Your Coworking Business in 2020: 5 Things to Focus on to Drive Growth and Make an Impact

What’s the goal of focusing on the right things in 2020?

1. Get more members

2. Keep more members

3. Make an impact and meet your financial goals

Get more members:

Most of us are always looking to add to our membership - more members is generally good for our bottom line and good for our members. More members = a bigger, stronger tribe (to a point). More members = more revenue and a higher margin, allowing us to invest in the space and invest in activities that help our members to connect.

Keep more members:

A wise member of my Flight Group program recently pointed out that it’s much easier to retain members than to lose them and have to find new members.

Make an impact and meet your financial goals.

As a coworking space operator, you likely have two goals:

Run a profitable business that helps you to meet your financial goals for the space.
Make an impact on your community.

We can’t pursue our purpose-driven goals if our space isn’t profitable.

Let’s dive in: 5 things to focus in your coworking business in the new year:

1. Systems

What do I mean by systems?

Get your business organized and automated as much as you can on the front end and the back end. This will improve your members’ experience and your teams’ experience and give you time to do the other things on this list. Be the CEO of your business. Create leadership systems that help you and your team to be intentional.

What are some examples of systems?

1. Have a weekly team meeting that happens on the same date and same time each week. If a conflict comes up, then reschedule the meeting for the same day or the day after. Don’t skip meetings. If you have to skip a week, get right back on the wagon and meet the next week. Your team needs access to you and you should be in the loop on what’s happening in the space so that you can make adjustments real-time, not when it’s too late.

2. Schedule time to run your monthly processes on the same day of the month. Here are some examples of processes that you should schedule and run like clockwork:

Have your team review the monthly billing before it runs to get in front of any issues (member off-board, member on-board). You might do this on the 23rd of the month. You’re probably using a space management platform that handles your billing automatically... But the inputs are still manual and mistakes are easy to make with the constant member changes in our business.
Have your team review the billing run to catch any expired credit cards, etc. on the 5th of the month. This is enough time that the billing system has reminded the member to update their credit card a few times and if they haven’t, you need to go into manual stalking mode to collect your membership dues.
Have your team block out time 1x a month to update your offer on Google my Business, and solicit reviews from members. They might also block out 2x a week to post photos to Google my Business. Have a tracker that you review during your weekly meeting to ensure that these critical tasks are getting done.
Schedule a time each week to review inventory and place orders. Do you know what’s almost as bad as the Internet going down? Running out of half and half.
Review upcoming holidays and make sure that you’ve blocked out your reservation systems and communicated with members. Members are OK with things that are inconvenient for them if they know well in advance and you tell them several times. They hate surprises. This seems very basic, but it’s one of those minor factors that will add up to create a disgruntled member.
Identify the KPIs that are most important to you and put systems in place to track them and work on them. Here’s a Coworking KPI Guide that you can use as a reference. Only choose a few each quarter on which to focus. Spend time automating the tracking and finding ways to optimize results. For example, if you want to increase the number of tours that get scheduled from your website, create a system around this. Create a dashboard that pulls the metrics that you need to assess performance. Add a link to the dashboard to your weekly meeting agenda so that you remember to review it. Or block out time in your own schedule to work on KPIs.

2. Train and Develop your Team

The same wise Flight Group member that I mentioned above, also reported that one of his biggest learnings from 2019 was to focus on his team first, and that focus will trickle down to the membership.

Having a high-performance team working in your coworking space each day will:

1. Attract more members.

2. Retain more members.

3. Give you, the owner, more time to work ON the business instead of IN the business.

When you have time to work ON the business, you should be able to create a more profitable, sustainable business that allows you to invest in your team and invest in the space and in your members which has a reinforcing cycle. No team wants to work in a space that isn’t well-cared for and support a membership with no resources for member events. And no member wants to work in a space that has an under-resourced Community Manager.

Just like losing members is a lot of work, losing team members is extremely disruptive to you, the owner, and to your membership.

Consider allocating one day a quarter for team development. If you have a small team, maybe it’s just a few hours, but it’s time for you and your team to align on the business, do some team-building, and ideally, provide your team with professional development opportunities.

Meeting with your team weekly is an important tool for staying aligned with your team, supporting them and ensuring that you’re making important decisions together. Human communication is extremely challenging. It’s easy to get off-track if you don’t communicate and check-in very regularly.

Provide your team with opportunities for professional development and a way to build their own tribe. If you don’t have the resources to do this on your own, enroll your team in our Community Manager University. We’ll give them ongoing training and development, monthly Q&A calls as well as a private Slack group for idea exchange and community-building.

3. Get Found First.

The thing about business is that it’s generally not easy, but it’s simple. The best way to get more leads into the top of your sales funnel is to show up first in the search results. If you’re in the U.S, that means showing up first on Google search results, and Google Maps (your Google my Business listing).

There are “free” activities that you can have your team do that will help your organic ranking. Write blog posts with keywords and update your Google my Business listing weekly with photos, offers and member reviews.

The next thing you should focus on is learning about Google ads and Facebook ads and hiring a professional to help you test them for your space. If you have a space with no marketing budget and you have competition, you will likely struggle to get enough leads. Take a hard look at your business and figure out how to create a marketing budget, even if it’s small to begin with.

Profitable coworking spaces in competitive markets are investing in paid digital ads on Google.

4. Celebrate Your Members

Your members joined your coworking space because they need a productive and professional place to work. They want to be a part of a community of diverse, but like-minded professionals. They want a reason to get out of their PJs each day, they want to be seen and have positive social interactions beyond greeting the UPS delivery guy.

When you deliver on the reasons that your members joined your space, they stay.

Honoring your members and helping them to build relationships and feel rewarded for leaving the comfort of their kitchen table requires intentional effort from you and your team.

Here are some tangible things you can do to recognize and celebrate your members:

Create a member wall.

Your member wall can be informal or formal, professional or entertaining, depending on your culture. It can be front and center for guests to see or tucked into your break room. I recommend making it as visible as your comfort level allows. Some spaces will use the member wall as a stop on their prospective member tours. People outside of the community want to see who is on the inside and make a call as to whether or not they’ll fit in.

Having photos and short bios of members in a visible place sends a signal to members and non-members alike that you respect and recognize your members and want to show them off.

Host Consistent Member Events

While some member relationships will develop organically, they’ll happen faster if you help to facilitate connections. One of the easiest ways to get members talking to each other and moving beyond “so…. what do you do?” is to host interactive member events. We have a detailed approach to developing a sustainable member event program here.

Highlight Your Members on Social Media

I always advise you to be careful about allocating too much of your team’s time to social media - it is not the search platform that will deliver you the most members. But it should be a part of your marketing mix and it can help you meet some of your non-marketing objectives such as helping members to feel seen and recognized, and helping members to meet and connect.

Highlight your members on social media. Consider having a simple member profile form that you get them to fill out when they join (or after your team influences them to fill it out). This form can have a mix of professional and personal questions on it. You should also “require” that they provide you with a headshot that you can use for the member wall and for your social media member shout-outs.

Create a “member shout-out” template in two sizes - one for Facebook and one for Instagram. Post to both locations, as well as to your blog and your newsletters. This content is compelling to most audiences and easy to re-purpose.

5. 1% Your Member Experience

If the 1% concept isn’t familiar, I highly recommend James Clear’s book “Atomic Habits.” He makes the point that if you are consistent in very small ways, 1% will add up a lot over time.

Image source: https://expertprogrammanagement.com/2018/11/book-summary-atomic-habits-clear/

Why is the member experience important?

The member experience will trump many things about your space (except the Internet and coffee). I will give you a personal example.

I opened my Palo Alto space almost 7 years ago. We took the space because it was fairly plug-and-play. It had almost the right layout, good lighting, great parking, etc. We had very low construction costs to get the space up and running which, as you know is a huge advantage to your ROI equation.

Over the years, we’ve had seasons of very strong membership and not great membership. The seasons correlate directly to the team managing the space - their fit for the role, and their execution of the five recommendations on this list. Members will drift away when the team isn’t committed to the member experience.

Membership starts to fall away when:

Member events are infrequent and inconsistent.
Staff is present but unengaged.
We don’t manage inventory and run out of things like half and half.
Our team doesn’t engage with each member personally.
We don’t celebrate members in a “public” way.
We don’t execute our basic marketing to-do’s. It gets a lot harder to post frequently to your GMB listing when you don’t host member events (no photos of happy members) and your members don’t fall in love with their experience and write positive reviews.

When the vibe starts to go down and members start to look at other options, it’s hard to close new members. They sense that something is off. The energy doesn’t attract. One of my new quotes is “Intensity makes a good story. Consistency makes progress.” This goes right along with James Clear’s 1% approach.

What can you do each day to make a 1% greater positive impact on your community?

Greeting members with a bigger smile or an individual greeting.
Chatting with members at the coffee bar.
Host member appreciate events (can be simple, low-budget).
Refresh your member wall.
Add something to the space that members have been asking for.
Update your on-boarding process.
Connect one member to another based on common interests.
Add fresh flowers to the space.
Change out your throw pillows. (Simple but 1% people!)

What have I not included here that you’re focusing on in 2020?

Join us in our Everything Coworking Facebook Group and share your focus areas for 2020!