341. Exploring Hotel-Inspired Hospitality Integration in Coworking Spaces
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341. Exploring Hotel-Inspired Hospitality Integration in Coworking Spaces
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. Thank you for joining me. Okay, we are gonna talk today. This is gonna be a bit of a shorty about hospitality and Coworking and I do not have all the answers on this one,"
00:00:59,"but I had a thought provoking weekend around this topic and wanted to share and also get your input. If you have some thoughts on this, I would love to get some feedback on anyone who is integrating aspects of hospitality into their Coworking space. So we're gonna talk about translating this idea of hotel hospitality into Coworking. We, there's lots of folks who, who talk about the idea that that Coworking should be a hospitality experience,"
00:01:31,"not a real estate experience, which I totally get. There's not a lot of folks talking about how to actually do that. So I would love to hear from you if you are doing that. And he, I'm gonna share with you a hotel experience I had this weekend that I think has some translations. I do wanna share one example of an operator."
00:01:52,"Grant Barnhill is the CEO and founder of Shift Workplaces in the Denver area. And they have been on the Flex Uncensored podcast. So we'll put the link to that episode in the show notes. Grant and his team have created a really incredible experience. Like I was literally like mouth, you know, jaw dropped when I first went into their space. It's,"
00:02:17,"first of all, they have really high-end beautifully designed spaces. They cater to a more experienced entrepreneur who's a little further along in their business stage and they have a culinary concierge on their team, which is pretty, that was the jaw dropping, you know, piece of it. And I won't do this complete credit 'cause it's been a while since I've visited,"
00:02:39,"and it's also been a little bit since we had Grant on the podcast. But they have someone on their team that will essentially help you host a guest. They will create snack trays for you. They have a really nice like adult beverage option that you can set up in advance if you're gonna entertain someone in the space. I think this is really, really cool."
00:03:00,"They are also really focused on kind of making little impacts on their members. So they try to remember, you know, member birthdays. Maybe they're delivering like a flour or a cappuccino or whatever, you know, a special sort of touch when it's a special occasion for someone. So they're really paying attention to those details. And I don't really know very many other spaces that are really integrating hospitality into the experience."
00:03:28,"I mean, aside from, let's see, work there at the Hoxton, you can order food at your desk. I, I'm not, I, yeah, so I would love to hear examples that are out there because I think it's a little bit challenging for many of you to figure out, okay, what does that look like in my business? And I also wanna mention Gio and I interviewed David Aria the other day for the podcast."
00:03:51,"It's not live yet, it might be by the time, I think it'll come out next week if you're listening to this, the week this comes out, he was the keynote speaker at the GWA. He has a really deep hospitality background and so I asked him about, you know, what he thought about hospitality, translating to the workplace and how the sort of business model around that would work."
00:04:15,"And sort of the short version of his response, which was really helpful, was that he thinks there's probably a margin impact there, which is challenging, right? Because this is not already not an incredibly deep margin business. And so we wanna be careful about this and, and that's why I mentioned the shift workspace caters to a more experienced entrepreneur who probably has a bigger budget."
00:04:40,"So they're slightly premium priced and can integrate that type of service into their offering. But if you are a lower priced space, I don't know how you're gonna do this, you know, reasonably, and we already have really lean staff, but that's why I thought this hotel experience that I had this weekend was interesting because they also have really lean staff. So I had mentioned this to David the beginning of my conversation with the hotel I had,"
00:05:10,"I think I'd called them and asked them, you know, how am I gonna get to the airport? We're going to Sun Valley for a wedding, and Sun Valley Idaho is in the middle of nowhere. It's a very small town, it's fabulous and beautiful and I needed to figure out how to get from the airport to the hotel, was not gonna rent a car."
00:05:25,"So I called the hotel to confirm my reservation and I said, Hey, can you give me some transportation suggestions? So they texted me the list and I thought that was really useful. I think in general, consumers really love texting from a customer support experience. I think many customers are also used to marketing messages. I am opted in some to some marketing messages from my favorite brands and I love to get a little text message."
00:05:58,"It might be a preview, it might be, you know, some, some special that that is coming up. But the, you know, I said to him, I said, I'm, you know, I'm curious about who, although as I opened my phone to, to look at the hotel example, do you know what's annoying? Is non-stop marketing messages."
00:06:16,"We're in a wine club and I really like this wine club. I'm not gonna mention the name, but they are incessantly texting with offers and I'm gonna have to opt out. I, I have a text from them every two days that's too many. Just too, too frequent for marketing messages. If I wanted to buy your wine offers, I would've said yes by now."
00:06:37,"Okay. So I was just looking for the example from the hotel. So I had asked David like, Hey, you know who, there we go. Who do you think is answering these texts? And he said, you know what, it might not be someone at the hotel. It could be someone, you know, kind of on the backend who's not on site,"
00:06:54,"who's really there to add this hospitality layer over text. They don't have to be on site. So it's possible that you could add this layer, okay. Business idea, someone, you know, playing this hospitality role for multiple Coworking spaces. If anyone wants to start that with me, call me. So I did ask, oh yeah. So they sent me the list of how to get to the,"
00:07:19,"how to get from the airport to the hotel. And then I said, you know, I wonder if I can respond to this text or just one of those automated things. And so I needed to figure out how I was gonna rent skis. I decided I wasn't gonna carry my skis, I was only skiing for one day, so I would bring my boots but no skis."
00:07:35,"So I responded and said, Hey, if I wanted to rent skis for one day, how do I do that? They responded right away and they, it's a template response looking for ski or snowboard or equipment rentals, black tie ski rental shop is on site to take care of all of your needs, phone number, website, all guests of Hotel Ketchum,"
00:07:53,"which is where we stayed, receive a special discount. Awesome. So I hit, I said thank you, and they said, our pleasure. So I asked at the front desk when I arrived, I said, who, who's responding to the text? Text and the woman who was on staff at the time. And now I was in town for a wedding."
00:08:12,"So there was, it was like a lot of people arriving all on the same day. And she was at the end of her shift and very sort of frazzled. And she said, oh, that's me, you know, and she actually, I, she, I think she was a little overwhelmed and probably most days are not so intense for her."
00:08:28,"But she did, I did ask her to add my husband to the reservation and she forgot. So I think she was a little frazzled, but she said, you know, it's totally us. Like the whoever's on duty at the time is responding to the text. It's not someone you know out of town or someone centralized, which I thought was interesting."
00:08:45,"And then I was getting automated text messages, you know, check-ins at four, let us know your arrival time. If you're gonna be here early, we might be able to get the room ready for you. So I, you know, said, yeah, I land at this time and I would love to be get an early room. Okay, great."
00:09:01,"They said, and then they reminded me again about the ski rental, which was awesome. They texted me when the room was ready, they said, you know, let us know if there's anything we can help with. And then I'd stopped by the front desk looking for a steamer for my dress and they had to go look for one. And then they texted me and said,"
00:09:19,"we do have one. So I just was like really loving this. And then, let's see, oh, we were out and about and trying to figure out what were we going to eat before we went to the airport. We wanted to take something to the airport with us in case the airport didn't have anything. Surprise, surprise, the Sun Valley airport has an awesome little cafe inside,"
00:09:39,"but we didn't know that. So I texted and said, Hey, if I wanted to grab something to take to the airport, like a sandwich or a bowl, any suggestions? And they gave me a couple of suggestions. So I just had such a great experience with that. And Hotel Ketchum is not the fanciest hotel. It's like a mountain modern kind of hotel,"
00:09:57,"you know, pretty kind of basic rooms. But they had a pool, they had a hot tub, they had a teensy, bootsy little fitness center. I was the only one in there the whole weekend that I could tell, but it like really only fit one person at a time. So it wasn't fancy. A very cute lobby. And they did like a basic breakfast and then this like hangout room,"
00:10:16,"which was cool, good coffee, but so I, the expensive hotel in town is the limelight. And they had like all the amenities, the free shuttle, anywhere you wanted to go, you could borrow a car. Really nice fitness center. So that was really the high end experience. Ours was not, and I was paying less for the room,"
00:10:36,"but even still the front desk was adding this extra hospitality, which I just, I, it, I thought it was a great experience and it answered any questions that I had right away. And it, you know, was from a real human, you know, it wasn't a bot, although they had some automated outbound text messages. So I just had a really good experience with that."
00:10:57,"And you know, when you wanna solve a problem or get a recommendation, you know, you just want it right now, instead of having to do a bunch of research online, you get a real human who's really familiar with the local area to answer those questions. And so it made it easier, it saved a lot of time and made the experience just like much more enjoyable."
00:11:14,"So I love that. So I think, how do we think about that in terms of what are the parallels for the Coworking industry when someone's not from out of town, right? So it's the being available on text is, is an interesting idea, I think. How do you, what's the use case for Coworking? And again, I'm not sure I have all the answers and is that something that our staff can handle?"
00:11:40,"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 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,"
00:12:17,"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. So we wanna 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."
00:12:57,"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."
00:13:23,"You can grab that training at Everything Coworking dot com slash masterclass. So David and I, David Aria and Gio and I talked when we recorded about, you know, the real challenge around being forward facing and being that person who just really wants to, you know, support members and engage with members versus being like a backend person who's doing, you know,"
00:13:48,"kind of the ops piece, and I think we talked about this in the podcast, is that's a, there's a really good argument for scale here. So if you have a really s small space, this might apply to you. Well, I mean I could brainstorm now that I'm talking about it a a few ways here, but let's start with the argument that,"
00:14:05,"that this is a good reason for scale. So if you have 15,000 square feet, you probably can support two full-time employees, one who's more backend facing and one who's more front facing and might have time to manage like, you know, member texts, like recommendations for lunches or, the thing I wanna be careful about as a former owner, I'm thinking about this,"
00:14:29,"I used, I always used to tell my team, like teach them to fish. It used to drive me crazy when people would walk up to the front desk and ask to book a meeting room, right? Because I felt like that's not what I'm paying my team to do. You're not paying me enough to make your conference room reservations for you. You,"
00:14:45,"you know, teach them how to log in and do it. And if you have, you know, office r and d or another app that, another space management platform that has an app that makes it really easy to reserve rooms, I think you really can, you know, push them towards that. But I wonder, you know, if that's an example,"
00:15:03,"a member could text you or you know, what if you texted your members and said, Hey, we're ordering lunch. You know, if you want the chicken press one. If you want the steak, press two steak salad if you want, you know, the pasta dish, press three, place an order. I know 25 North has a lunch program and they do kind of a similar thing and they run it on slack."
00:15:23,"You know, slack can be hard to get folks engaged in. So I wonder if there are some of those amenities. We just had a topic come up in the Facebook group around car wash services. So I also wonder, could it, could you use it for something like that? Hey members, you know, via text because maybe they're not reading your emails or reading the signs in the bathroom."
00:15:45,"We're doing car wash, you know, car detailing on Friday. You know, if you wanna reserve a spot, you know, hit reply and tell us what time or here's a calendarly link, you know, for the slots book, you know, click here and book your spot. So I'm just brainstorming a little bit. I think it's interesting now if you have a smaller space and you don't have that team on site,"
00:16:05,"say you're unstaffed, which is unusual, but let's, you know, just for sake of argument, you have a small space and you're unstaffed, you could do it on the backend and just have somebody who is familiar with the local area who's not there, but is sort of on demand answering these texts. The challenge I think is that you do have to be available and have a pretty timely response because I suspect the,"
00:16:29,"it depends, but some of the types of requests you would get would, would warrant like a timely response unless it's something like the hey we're, you know, having a card detailing, you know, opportunity on Friday if you want in, you know, click this link that's sort of an outbound, you know, amenity offering that you're bringing to their attention."
00:16:49,"I do think probably there's some resistance to you, the owner, to texting your members a lot. I actually think people prefer it if it's, you know, something simple that they don't really have to process because you know, so many of us are just really overwhelmed by our inboxes and we're on our texts all the time. So if you can kind of keep it top of mind,"
00:17:11,"I think that's really helpful. So I'm just, you know, I, I think it's important for us to have this conversation about how do we from a practical perspective start integrating some of these hospitality ideas. And I think, you know, being available over text is a very interesting one. It will add some requirements to your team. So I think you either have to outsource it,"
00:17:36,"you know, and have someone who's like really part-time, but available handle it. Or you have to have some capacity on your team to be able to handle that. So if you have some ideas around integrating hospitality into Coworking, then I'd love to hear from you, DM d us on Instagram or send me an email and that's what we're gonna cover today."
00:17:57,"So we'll see you same time, same place next week. 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. 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."
00:18:24,"We'll see you next week."
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