318. The DIY Dilemma
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318. The DIY Dilemma
00:00:00,"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,"
00:00:27,"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. Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast. This is your host Jamie Russo. Thank you for joining me today. So today we are talking about the D I Y dilemma and I like to call myself a chronic d iyer. So I grew up on a farm,"
00:00:57,"on a dairy farm in upstate New York and we did not pay for things to get done. My dad did all of the things, he fixed the cars, he remodeled the house, let's use that term lightly. We wanted a swing set. He built the swing set, he poured the concrete for my brother's basketball court. We did all the things. So he actually just had to get a new roof."
00:01:24,"And I think this is the first time and he, he is not young enough to be on the roof anymore. He had to pay to have somebody put a new roof on. Maybe last time he did it himself. I really don't know. So I inherited this d I Y approach. You do things yourself. My husband on the other hand grew up on Long Island and his father was not at all handy and so they either didn't do things that needed to get done or paid for things to get done."
00:01:55,"So you may be able to relate to that in your household. So even today where I really value my time as an entrepreneur, you know as a business person, a parent, I have a lot going on. I run our local soccer league, which you've heard we talk about before. Time is really precious. And so I've had to sort of unlearn the do things yourself challenge."
00:02:22,"But recently we have a second home that will hopefully be an investment. We are on the short-term rental waiting list for some time. But we will start creating that as a short-term rental property as soon as we are able to. So we've been kinda getting it all set up. So that is some extra work, certainly an extra expense until we can monetize it and we have to get the deck stained."
00:02:55,"So we had a very challenging winter, 700 inches of snow. We have three decks and I've started looking around the neighborhood. Very few houses have three decks. It's ridiculous. Something maybe to consider in the purchase process that need to be maintained. So they need to be stained. So we got a quote for this and mind you, I should tell you in the middle of this,"
00:03:18,"we had, so we bought the house last year and then had had it all repainted new floors and then we had significant water damage. So we had a lot of expenses over the winter, some of which were covered by insurance, not all to sort of rehab water damage, which was in a lot of the walls. We didn't lose any furniture fortunately,"
00:03:44,"but we had to repaint and do do a bunch of repairs. So anyway, coming off of that, we got a quote for the, to get the deck stained and it was $5,000 and I was like, that's a lot of cash just to stain the decks. I'm gonna stain the decks thinking my husband and I would stay in the decks. So our plan was to spend most of July at the house,"
00:04:08,"which we did most of except we had to leave for part of the month so that the repairs could get done because as you know, if you've had anything to do with home or commercial construction, it's hard to get contractors. So we were at the mercy of their schedule. So we did not have all of July and we also did not anticipate that there would be a ton of pollen."
00:04:28,"So I don't know if this is typical, but we had an awful mosquito season and pollen season. So for all of July we'd wake up every morning and there would be like an inch of pollen on the decks, on the driveway, on the cars. It was a mess. So we realized, oh, we cannot leisurely deal with the decks while we're here because of the pollen."
00:04:47,"Like how do we do the decks with pollen accumulating every day? So we said, okay, we're gonna put a little hold on that, we'll get an estimate. That's when we got the estimate. It was five grand. And I said, okay, well I'll do it and I'll do it. You know, I'll figure out a time like early fall before soccer season starts."
00:05:06,"'cause once soccer season starts, I cannot spend any weekends there. So we talked to our local handyman, he gave me a couple of tips, I scribbled them down in a notebook and I was like, I can do this. Then I started watching YouTube videos. Does this sound familiar? If you're thinking about starting a Coworking space, this is my analogy,"
00:05:25,"watching YouTube videos, trying to piece things together. So I watched some videos and I was like, I got this. They make it look so easy. I watched a couple of like independent people and then I watched like the Lowe's Weekender video and I was, which is a woman. And I was like, I can totally do this. So I didn't,"
00:05:44,"because of scheduling though, I couldn't get my equipment locally, I had to get it at home. So I went to the local paint store and I, in hindsight, like they're not an expert in decks that get snow, that deal with snow, right? Because where I live, there is no snow ever. There's a lot of rain, but they don't get snow."
00:06:06,"And so I'm not totally sure the person I worked with, he seemed pretty confident, but I told him what I wanted. They didn't have exactly what the contractor had recommended, which I could have gotten if I went to the location where I the local, local to the, the cabin could have, yeah, it's a cabin. So picture cabin with with wood exterior and wood decks,"
00:06:30,"three of them. So if I'd bought the materials locally, they would've had what he told me to get, although I still would've gotten the wrong color. So anyway, I buy all the materials, which is hundreds of dollars worth of materials, I take them to the cabin. So I kind of like make, make a work week where I've got some time like in the morning,"
00:06:51,"in the afternoon to do some deck staining and I'm ready. I've got a little time blocked off. I'm there by myself. I have one dog and not two dogs, no kids. So my plan is to spend like the mornings and the evenings doing the deck and then do my meetings and whatnot in the middle of the deck staining, well I revisit the YouTube videos and I realized I did not watch them that carefully."
00:07:19,"I was kind of overly optimistic maybe or just not very detail oriented, which is certainly possible. And I didn't ru make notes about the drying time. So when you stain you have to do, and I also didn't really absorb these details. You have to p, you have to use deck wash. You're basically using a chemical to get the old stain off,"
00:07:45,"which I didn't process. And then you power wash it and then you wait two days, then you sand it and then you wait. You have to power wash it again and wait one or two more days and then you can stain and oh by the way, then you need two coats. So I did not process all the drying time so I didn't really have the drying time worked into my plan and then all of a sudden there's rain in the forecast."
00:08:14,"There is never rain in the forecast. In September, it was end of August going into labor day and it was when the hurricane came through, the first one since 1934 in California. And so we got some rain, not a lot, but enough to make the decks wet. So I did the prep work, I used the deck wash, I power washed."
00:08:37,"The power washing itself was quite a process. It sounds easy. So I bought a little power washer off of Amazon and I love the power washer. It has many uses. I'm glad I have it. So I did the stairs and so we've stairs two sets of stairs, one is bigger than the other and then three decks. So the challenge with the one of the third deck is that is on the second story."
00:09:01,"And so I had to, getting the hose up to the second story to connect to the power washer was like a major circus feet. I'm sure the neighbors were like, what is this woman doing? By the way, I'm making quite a racket while my neighbors aren't working from home, which probably no one else thinks about, but I'm power washing, I'm making all sorts of noise during the day while I know both of my neighbors work from home."
00:09:27,"And I'm like rodeo, lassoing this hose over the top deck to get the power washer connected. Hey there, I'm interrupting our discussion to ask you when is the last time you audited your member onboarding process? Probably it's been a while. We are covering that topic in our Community Manager University live training this month. Now I can assure you that this is not the first time we've talked about member onboarding."
00:09:59,"In this program we have over 40 training modules that we've run live and are recorded in our learning hub. We have checklists for onboarding, we have automated email series for onboarding. We've got it covered. But what I find is this is one of those topics that you cannot revisit often enough. It's so critical for success. So we're running through some case studies revisiting our checklist and having a great discussion with our global group of community managers about how to onboard members for success and retention."
00:10:36,"So if you've been thinking about adding your Community Manager to the program, this is a great time to do it. Also coming up, we are doing a Google Business review contest for the month of May. So if you are not averaging two to three new Google reviews per month, get your Community Manager in the program. We are going to make sure that they ramp up their reviews and that we get them in the process of getting consistent reviews every single month."
00:11:09,"So these are just some of the things that we cover in our program. We would love to have you join us. You can get more information at Everything Coworking dot com slash Community Manager. So anyway, iDeCK washed, power washed, weighted sanded. And the sanding is also where I realized I had not thought through the process. And when I watched the videos,"
00:11:35,"I realized that I was not processing that the videos were only about the floor of the deck. Never in the videos did they address the railings and the spindles. I guess they call them like all the vertical pieces of the railing and there's like hundreds of them. So finally I watched this video that basically says, ideally you should take, you should disassemble the railing,"
00:12:00,"take off all the spindles sand. This is actually a video for refinishing a deck, which is not what I'm doing, but the self-doubt started to creep in. So there's two things now happening. One, I have no idea with the rain coming how I'm gonna actually get the deck stained because I cannot stay for an extra week. Soccer's starting, I have to go back."
00:12:22,"When am I gonna come back and do this? And I'm now, I'm watching these YouTube videos and realizing it's gonna take like forever to stain the spindles of the deck, the floor, no problem. 'cause at this time I've done the prep work, but I'm starting to get very overwhelmed by all the time that it's gonna take to do the spindles. So I tell my husband like I've done a crap ton of work."
00:12:46,"I was like literally falling asleep at the kitchen counter at night while I'm doing this. 'cause I'm trying to work during the day and I'm, maybe I'm doing workouts in the middle of the day. I'm walking the dog and I'm doing all this work and I was so tired, it was exhausting. And so now I don't know how I'm gonna make the time to do it and,"
00:13:10,"and I am not sure that I've actually done everything right. I can see some shiny spots on the deck and I don't know what to do about that. The third deck, my husband thinks that doesn't need to be done. I think it needs to be done, but the deck wash doesn't get it to the point where I can sand it. And then I'm wondering do I have to take off the spindles or am I sanding between the spindles,"
00:13:34,"which would take forever. So I'm starting to realize, oh this is why it costs $5,000 to sand and stain three decks with lots of spindles and a set of stairs that are not super significant, but they took a decent amount of time to sand. This is why it costs 5,000. This is why it's hard to do it yourself unless you really have the time and maybe if you live there full-time,"
00:14:01,"which I don't live there full-time. And in the meantime by the way, my daughter, you know, really the reason I can't be away from home is because you probably have this challenge too. My daughter has to be at 17 different things after school every day. So my poor husband, while I'm exhausted from sanding, is dealing with another dog and a kid who has lots of transportation requirements."
00:14:23,"So anyway, how does this relate to Coworking? Well, we meet people all the time who D I y, the process of opening a Coworking space and they think this can't be that hard. They watch some YouTube videos, they listen to my free podcast. I get emails all the time. Thank you so much for your free content. I feel like I have an M B A in Coworking."
00:14:46,"I mean kind of, but there are a bunch of mistakes that you can make on your own. So anyway, to continue the story, I wave the white flag. I tell my husband, I, I can't, I don't think I can do this and I'm not totally sure I've done everything right and the decks are important. I don't wanna totally screw it up."
00:15:06,"So, and then I have to pick a color. And honestly that's where I started to really fall apart. Well, I'd already picked the stain and I started to, after I sanded, I was like, I don't think I got the right stain because the place in in my hometown had given me basically a clear stain. And then I realized because I was paranoid about picking the wrong color because the deck matches the house and doing the whole matching process was too much for me,"
00:15:35,"it's overwhelm. So I was just like, we'll go with clear. Well, after I sanded I was like, oh, I see now it's like a blank slate. And so you're, it's not gonna look like the house. It's gonna look like a sanded deck that has a clear coat over it, like a clear coat of nail polish. So then I,"
00:15:54,"so I'm like, I don't, I don't know if the stains right, so I call the painter and we have a painter, the not the one we've gotten the estimate from, actually the painter who did our house. And so I call Jim, I don't think I can, here's what I've done, can you come over and take a look and give me an estimate for the rest of it?"
00:16:12,"I'm hoping you can use my pre-work. So he sends his project manager over who fortunately was kind enough to give me a giant high five over all of the work that I'd done. And I said, Ivan, I can see why people don't do this themselves. He is, oh my God, I'm, I'm kind of happy you did all this work because nobody understands how much work it is to do this."
00:16:33,"And so they think it's crazy how much it costs or how much time it takes. So he, he looks at my stain and says, well this is a primer. It's not really a stain. And so it's the wrong product. This is not what you wanna use. He told me what color they typically use but didn't think that was the right color for the house."
00:16:51,"So he sends me to look at a house that has a similar color and we do, he tells me how to go through the process of picking a color. So then he says, high five, you've done amazing. You did everything right except the shiny spots that I had mentioned. Those do need to be removed. You need more deck wash. So he's,"
00:17:09,"or we have tools that can help with that. And the third deck that we're a little bit in between on he's, yeah, we need to strip that or if it's a darker color we can just go over it. But stripping it probably is out of above my pay grade. So Ivan says, you did a great job, we can definitely use your pre-work,"
00:17:27,"you know, we'll get you an estimate, we'll take care of it, but we need to get different stain. You gotta use this product. You can't use the product that you have, you return it. Thankfully it was clear so I could return it. It hadn't been mixed. So anyway, my, oh, and I said, Ivan, are you gonna take apart the the spindles?"
00:17:47,"I watched this video on YouTube and it sometimes people take them apart. He's no, no, no, no, no. He's like, you can't even imagine what it would cost if we did that. He said, we don't even sand the spindles and the spindles what was, was what were really like blowing me away and thinking I cannot do this."
00:18:05,"They stain the spindles, which certainly will take time, but they don't sand them. And I had sanded them. I would say I did a B grade on the sanding, the, the stairs and the floor a A grade, but did not do what I thought was excellent work on the spindles because it was so time consuming. You could only listen to so many podcasts."
00:18:27,"You know what I'm saying? So he said, oh yeah, we don't even stand in between. We don't even actually sand the spindles. We just put the deck wash on and call it a day. We do our best but we're not going for perfection here because it would just take too long. Nobody wants to pay for that and they don't wanna spend the time on it."
00:18:42,"So the other piece of this is, it's such detailed work. Like my, I hate detailed work unless it's, yeah, mostly I hate it. So I didn't wanna do it like I was thinking through, you know, I doing the, the floor of the deck is fine 'cause that's like broad strokes. Couple of codes we're done, we feel good."
00:19:05,"But man, those spindles, I was just like that's gonna be torture. And that's a personality thing and probably an entrepreneurial thing, right? So somebody else needs to be paying attention to the details. So how am I gonna bring this back to Coworking? I'm gonna bring it back to Coworking because again, I see a lot of people thinking they're gonna D I y this process and they make a bunch of assumptions."
00:19:25,"They watch some YouTube videos, like I said, thank you for the M B A from the podcast. But that is not gonna get you all the way, you're still gonna have to do a lot of detailed steps that probably you as an entrepreneur will not make yourself go through on your own. And whatever money you would spend getting some professional support will have an r o i 100% and it's worth it."
00:19:47,"It just costs that much to start a business. Like with the deck example, you know what, it's five grand 'cause it takes a lot of hours to stain the deck. So it's really like man hours, you know what I mean? They're not like promising some magical transformation. It's just man hours. So it's worth it. There's a reason it's so expensive,"
00:20:08,"right? And starting a Coworking space is a giant investment. Even if you have a landlord paying for a build out, even if you're getting a good deal on rent, it is a giant investment. And so you wanna spend the money upfront to make sure you get it right. So you don't, you wanna make sure, you know, like I picked the wrong stain."
00:20:29,"I didn't, the deck wash was pretty good but it wasn't perfect. And honestly I just didn't know what are those shiny spots from. In hindsight, I was like, oh of course they just need more deck washing. I didn't even really understand what the deck washing was doing honestly, while I was doing it. I didn't even wear gloves. It's like a chemical."
00:20:47,"And I did, I didn't really pro process that. I was like, that stuff smells kind of strong and I'm a reasonably intelligent human being. So relating this to Coworking, it's, look, there's a lot of upfront work that you have to know how to do in order to even start the project. You need to be able to validate your numbers,"
00:21:06,"you need to be able to validate the location. You need to do a bunch of challenge boring pricing research. We do this stuff all the time. Our team does it for operators. We have a a done for you approach that we're using with landlords. And so we do all this detail and I also find it to be monotonous and boring because it's a lot of sit at the computer and do at work."
00:21:30,"So we have team members who will do it, but you have to do the work. You can't just skip it 'cause you're an entrepreneur and you like the vision and the big picture stuff. So I would've used the wrong type of stain and would've had to redo it and it would've been redo a bowl. It would, you know, yeah, I mean if I'd used that stain,"
00:21:50,"I don't know what the outcome would've been. Are you working on starting a Coworking space in 2023 or even 2024? We want to make sure you are set up for success. You hear me talk about this a lot. The biggest mistakes made in Coworking businesses are made before you ever open your doors, before you ever sign your lease, your lease, your product mix and ensuring that your real estate deal and your offers align with your ideal future members are everything in terms of making sure that you set your business up for success."
00:22:31,"We can fix your marketing and your paint colors and your bathroom fixtures anytime, but we cannot redo your real estate deal or your product mix. We can, it's just really expensive. So we wanna help you get all of that right and be among the Coworking space operator operators that are sleeping well at night because they sign the right real estate deal and they know that their business is set up for ongoing sustainability and set up to meet their financial goals."
00:23:00,"So we'd love to have you join us in the Coworking Startup School. We cover getting started with your real estate search and signing your lease and picking your product mix and more. If you already have a location, over half of our members are already building owners, you can get all the details of what's covered in our program at Everything Coworking dot com slash start."
00:23:26,"We probably had to put another coat of actual stain on it, not just because it didn't have a color and it wouldn't look great, but because it was the wrong product. So, you know, this is akin to like in Coworking probably picking the wrong product mix except let me tell you to fix the deck. Maybe it would've cost, you know,"
00:23:43,"another thousand dollars to do another coat of stain. When you're talking about starting a business like Coworking, if you get your product mix wrong, that is like generally unfixable because we're talking about walls and insulation and wiring and electrical and all HVAC things that you cannot change after the fact without spending a lot of money. And so you want to do the work."
00:24:08,"I see people all the time making just the wrong assumptions about what size the offices should be, all sorts of things, what the layout should be, what the right product mix should be, what works for a certain market. They don't wanna do the work, they just like the creative part of sort of, you know, throwing spaghetti down and not being really,"
00:24:27,"really diligent about the details. We totally get that we relate, but you gotta do the work and so you should get help and hire people to do the details that you don't want to do. We see people sort of putting earmuffs on about their proforma. They don't wanna do the detail on the proforma. I mean, I work with entrepreneurs who, who are absolutely phenomenal about getting into the numbers."
00:24:53,"I'm not saying nobody, but we do see it where people just la la la the numbers are fine. People who are planning to go pursue funding. If you want to get a bank loan or an investor or sign a lease or buy a building, you have to really, really know your numbers or else that is a giant risk that I would not ever take."
00:25:15,"So to me, that's your you, you know, you're, you wanna, you wanna work with the professional. Like when Ivan came over, I was like, oh my god, Ivan, you know, has stained like a million decks in his life and now he's a project manager, he knows what all the mistakes are and he can just make this go really,"
00:25:30,"really smoothly. It was so reinforcing. Now I was still really proud that I'd done a lot of work on my own and frankly that it was gonna be a lot less money because I had done all this manual labor. So I had saved the money and in my mind I was like, look, I don't wanna spend five grand on the decks. I wanna spend five grand on,"
00:25:51,"you know, some other thing that we need. So if I can leave that in the bank account, I would like to do that and use it for something else. But that is not how it worked out. We had to spend it on the decks. So the, you know, and even unforeseen challenges that come up, okay, I don't really know what to do with this third deck that's kind of needs stating kind of doesn't."
00:26:13,"I see this all the time, construction costs are too high. I get an IT quote that I don't understand. People think that they can figure out the process as they go along, but man, you're really in unchartered waters. Once you get into validating the business model and then picking your tech stack, the IT quote, I mean, I can't tell you,"
00:26:34,"I just saw yesterday, you're probably listening, the person who sent me this has a 3,800 square foot space and their IT quote was for $64,000. She sent it to me. She's like, does this look right? No it does not. So I sent her, you know what it should look like. And I said, this is what you ask for."
00:26:53,"She's in our Startup school and works for this one-on-one. So you know what if she was doing this on her own and just thought, you know, that's what you have to spend, that's a giant expensive mistake. But she doesn't know. No one knows, I mean, unless you've done it before, you don't know what the IT equipment looks like."
00:27:12,"And these quotes they send, not to go on a tangent, but you couldn't tell what anything was. All the line items were like Greek, literally. It was ridiculous. I said, honestly, I said, this is some male IT guy trying to take advantage of the fact that you're a female and have no idea what you're doing with it. Send it back and tell them no thank you."
00:27:31,"Happens all the time. So you're running into details that you don't know how to navigate and if you don't have support, it's gonna get really expensive really fast. And the cost of fixing these errors is like almost undefinable. Some of them you simply cannot fix and you're gonna lose money. And even I'm talking to you, the sophisticated asset owners out there who spend money on real estate and you know,"
00:27:55,"have have p and ls and all those things. I work with asset owners who make a lot of assumptions about the business model that simply just are not right. And it's, you cannot create a sustainable business the way they're approaching it. So you need to understand what the benchmarks are and what a successful model looks like, and then adjust from there. Certainly there will be things you wanna do yourself."
00:28:23,"I see talented designers who designed spaces themselves. I see people who know a lot about, you know, marketing. I was just thinking, actually, I wanna have 'em on the podcast. There's a landlord who took over a space early in the pandemic and he, I would say doesn't knew nothing about the operations of Coworking, but he, his family owned a lot of real estate and his day job was in customer acquisition."
00:28:51,"So he called me and asked me all these questions about CAC and you know, all these metrics in the industry and he sent me a note and said, we're full. And, and I was like, yeah, that's interesting. He doesn't know anything about the business, but he understands customer acquisition and that is a huge advantage in this business. And so there are things that you will d i y because they're in your wheelhouse,"
00:29:15,"but there are things you should not d i y. So there's financial costs, there's time delays. By the way, our decks still have been stained. I'm still waiting for the contractor to do it. So, but I was never gonna get to it myself. I can't, I cannot, my schedule does not allow me to go up there for days on end waiting for stain to dry during soccer season."
00:29:38,"I coach, I referee and I am the regional commissioner for the league. It's like a part-time job except it doesn't, I'm not paid emotional toll, like frustration, doubt. You know, I would've had a lot of regret if I'd done all that work. And it turned out I put a primer on the deck instead of a stain and then explain that to my husband,"
00:29:59,"by the way, who wanted me to pay to get it done like from the beginning and to, you know, tell him like, look, I spent all this time and money on the materials and I got it wrong. Even telling him like, you know what I told you, I watched all those YouTube videos, but I didn't take notes and I did not really process what this looked like was embarrassing to me because he is super detailed."
00:30:23,"He's a finance guy, he's very, he does not make those kind of mistakes. So he does not have my like big picture chase shiny object tendencies. So even telling him, Hey, I totally got this timeline wrong and I cannot actually stain the decks when I thought we could, was challenging for me. So imagine telling your spouse, Hey, I made this all up and spent hundreds of thousand dollars of our savings,"
00:30:50,"but I made a bunch of assumptions I didn't really take, you know, I didn't get into the details, I don't really like details and so I made a bunch of costly mistakes and we're not gonna make as money on this, much money on this business as we thought. Imagine that you don't want that. So keep those things in mind when you are attempted to d i y this business and figure things out on your own because it looks easy to reverse engineer."
00:31:15,"The deck looked easy too. And it would've been if I had only been looking at the floor of the deck and not come and not missing some of the details. I seriously, when I go back to those YouTube videos, I'm like, how did my brain not process the wait time, the drying time in between all the steps just yep. Gone didn't process it at all."
00:31:35,"And so that will be happening to you. So my advice is it doesn't have to be our team. It doesn't have to be the Startup school. It doesn't have to be our done with you programs. But don't d i y this because this is not the d i ying A deck is pretty low risk. We're talking a $5,000 mistake. DIYing, A Coworking space is tens,"
00:31:58,"maybe hundreds of thousand dollars of mistake, especially over a seven year, 10 year lease. So make sure that you're getting some expert support. So send me a message if you want to talk about the D I Y dilemma or share any D I Y mistakes that you have had over time. We'll see you next week."
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