it again. I'm trying to get myself to re-listen to books. I'm such a craver of information that I don't watch movies repeatedly. Like my husband will be like, oh I'm gonna watch the whole, you know, whatever series twice again, like I just don't relate to that. I only want new stimuli in my brain so I don't do anything twice,
00:05:46 but these books are so good. I'm trying to think about more of an approach of like studying these books instead of just reading it and thinking it's amazing and then moving on and never doing anything with it. It, so I'm gonna listen to this one again. Okay, so here's what I loved about this book. It is about the restaurant industry but it is not,
00:06:06 there's a bunch of quotes on the back. One of 'em says one of the five best management books I have ever read, plus it is the most engaging and entertaining by a wide margin. I totally agree. The guy says this is flat out not a book to miss. A hundred percent agree. So he talks a lot about team culture, customers,
00:06:26 how to systematize, delighting your customers. There's so many good examples in here. Partnerships, how to work with partners, how to innovate. He has this 95 5 rule where he's super, super budget focused, you know, 95% of the time and then he leaves like 5% of his budget to just be silly and let his team do silly things and let them innovate.
00:06:51 How you scale a culture, how you practice creativity, how you stick to the basics. But look to innovate, I mean he, it's just so many amazing examples. You will eat this book up and he runs a fine dining restaurant so it's different, right? It's like it doesn't maybe make sense to apply the grand concepts that he has applied to his business,
00:07:15 you know, to the co-working business. And yet I think there are nuggets of delighting people. I'll give you a very simple example. I drove in significant rain in San Francisco a couple weekends ago and my headlights shut down and my turning signal wouldn't work and I, so I thought the alternator was going and I was kind of freaking out and so I took my car in and the owner of the shop,
00:07:43 you know I come in, he makes time, I was late, I completely forgot about the appointment. So I show up like six hours late and he greets me, he runs the test like the diagnostic thing on my car twice to make sure that he got it right and that nothing else popped up. He filled my windshield wiper fluid and he put air in my tires and he didn't charge me for any of it.
00:08:06 Now I do have a significant repair that I will be going back to get done. That's not urgent. But I did make an appointment to get that done. So he probably thought, well you know, I'm not gonna charge her for this but I felt so taken care of and all he did was put wiper fluid, which I know how to do and put air in my tires,
00:08:23 which also I am totally capable of doing and always do on my own, but I don't like to do it. I don't like to get, have to get down and you know, go to the GR whatever. It was so special and I haven't done it yet, but I was leaving there and I was like, I have got to write this guy the most fabulous review ever and he has 1 million amazing reviews because this is just a part of their D N A,
00:08:45 it's what they do. I just loved it and my love language is service and so I just felt like so taken care of, it was lovely but so simple and how do we apply those, those concepts to our business? What are the little things we can do for our members or for our prospective members to show them what it's like to be a member or how do we change what it is like to be a member?
00:09:06 You know, I think there's room for like a significantly elevated experience in Coworking. I think we will start to see very premium spaces where people like fine dining will just pay for the experience. Now this is the level of restaurant where it's super pricey and people go for like very special occasions or corporate celebrations. So it is not a thing you pay, you know you do every day.
00:09:30 Although they did add lunch, which is also interesting from a business perspective. Anyway, I'm not gonna dwell on this any longer, but it is a must-read. I'm telling you I love this book. I'm reading it again and you must read it. Okay, so the next one is called Quit and I keep telling people to read this and I feel like they don't wanna read it because they don't wanna quit things and they probably think I'm telling them to quit their co-working business.
00:09:54 I am not necessarily, but the tagline is the power of knowing when to walk away. And it is by Annie Duke. Annie Duke, super fascinating. Has, I don't know what her degree is in something to do with the brain. Oh I should have looked that up. But anyway, she was also a professional poker player for like 20 years.
00:10:15 Fascinating. She's so interesting. Okay, so my business coach recommended this to me and I also love it and have been telling people to read it. This one I did actually listen to two times and my suspicion was that I missed half of it the first time because I'm thinking about things or whatever, but I actually like, I remembered most of it so I was pleased with that.
00:10:36 But anyway, okay, so quit by Annie Duke. The links to these will be in the show notes so you can grab them. Actually also, if you are listening on Apple Podcasts on your phone, you probably know this, but in case you don't, you can just like tap on the episode and scroll up and get the show notes and the links are right in there.
00:10:54 So if I ever say something's in the show notes and you're like, where the heck are the show notes on the website? Everything Coworking dot com or right in your phone. Okay, so this is not about quitting everything you do, although some of you should quit your Coworking spaces because you are not making money and you're not on a path to make money.
00:11:10 And if that is your goal then you should find a way to get out. So she goes through how you evaluate what you're working on and how to be more aware of our human biases and how to think about what to spend time on. She talks a lot about expected value, which is a great exercise if you're thinking about opening a new space or adding a new product line.
00:11:34 What is the, like one example that we went through in our 2023 planning session that I ran for my academy members and anybody else that wanted to join was the one example was, you know, what if you add as a product line, sit stand desk or monitors, you know, basically extras that people can rent. Hey, I just wanted to jump in really quickly before we continue with our discussion.
00:12:02 If you're working on opening a Coworking space, I wanna 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 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.
00:12:25 If you'd like to join me, you can register at Everything Coworking dot com slash masterclass. If you already have a Coworking space, 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.
00:12:51 The platform includes many courses that cover the major buckets of the Community Manager role from community management operations, sales and marketing, finance and leadership. The content is laid out in a graduated learning path so the Community Manager can identify what content is most relevant to them depending on their experience and kind of jump in from there. We provide a live brand new training every single month for the Community Manager group.
00:13:20 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, 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 slash Community Manager. So we went through the exercise of saying,
00:13:47 okay, well how much revenue would that bring in? How likely is it that it will succeed? What are the cost to launch this? And then what is the benefit and is it worth it? What is the expected value? And sometimes I think as entrepreneurs we get these ideas and we just decide to go for it without going through the exercise of deciding what is the expected value and what is the opportunity cost?
00:14:08 If I spend my time and resources on this, what can I not do that might have a higher expected value? So it's just like a really good book for thinking about and why do we not leave things that aren't working? So like if your co-working space is not working, you're not making money or you're not losing money but you're not paying yourself, that is a common challenge that I hear often.
00:14:29 So sun costs are one thing, like you put all this money in, how could you leave it? Now the sun costs fallacy is fairly common. You might be familiar with it, but it talks about like you should not evaluate future decisions based on money that you've already put in. Your decisions should be made going forward or what is the kill criteria?
00:14:48 So I'm gonna try this new product line, I'm gonna try testing day offices or part-time offices and I'm gonna give it six months and if I don't make you know X amount of revenue, then I'm gonna kill the project. Thinking about, you know, when you go into something it's hard to predict how something will work, but you have to have kill criteria so that you know when to get out because we spend way too much time on things that aren't working.
00:15:10 Why we keep doing things besides sun cost identity. Identity is a big deal and I can totally relate to this. So if your identity is I own a Coworking space or your identity is I own a Coworking space that is only open space, even if it doesn't and it's very community focused, even if it doesn't produce the profit that lines up with your goals,
00:15:31 then it's hard to make changes. It's hard to not be a Coworking space owner or again, I'm not trying to tell you to quit your business but quitting anything that's that it could be, I don't know, quitting a friendship or quitting a hobby or all sorts of things. Anyway, this is, I just think it's a super important business book because quitting an employee,
00:15:55 you know like just how do you get yourself out of the habit of doing things for too long that are not working because everyone does things that don't work, right? We are imperfect and we cannot predict how things will turn out. I'm listening to another book by Annie Duke called How to Decide and the point of that book, cuz I love Annie Duke,
00:16:12 she also narrates her own book, is that there's so much luck involved with outcomes that you cannot get caught up in the results of decisions. But you have to have the right process around the decision making and do your best at imagining possible outcomes and then try to get yourself over the biases that make us stick with things for too long that aren't working and lots of things don't work and that is totally okay.
00:16:37 She talks a lot about, so there's a concept called escalating commitment. Fascinating. As humans, we tend to try to save things that aren't working. Again, this could be a project, this could be an employee, this could be some new product that you're testing, but wanting to like double down on making it work when it's not working. And the,
00:16:56 there's lots of evidence to show that we do these things. Anyway, I'm doing less of a good job selling this book. It's very hard to describe I think how it could impact your life, but I really love it. I think it's super helpful. So quick my Annie Duke. Okay, the next one is called a former business coach sent this to me and I owe her a thank you.
00:17:17 She literally just put it in the mail and I don't even know if she put in a note. She's been on the podcast Rita Highland way, way, way, way, way back. I would love to have her on again. She has her own podcast. That is wonderful. So this is called 4,000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Berkman.
00:17:33 And this one I am also going to read twice. So I am committing to this. So this one, again, I'm not gonna like summarize the book, but a couple of things. Like one of the co, this is probably more for your entrepreneurial mindset. Like it talks about this idea that you cannot clear the decks. I definitely get into this mindset that I can clear the decks.
00:17:59 Clearing the decks means you've got this like giant to-do list and you're gonna actually get it all done. You cannot get it all done. You cannot clear the decks and so you have to like shift your mindset around. I think if you liked, oh, what is it called? Uhoh Greg McCune's book. The one about doing less. Oh boy, don't believe it's not,
00:18:21 oh essentialism, it's on my bookshelf. If you liked Essentialism, you'll also like this one. It's like shifting your mindset about what you can do in your life and what you can get done. So again, this is more of a mindset book and you might just have to take my word for it, but one of the chapters is called You Are Here.
00:18:40 And it struck a chord with me because it's basically saying that I'll read a line, it says, and yet we'd be fooling ourselves to put all the blame on capitalism for the way in which modern life so often feels like a slog to be gotten through and route to some better time in the future. The truth is that we collaborate with the state of affairs,
00:18:58 we choose to treat time in this self-defeating, instrumental way, and we do so because it helps us maintain the feeling of being in omnipotent control of our lives. As long as you believe that the real meaning of life lies somewhere off in the future, that one day all your efforts will pay off in a golden era of happiness, free of all problems,
00:19:15 you get to avoid facing the unpalatable reality that your life isn't leading toward some moment of truth that hasn't yet arrived. He's basically arguing that we should live our days as if we might not have more days that we should not do things. Not that we can't do some things like to invest in the future, but that you can't live your life for some fuzzy future.
00:19:40 You should live your life for the now. You need to do things today that are the things you want them to do, not, I mean, to some extent I get it, you're an entrepreneur, you're building a business, you are, you know, creating wealth. You're maybe of an age where you know, income and and things like that matter for the future.
00:19:57 But also we can't live our lives as if there is some future down the road that will be very different from today that we get to enjoy when this is all over because that is not necessarily true and it could all be over at any point. So it was super insightful for me and good for my mindset. If you are an Engram three like I am,
00:20:17 then this book is for you and it's a good time of year to think about how you wanna live 2023, and this will be some good input. So I will stop there and leave the links in the show notes for you and wish you some happy reading or audiobook listening, and we will be back with an interview next week. Thank you for listening to today's episode.
00:20:41 If you like what you heard, tell a friend, hit that subscribe button and leave us a rating and review. 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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