180. Three Ways to Build your Coworking Virtual Office Business

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180. Three Ways to Build your Coworking Virtual Office Business

0:00:01 Welcome to the everything co-working 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 co-working podcast. This is episode number 180, and I am your host. Jamie Russo. Thank you for being here with me. If you are a new or a long-time listener,

00:00:43 I am grateful for you. I am even more grateful to those that I get to meet digitally these days, but let's call it. Let's call it live. You. Most of you are just a mysterious face out there, walking the dog or running on your treadmill or riding your Peloton or working on remodeling your bathroom, whatever it is that you're doing while you listen.

00:01:09 And I don't get to know who you are, but when you join my programs or reach out, then I get to meet you in person. And I am super grateful for those that I get to spend real time with, but also grateful for all of those of you that are listening out there. It's the end of the year, a time to be grateful for community and for what we have and look forward to a new year with very many exciting things to come for our industry.

00:01:41 So today we're going to talk about a practical topic that is good to focus on while we're still in limited capacity in some of our spaces. Although, again, I always say this whenever I jump on live with folks, we are starting to hear some good news. Some of my flight group members are seeing upticks and membership. We're getting there. We will get there.

00:02:03 So hang in there, stay focused. May June is not that far away. I think that's one of those dates where you feel like that's a lot of time and it will go so quickly. So it is time to buckle down and get focused on preparing your business for re-entry. I know we keep talking about this, but it's really, we, I we're,

00:02:28 we're optimistic. So it's time to get prepared. We're going to talk today about something you can do today to start working on driving more revenue, which is focusing on folks that don't have to physically be in your space. We are going to talk about how to grow your virtual office in virtual mail businesses. And we'll talk about kind of what those are,

00:02:47 what those look like. And the three primary sources for building that business and demand for virtual offices is growing. So building up a around marketing and servicing virtual office memberships or virtual digital mail memberships can add margin to your business and help you to serve a member that doesn't require much access to physical space and oftentimes no access to physical space. There are operators that build their virtual business to the point where it pays their rent.

00:03:23 So not that won't work in all markets, but it is something to consider and something to invest some time in. So we're going to talk about that today really quickly. If you have not set up your virtual office or digital mail offering, yet, if that's been on your list and you feel stuck until January 15th, I am giving free access to my mini course,

00:03:48 how to set up a virtual mail program. It's really focused on male versus the broader office program, but male is a primary component to the offering and it goes through all the details, how to become a CMRA, where to store the mail, how to process the mail lead gen partners, et cetera. It's usually $97, but until January 15th as a new year's gift and a thank you to you for listening,

00:04:15 you can access it for free. So grab it before January 15th, go to everything co-working dot com forward slash virtual office. We will put that link in the show notes so that you can grab it. If you are working on opening a coworking space, I want to invite you to join me for my free masterclass three behind the scenes secrets to opening a coworking space.

00:04:38 If you're working on starting a coworking space, I want to share three decisions that I see successful operators make when they're creating their coworking business. The masterclass is totally free. It's about an hour, including Q and a time. I'd love to have you join me, please register@everythingcoworking.com forward slash masterclass. A couple of other quick notes before we dive in, thank you to those of you that wrote some podcasts or reviews.

00:05:07 Some of you, I sent an email to, and some of you a snuck in there and wrote some for me. So thank you to Mt. Erin. I know who you are. Thank you for that review. Thank you to M N M long string of digits. They claim we've easily saved thousands of bucks in our business just by listening to the podcast.

00:05:33 M N M one two three four five five, et cetera. I will send you my PayPal account address. Just kidding, Kim. Thank you for sorry. Ellen, the Kevin there. Ellen. Thank you for writing me the review Jody, they give for the review coworking passion. Thank you for the review. You guys are awesome. Quick note,

00:05:56 I mentioned on the last podcast episode, that 2020, it was not a great year for me walking the talk on, making sure you get your reviews. So it's just like Google, my business reviews, which I'm working on with my community manager group in January, we have to stay on top of those reviews. The algorithm likes updates the algorithms behind Google,

00:06:21 my business, iTunes, whatever it is, they want to see new reviews. And so we have to track them. They're now on my KPI tracker, just like my Google, my business reviews used to be. And sometimes we have to send out emails and ask people to help us out or ask on the podcast. I appreciate you guys a ton for doing that and a quick welcome to my new flight group members.

00:06:45 If you're on my email list, I opened up my flight group program, which I had never really done publicly. Usually it's been my coworking startup school alumni. And then folks that kind of find me in are looking for a group to join. So we have a huge group of new folks that joined and I've started doing get to know you calls with those that I have not met before.

00:07:06 And I love to hear about everybody's business story and connect folks. And so welcome. Welcome to any of you that I haven't connected with yet. I am looking forward to it. Okay, let's roll. So we're talking about virtual office virtual mail. So I always get in trouble. Lauren Delani, if you're listening, I know he he's always like stop calling it virtual mail.

00:07:30 It's virtual office. What is a virtual office? It's a combination of services that one can offer to someone who is not going to utilize the physical aspect of your space, but needs a professional presence. So a combination of a business address we should, we might think of as being a virtual mail digital mail offering, but it might also include meeting room hours,

00:07:53 coworking day passes, day office hours to use and services such as phone answering. So it can be a comprehensive offering for someone that needs a professional business presence, but isn't going to be a member or that's a member. But once these ad-ons as an option, which many of us never think of? How many of you are selling phone answering to your members?

00:08:18 Raise your hand. That very many I suspect so really quick sideline here. It, so it can include any of those that bundle. And you may have offerings that include aspects of the bundle or the full bundle. And I'm going to provide some examples. Pacific workplaces is one of them that have really great offerings on their website. E-commerce by with a click of the button,

00:08:44 super easy access. They are selling virtual offices on line, especially during this time. So take a look at their offering. Many folks, this comes up all the time. We'll ask about the Google, my business listing. And I don't want to go down a huge rabbit hole about how this fits in many peop people may handle it differently. Here's my suggestion guard,

00:09:11 your Google, my business listing very carefully. We've talked about this. This comes has come up a bunch of times in the Facebook group. If you're not in the everything co-working Facebook group, come in, it's super active, lots of great conversations. Folks wondering about whether or not they should allow people to use their Google, my business listing. So one of the topics that's come up is,

00:09:35 is people recognizing, because they're tracking and paying attention that they're getting a lot of top of the funnel traffic from their Google, my business listing, sometimes many times the number of visitors that they get to their website. So your Google, my business sustaining is a very, very critical marketing tool for you. It is also a critical marketing tool for other local businesses.

00:09:58 And some of them may not have a local office. So they want to use you as their local office and they want your address to use for Google. Now the post office does not care how many people reside at one generally, right? If you give them a personal mailbox number, the post office carrier understands what's happening. We're not really worried about duplicating addresses for the post office,

00:10:24 which by the way, has some of the poorest Google my business refuse I've ever seen. I was looking up a look at an address for a local post office earlier. They're so terrible. So we want to manage our Google, my business listings very carefully. So if somebody say you have a local landscape architect works from home, but doesn't wants to have a,

00:10:48 doesn't want to have their home address on client invoices. So they want to use your virtual mail option, and they want an address that they can use for Google my business. You cannot use a home address for Google my business. So they want to use yours. Now. You just have to be really careful not to duplicate. Some people will duplicate and you may be fine.

00:11:10 Maybe Google doesn't find you and they don't ding you for it. But Google is pretty smart. And I wouldn't mess with Google and I wouldn't duplicate. So make sure you're giving them a suite number or a, you know, suite 100 dash, 200 or suite 100 dash two Oh one, similar to the PMB that you're using in your digital mail system.

00:11:32 So that it's unique. And you want to verify that address card when it comes in, do not give it directly to your member, make sure you review it and make sure they've provided Google with a unique address. Again, you can take the risk if you want to duplicate your address, but Google doesn't like customers to be confused. So Google wants a consumer to be able to show up and figure out easily where to go.

00:11:58 So really my point in this conversation under this topic is should you let virtual office virtual male members use your address for a Google, my business listing. If they use an address that is not a duplicate of your exact address, and if they really are a local business, then they will tremendously value the marketing tool that it is, and they would be willing to pay for it.

00:12:28 So you should charge them extra. Many of my flight group members are charging a co-working membership. For example, you have to have a minimum of a co-working membership in order to use the Google, my business listing, because if they truly are a local business and you probably don't want to give Google my business listing addresses to people who don't have any local presence at all whatsoever,

00:12:51 again, you can, it's your choice to kind of figure out how to manage that. But Google wants that, you know, wants that person to be find-able. So if they, you know, live in some other country and they're never actually showing up, you want to be careful about that, but charge for it. So make it part of the offering,

00:13:09 but it's an ad. It's an add-on, it's an incremental price point. So there's, when you think about bundling your services, make sure you're charging more for that. Google my business listing. One of my community manager university members posted recently asking, saying somebody called and said, well, the ups lets you use their address for free. So knowing that that was not the case,

00:13:33 Google does not want a customer to show up at a ups store, looking for an actual business because looking for a local business because local businesses are not sitting at the ups store waiting to meet their customers. That is not a use case. And Google wants customers to be very clear that when they go to a place on a map, there's a business there in person.

00:13:54 So I knew that ups store was not a thing. So we did a little Googling. We confirmed absolutely not. That's not a thing. And you know, she corrected the customer and let them know, you know, she could get in trouble for doing that. People do do it, but if you get caught, if Google verifies that, then you're going to get in trouble.

00:14:14 So you want to charge extra for them to use your address for a local Google, my business listing, which is very different from just a postal service list listing. Okay. So virtual office is more comprehensive than mail digital mail. Virtual mail is only an address usually. So when we're talking about virtual office, it includes use of this space, even if it's not full time and many of our channel partners will help you create those bundles and help you give you examples of what might be bundled well together.

00:14:50 And again, in the show notes, in the show notes, I will put a couple of links to operators that do this really well. So let's talk about how to grow that business. The first way would be to pay for ads. So Google ads here is most likely because we could spend some time on a platform like Facebook, educating folks about this,

00:15:11 probably a bit challenging to teach people what it is. Although I would encourage you to teach your members what the opportunity is, because this is a great way to maintain some revenue. As members leave the space and Tracy from Pacific shared, they're having great success with that. You have to, it has to be part of your offboarding process to offer them a virtual office package.

00:15:35 So if somebody has an office with you or even flex dedicated desk, but they're used to having a business presence in your space and they need to downsize and need to go back home, or maybe they're moving, make sure you give them the offer to maintain a presence with you to continue to get mail. You can forward the mail to continue to use meeting rooms,

00:15:55 let them know that's an option because oftentimes people just feel like, Oh, if they take and their membership, they need to end that relationship. But that's a great way, even though it's not the same amount of revenue that you would have gotten from them using the physical space, that's still recurring revenue that, that adds up as you build up your business.

00:16:13 So make sure you're offering that option to your members when they off-board, but back to the ads. So we probably are not going to teach people on Facebook ads. You know, what a virtual office offering is, but you can teach your members. So when we're not teaching people and educating Google is a great place to go to because Google searchers understand their solution.

00:16:36 They're looking for virtual office virtual mail there they're Googling that online. And so if you don't have a lot of local competition, you might run ads to capture that traffic. Be careful here. Facebook ads, even Facebook ads are actually quite complex. If you are going to run them and go at them their right way in terms of getting people through a sales funnel and putting the right messaging in front of them at the right time.

00:17:07 But Google can get really expensive really quickly if you're not doing it well. And it's just more complex and harder to teach yourself. We had this discussion about Google ads and the Facebook group recently as well. And I had a lot of folks kind of echoing my concern for people running ads on their own in general, you're going to want to get some help running ads to execute on those.

00:17:29 So it's an investment to run ads. You may be able to build your virtual office business through ads, be careful in markets where there are national brands. They may be paying for keywords and it may be expensive to run ads. So your next choice would be to sort of take the longer game, but work on search engine optimization and organic traffic. So write blog posts,

00:17:56 advertise your offerings on social media and social media can be a way to educate your audience inexpensively. So my favorite example is from forge in Birmingham, Alabama, they have a blog post that performs very well for them, eight best places to reserve conference rooms in Birmingham. So do some, some research on search terms that are popular in your local area. Is it meeting rooms?

00:18:25 Is it conference rooms? Is it places to meet? Is it, you know, is it address? Is it virtual, you know, office? What are people searching for? But the conference room, this is not related to virtual services, but an example of an SEO and organic approach that they took. And this blog post, they wrote back in 20,

00:18:48 let's see and see the date on it anymore. Oh a while ago. And it performs well for them and they highlighted other places to meet around Birmingham and they got some good sharing out of that and they still get organic traffic from that. So write blog posts, highlighting your virtual offerings, highlighting, educating folks on why virtual office, what you can do with a virtual office,

00:19:13 what problem it solves, et cetera. And, you know, write one of those posts periodically say once a quarter, can't overdo it. How many, you know, don't overdo it, but put it into your content plan and start building up your organic traffic for that offering also make it a really visible offering on your website. So we get lots of traffic to our website.

00:19:37 We're trying to get folks to convert to two words, but if somebody is looking for a lighter option, then you may be able to convert them right online. And again, I'll put a couple of examples of e-commerce capabilities, that market virtual office programs, right on a website. So make it clear, put it on your homepage as one of the,

00:19:58 you know, nav buttons in the upper, right. If you're going to focus on building it, make it visible, put it in their consideration set. And you know, I don't, we talked about this last episode. I think we don't want too many options in our plans, but the virtual option is pretty safe because folks are generally looking for physical space or they're looking for a virtual presence.

00:20:21 So I don't consider it to be too confusing or, you know, put people into analysis paralysis. If you have that virtual office option right on, you know, your plans page and make it really easy for them to sign up. And then the third bucket is lead gen partners. So this one I highly recommend because ads are expensive for you to do,

00:20:47 might be cost prohibitive. We'll at least take some time for you to figure out the right resource to hire and do the market research and figure out if it is even a route that makes sense for you to go SEO, organic search, great path to go. We'll take some time. Your lead gen partners can start bringing you wins immediately. So it's a,

00:21:11 win-win, you're going to pay them a sort of a marketing fee for the leads that you get, but it's totally worth it because they're going to bring you leads that you would never get access to on your own, or would take a while to do. And most folks who are really investing in building up their virtual office competency, we use a combination of both.

00:21:33 So they want to capture folks that come in their front door. They want to offer it as an option to their members as they leave. So don't feel like you can only do lead gen partners. You can still absolutely bring those leads in on your own and have that option on your own websites that your traffic, you know, goes straight to your offering,

00:21:52 which is a hundred percent, you know, your pricing. But it's also great to partner with folks who are spending a lot of marketing dollars, getting leads for you. So we are working on updating the everything, coworking tech and tools resource for 2021 that will be out in January. But since we're talking about this, now I'm going to link to the 2020 version in the show notes.

00:22:19 And it has a little list of lead gen partners. So on pages 20 and 21, page 20 is a lead gen partners for virtual offers, virtual offices, conference rooms and memberships. And then 21 is lead generators for digital mail. So for virtual offices, cloud VO, DaVinci virtual office solutions, that might, they may be it for the more comprehensive offering for mail,

00:22:54 anytime mailbox, cloud VO, DaVinci. Again, I post a one sphere mail Opus. We're li we're adding several folks this year to that list. So make sure you access that you can register with more than one lead gen provider. You just have to have a system down to, you know, make sure you've get organized and make sure that your team knows how to track.

00:23:20 Who's a male comes in for, you know, which lead gen partner and how to process it because they each have their own apps or their own systems for processing mail in particular and tracking virtual office use, et cetera. So you have to get a system down. So maybe just start with one and get everything in place. And then you can expand and build your leads that way.

00:23:45 But Legion partners are a great way to go because they are spending money with Google to get leads and they don't own their physical spaces. And so they're sending those leads to folks like you that have physical spaces. And I'll tell you, I have co-working startups, school students, flight group members, everybody in all sorts of markets, small markets, large markets,

00:24:07 and they get leads. And so w you know, the need for virtual office solutions is growing probably, you know, our work from home or downsizing folks. It's hard to, or, sorry, it's easier to picture sort of why someone might need access to meeting room spaces or day offices and a business address. There's a local, but there are lots of reasons,

00:24:31 you know, insurance reasons, business, license, reasons, lots of legal reasons why people need addresses in other places. And I'll give you a couple of just like more broad examples. If you send a newsletter, I send a newsletter and I don't have a physical space right now. So I need to use a business address. That's not my home in that newsletter.

00:24:52 So there are lots of folks out there that are doing things like that, where they're operating things from home, anybody that has clients who wants their home address on a client invoice client can go Google them and see how much their home is worth. No one wants that. So lots and lots of reasons why people want to use your mailing address. And then we're starting to build up,

00:25:16 you know, an understanding of how useful coworking spaces can be for ancillary services, like meeting rooms, phone, answering, all that kind of thing. And these are solutions that we can provide today to folks that are not ready to get back to a physical space, but have a business need for these services. So if it's been on your email list,

00:25:40 take the week off where this one is airing the week of Christmas. So, you know, put it on your list to review, but get your team working on this. So I'm going to mention one more time that you can grab until January 15th, the, my mini course, how to set up your virtual mail program and your team can do it.

00:26:01 Your team can, if you have a community manager, if you're not the community manager, that's listening, you, anybody can run through that training and it's super step by step and get it all set up and taken care of. And then you just want to integrate those sales goals into your KPI trackers to make sure that you're keeping an eye on them,

00:26:21 make sure that you're doing things like writing blog posts, adding those to your content plan, talking about that, offering on social media, updating your website. Of course, there's a ripple effect to anything that we choose to add to our business. But if it's something that you're offering and you haven't been talking about it a lot now is the time I would definitely be talking about that in your business.

00:26:44 So that is it for today. Hopefully that kind of gets you thinking and gets you motivated to start focusing on virtual offices and virtual mail as offerings and grab that mini course, jump into the Facebook group. Talk about what's working for you. We'd love to hear from you. And most importantly, again, thank you for being a listener and happy holidays,

00:27:10 and we will see you again or talk to you again next week.

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