379. Summer Slump? Not This Year! 3 Smart Strategies to Keep Your Coworking Revenue Flowing

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379. Summer Slump? Not This Year! 3 Smart Strategies to Keep Your Coworking Revenue Flowing

00:00:00,"Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast where every week I keep you updated on the latest trends and how to's 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."

00:00:44,"Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast. This is your host, Jamie Russo. Thank you for joining me today. Today's topic is Looking a little ways ahead, but you might have just experienced the same pain that I did, which is making me think ahead to summer. We just had a full week off for winter break and we had some challenges. My daughter is a gymnast and she had to be in town for practice on Tuesday and Thursday because she had a meet on Saturday and I talked to her coach about we also have a meet over spring break and she is a competitive gymnast but not like the Junior Olympic track."

00:01:32,"She's on the Excel track if you have a gymnast in your household. So we're not going to the Olympics and we take it very seriously. But on the other hand we would like to have our breaks. So we had a little talk with the coach about scheduling meets over breaks. One of the spring break one she does not have control over, but the winter break one she did."

00:01:53,"So the problem here with being in town is then we don't schedule time off as a family. So we're kind of working and my daughter's at home and she doesn't have anything to do, then suddenly if she needs a ride to, you know, go with a friend and she doesn't really compute that I'm working. And even though she's off and so it's a challenging week, which made me think ahead to summer and how you know, how that challenge is going to last for months on end."

00:02:20,"So it made me think about summer for coworking spaces and if you've been running a coworking space for more than a year, so you've been through a summer season, you've probably noticed that the summer can bring a bit of a vibe shift maybe for you in your own personal life and in your business life and who's showing up at your coworking space. So it's possible that one minute your space is buzzing, everybody's in for like the spring, get it done."

00:02:48,"Momentum. And then the next minute, half of your members are posting vacation pics from the beach or from summer camp with the family, while your once packed flex desk area starts to feel like a ghost town? Now, you might also be on the flip side. So for some of your spaces, summer means slow down, which is hard. But for others, if you're in a vacation destination or, you know, a city that happens to attract remote workers, you might get a spike in demand."

00:03:20,"So before we dive into today's strategies, take a second to thank. Which, you know, category are you in? Does your space get quieter in the summer? So you need to start thinking about how are you going to cover that lost revenue? So we're going to talk about some ideas on how to stabilize your revenue and create some more predictable revenue for the summer. Or do you actually get a summer rush?"

00:03:42,"And if that's the case, do you need to start thinking now about how you're going to take advantage of that so that you're ready for it and don't feel like you're missing an opportunity when we get there? And if you haven't been open for a whole year yet, then you might know which category you fall into. Start thinking ahead, because marketing plans, you know, getting new programs in place, all of those things take time."

00:04:05,"You cannot spin them up, you know, in the moment when you realize, oh, I need more cash, or, or, oh, you know, I had an opportunity here to really capitalize on being in a tourist destination, but I didn't plan ahead. So I'm here to try to help you to start thinking about the summer. And I am actually in Northern California, where we are incredibly blessed to start seeing things bloom in February."

00:04:31,"I was walking the dogs yesterday and sending my mom pictures of the blossoms that are starting to come out on the trees. It still blows me away. As someone who grew up in upstate New York and then spent 15 years in Chicago, the weather here is wild. So the key is preparation. So we're going to talk today about three potential revenue strategies that might help your cash flow over the summer so that you can go into the summer feeling at least that you've done everything you can, you've prepared, and you feel confident that you've prepared instead of crossing your fingers and kind of hoping for the best, or just not thinking about it at all and getting into the moment and being like, why was I not thinking about this sooner?"

00:05:14,"I know what it's like to be a business owner. I am also one. I operated coworking spaces for eight years. It's always Hard to be thinking ahead, right? It's, it's our goal. It's what we do. I should mention for our program members, we have a Q2 planning session coming up. So make sure you check your email and watch out for that because that can be, you know, a little time to just do that strategy work and start thinking ahead about summer strategies."

00:05:39,"Okay, so strategy one Build or grow your virtual mail program. So you know I'm passionate about building your virtual mail program because yes, it's admin work, yes, there are lots of things you have to figure out to get it started, but by and large, most people feel it's totally worth it. It creates consistent revenue that you can pretty much count on. Once you get that program up and running and you put some real focus against it, you get your referral partners on board, you'll start to see that business grow and you'll get a sense for kind of what your net new members are every month."

00:06:18,"And the this business really compounds on itself. So it's like, you know, investing in your 401k. You want to start today because it starts small but then it builds and the retention rate on a business address is pretty long because it's a pain in the butt to change all of that. So I just signed up for a business address with Pillar Coworking which is across the bay for me."

00:06:44,"So I'm excited about that. I finally got sick of sending invoices with my home address on it. I know I always use my coworking space address and just haven't gotten around to figuring out where my address should be. So I am thrilled about that. So you want to have. You want to. If you don't have a virtual mail program in place, get, get started. Get something set up."

00:07:08,"Get your organic plans set up on your website. List them on your Google business address. Start figuring out how to be a commercial mail receiving agency and follow all those rules. We are going to run our Mailbox moneymaker challenge again. Stay tuned for the date. If you want some help getting this set up, you can go to mailboxchallenge.com and get on the waitlist. We go through how to set up a program and how to maximize your revenue."

00:07:38,"We provide landing page templates, all the goodness and step by step by step support to get you set up on with your own organic plans and with referral partners. But you are also can just do do it yourself. We have the overview on how to set up the plan in our community manager university. So if your community manager is in there, they can Ask all the questions they want about setting up a virtual program."

00:08:04,"We have questions about mail all the time. As a matter of fact, tomorrow, the day after I'm recording this, we have a special Q and A with William Edmondson from iPostal1, who's going to keep us up to date on any CMRA updates and answer any questions about mail. So if you're in our community manager program, get started and come in and ask all the questions. Put it on your community manager's cue."

00:08:27,"Two goals and you'll be up and running and you may not see, you know all. You may not have this instant cash flow for the summer, but this will serve you well in the summers to come and you'll start building for this summer and it will help replace some of the cash flow that you might lose in the summer. But also it's going to be, it's just a great compelling reason to get your butt moving and get you committed to getting that plan in place."

00:08:54,"And if you have a virtual mailbox plan in place or virtual membership. There are lots of different ways to approach virtual memberships, but we're usually kind of focused on folks who want to use our address or want access to the space to have a business identity address, plus meeting rooms, et cetera. So the so if you already have a plan in place, this might be the perfect quarter to refocus."

00:09:21,"Make sure you're marketing. Make sure you're selling this service to your existing members, promoting it to your newsletter list, promoting it on social adding a referral partner if you haven't signed up with the key referral partners, taking a look at your pricing, making sure your landing page and your signup workflow. If your virtual plans are not E commerce enabled, then this is the time get that set up so that people can check out and buy those plans online."

00:09:50,"So optimize those so that you can start growing that revenue even more for the summer. So we love virtual memberships because it's revenue that's pretty consistent once you get that program started and usually will build on itself over time. It requires no physical space except a filing cabinet to store your mail and it has good margins. Again, you, you're going to pay out referral fees and you're going to pay your team to sort the mail."

00:10:22,"But even after that, a team or a part time mail person to manage the mail. But I'm telling you, most people who run these programs think it's completely worth it. So if you don't have a program yet, put it on your Q2 plan, get on the waitlist for our mailbox moneymaker challengeailboxchallenge.com and if you already have a program, it's time to start really focusing on that. I have one other idea for you around virtual plans for the summer."

00:10:52,"You may have existing Flex members. I'm going to focus on Flex members because I'll assume that you have some sort of terms in place for your office members and that your office members in general don't disappear for the summer. So your office revenue is probably pretty consistent. But you may start to lose Flex members because your Flex members are like, well, I'm not going to be here for July and August, so I'll just cancel or you know, hold, pause, whatever you let them do for the summer, which is really hard, right, because you've got some, you know, revenue line that exists of your Flex memberships."

00:11:27,"And if in general your market takes a dip and is not a tourist destination, then you're going to see a loss for your coworking revenue or a decrease, I should say, for the summer. So what you might do is put in a policy that says, we'll let you hold, but we're going to put you on our virtual plan for the summer so that we're not off boarding you, we're leaving you in our system and you can still receive mail, etc."

00:11:54,"To the space. So you could give them a tangible benefit. You might even say, and you know, we're going to get, we're going to automatically, you know, give you a free upgrade to our premium virtual membership, which also gives you some meeting room time and day passes if you still need a little bit of access to the space for the summer, but not full time access. Or you might even bundle like a virtual plan with a punch card, you know, plan for the summer."

00:12:23,"So play with this to see what might work for you as a way of retaining some revenue from your Flex members. So potentially instead of saying, yeah, you can just cancel for the summer, say, look, here's what we'd like to do for you for the summer. You know, make it lower than their coworking fee so that it's compelling, but you know, keep your address, keep you in the system."

00:12:46,"Speaking of which, the, the one way this works better is if you have a setup fee and you should consider a setup fee. People get surprised when they're starting a space when we say, hey, you should have a setup fee. Think about all that I was even listening to. Like, you know, there's a setup fee for setting up your phone and Committing to Verizon for the rest of your life."

00:13:08,"You know, there's setup fees for everything. And I think sometimes, like, we get really sensitive about, like, nickel and diming and having too many different line items on an invoice because some of us don't want to. You don't want to operate that way. But there are real costs associated with adding new members to the system and certainly then offboarding them for the summer and onboarding them again. So charge a setup fee."

00:13:32,"It might be, you know, $100 a person, depending on the level of your membership. Maybe it's $50 for a Flex member, but there should be some fee for them to offboard and then onboard again. So you could say, look, Instead of the $50 onboarding fee, why don't you do our virtual plan? That way you get to maintain your business address, you stay in the system as a member, you keep your access to the Slack group and, you know, member announcements and, you know, again, maybe you throw in some other bonus like some day passes, etc."

00:14:05,"So play with that and see what works for you. But you might consider some sort of, you know, that downgrade plan for your members who are trying to leave you for the summer. I'm interrupting for a second. Are you working on starting a coworking space? I often emphasize how important the planning stage is. You've heard me say most unrecoverable issues happen well before you open your doors."

00:14:35,"And they are related to the size of your space, your real estate deal, and a few other things. 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."

00:15:07,"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. 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."

00:15:34,"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. 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 everything coworking.com"

00:16:05,"forward/masterclass. So the second strategy I want to talk about for the summer so that you can start thinking ahead and this can work with if you're new or you could create a new membership that you start funneling new members into. You don't have to grandfather your existing members into it, but you might consider finding a way to offer an annual membership option. So you it might be depending on your space and what you offer and whether or not you have a niche, et cetera."

00:16:39,"This may not be a no brainer for you, it might take some creative thinking or you may not feel like it makes any sense. But we have a member of our startup school who's doing this. He will absolutely get on the podcast and talk about his launch. He just launched in December so we're going to give him a little time to get rolling. But he has a specific niche that is kind of weather dependent and so his approach and I think he can do this because he has a niche space, he's catering to a very specific audience and he has pre sold his space and done his launch marketing extremely well."

00:17:17,"He has an excellent product market fit and he has a lot of demand for his space. So he is requiring annual memberships for his non office members. I can't remember what his office terms are, they may be similar, but his flex members have to commit to a year because it is somewhat weather dependent and so he would have everyone cancel during the summer and then come back for the winter and he does not want that variability in his business model and his revenue."

00:17:48,"So he said okay, this is what we're going to do. You're a flex member, you have to sign up for an annual membership or you don't get to join. And I think this is brilliant. Again, you can only do this if you can find a way to make it relevant to your members because we've I've also done podcasts about how commitment phobic people are, how it's really hard to get them to commit."

00:18:13,"And you know, you have to think about pricing your flex payments passes in a way that encourage your members to commit to ongoing recurring memberships versus buying day passes etc so I want to acknowledge that this is not that easy for many of you, but you might have a way to do it and getting folks on an annual membership can bring so much value when when you don't have people leaving for the summer."

00:18:39,"So are there bonuses that you can offer? Do you have me? Could you create A really compelling package that is just such a no brainer for your members. Think back to like when you did your founding members launch, you probably did some pretty exciting things like a special event for your founding members or maybe free consulting with some of your members who are business coaches or you know, have some sort of legal service."

00:19:07,"You could still go ahead and create those packages and bundle them into an annual membership that is worth more than just the flex coworking membership. And it doesn't have to be a full time membership because even if you maintain, you know, those 10 day a month folks, there's a lot of value in that for keeping that revenue in July and August or even June or even December. I mean, people try to pop in and out all the time, right?"

00:19:35,"So especially if you're in a smaller market where people aren't inclined to sort of, you know, space hop and cancel out of one community and try a new community because they have so many options nearby. If there are not a lot of options in your market, I think you could totally make this happen. You might also even simply make this happen by giving a decent discount for an annual membership."

00:19:58,"If you're not offering that, it's worth it. I like the bonuses because again, if you give a month free, you're basically giving away July anyway, right? Or December anyway. So try to create a bonus package. The nice thing about the bonus package too is that it could promote other members so you don't have to deliver the bonuses. Again, this could be business coaches in your space, attorneys in your space, accountants in your space, other people who would love to, you know, do a 30 minute session with your team."

00:20:28,"Or it might be fun things like swag or you know, again, a special lunch, you know, with, with only your annual members. Or it might be access to the event space for one event per year. It could be perks with other local businesses like a 50% discount on a massage or you know, something with a local coffee shop. You, you can get creative on those. But think about what you might bundle to get folks to sign up for an annual membership."

00:20:57,"And here's what I want you to think about. This may not work that well on new members, right, because the new members may just really be stuck in that commitment phobic segment. But it might work on folks who were commitment phobic, but now they've been a member for a little while and it's in their routine and now they know they're going to stay. So if you gave them some incentives to just go ahead and sign up for the whole year at once."

00:21:22,"It might work. So don't get discouraged if you, if it doesn't work with new members, but it might be something that you have on an automation to offer to existing members after three months, for example. So you could have it kind of do that on a rolling basis. Juicy North America, a coworking conference is coming up April 7th through 10th in Boston. It's at the Track and New Balance."

00:21:46,"It's a great venue, but even better than the venue. The content and the people and the conversations and the connections and the insights and the perspective. Nothing replaces taking a couple days out from your business, getting out of town and really immersing yourself into the business that you're in or working on, being in that you love and getting to do tours and just connect with people that you've seen on Zoom but never seen in person."

00:22:15,"I might be one of those people. I'm definitely going to be there. I haven't missed one in 10 years and I would love to see you there. We have a special discount code for you. Thank you to the Juicy team. It is in the show notes. So grab the show notes on your phone or on the website and the URL to get all the details and register is in the same spot."

00:22:36,"I'd love to see you there. Okay, so we talked about that a little bit. Strategy number three, create a summer only Flex Pass or a Bogo. Okay, so this strategy I want you to think about if you tend to have a little bit of a slump during the summer or if you have a lot of opportunity in the summer. So how can you start marketing something flexible for folks who are not going to be in town that much or for folks who are going to be in town but they're not long term members, they're visiting family and they still need to get some work done or they're traveling."

00:23:13,"I think there's still a lot of people who do longer term travel because, you know, the Pandemic taught us like, oh, we can, you know, go abroad for a month and keep working, but maybe that's really hard to do at the Airbnb and you need to get out and you need to find a place to work or we even have folks in our operator membership who just live in really great seasonal locations where people have summer homes and they come in for the summer to spend time with family, but they still need to work and the house is kind of mayhem and they're staying with the in laws or whatever."

00:23:48,"So start thinking now if you have, you know, one of Those markets where you're going to benefit from the summer. Make sure you're kicking your marketing into high gear in advance of the summer so that people who are starting to plan, you know, may, maybe early June, you're really getting in front of people and getting those offers out and doing a little bit of extra marketing. And this may be a good time to be running Facebook ads because you have something really specific that you could offer."

00:24:19,"You know, it's a limited time, you know, pass that you're offering. So you might do offer a pass that you don't offer other times of the year. So maybe you don't offer a 10 day pass or usually, but you're going to offer one that can only be used from June to August. Or maybe you're going to offer, you know, the remote worker summer pass and marketed as great for hybrid workers who want to escape from home."

00:24:47,"What I would be thinking about is creating something really compelling that either just solves a problem, like it may just be enough to offer it and talk about it a lot and connect the dots, right? Start connecting those dots to your audience in advance so that they're ready to sign up for it and that they know it's a solution when they arrive and it's not halfway through the summer when they figure out you exist and can solve their problem."

00:25:13,"And it might even be that you're targeting, you know, locals who have guests coming and the locals don't want the guests in the house all day long. You know, they need a break too. So they might, you know, buy it for their guests or at least tell them about it. So just make sure you're really getting out on social. I would encourage paid ads for something like this."

00:25:31,"So it might be time to hustle it out and take a Facebook ads class. Organic face. Organic Facebook and Instagram marketing is very challenging because approximately 10% of your audience is seeing your messages. So if you have a really targeted promotion, like something for the summer, you're going to want to put money against it. Boosting your ads does not have the same impact. You really want to do it through the ads manager."

00:25:58,"So you want to take a class and do it through the back end, you could find somebody to do it. It can be really expensive and you're not going to know if they know what they're doing. So I encourage you to at least take a class so that you know what you're getting into if you hire somebody. The other thing I love to think about for this summer, so two things."

00:26:16,"One, really connect the dots on the pain points. Because I think, you know, parents, you might do this with current members. And this gets into the sort of tell a friend. I really think the summertime is such a good time to get people to share coworking with their friends. So connect the dots for current members. Get them thinking like, hey, summer's coming up. It'll reinforce the fact that they need to keep their coworking membership if they're not traveling for the whole summer."

00:26:44,"Again, there's not a lot we can do if people are traveling except to downgrade them and keep some, maintain some revenue from them over the summer. But if, you know, kids are at home, maybe there's a babysitter at home or a nanny at home, or there are teenagers at home, which is so hard because exactly what I just talked about with winter break. The kids, you know, don't really process that you're working and cannot be at their beck and call getting them snacks and driving them to their friend's house."

00:27:10,"Like you really need to disappear in order to not be on the hook for those things, even if it's a few days a week or a couple of days a week. And parents, you know, forget that pain if they're not in it. So start reminding them what that's gonna be like. If you're a space that can offer programs for kids, that's amazing. That's not a lot of you, but there might be some of you."

00:27:33,"Maybe you create some sort of partnership if there's somebody local. Like if you happen to be next to a school or a camp, then you create sort of a marketing bundle with them. Like, hey, the kids can go here during the day and you can come here and get your work done. It's really about connecting those dots and letting people know that you can solve this pain point that they have for the summer."

00:27:55,"So onto the. So you just find something that you can market that you feel like really fits your market for the summer. So again, it might be a lighter commitment than, you know, what's usually required. So maybe it's a 10 day, or maybe it's 10 half days or 20 half days because, you know, you get the parents who can come in in the morning and then camp ends at whatever time and they have to leave and go get the kids."

00:28:19,"And so mentally they feel like paying for a whole day. You know, they're not getting the total value out of it. I know this drives us nuts, but it happens. So you might do something like that. Really meet your members where they're at if, if you, if you know your members don't want to pay for the whole day, then sell them. Instead of a 10 day pack send sell them 20 half days."

00:28:40,"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."

00:29:16,"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."

00:29:44,"And this is an excellent group of community managers that have invested time and effort into getting better at that role. 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."

00:30:06,"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. So we provide some done for you resources like Google business posts, detailed event ideas etc that they can just kind of grab and go and use."

00:30:34,"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. So 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."

00:31:03,"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. 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."

00:31:38,"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 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."

00:32:04,"How to close it to our 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. 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."

00:32:41,"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/community manager. Now back to our episode. Okay, and back to the Share with a Friend. I just think that the summer is a beautiful time to do a bogo. Kim Lee, who runs the Forge in Birmingham, Alabama, does this every year she and her team do and it works really well for them."

00:33:11,"So a bogo is buy one, get one and she gets a lot of teachers and other folks who aren't working for the summer or have some sort of different routine for the summer who the way she does it actually is buy one month, get the next month free. I love that. I also love the idea of you buy one and get the other one for your spouse or for a friend."

00:33:35,"I think introducing friends who work together is so compelling. I've probably mentioned this, but I joined a gym. It's called Basecamp Fitness and it's like a, it's kind of like an interval training gym. It's very well run. I'm really impressed with it. If you listen to the podcast, you know, I'm often not impressed with the way things are run and they, they just do a fantastic job at onboarding members and creating community."

00:34:06,"So they're run, they constantly are marketing, bring a friend, bring a friend. They do this because they know pretty much everybody can think of a friend who would love it at Basecamp. It's a really smart workout, but so I won't go into the details, but pretty much Everybody should be able to think of somebody who would be a great coworker either who could use an office or a business address or a flex desk."

00:34:32,"But you have to encourage them to tell them. You have to keep reminding them. You have to give them incentive. Even. I can think of friends who. And I'm not a full time member at the gym, so doing these challenges is hard for me because I don't want to go every day. I want to do CrossFit the other day, so I'm not a good example. But this current promotion they're running, if you go every day in March, you get a ticket to give to a friend for a whole month free, which is a pretty big deal because it's a few hundred bucks to go full time for the month."

00:35:03,"So that's a huge incentive. I even almost thought about doing it, honestly. I do have one friend who I think would really like base camp. I have more than one, but there's one in particular. And I was like, wouldn't it be awesome for me to give Monica this free month at basecamp? So they're constantly running these challenges or promotions about bringing a friend, but because it's a way to remind people to tell their friends."

00:35:27,"And also the reason I joined was because I knew I needed to leave the house more often. And my CrossFit gym is too far away. It's like more than 20 minutes. And so getting there and back in the morning adds too much time on my already very packed morning. I have two dogs that have to get walked, a kid that needs to go to school, all the things."

00:35:45,"So this one's in town. And I have a very good friend, actually. I have a lot of. I. I know a lot of people who go there. And I have a very good friend who goes there. And. And so I said, you know what? I'm gonna commit to going with Jenny. And Jenny's gonna love this. So Jenny and I go every Monday and Thursday and every. Jenny always leaves class before I do."

00:36:01,"Cause she has a one year old and she has to roll so that her husband can come work out. So I stay for like the core part or whatever. So she leaves and she always says, okay, book your next class. And so we get out our phones and we book the next Monday or Thursday, whichever it is. Cause the 6:15 always fills up so you book right away."

00:36:20,"But she's my accountability person. And there's a lot of times where I keep thinking, I really probably would prefer to do CrossFit every day. But I go because Jenny's there and I like the workout enough, but it's so compelling to have a friend there and to have a routine with a friend 100%. I would not go as often or I would be probably a little bit more sporadic about when I go."

00:36:41,"Anyway, the BOGO is very powerful and I don't think it's used enough. I also want to suggest that we talk a lot about BOGO and referral programs in our community manager University. We have playbooks on how to run them, promotional materials that you can swipe, email series is that you can just copy into your own mailchimp and use it. So if you're in the program, get in there and use it."

00:37:05,"And if you're not, this may be the reason to get in there and join because it's all there. But I think we just underuse the referral program and the attachment to a friend in behavior change. So I would suggest like the focus on like free Fridays. It's probably not moving the needle very much unless people are bringing a friend. I I don't think most people want to go to a coworking space on Friday."

00:37:30,"They're trying to work from home, they're trying to get appointments booked, they're trying to take a long weekend. Whatever it is they're doing, it's not a good day to try a coworking space and do something totally new for a lot of people unless it's totally working for you. But if it's not working that for you, refocus on the bring a friend. The bogo, the referral program. I don't think you can lose by letting friends give friends free time in your coworking space unless you're full."

00:37:57,"But if you're not full, really be generous about giving your members a chance to get their friends involved. So that might be a free week, a free month, free meeting room use, whatever, but try to encourage that. I think the summer can be a great time to do that. If people are in town, their routines are a little more flexible and they may feel like it's a good time to kind of, you know, test a new routine."

00:38:25,"Okay, we talked a lot about a lot here. So it's the end of February when I'm recording this, so summer's a few months away, but it's time to start thinking about how do you try to maintain your level of revenue through the summer or take advantage of a possible spike in revenue if you are in the kind of market that gets an influx in the population during the summer."

00:38:52,"So here are a few ideas that we just talked about. Get your virtual mail program started or dialed in. It's a great way to create predictable recurring revenue that doesn't disappear for the summer. Try creating an annual membership option to get folks to lock in for the year. And again, this might take some creativity. It might take some really awesome bundling ideas. Feel free to get somebody else involved in your brainstorming."

00:39:20,"Jump into the Facebook group, join our Operator membership and see what you can come up with here. And it might not work on new members. It might be something that you upgrade upgrade existing members to on a recurring basis. But this might be a way to keep members engaged and not canceling their membership in July and August. Do something really compelling for the summer to get people to stay or draw people in who haven't been using a coworking space but could use a coworking space in the summer because their kids are home or they're home because they're have a different, you know, job situation during the summer."

00:40:00,"So create some sort of summer deal, Flex Pass or a BOGO deal to attract those folks who might be looking for some solution over the summer. And of course, if you want help creating your own custom summer revenue strategy, you can sign up for a mentor. We're really focused on mentorship this year for both folks who are starting spaces and have existing spaces and know you could be generating more consistent revenue or you're ready to get all your systems in place to expand to a new location."

00:40:36,"If that applies to you, book a discovery call with us@coworking mentorship.com this call, by the way, is for owners who want to uplevel their business. It is not for community managers. If you're a community manager, our Community Manager University program is the place for you to get that professional development and coaching support. Okay, that's it for today. We'll see you same time, same place next week. Thank you for listening to today's episode."

00:41:04,"If you like what you heard, tell a friend, hit that subscribe button and leave us a rating and review. If you'd like to learn more about our education and coaching programs, head over to everything coworking. Com. We'll see you next week."

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Jamie RussoComment