363. Creating a People-First Coworking Experience with Kristin Hardwick, Founder and CEO of CoHo
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
Everything Coworking Featured Resources:
Masterclass: 3 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets to Opening a Coworking Space
TRANSCRIPTION
363. Creating a People-First Coworking Experience with Kristin Hardwick, Founder and CEO of CoHo
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 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."
00:00:40,"Welcome to the Everything coworking podcast. This is your host, Jamie Russo. Thank you for joining me. Today. We have another great guest in store for you. I know you love to hear stories of other operators. Kristin, my guest today and I were talking about how important it is to connect with other operators because you kind of live in your own, you know, head and your own business."
00:01:05,"And while our business is really about building community, sometimes as operators, you, you know, are kind of missing that in your own life. So Kristin was a member for a long time of our, I call it our secret operator mastermind. We don't talk about it that often, but, so I knew a lot of her story and as I said in the podcast, I kind of think of her as a marketer, but her background isn't marketing."
00:01:29,"I think she just kind of picked up that hat when she opened her coworking space. But a lot of you are going to love this story. Kristin is in a smaller market, but pulls members from a lot of surrounding towns. She's like 45 minutes from Boston in New Hampshire and in a town of about 16,000. She opened with 7500 sqft, has added offices since the pandemic, but now has twelve offices in the typical mix."
00:01:59,"She has some really beautiful, unique meeting rooms. So we kind of dive into all the things, her coworking story, her product mix, what she's changed, you know, post pandemic, what's working? Well, meeting room revenue. Roughly 60% of her members are remote workers. So some spoiler alerts in here, but I know you're going to be interested in her story and some of the nuggets she shares on how she markets and her, her real focus on people."
00:02:27,"First, you know, not all the operational aspects of coworking, but just really making those connections with her members and helping them to connect with others. So without further ado, here is our interview with Kristin Hardwick. She is the founder and CEO of CoHo coworking House for Long in Milford, New Hampshire. Welcome. I am here with Kristin Hardwick. She is the founder and CEO of CoHo in Milford, New Hampshire."
00:03:07,"I had to find the. Okay, but it's short for coworking house. Is that true? That's correct. Yeah. But everybody, everybody casually just calls it CoHo or the cohort. No, I think CoHo is the perfect name for a coworking space. Yeah. Okay. So we were just chit chatting a little behind the scenes. Thanks for joining me. We haven't caught up in a while, and I also just kind of, you know, I don't know if I really know your whole origin story, so I would just love to hear."
00:03:38,"Let's kick off with, like, what was your life before coworking, if that's even in your memory, and what was your coworking story? What. How did it come to be that you had to open a coworking space? I would love to tell you. I just want to take a moment and tell you that I listened to this podcast before we open a coworking space. So for me, this is like the OG coworking podcast that I listened to when I was like, someday I'm going to do that."
00:04:04,"So it's so fun to be here. And here you are. So I started my first business as a photographer back in 2009. I worked a corporate job, very corporate, in finance, and I left that in 2016 to be able to run my own photography studio, which focused on brand personal branding, headshots, that sort of stuff. Worked by myself in a photography studio and was like, yep, I'm doing it."
00:04:28,"I'm living the dream. Oh, my God, I hate working by myself. I went from sitting on a trading floor with, you know, 100 people to sitting by myself, you know, in my studio. If I didn't have a client in that day and I was slowly dying a death. So then I tried. I tried the thing that we all tried. I went to coffee shops, I tried to work at the library, I tried to work."
00:04:49,"But you're a photographer, so also that's work. I'm like lugging all my gear and all my stuff. It was just awkward. So I was like, okay, well, I will join a coworking space. I looked around, we didn't really have one. There was. So you knew what coworking was. How did you know what coworking was in? Well, tell us. So did you work in Boston before you became a photographer?"
00:05:09,"So the corporate company that I worked for had an office in Boston that I was supposed to be at once a week. So I had, I mean, probably twice a month I actually went down there. But yes, so I did know what coworking was just from seeing it in the big cities, so. And then, I mean, honestly, probably Instagram, probably social media. I was just like, oh, like, that's the thing."
00:05:27,"We probably have one of those. So I looked. We had one a couple times over. It was so expensive, and it was very finance tech, bro Yden. Like, I went to one of their open houses, and I was like, this is the most intimidating thing I've ever been to. Nobody talked to me. They had great beers on tap, glass walls everywhere, and it was like $700 a month just for, like, a basic co op membership."
00:05:50,"It was so unattainable to me as a small business owner. Yeah, I just couldn't do that. So shocking. And I was like, well, I'll just build mine. I'll spill one. We'll just do that casual, right? Like, no big deal. But really, truly, that's how. That's how it started. I wanted one. I didn't like the one that existed. It didn't seem like it was taking off. And I was like, I think I could do that better and just make it more."
00:06:11,"More friendly, honestly. And so I started down the path of, you know, business plan and listening to podcasts and doing research, and then, you know, putting together the first iteration of coworking house. We opened in 2009. I'm sorry. 2019. No, 2019. Okay. I would say 19. How. Okay. No, 2019. So you were right before. You were also, like, pre Covid. Before COVID Okay. I was thinking you've been open a little longer."
00:06:37,"That is so hard because it's so. The first 18 months is so hard. Anyway. And then anybody. I feel like we're in that generation where a lot of people I know are, like, just right in that range 1000%. We opened the end of 2019. Like, the end of that summer was our grand opening. So we had six months under our belt before the pandemic hit. So that was a cool, really challenging time for everybody."
00:07:02,"Yeah. Did you start with a business partner? I started with a business partner, and then about one year after we opened, I bought her out. She is a personal trainer by trade, and so she wanted to focus more on her. Her business and grow that, and I wanted to focus on coworking. Okay. Got it. How many square feet is your space? 7500. We are three stories. It's an old building."
00:07:23,"It's so fun. It's an old brick building. It was actually originally built as a bowling alley, which nobody believes me, but town hall has been true. I'd be looking at the photos. I will put a link to your website. You have really beautiful photos on your site. I love your. It's so light and bright and it's light. Thank you. Yeah. So it started out 100 years ago as a bowling alley."
00:07:44,"Three stories. And then we became a bank. It became an office. It has had many iterations. So we got to gut the building completely, rebuilt almost all of it inside. And so now it's a beautiful coworking space with we have three meeting room, three conference rooms, we have twelve private offices. We have mother's room, we have and then open coworking and dedicated desk. The normal stuff that you would expect from a coworking."
00:08:07,"Yeah. Okay. But, well, we'll get there. I'm really curious about your library. Yeah, meeting room. Yeah. Obviously poking around on your website yesterday. So. Okay. So I'm just kind of back to the beginning. So first, what did your husband say when you came home and you're like, yeah, I'm going to open this coworking space because I need a place to work. My husband is actually a magical, calm human being who doesn't get stressed ever."
00:08:33,"And he at that point was like, cool. You already built one business if you're going to build another one, whatever. Just, hey, his big thing, he had already built me a photography studio. Like construction, manual labor. And he was like, can we hire a crew for the next one? And I was like, maybe, I don't know. Let's see if it's in the mod. And we did, but that was his big, like for sure, go ahead, do it."
00:08:52,"But I'm not building it. I don't think I can. He had just started like a newer job. Like he switched jobs when I wanted to leave corporate America so he would carry the health insurance for the family. And so he was like ramping up his career and his name role was a lot more. So very supportive. But also did not want to be a general contractor at the same time for the space."
00:09:10,"Okay. And then did you think very hard about 7500 sqft? Like that's bigger. You know, we run this startup school. We get a lot of people who come in who are thinking much smaller because 7500 sqft looks like a lot of face when you look at it. Right. If you're not, you don't really know the business model yet. So was that just like what was available or town?"
00:09:33,"Let's go through. So Milford is 16,000 people ish. You're how far from Boston? We are about 45 minutes from Boston. So we're in southern New Hampshire. We're about 45 minutes from the seacoast, we're about, you know, 30 minutes from the mountains and we're about 45 minutes from Boston. So the way that New Hampshire sounds amazing, by the way. It's lovely. Thrilled to be raising my children here. We are kind of situated in a nice spot where we are near two main highways that most people use to commute in this area to Boston."
00:10:03,"So a huge part of our neighborhood lives here, but works in Boston and does that commute. So when we were looking for spaces, we actually didn't look in Milford. We were looking almost exclusively in Nashua, which is two towns over. Beautiful, great downtown, but much bigger than us. And I really thought that their main street was where I wanted to be. They had coffee shops, they had restaurants, they have retail."
00:10:25,"They have a whole economic development team that's already pulling people to that area. So I assumed that that was the logical step. We looked at 30 properties in that town and nothing would work. And to your point about size, we were looking between 5000 and 10,000 sqft. Because I used the pro forma that you had available back then and kind of knew we can't really make money at too small of a space."
00:10:48,"We knew we had to take the leap and go a little bit bigger than we were comfortable with just so that there was enough revenue potential. So we were looking at spaces in Nashville. Nothing was really panning out. Landlords didn't get it. Nobody really wanted to put any build out money into this project because there wasn't a successful coworking space around here. We were the first people that were like, no, we can do it."
00:11:07,"So when this building came up as an option and the landlord was going to buy it, offered to do, you know, most of the structural build out and then we would just pay for all the fancy add ons. We kind of, you know, said, okay, let's look at Milford. Looked at. I did so much research. I was so nervous about being in Milford and there not being enough traffic or enough people here."
00:11:27,"Yeah, okay. But I love you were nervous. Everybody should be very nervous and try to. I was wrong. Are you sure? Like, Milford does that, do they have enough people? But Milford is beautifully geographically located in the middle of a bunch of other small towns that have higher, you know, higher demographic, like household income. Household income, yes, exactly. And a lot more population of people that have high paying jobs in Boston but that work remotely already."
00:11:56,"So it ends up being a really great spot geographically. And I'll say that we do have some members from the town of Milford, but 90% of our members come from surrounding towns. Okay. Wow. Yeah, that makes sense. Like, kind of the 20 minutes. Yeah. Okay. Amazing. I'm interrupting for a second. Are you working on starting a coworking space? I often emphasize how important the planning stages. You've heard me say most unrecoverable issues happen well before you open your doors and they are related to the size of your space, your real estate deal, and a few other things."
00:12:40,"If you think you are going to pick your favorite coworking space and reverse engineer what you think you see happening in there, and then pick your own paint colors and your favorite furniture, you are in for a surprise. This business is really about making the right fundamental decisions that align with your individual, personal, and financial goals. So we want to help you avoid the mistakes that a lot of operators make in planning and launching that can really set you back in terms of time and finances."
00:13:15,"So we have got your back. We have created a free training to help you really get behind the three key decisions that we think are the most critical for you to get right when you're designing your coworking business. The model, not the colors. The model. And these insights come from years of operating, designing the model for two different locations, and then my work with hundreds of operators as they work on their businesses."
00:13:47,"So grab your spot in our training class. You can watch it anytime, it's totally on demand. And start your coworking journey with confidence and the right strategies in place. You can grab that training at everythingcoworking.com masterclass. Okay. And then, okay, so. And then you also knew offices, so you convinced the landlord, like, okay, we need. Yeah. Yes. And I was really. The way. The way that we built it, we built it with, I think, seven private offices, and then we had two on the third floor."
00:14:20,"We built out two distinct suites, so each one had, like, a reception area and then private offices. And after the first year, so through year one, most of my downstairs memberships had failed, but my private offices were starting to fail. And then Covid hit, and then everybody only wanted a private office. Nobody wanted to work out in the open space, so people in the open space went into private offices."
00:14:42,"So those two larger suites were kind of unrentable as they were. People didn't want huge suites. They wanted individual offices. So we broke them up, and now those are all filled as individual offices. Okay, so you, did you build, was that like, drywall and drywall? We added doors. Yep. Yep. Okay, got it. Drywall and doors. So you kind of did that after the fact. Okay, I'm curious about your dedicated desks, because they're so cute and they're."
00:15:07,"I don't know if you had. Was that what they looked like when you first opened? Or is that like a post pandemic sort of vibe? Like, they've got the. We have the. We have a little panel. Yeah, there's the panel. They're actually found the inflation panel. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And so we added those probably two years ago. We were pretty full, you know, so we have six together."
00:15:27,"It's like a little, you know, I don't. A pot. I did not want them to look like cubicles. I did not want to put cubicles up. But six people on zooms at the same time is a lot of noise when they're looking at each other. It just didn't work. We're like, okay. Didn't. Didn't think that went through. So adding those sound panels to the back of everyone's desk really helps, so that it's just enough of a buffer, but they all still feel like they're sitting together and they're, you know, sitting on the open."
00:15:52,"But, yeah, those are purely just sound, but it gives a little privacy, too. Just a sense of, like, your own individual space. It does act as you. Yeah. And it lets them put their, you know, their own little thing with their pin boards so they can. Yeah. You know, tack up their little stuff as if it was a cubicle. It's just more open. Yeah. So you still sell dedicated desks like that?"
00:16:14,"You have a demand for those, correct? Yep. So I have six right now. Two are available as of September 1, so. Okay, cool. So, not a chance. Yeah, some people sell them, some people don't. So I. You know, I'm always curious. And then do you provide the extra monitors or do people bring those? People bring those. So we. The dedicated desk comes with the sit to stand desk, the ergonomic chair and a file cabinet."
00:16:37,"The way that we have had success marketing them is when I give tours, I kind of point them out to people that might be introverted. You don't have to come in and figure out where you're going to sit every day. It's really calm. It's calming and comforting to know that you have the same desk every day. That works really well for people. That's actually really a great insight."
00:16:55,"Just that some people are totally comfortable with that awkwardness, especially initially. And you're right, some people. That could be enough of a barrier. I'm not going because I feel too weird. Like, yeah, it really does matter. Yeah. Yeah. So that's we. I mean, we have a couple people that have them that are very extroverted, and it just kind of works. And the nice thing is we at one point had five desks filled and only one desk open."
00:17:24,"And the five people there were scheming amongst themselves over who would take the 6th one because they wanted to kind of control the energy and that, you know, the vibe of their little pod. I was like, you guys, just let me know who you think. Just. Just let me know who I'm emailing it. An invite only, dedicated desk. We're like, we're going to have an application process for that."
00:17:42,"Yeah. That's so funny. Okay, then how do they still, do they make calls from their desks or do you have phone rooms? So we have two phone booths. When we give tours, I always tell people that the open coworking area on the main floor is like a coffee shop. You're welcome. Take phone calls and zooms. We ask that you wear headphones out of respect for the people on the other side of your screen."
00:18:02,"And then if you need more privacy, we have two phone booths that they can pop into. The phone booths are standard. They, you know, big desks and sound insulation and everything that everyone else's phone booths have. Are they reservable? They're not. Oh, first come. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah. And we've never really had a problem with that, so. Perfect. Yeah. Okay. I'm curious about your meeting rooms, because that's another thing."
00:18:26,"You went bigger on the meeting rooms in a smaller town, so. And one of them is a library, which is more of a lounge. Yeah. I'll let you kind of COVID your inventory, but I'm just really curious, because meeting room. We were just at the GWA conference last week, and I know this, but it's always fun to see the data. Like, on demand bookings are really what's growing over time."
00:18:51,"I got balloons on my screen. What happened? I know. Zoom knows I'm excited about meeting rooms. Meeting rooms, you know, day offices, things like that. So you went, yeah. Talk about your inventory and how your meeting room business is going. Meeting room business. So if I could say that there was anything I was not terribly intentional about, because I didn't know enough to be intentional, it would be meeting rooms."
00:19:13,"We've definitely involved this probably the most out of our business models since we've opened. So the library is warm and beautiful. We have leather couches in there. It's got big windows, and it's filled with. And a bookshelf, which is kind of one of the first things you see when you walk into the building, because it's actually right at the front of the building. And we use that for happy hours."
00:19:32,"We use that for book club. We use that. This morning, we had AI insights and innovation. So that's, like, casual, comfortable, sit around and chat things. It's so pretty. I just. I love it. It's so. It really is, like, really nice in that room. And it's warm, which is the windows and the plants. It just a good vibe. I mean, it's really. Yeah, nicely decorated. I shouldn't use the word pretty because it's really, like, perfectly sort of gender neutral."
00:20:00,"I mean, it's got the leather, but I just. I don't know. I just love the vibe. Yeah, it's so funny because the rest of the building is all, you know, white and wood tones and, you know, navy blue carpet, but that rib is painted navy blue dark, and it's got dark furniture, but the light in there really balances it well. So it's. That's a great room. So we use that one a lot."
00:20:20,"That's where we host a lot of our events. And that's actually if we have, you know, like, we have different people that book that room for monthly marketing chats or, you know, there's a. There's a women's group that will use it. Any sort of networking thing. People kind of prefer that room versus the two traditional conference rooms. Yeah. Now, the conference rooms are great because we have one that is smaller."
00:20:39,"It seats eight. It's got beautiful glass doors, a whole wall of glass in the front of it. Shout out to my retired contractor because we found an image on Pinterest that was like a steel wall, and we're like, we want this. He was like, oh, I can't do that, but I'll build it for you out of wood. So he just ripped out a whole wall for us and built this wall of glass, and it's gorgeous."
00:20:58,"And so that's, like, a really beautiful room. And that gets used probably the most because it's just the right size. Like, an eight person conference room works well for four people. It works well for eight people. It's just really, like, the most popular one. And then upstairs, we have what we call our boardroom, which is the biggest room we have. And in there, instead of a traditional conference room table, we have four big work tables that we can put together to make a conference room table."
00:21:25,"You can make a new. You can do classroom seating. You can pull them apart and seat 18 people. In there. So both rooms, both conference rooms have the same tack. They don't have a big tv to project to. They both have whiteboards. They'll have sound insulation. It's just really the layout and the size of them that is different. So they both work really well for different needs. And are you seeing more demand for the bigger room recently?"
00:21:50,"Yeah, I would say that the first half of the year we. I don't know. I don't know what was wrong with it. It just wasn't really. It just wasn't really being booked too much like a couple times a month, but not. Not anything noticeable. And recently, over the summer, it got used a ton. We've had people do full staff leadership trainings up there. A real estate continue in Ed last week, and this week we've had the New Hampshire Home Builders association using it for their OSHA training."
00:22:17,"So, you know, 16 builders in there at once. We have. The local teachers union uses it for meetings. The local dental office uses it. Like, it's just a bunch of, like, when you need a larger group and you don't need something fancy, that's. Yeah, that's the room that everyone chooses. So it's definitely seen in uptick recently. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, that's. I mean, what we continue to hear from, like, the liquid spaces, et cetera, that there's a lot of demand for bigger rooms for people who write, like, don't want to go to Boston and me, but, you know, maybe there's no other option, you know, in Milford besides, like, the library or the hotels."
00:22:55,"Yeah, yeah. That's what. When the builders were. And they were talking about how nice it was to not have to go sit in a giant, like a grand ballroom for 16 of them. Totally. With no windows. I mean. Yeah. Cause that. Well, that room doesn't have windows. It's so. Also so pretty, though. It's. Does not have windows. I was still worried about, you know, when we first built it, but it was."
00:23:15,"That room was. I feel like we talked about that, really, when you were something about that room and the windows and. But it's so nicely styled and the, I don't know what you call, like, the style of the, like, lower paneling, but it just has a lot of detail and the artwork and. Yeah. So our building's interesting in that we actually only have windows on the front of the building and the back of the building."
00:23:36,"So we have a lot of rooms that have no windows. So we had to be very deliberate about where we use glass. You know what we paint where we painted, where we didn't paint, and just make sure that we pulled that light the whole way through. Yeah. So there's. There's some tricky rooms like that. That room, but that room. I also want to give tours. I, you know, I advertise that one is a little bit more private."
00:23:55,"So if you're doing employee reviews, if you're doing interviews, if you're doing brainstorming, you know, the downstairs conference room is beautiful and has glass and everybody can kind of see what you're doing. This one's much more private. Yeah. That downstairs went. So did you do all the. Do you have a designer that helped you or did you do all the designing? It was just myself, my business partner."
00:24:17,"Yeah. Yeah. I think I feel like you have such an eye for it. I mean, these rooms are so attractive and also so different from what you find in a hotel. It's like they have the tech and the whiteboards that you need, but they also just feel a lot more. I don't. They just have a lot of character. So we deliberately tried to not make this look like every other commercial."
00:24:43,"I hate to say the Debbie word, but we didn't want it to look like we were like. We really wanted it to look like a local, independent space that could fit into any, you know, downtown. Yeah, but still 100% professional. But just has that, like. Yeah, just that more. I don't know. Yeah. Creative, comfortable vibe. But again, like, totally professional and has everything that you need, which I love."
00:25:11,"Hey, there, I'm jumping in again. This time I'm speaking to those of you that are either getting ready to hire a community manager or who have a community manager and you would like to support their training and development. We know how challenging it can be for coworking space operators to create their own training and development material to support their community managers. And this is so important in terms of onboarding new community managers and supporting the growth of your existing community managers."
00:25:46,"And we're getting towards the end of the year, what a great holiday gift, end of year gift to give to your community manager. So the platform is really around a couple of things. One is access to a community of like minded folks. We have a very active, slack group with really wonderful questions that are posed every single day. And we find that's one of the biggest values. We have community managers from all over the world, and this is an excellent group of community managers that have invested time and effort into getting better at that role."
00:26:22,"And they are the kind of folks that you want. Your community manager to be by and hanging out with and they know their stuff or sometimes they don't and they ask questions and we help them out. So I'm in the group, we have coaches that are in the group to support them. So we love when they ask questions for things they need help with because the other aspect of the program is really around helping them get resources they need to make their jobs easier and to learn things that they can use in their role to be better at their job."
00:26:53,"So we provide some done for you resources like Google Business posts, detailed event ideas, et cetera, that they can just kind of grab and go and use. And we also provide monthly resources that add to our training library so they can do our certification. And then we have a lot of electives that help them kind of get better at all the things that that go with the role."
00:27:19,"So the our community managers wear a lot of hats. So we break our content into industry knowledge for new community managers, community building operations, sales and marketing and leadership. So the leadership bucket is great for our more advanced community managers. We also have virtual office and digital mail training and coffee training for anybody who needs to know how to use commercial coffee brewers. So we have some of the I'm just going to give you kind of a sampling of content that we have."
00:27:55,"So in our community building modules, we have hosting your first member events, building community with budget friendly events, member event swipe files, our sales and marketing modules. We have tour training. We have the training on the full coworking sales funnel so they understand what that looks like. We have social media planning frameworks. We have. What else do we have? Three simple steps to an effective marketing newsletter."
00:28:25,"These are just some of our samples. Ooh. These are some of our best utilized topics. Demystifying the process of letting your coworking members use your address for their Google Business listing, how to close a tour operations modules, how to set up automations, how to do a new member onboarding audit, simple ways to use AI to boost your productivity. We have over 40 courses in the program, so we cover kind of higher level topics and then we also cover things that are timely like the CMRA updates, Google Business updates, et cetera."
00:29:00,"So we get together monthly to do official training and we also host a best practice sharing call, which is one of the fan favorites of the group and the Slack group. So if you have any questions at all about the program, don't hesitate to reach out. You can learn more and register at everything coworking.com forward slash community manager now back to our episode. Okay, how so tell me about."
00:29:28,"I get, it's funny, I didn't realize you were a photographer because I think of you as a marketer and I'm trying to remember why that was. It's been a while. I know. So it's like a great compliment, right? The hats that, you know, I'm like, you're an interior designer, you know, my gosh, no. Marketing. Marketing. The thing that I could do over and over and over forever. I think that's what I loved about photography when I was actually doing that Washington, we were doing photography for people's marketing."
00:29:54,"You know, it was personal branding photography and lifestyle shape. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You weren't like the wedding photographer or it was like, no, you had more of that maybe business. Yeah. Mindset for your client. Yeah, right. And so with marketing this place, you know, everything changes over five years. Right? Like what we did five years ago, it's not what we're doing now. We. But I love that point because it's so true and that's like either people get excited about that or it's exhausting."
00:30:24,"You know what I mean? You can't just repeat everything. Yeah. I have a really wonderful business advisor through the small business development center. So I'll plug that program. Every state has one. It's usually free advising. I've had mine since I worked in corporate. She helped me quit that job, but so she, one of the core things that she taught me when you're building a business or when you're running a business is you have to have your mores in your ceilings."
00:30:46,"Right? So like I could work on marketing 40 hours a week and get nothing else done. So I have to have like a ceiling. Once I've hit x amount of hours on marketing to cut yourself off, I need to put it away and go do my bookkeeping or, you know, the tasks that I am avoiding. Yeah. So we've, in terms of marketing here, we've tried to really take a people first approach."
00:31:06,"I think that especially during COVID everybody bought the fancy chairs and the fancy desks and all the gadgets to work at home. So the draw to come to a coworking space has to be the people and it has to be the energy here. So we really focus our marketing and trying to showcase the people that work here and the fun things we do here. And to your point, it's beautiful, right?"
00:31:28,"Like people aren't going to pay money to leave their house to go sit in a dark dingy. Right. Or something less nice than their own home, which to your point, correct. The bar went up in 2020 because people were like, that's what we did. You know, we, like, changed the guest room into a nice office. So it's. Yeah. And it's exactly what people want, but it. Right. So why are they coming?"
00:31:52,"You have to give them reasons. We have to give them reason. Yeah. And so we're really trying to focus more on storytelling now and kind of sharing the people that are here and why they're here. And, you know what. What? The added benefit of getting out of your house, getting dressed, and leaving your house gets you. XYZ. You know, we really also focus with marketing on the work life balance and having that separation of, you know, when you're here, you can't be doing laundry, you can't be answering the front door."
00:32:18,"You know, you're just here to work and get your stuff done so that you can get your work done and move on with your life. Yeah. And also just that, like, mental separation. Yeah. Yeah. I find myself, my. We have daughters similar age. My daughter's a gymnast, and she has gymnastics 3 hours twice a week. And I find myself, like, I'll drop her off, and then I'll come sit in my office again, catch up on things, you know, because, well, I have 3 hours, and, you know, nothing else to do, so."
00:32:48,"And, I mean, I have lots of other things I could be doing. I have so many other things to do. I. And I don't know how much this is. You know, Covid changed the way that we work or how much this was actually prevalent before COVID but I I think a lot of the people that work remotely for themselves or for a company, there's this expectation of always being available."
00:33:06,"And so if you can always work, like, all of us can work all the time. So having that separation of, oh, I'm not at work now. I'm in my car, I'm holding soccer field. That gives that nice distinction. Yeah. So are a lot of your members remote workers, or are they freelancers? Not to talk about your mix. So, so funny. You think it's gonna be one thing, and then, you know, I thought it'd be all twelve business owners, and we're about 60 40, 60% remote employees, 40% self employed."
00:33:39,"I will say, though, we joke that it's contagious. Once you're. Once you're a member here, if you don't already have a side hustle, you'll get one. Get one. That's. You're getting one. Everybody here has a side hustle. Everybody here has a side project. It's just kind of the infectious energy of being around people that want to create and are ambitious. Totally. I love that. Okay, so back to your marketing."
00:34:04,"Do your members come from referrals? Search, social? Social media has been our biggest focus up to this point this year. We're switching a little bit, and then word of mouth referrals and local partnerships. We did a lot the first couple of years of making sure we were going to all the chamber of Anthony. We were going to the women's networking events, partnering with our local coffee shop, partnering, you know, with the SBDC, the SBA, just partnering with, like, the local community to make sure that everybody knew that we were here and we were a resource for them."
00:34:36,"I did word of mouth referrals with a couple of realtors, and that was really effective. We have several members that joined us just for a week when they moved to get their, their comcast, their wifi set up, and then they never left. So that was a really great huck to get people in. Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. So, and I did notice when I was looking at your market, like, the population is growing."
00:34:56,"I'm sure you had that post pandemic. Of course. Yes. Right. Why live in Boston when we could live? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, interesting. You have realtors that are members or are those just partnerships? You went out and initiated partnerships? I went out and initiated. I think one of them. One of them is a virtual member right now. Not like an in person, but it's just good to be a resource for them that they can say that we can't."
00:35:22,"Day passes for these people, like, oh, it's part of your welcome package. Please let them know they can come work here while their Internet's getting installed. Right. Which makes them look great and give a great experience to their clients. And it's good for you because you get the trial. We try to really make sure that everything that we're doing with the community is really relationships based, relationships over transactions."
00:35:43,"I swear to God, I say that six times a day. It's got to be with the people, take care of the people, and it will work out for you. So we just kind of keep circling back to that. And so when we do marketing, we try to make sure that all these partnerships, I'm supporting the other business and making sure that they're getting something out of it, because if we're going to be the hub for small business in this community, we're going to be that, you know, that foundational partner."
00:36:06,"We want to make sure that we're taking care of everybody else. What do you spend money on? Do you have to run ads or not in your market? Not really. We have, I was just talking to somebody else about this. We have run ads and I mean they're effective in terms of clicks and impressions and stuff but I just haven't seen them really translate. Well, move the needle."
00:36:27,"Yeah, they haven't. Like when I look at our clients, you know, our best members or our longest term members, those are never the people that come from, from that. There are always people that come from word of mouth or raffles. I don't know if anybody else is doing this in their market, but if you have a pure local charity and you need a raffle item, I'm the first person to raise my hand and say for sure because people either don't turn them in, which is fine, or if they do turn them in, every single one of them that has come in with a free, I got a free month of coworking has converted to a long term member."
00:36:58,"So I know every time like the auction comes up for my daughter's whatever, I'm like, I know such a good way to give. Yeah, yeah. And it also costs. Like, I really think that the only people that are bidding on that are people that are remotely interested. Right. Like they wouldn't bid on if they don't. They weren't even curious. So that's like an easy no brainer for me."
00:37:17,"Yeah, yeah. We don't, we don't spend a lot of money on marketing yet. I mean at this point we're, we're, our offices are filled and I would love to do, you know, sell some more conference room hours, but yeah, I. Facebook ads in the past have not been wildly successful. Yeah, yeah. I mean, which is like good news, bad news. It's like good news. You don't, you know, can't spend bad news."
00:37:37,"Like there's no easy button to be like, there's ads and we'll get right. More meeting room hours booked. No, nope. No easy button over here. It's still a lot of going out to the community, making sure that people know we exist and this is how we can help. And you know, every time we, every time we have opened our doors to invite a group to have a meeting here at, you know, a discounted rate or a free rate, we've gotten bookings from there."
00:38:00,"So I wouldn't say, you know, just give away all your hours, but yeah, yep. And get, getting the right people in the door like, you know, we have, we'll use a teachers union, as an example, we let them use it at a very discounted rate because my mother in law's a teacher. That's like a connection I can make. Those. Those people don't have side business. Like, those people aren't going to be paying for conference room outside of that meeting."
00:38:22,"Right. So that's not something I would recommend other people do. But the builders association, who did pay. Wonderful. Thank you. All those people that came into my room all have their own businesses and all have their own staff, and all these, you know, all work out. They all work out of their truck. They all need conference rooms. Yeah. So that's, you know, an area that I would make exceptions and just kind of be thoughtful and try to be inviting people into your space."
00:38:44,"That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. And let them try and understand all. But also, like, even with the teachers, you never know who they know. Right. Who has a small business or something. Side hustle. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Do your remote workers pay for their own memberships or do you find they have stipends? Yeah. What is that? So we. It's so funny. We. I think about 50% of them, their companies pay for them in full now."
00:39:10,"Wow. Even some of. Even some of my private offices are fully paid for by their companies. Most people get some sort of stipend for working from home, you know, to cover their Internet, but a lot of people are just paying for it out of their pocket, too. Yeah. And it's worth it. Yeah, it's worth it. Yeah. Interesting. The. I think. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. I was just gonna say, I think when."
00:39:30,"When I think about the people that are paying for it out of their own pocket and they work for a company, I think those are the people who are sharing a home office with a spouse. Right. Where two families are, you know, are both trying to. Two. Two parents and one family are trying to work from home, and it's just not great. So it's easier for them to justify that one of them gets space here."
00:39:52,"Totally. Yeah. I love that. It's also just not great to spend that much time with your spouse. I'm always joking, like, so much, like, exposure to one person, back to work life balance. I think we need that. Right. We need a little bit of separation. Exactly. Okay. So you could spend most of your time on marketing, but tell me, like, how do you. What does your role look like?"
00:40:15,"What is. You know, how do you. What does your day look like and your role in the business? I mean, CEO. I'm involved in everything from operations and marketing to community building. So I try to structure my day. I'm big on batching my work so that, you know, my brain can focus. Mondays are usually, you know, marketing. I try to get all of my marketing for the two weeks at a time done."
00:40:40,"Follow up with anybody, lead generation, any. Any outreach that I need to do, I generally try to do on Monday when I'm fresh and I'm not interrupted by a million things I will say each morning kind of looks the same. Come in, make sure. Reset the space, make sure everything's clean. Like, I'm still doing community manager. Yeah, basic in house operations. Right? Like, I'm still making the coffee, I'm still restocking the toilet paper and making sure that the conference rooms are set for the day."
00:41:02,"Um, so that unglamorous stuff is still there, which is totally fine, because it's not a big lift. I don't mind. And then, you know, Tuesday through Thursday is a lot of, you know, making sure leads get followed up on, making sure that new members have multiple connections. This is a big thing I'm focusing on this year, and it's working really well. Is making sure that every time a new member joins that I'm not their only connection, making sure that they have sticky connections with at least two other people."
00:41:31,"I'm trying to be really thoughtful about that so that if I'm not here, if I'm taking time off, you know, whatever, if they need something, they feel like they can ask somebody else in the community, they can build those relationships, because then they're more likely to contribute to the community, be part of us, you know, just. Just staying around longer. Yeah. So community buildings, a lot of it."
00:41:51,"And then Wednesdays and Thursdays are usually the days that we host events, and Fridays all summer longer. Take Fridays off, which is wonderful. The whole day. You just don't staff Friday. I just on separate. I'll usually hop in in the morning just to make sure that, you know, the mail is sorted and there's no emergencies. But, yeah, we've kind of structured the building so that a lot, like, a lot of it's runs by itself."
00:42:15,"My members are pretty independent. We kind of train them that this is where things are, and this is how you take care of things and this is how you use things. But we have a really good group that feels ownership over the building and over the space, and so I don't have to do a lot of that micromanaging, which is great. Totally. Yes. Okay. That's very inspirational. December Fridays, summer for Fridays, we have no meeting Mondays, and we have."
00:42:38,"We have very late Fridays. Yeah. Okay. What does your tech stack look like? What do you have, how do you do your billing? And what's your platform? Embarrassingly simple. There are very tech savvy, complicated ways to go about this. We just switched to optics in August, which we have been delighted with. I think it's very smooth. It's great user interface. Our members are very happy we use that."
00:43:04,"We use quickbooks trying to think what else we use. Our door system does not integrate with optics, so that's a third system all by itself. And same thing. Our Wi Fi network is a fourth system. So, yeah, it's pretty simple. That's really okay. I know, sometimes I'm like, isn't it kind of crazy how many apps it can take to. I mean, we didn't talk about marketing letter. You've got all the."
00:43:30,"Right, right. I can talk about all the things we use for marketing, but for operations and member management, it's really basic. Those four. Do you use digital door access, or is it a. Do you remember RFID cards? Which is actually not my choice, I think. I would love to do digital, but when we were first building out five years ago, my landlord chose that and the install, so I, you know, totally."
00:43:53,"I know. Isn't it. It's crazy how much everything changes. It's like, now even, you know, people are like, oh, yeah, my building uses open path. Or it's just like, that's the. And it's probably the exact same cost at this point, but five years ago, it was so cost prohibitive to do that that we just went old school, you know, just RFID cards. And then all my private offices have actual physical keys."
00:44:16,"Yeah, yeah. So we just managed that, which is a pain. Even that, I think, is about to change because the, like, the Kisi, like that, being able to put that on all the doors is becoming more affordable, which. Right. When. Yeah. Never used to be the case. No, yeah, yeah. That's okay. Since you're a marketer, what do you use for your newsletter platform? So I actually love flowdesk.com"
00:44:36,"dot. Yeah, yeah. Carrie flow desk. But I'm always like, it's so beautiful looking and so simple. It's simple. It's easy. They. If you want to do funnels and, you know, different flow sequences, it's so easy to do that. I've used constant contact, I've used mailchimp, and all those have more capability. But if you're a small organization with a consumer base under 20,000, all that just seems way overkill."
00:45:03,"I can do anything I need. Flow desk. Yeah, you don't need HubSpot. We actually, one of our members works for HubSpot, and she's always like, I could show you how to do this. I'm like, I'm not going to do it. I just appreciate it. I would say HubSpot is kind of like a BMW. There's so many features. Most people don't use them, and so they're, you know. Yeah."
00:45:22,"Somebody said the other day, HubSpot goes from, like, free to $800 a month, like, very quickly. Uh huh. And, and it's beautiful and wonderful and a great platform, but it's just a little bit more than I need at this point. Yeah, totally. Okay. You did mention being very mindful about following up the leads. Do you use a CRM or. I don't search. So optics is pretty great. If people enter the optics, you know, just to, like, as a lead, we get notifications, and it makes it real easy for me to follow up with them."
00:45:49,"It's just kind of a habit that I built since before we had optics. We were on a different platform that didn't, didn't notify me about leads. So I just got in the habit of every morning checking, which is part of my, my everyday workflow now. Always be looking for those. Yep. And so when people join the platform without reaching out to us, there's like an automated email that goes out to invite men for tour."
00:46:10,"But I still might be overkill, but I still personally reach out and be owner of the company. Saw you join. Would love to answer questions. You know, I'll give you a personal tour. And that's worked really well. No, I think people probably on. I think some people are more comfortable with the operation side, even, you know, community managers. Like, yeah, either. Either or. And so they don't, they aren't as on top of the lead management, which can feel, you know, manual and, like, kind of."
00:46:38,"But that's, you know, that's important if you don't have. Yeah, I. Yeah, we have. When we first opened, before we opened, we're doing construction. We gave what we called hard hat tours. And so I would literally bring people in, let them wear hots and walk them around and kind of, like, sell them on the vision. This is what we're gonna put over here. This is what we're gonna put over here."
00:46:57,"It'll be beautiful. And I try to still have that, like, enthusiasm and energy when I'm reaching out to these people, like, oh, come in. It's amazing. You're gonna love it. Like, what do you do? Oh, we have somebody here to connect. I really try to make sure that before they're even thinking about whether or not they're going to sign up, they're excited about being in the space and excited about coming to check it out."
00:47:18,"It feels welcoming because every time I go to a different city, every time I travel, I try to visit two to three coworking spaces, and I am shocked at how coworking space is in cities specifically. But they all feel kind of like, yeah, we'll take your money. And there's no follow up. There's no questions about you. There's no reason. Come join us. Even if it's just for the day."
00:47:38,"Like, we. You want to take us? Come on. Come hang out with us. We make coffee. We try to really, really push that relationship human being aspect, and that works well with our leads and keeping the energy fresh. Like, you know, like, like, it's. You're like, yeah, I've been doing this for about five, six years now. Yeah, right, five years. You know, and you could get a little complacent about that energy, but to everyone else, it's totally brand new, and so."
00:48:04,"Yeah, I love that. Yeah. What do I. Let's see. Last questions here. Since you've been open for five years, what advice would you give to somebody who's just starting? That's a great question. The risk of sounding like a broken record, like, care about the people. Care about people. We've, you know, the more you can care about the actual people in building and look at them as humans and ask about their families and what they want to do outside of work."
00:48:31,"And knowing that helps you connect them to each other. And once they are in that spider web, it's much easier to attract more of the right people when you have the right people in the building. So focus on getting the right people in the building more than you focusing on your tech stack or your newsletter or anything like that. You know what? No, it is. But I feel like it's a simple thing, and yet."
00:48:57,"Right. We can easily get sort of distracted by everything else and not pay attention to, like, first things first. It's about the human first things first. And I love a good, smart whiteboard. Like, I love. I love the tech. We have an algorithm. Like, I love all that stuff. I could geek out on that all day long, too. But at the end of the day, you have to make about the people that are working here, and you have to make them feel cared about."
00:49:20,"Yeah, I love that. Well, thanks for sharing your story and all your kind of behind the scenes and insights. Five years is a big deal. Do you feel like five years has gone slow or fast? Oh, my gosh. I'm blinking an eye. Yeah. In the blink of an eye, I can't even wrap my head around the fact that we just hit five years. Right? That's what I tell everybody who's."
00:49:40,"Who's thinking about, like, who's really intimidated by signing up for, like, a seven year or a ten year lease. I'm like, you don't understand. It'll be like, gone in a second. And you'll be like, no, no, not done yet. Five years. Yeah. Ten years gonna be like, hey, don't. Don't raise my rate. I want. I want my rate from ten years ago. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. One other thing I would say."
00:50:01,"One other piece of advice I would say is to jump in and align yourself with other coworking space owners. I think that it's such an independent industry that it's so helpful to join groups and be with other people that understand the struggles and the challenges. Because I don't know that I would have got here for five years if I didn't have other people to talk me through all the things that you have to talk through."
00:50:25,"Perspective and what's working, not feeling alone. All the things that every business underneath. Yeah. We all build these businesses for community. Right. And then we still need community of our own. So. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. Awesome. Well, it was good. Good to hear all the story. Thanks for doing this. I appreciate it. Always. Thanks for having me. 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."
00:50:55,"If you'd like to learn more about our education and coaching programs, head over to everythingcoworking.com. we'll see you next week."
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