328. Three Things You can do to Optimize Revenue in your Coworking Space
Everything Coworking Featured Resources:
Masterclass: 3 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets to Opening a Coworking Space
TRANSCRIPTION
328. Three Things You can do to Optimize Revenue in your Coworking Space
00:00:00,"Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast, where every week I keep you updated on the latest trends and how tos in Coworking. I owned and operated Coworking spaces for eight years and then served as the executive director of the Global Workspace Association for five years. And today I work with hundreds of operators and community managers every month, allowing me to bring you a thought provoking operator,"
00:00:26,"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. Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast. This is your host, Jamie Russo. I hope you are all doing well. It is a busy time of the year. We just attended our middle school holiday concert."
00:00:55,"It's an ice skating event tomorrow night for the middle school. Lots going on, running around. I do have a fun girls weekend coming up this weekend and some industry meetings next week in San Francisco, which I'm looking forward to. Bunch of folks coming to town. So life is good. And speaking of good, I have been collaborating with Mike Everts from Office RnD on a video series."
00:01:25,"It is super good. We are still recording and releasing some of our videos for post-launch operators, but we have an awesome six-part series for pre-launch operators that are looking to kind of get a, a really good roadmap to opening a Coworking space. So we cover the really important foundational aspects of starting a space location selection, crafting a product mix, learning about tech stack solutions,"
00:02:02,"pre-selling techniques and more. And we have released the first half of our post-launch operator series. So it's an awesome resource. We've had a lot of fun doing it and pooling our expertise. Mike was one of my very first Flight Group members and I used to call him the operations poster Boy, he was a great operator. He operated in Atlanta before he joined Office RnD,"
00:02:27,"and he is a total natural on video. So we've had a lot of fun doing it together. But more importantly, if you're working on opening a Coworking space, it is an awesome bootcamp. So if you wanna grab the bootcamp, you can go to Coworking bootcamp.com and opt in to grab your access to the video series. And you don't have to watch it all at once,"
00:02:51,"but they're short, digestible videos. You can watch it on mobile if you want, but you'll get access to our video hub and you can kind of watch them as you go, or you can binge watch them all at the same time if you want. So you can grab that video series at Coworking bootcamp.com and then let me know what you think and if you have any additional topic requests."
00:03:15,"Okay, so today, today we, I'm thinking forward to 2024. People are probably starting to take a little break for the holidays, but thinking ahead about things they're gonna tweak in 2024. And one of the topics that comes up a lot in our mastermind calls that we do for our Everything Coworking Academy program is what do you do when your product mix is not working exactly like you planned?"
00:03:45,"So when you open, you make a bunch of educated guesses about, okay, here's my ideal customer avatar. Here's the product mix that I think is gonna be a fit for them. Office sizes, number of offices, dedicated desks versus flex desks. So you know, what does your product mix look like? What are you selling? And then you open and you got a lot of it right,"
00:04:06,"but you need to do some tweaking based on what you're seeing happen in real life and how it's playing out. So we have had some really good ideas come up in the group and I thought I would share some of those because they come up in conversation all the time. And in, in this recording, I actually refer to screen sharing and I left it in there because I think it's a good screen share and it's on our YouTube channel."
00:04:34,"It's also my sneaky way to get you to go over and check out our YouTube channel and subscribe. We're doing some more work over there. So I'm gonna put the link in the show notes to the YouTube version of this and you can pop in and look at the screen share. And a big shout out to Carol d Giovanni who has the pod concept that I'm sharing."
00:04:56,"She in Chico, California. She's an awesome operator. They own their building and she had this creative solution that is working well for her. So without further ado, let's jump in to three tweaks that you can make to try to optimize revenue in your Coworking space. So the first idea is related to dedicated desks. So you probably have a mix that might include flex,"
00:05:28,"typical Coworking open plan seating, some dedicated desk, which typically are fixed locations. You get your own desk, same desk every day. You can leave your large monitor, you can put up pictures of your dog, you can, you know, do what you want. It's your reserved seating. And sometimes and and then you probably have offices. So your offices might be full,"
00:05:51,"although we have some ideas for those harder to sell offices. And that's going to be number three on our list. So hang in there with us, the dedicated desk. So this is one of the more challenging products because we wanna include them as that, like mid-range product between flex and offices. But sometimes we do a good job selling them and sometimes we just cannot drum up the right demand for that product."
00:06:19,"So sometimes we have more inventory than you would like to have of those dedicated tasks. And that is a topic that comes up often. I host a membership for operators. It's a mastermind format called the Everything Coworking Academy. And we do calls once a month. And this is one of the topics that comes up, creative ideas for adjusting things that aren't working really well."
00:06:43,"So one of our members has a great solution, and I'm gonna share my screen for a minute here. She converted some of her dedicated desk area to what she calls office pods. So if you notice the office pods here, you can see they are not, there's no drywall, there's no ceiling, no tops to use a non-technical term on top of the pod."
00:07:08,"So there's no silent sound privacy. You can see the little feet at the bottom of the wall system here. You can see the gap underneath, but these doors lock and so it feels like an office and you get the sense of privacy, which is awesome. So people tend to really get attracted to that sense of visual privacy and that sense of having your own space and the ability to lock things overnight,"
00:07:37,"not worry about security, et cetera. So this can a be a good mid-range product to use if your offices are full and you're looking for a way to get folks to commit to a membership, but they're on the wait list for an office or somebody is kind of interested in something beyond a flex membership, not quite ready for an office. And those dedicated desks are just not selling."
00:08:04,"This is a way to create less inexpensively than building offices. Adding offices is another capital investment. If you are using drywall, it's noisy, dusty, dirty and and requires permits. So this is a furniture solution. This solution happens to be by very VARI. It looks great. It's a really affordable way to create a sense of an office without creating new offices."
00:08:33,"There are systems called Falk built that could, could function, actually do have tops and do have really high sound ratings. There are other options out there, but this is a really simple approach if you're looking to create sort of a pod effect. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen now. So that's an idea to consider if you're looking for something approachable and affordable."
00:08:58,"Okay, so let's talk about idea number two. So idea number two is you, your offices are full and you are looking to maximize revenue. And you have some meeting rooms that are not fully utilized. And it's really important to track your utilization of meeting rooms to know which meeting rooms are getting used most often. Do you need all the meeting rooms that you have?"
00:09:24,"Should you have more four person more, two person, what's working, what's not working? Because while your space is relatively fixed from a physical perspective, anything inside of four walls could be a meeting room or it could be an office. So you can use those interchangeably. And I operated two Coworking spaces and we used to do that all the time. We would just kind of adjust with what was happening."
00:09:48,"If our meeting room revenue and demand was kind of dipping a little bit, but we had folks looking for an office and ours were full, then we could convert a meeting room to an office and get that fixed revenue per month. But you also wanna know, the reverse might be true that you'd be better off using an office as a meeting room depending on your location,"
00:10:08,"your parking and your marketing. Some folks are doing really well with meeting room rentals today, higher than ever before. But that does require generating that revenue and growing that line of business does require some intentionality in marketing and lead generation. So if you're not quite there yet, then that may be something you wanna work on building. And in the meantime, take the consistent revenue of an office."
00:10:36,"So the third idea I wanna share is if you have an office that is not selling, maybe it's an interior office, maybe it's a larger office, it's like a five person office and you've been working it and it's just not going anywhere, it, you're just kind of stuck with it. One concept, we've talked about this on the podcast, but I still get questions about it all the time."
00:11:02,"This discussion has recently come up in our Community Manager University program. People are just always trying to figure out how do we, you know, get to closer to a hundred percent capacity occupancy, sorry, in the space. So if you have an office that's just not moving, try making it a shared office. So there's a few different ways that you can do this."
00:11:21,"And the reason I like this is because there are users who aren't good flex based candidates. Maybe they're on the phone a lot, they wanna get out of the house, but they don't wanna commit to a full-time office. Maybe they work part-time or you know, whatever it is. Maybe they just, they know they're not gonna use it full-time, so they love the option of an office chair."
00:11:42,"So this can, you can, you know, sort of figure out what works in your market. One way to do it is just to simply sell the office as say a one person office, or it could be an office for a team. And even though it's a little bigger than is appropriate for that use case, if you can oversell it, then you're getting closer to market rate for that office."
00:12:03,"So you might sell buckets of hours, for example. I love that model the best. So you sell, you know, 16 hours a week or 24 hours a week kind of increments of four tend to work so that people can book in half days. You might require a minimum of a half day booking so that it's being used either in the morning or in the afternoon by someone and you can oversell because folks typically aren't gonna use their allocation every week."
00:12:29,"And so you might get close to what market rate is, even though it's a big office that you're using for buckets of hours. And this is different than a day office. 'cause a day office is really designed to be rented by the day, but this is somebody's membership. So they're committing to a certain number of, of buckets of hours and it that they,"
00:12:50,"those hours don't roll over. They renew every single month. This, there's a lot of folks having a lot of success with this. I love this product. It's the exact product that I would wanna have. You could also certainly make it an actual office share. I have friends who are not in the Coworking industry who share a, an enclosed office that's smaller."
00:13:12,"So it's not a giant room of enclosed dedicated desks, but it's a smaller office and they say, you know what? I don't mind sharing an office with somebody. I can pop into a phone booth when I wanna make a phone call. Or I know the other people generally aren't there, you know, Thursday and Friday, so it's all mine on Thursday and Friday."
00:13:28,"So you could try that approach as well. You might have to experiment for a little bit and see what resonates with folks when they tour. And that's just the mindset I would really encourage you to have is try it. It might work for you, it might not work for you. I always like to try things for a minimum of three months because it's really hard to know if you only try something for a month or a few weeks."
00:13:51,"Is it a seasonality issue? Is it you just, you know, you just haven't given it enough time to really see is there demand for this? Is this gonna work? So those are my three ideas. So one is dedicated desks, shift them into office pods and try and increase the price on that product and get the ROI on the office systems."
00:14:14,"The second is, if you have a meeting room that's underutilized, but you have a lot of demand for offices, convert that room to an office. You can always convert it back. And the third idea is to make an office that's hard to sell. A shared office sell buckets of hours at a lower rate that makes it more accessible for people who are kind of in the middle."
00:14:35,"These options, we have lots more ideas. Consider joining our Everything Coworking Academy, which is our operator membership for operators who are open and launched and looking to optimize their business and learn from others and learn from experts throughout their journey. Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you like what you heard, tell a friend, hit that subscribe button and leave us a rating and review."
00:15:03,"It makes a huge difference in helping others like you find us. If you'd like to learn more about our education and coaching programs, head over to Everything Coworking dot com. We'll see you next week."
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.
.