157. What the Heck does a Coworking Community Manager do All Day?
Everything Coworking Featured Resources:
Masterclass: 3 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets to Opening a Coworking Space
Creative Coworking Partnerships: How to negotiate and structure management agreements from the landlord and operator perspective
Transcription
157. What the Heck does a Coworking Community Manager do All Day?
00:00:01 Welcome to the everything coworking podcast, where you learn what you need to know about how the world wants to work. And now your host coworking space owner and trend expert. Jamie Russo, Welcome to the everything coworking podcast. This is your host, Jamie Russo. Today, we are going to answer the question. What the heck do community managers do all day in our coworking spaces?
00:00:40 First, I want to mention a couple of things we have coming up. One is this episode is brought to you by my masterclass three behind the scenes secrets to opening a coworking space in 2020, if you are working on starting a coworking space, I want to share three decisions that I've seen successful operators make when they're designing their coworking space. This masterclass is totally free.
00:01:08 It's about an hour, which will include Q and a time. If you'd like to join me, please register at www dot everything. coworking.com forward slash masterclass. And since this episode is about community managers, I would be remiss if I didn't mention my program for community managers, community manager, university, we had several new and seasoned community managers join the program recently to learn,
00:01:39 grow, and connect. And if you would like to learn more about investing in your team to help them contribute more deeply to the business and to love their job even more, you can learn more@everythingcoworking.com forward slash community managers and this program because it's new. I just want to mention a couple of things. One it's really good for new managers. It has extensive training on the industry and on operational aspects of the coworking space,
00:02:10 community, building, finance, leadership, you name it it's covered. Um, but it's also great for community managers who have been in their role and are looking to grow and connect and integrate best practices. And also just kind of optimize things that they've been doing. So there's training on how to set up a virtual mail program. We do training every single month on a new topic.
00:02:34 So always learn opportunities to learn and to grow. So today we're going to talk about community managers. This topic comes up. I think this is a great topic. If you have a community manager already, you probably have a sense of what they do, but if you're like me, you always wonder, are they doing the right things? Are they focused on the right things?
00:02:56 And could they be doing more because I'm the kind of person who thinks everything takes less time than it actually does. And I've worked for that person before back when I used to work for a startup and it was painful. And so I understand what it's like to make those assumptions, that things, you know, take less time than they do. So we're going to talk about that in a minute.
00:03:19 I have a day in the life of a community manager broken out to share with you, but it's also a helpful discussion. If you are new and working on open a coworking space, and you're trying to wrap your head around who you need to hire, what, you know, what it is that they do all day, what are the types of roles?
00:03:37 What do they handle in this space? What will you do versus what they do? So we're going to talk a little bit about that today. And I will be doing more episodes about community managers. So we're just gonna cover this topic today. This also might be for you, if you are a community manager and you're wondering yourself, what, how do other people spend their day?
00:03:58 And, you know, kind of my focusing on the right things. And a lot of times that depends on the type of business, right? We're seeing so many different flavors of coworking, shared workspace, flexible workspace pop up. And we're going to talk a little bit about that too. So I'm gonna start with just a couple of concepts. One being sort of the foundation of the discussion,
00:04:22 which is that I believe that the success of your team really drives the success of your business. Now, this assumes that you signed a good real estate deal, that you are in the right location, that you designed your business in your offering to be perfectly situated for your target member and that you are marketing effectively to that member. But assuming those things are in place after that,
00:04:49 your team is super critical. Your team not only drives, you know, what we think of community managers doing this space, but really at a high level, they own sales often and they own retention. So they own getting people in the door and then they're responsible for retaining those members in an our business. That's really everything, right? That's what it boils down to.
00:05:13 And they may not own every aspect of marketing. So I may be overstating a little bit, but, um, you, you know, the operator or you may have a marketing team, that's driving leads into the space, but typically it's our onsite team. And I use the term community manager. I loosely to kind of refer to the folks who are the,
00:05:34 you know, the face of the coworking space, where they're every day who are giving tours, we're doing member events, you know, they're the ones really interacting with potential members and your current members. So I think when you boil it down, they, they drive the sales and they drive the retention. So they are super critical. And just a little bit more kind of about,
00:05:58 you know, why in this business, they matter space is essentially a commodity, right? We're not selling workspace. I talked about this a couple of episodes ago, if you didn't listen to it, it's an episode about internal and external problems and what we solve. So go back to that one, if you missed it, because we talk a lot about this.
00:06:18 We're not selling workspace, we're selling the transformation that our space creates for our members, right? So our team plays a big role in that because they see our team every day. Our team plans, the events that helps them connect to other members. Our team teaches them about how to interact with other members or teammate, connect them directly to other members members come for the space,
00:06:41 but they stay for the people or the service hospitality, whatever aspect is unique to your business, your team delivers that experience. So they're super critical community. Generally doesn't happen just by putting people in the same place. So it's our local team that, like I said, connects people, plans those events, uh, you know, makes the magic happen.
00:07:06 Community grows over time, one part organically, and one part miracle grow, which is your team. So your team is miracle grow in this case. Um, so they're really responsible for the health of your business, right? They, they do, uh, we rely on them to do a lot of things in their role. So they matter a lot.
00:07:32 So now we know they met her a lot. What do they spend their time doing all day? So a couple of notes, I would say one, the fewer, the members, the less there is to do in this space, right? So if you're newer, um, you know, there's going to be fewer members to talk to and spend time with,
00:07:55 and events are going to be slower to start until you kind of get this base of membership. There's just going to be less sort of urgency, um, in terms of the operations of this space, but then the fewer, the members there are in this space, they're more, the more there is to do, you know, outside of the space.
00:08:13 And then they put on their marketing hat. So it can shift depending on what life cycle you're in. So in my community manager university, I break the role into community building operations, sales, and marketing, finance, and leadership, and probably our community managers don't get so much into finance and leadership until they're, you know, further into their role,
00:08:38 but they may play a role in, in bookkeeping. And I'm sorry, I'm looking at closing out the end of the month, making sure we don't have accounts receivable, et cetera. So, um, and then in terms of finance, as they get more seasoned in their role, then they may really help support us with the P and L and growing revenue and managing expenses and playing a more strategic role in that term.
00:09:02 And then in terms of leadership, they may manage other members of the team. They may take, you know, more of a leadership role in terms of driving, you know, projects in the business. So it depends, but for sure, community building sales and marketing operations. So I like to kind of look at those buckets. So let me reference.
00:09:23 So I'm going to go through a day in the life of a community manager resource that I put together, and this was partly driven by my own struggles with making sure, you know, my team was, was working on the right things and focused on the right things and understanding how much capacity they had in a day. And then this question coming up for a lot of folks in my coworking startup school program,
00:09:48 I work with folks who are opening coworking spaces and they always, you know, hiring a team is the biggest expense after rent. So it's a major line item on our P and L's. And so we think hard about that, and people are always wondering, do I need someone full time? What does that look like? So we're just going to kind of walk through
00:10:05 and I'm going to leave this as a download. If you go to, um, everything coworking.com forward slash episodes, four slash one 57, um, or you can go to podcasts and kind of scroll through and find it it's one 57. You can grab this download, which literally breaks out what, what my community manager was roughly spending time on during the day.
00:10:28 And this will depend on many things. So the size of your space matters, whether you have a lot of traffic in and out of during the day conference, your rentals event, space rentals, um, day passes. You know, those folks I'll need stuff from you and from your team. So it'll keep them busier. If you have a bigger space,
00:10:49 you have just more people coming in and out during the day. And then if you have more open space also tend to have needier members. And we mean that in the most respectful, wonderful way, but typically office members are a little more lowkey that kinda, you know, grab their coffee, do their thing. And I'm not saying that they don't connect.
00:11:09 I'm not saying they don't need community. I'm just saying they're easier on a community manager typically. So the demands on your manager will depend on size of space, the traffic in and out of the space and also the roles that you give them, right? So we all have different ways of managing people and we may give them fewer or less hats to wear.
00:11:31 So I'm going to go through what it looked like, you know, for my manager, but this may be different for you. And I mentioned this at the beginning of the episode, but one of the struggles I've always had is, you know, this is my community manager, have more time. Can they help me with more stuff? When you get somebody who's good at their job,
00:11:48 you start thinking, Hmm, what else can they do? And I've always worn multiple hats, you know? Well, at the beginning of my coworking career, even then I was still doing some consulting. So I've, I've always, you know, run the space at two spaces. When I first moved to the Bay area was doing consulting, then I dropped the consulting.
00:12:10 But then I became the executive director of the global workspace associations with both an operator and running the industry association. And then I started the coworking startup school and eventually community manager university. So I've always had kind of a lot of things going on and it gets tempting when you have a lot going on and you get used to delegating that you want to give people who are good,
00:12:32 more stuff to do. And so you start thinking, they must have time to take this on what are they doing during the day. So here's kind of what the breakdown looks like. And this is like really in order, probably more of the day part, then the buckets of what they do. So you can grab this and kinda, kind of look at it for yourself.
00:12:52 Again, if you go to everything, coworking.com foresight forward slash episodes four slash one 57. So they're gonna open the space, which takes, you know, more or less time, depending on how big the space is, but let's call it a half hour. They're going to make coffee. They're going to put the dishes away from last night. They're going to make sure the conference rooms are in ship shape.
00:13:12 You know, they're going to judge pillows, they're going to make sure that phone rooms are good. And, um, certainly I'm recording this during COVID-19, they're going to have a whole bunch of health and safety protocols they have to adhere to in the space. And so we might be doubling or tripling some of the times on some of these line items.
00:13:30 So definitely keep that in mind. So space opening may take a lot more than 30 minutes if you're spraying surfaces, making sure, you know, the cleaning staff did everything they needed to do, making sure that the standardization stations are set up, et cetera. If you do virtual mail at some point during the day, they're doing mail management depends on when your mail comes.
00:13:50 So it depends on how much volume of mail you get. That is, it is a bit of a myth that mail volume can be excessive, but there will be male. If you have male clients about take some time. So that's a half hour to 30 minutes. It's probably not more than an hour a day, unless you are killing it on mail service,
00:14:08 then you're hiring someone else. Um, keeping the space neat and clean. This can take more time, you know, with more members and again, you know, health and safety protocols during COVID conference room wiped downs in between meetings, all of these things, you know, again, depend on how, how many meeting rooms you have. And if you have a larger space with more meeting rooms and a lot of in and out traffic,
00:14:33 then you're probably adding team members to support that. And that again, kind of a lot of it depends. I always use the rule of thumb of, you can probably get to like 7,000, maybe 8,000 square feet with one person. But once you get up closer to 8,000, you're probably adding another half a person. And that's usually to support the busy times of,
00:14:57 you know, traffic coming in and out or setting up in the morning. Uh, one thing we started doing was having somebody who just came in in the mornings to set the space, because that took, you know, a bulk of time, my 30 minutes on that it was OCD. She set the space and then did mail management. You know,
00:15:12 that could take an hour to two hours depending. Um, Oh, sorry, making coffee. You know what, I've lumped space opening in with making coffee, but those are two separate line items. We had 45 minutes in for making coffee. And again, that can vary greatly. If you have more people coming through the space, then that's all a lot more coffee helping members when they have questions,
00:15:32 you know, that might be 15 minutes a day. That might be an hour a day. Um, and then putting on other hats like marketing. So sending member newsletters every month, sending marketing newsletters every month. Um, so we, you know, there's time for that. That's allocated, we put some, some daily minutes in there, but really,
00:15:51 you know, that probably happens as a project one week a month, onboarding new members, off-boarding members that leave. So that all takes time. And again, it just depends how much turnover you have when you're bringing new people in and, and, um, having some turnover that will just take a fair amount of admin time greeting conference room guests, giving tours.
00:16:14 So again, the tour time they spend is going to vary greatly on your space, how big it is and how much capacity you have open. So how many tours you're doing and how much marketing you're doing, doing to bring in tours. Um, so back to sort of that sales and marketing hat running tours, following up on tours, um, entering tours into your CRM,
00:16:36 uh, chat, you know, chatting with members end of the month, putting on sort of that accounting hat, you know, are they, you know, making sure invoices are set to run, are they matching, you know, deposits to the bank account? Are they doing anything in QuickBooks? I often would have my manager help with those tasks because they were so familiar with the members that they knew if something was off,
00:16:59 even if I couldn't see it, um, because you know, they, they know who's making changes to their account marketing hat back on posting photos, to the Google, my business page posting to social media community, building hat back on hosting member events, um, you know, operations hat back on ordering supplies, dealing with maintenance issues. So those are the things on the list.
00:17:23 And I'm sure some of you could probably add to this list. Um, you know, I don't have things like writing blog posts, um, you know, some of the other kind of little things that happen in the space of a blog post would be considered kind of a big thing. Um, and other marketing activities, you know, attending networking event hosting external events is also not on here,
00:17:46 but just the things that I have on here, um, seven hours a day. So that's, you know, no breaks, nothing in there. And that, you know, that list was pretty, you know, somewhat sort of bare bones. Like most community managers would be doing these things. And that adds up already to almost a full day.
00:18:05 So it seems, you know, when you don't add up all the, the minutes, you think eight hours a day is an awful lot of time, you can get a lot done in eight hours, but, you know, we were talking on our, uh, coworking startup school call this morning, like being a community. Manager's a little like,
00:18:23 you know, death by paper cuts. It's like just lots and lots of little things that take up your day, but it's a full day. And I'll say a couple of things about the role and having your community manager spend time on these things is I've gone through phases of asking my manager to take on other responsibilities for me. Like I said, not sort of understanding where,
00:18:48 you know, where they're spending their time and the, and the value and how critical some of the things they were doing were, and having them help me on other projects. And I will tell you that every time, well, I didn't, I didn't do this too many times cause you see really quickly, but it can take time to see the impact spending less time supporting the community hosting member events,
00:19:14 all the things that take time, you know, as owners, we may think member events just sort of appear. They, they take a lot of time to plan to, um, you know, plan a calendar to conceive of the right event for the membership that you have and then to market it and put, do all the operational things to get those things going.
00:19:34 Even if you keep your event pretty simple, which I always recommend, um, simple but effective. It's still a lot of work and takes time, but these things matter. So having your community manager or some member of your team really focused on member retention, connecting those members. Remember at the beginning, I said, we are not really in the business of selling space.
00:19:57 We're in the business of helping our members be the people they want to be because partly because of our space and the people they're meeting and the connections they're making and the work that they're doing and just how they feel that takes effort. And it takes intentionality and it takes time and it takes a community manager. And if you take your community manager away from that focus,
00:20:19 you'll see your retention fall. That definitely happened to me when I took on that GWA hat and said, Oh, now my community manager, you know, needs to help me do some of these things. Cause I'm, you know, overwhelmed with this other hat on. And we definitely saw the pain of that. It takes a little time for that feeling to sort of sink in with your members.
00:20:38 And then for them to say, I might as well, you know, sort of work at home or start to look at other spaces. Um, but then all of a sudden, you know, there's an impact and I'm sure many of you are seeing this. Now it's hard to rebuild this space. When you start to lose membership, you start to lose that mojo.
00:20:54 And when you're, when you give tours to a full space, people, you know, feel that they want to be a part of that. And when you give tours to an emptier space, it's harder. And if you're building up a space, you're, you're going through that are rebuilding after COVID. So member retention is, is really critical. And on the other side of that,
00:21:14 when you give your manager the time and the resources and the support to focus on the community, then the reverse happens. It gets stronger. I can tell you, you know, the last community manager that I had super fantastic. And we, you know, love letter after love letter from our members about her attention and the events and the culture of the space.
00:21:37 And, um, she had a big impact on, on attracting people to this base and retaining people. So, um, their role really matters and we asked them to do a lot of small things, but those small things really add up, um, and really matter. So my recommendation based on every, you know, input I I've seen personally,
00:21:59 but also, you know, across the industry with the, with the kind of macro hats that I wear or that communities matter, you know what I'll mention one more thing. And I had never thought of it this way, but I had Casey Godwin. He has been on the podcast a few times. He's a broker, but we were talking about multiples of a traditional rent rate.
00:22:18 So if you offer flexible service, you know, coworking space, what can you charge per square foot to a member, uh, versus market rent and the multiple. And he was talking through what impacts that multiple, can you charge one time, two times, three times? And he mentioned, you know, the manager as being an impact on the multiple.
00:22:41 If you have a service space, there's a community manager there who's going to add in tangible value and sometimes tangible value. You know, I'm here to greet your guests. I'm here to make your coffee. I'm here to, to help you be the entrepreneur or the, you know, remote corporate employee that you want to be. There's a lot of value in that,
00:22:59 and that impacts your ability to price. So that's another reason to make sure you're sort of recognizing what your community managers are do, and giving them the space to do those things. And just also there's, you know, there's an ROI on that role. So I'm going to wrap up there. I will post my day in the life of a community manager PDF again@everythingcoworking.com/episodes/157.
For the full show notes of this episode, click here.
Want to join our coworking conversation in the Everything Coworking Facebook Group? Find us here!
Looking for a specific episode? Go to the episode index here.