385. Tech That Pays: Boost Coworking Profits with Better Booking and UX
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385. Tech That Pays: Boost Coworking Profits with Better Booking and UX
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 8 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 thought provoking operator 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."
00:00:45,"Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast. This is your host, Jamie Russo. Thank you for joining me. If you are new to the show, I have not done a solo episode in a couple of months which is a little bit unusual, so I'm glad you're here. I operated coworking spaces for eight years and was the Executive Director of the industry association for five. And since about 2018 I've been helping landlords and operators open and operate profitable coworking spaces."
00:01:18,"So today I want to talk about something that absolutely will drive your profitability. And I should note it's not that we're only about profitability here, but I find that's where I can add the most value in your business. And if you're profitable, then the other aspects of your business that you really care about, how much time you spend working in your business, for example, what you can contribute to your community, that is all much easier when you have a profitable business."
00:01:49,"So those decisions are easier to make. You have budgets to do the things that you want to do, but you can't. You don't have that freedom if you don't have a profitable business. So one of the things that's happening in the industry today, which I think is very fun and exciting, is the acceleration of technology advances. So I'm sandwiching myself between a couple of episodes. On the last episode we had Kurt Patrick and James Shannon from A Census on the podcast to talk about their new product Illumo."
00:02:23,"And it doesn't matter if you are not an Ascensus user. This is a total a la carte product, if you will. It can be used independently. If you were at the Juicy conference, you saw it on a room phone booth, you can walk up, reserve tap and pay with your phone in like two seconds. It's fantastic and I think has a lot of applications in our business, which I'm going to talk about in a minute."
00:02:49,"And then next week on the podcast we have Miro Miroslava from Office R and D He's the CEO and they just released their Growth Hub which is an incredible update to their E commerce interface in their product. And I am not in any way compensated by Office R and D. I'm just a fan of the platform, especially for multi site operators. And if you are on their platform and haven't updated into the Growth Hub, I strongly encourage you to do it."
00:03:18,"I, I know there is a different fee structure. They, you know, Office R and D invested an incredible amount of resources to create this platform and the data shows that it will create higher conversions, which is one of the things we're going to talk about today. So I wanted to kind of insert myself in the middle just to talk kind of broadly what I see happening in the industry around tech and why you should care."
00:03:42,"Now if you're operating in a small, a very small market, then it may not make sense for you to invest a lot in optimizing your website, putting a Lumo on your phone booth, et cetera. I totally get it. So take this with a grain of salt. But also all of these advances in technology also create more opportunities for automation, which is often important to smaller spaces and smaller markets."
00:04:09,"But if you're in a bigger market with competition, you simply can't afford to ignore your website and have it convert in a subpar way, your Google business listing, et cetera. So I want to talk about a couple of the shifts that we're seeing and some opportunities for you today. I think one of the big shifts is just that historically coworking spaces have kind of tolerated technology that's maybe been a little clunky, the interface has been a little outdated, but it works."
00:04:38,"And I always like to remind people, when I started my first coworking space In Chicago in 2020, the very beginning of 2012, there really was no software. So that was specific to the industry. There probably was something in the executive suite world like maybe the original versions of Cube existed at that point, but pretty early days. So I mean there wasn't even much on the Internet by way of like how to run a, a business like this."
00:05:09,"Executive suites have been around for a long time. So again, there's probably some legacy software there that, but they, that software was often focused on phone answering and things that we don't do anymore very much of anyway. So the first software that I used was, I think called Desktime, which was Sam Rosen's original software company. Sam was operating a small coworking space and then he bought a coworking space in Chicago and he launched the software and it is no longer, but that was in 2012, so that's 10 years ago."
00:05:43,"All the other softwares are new since then. Anything you're using again, except maybe the early versions of what's now Yardi Cube, didn't exist. So there's been incredible progress and investment since then. So of course it's a little clunky, of course it feels a little circa 2014 for a while because it's just all new. And it's an incredible lift to create all of that from scratch. And some people have tried along the way and closed down."
00:06:11,"So anyway, we are at a point, it's 2025 and today we expect things that we do online to be really seamless, efficient and user friendly. And I also think we have this mindset that it's okay to be a little behind the times when you're serving a B2B client. So it doesn't have to be a super, super simple frictionless experience if the person on the other side is B2B."
00:06:36,"And by that I mean like we're serving business owners or remote workers. Like, you know how like health care websites and things like that can still be pretty clunky, but if you're on Instagram and you're scrolling and somebody shows you an ad for heated gloves, you can buy those heated gloves in like 25 seconds through your phone with a couple of clicks of a button. That's a, you know, B2C sale."
00:07:02,"And we expect those to be very frictionless and easy. So I think we've gone through this phase where it's like we just have a lower bar for B2B transactions. And I think that's really going away because we're just too far into great technology from a B2C perspective. And now we expect everybody to, to have this higher bar and for it to be really intuitive and simple to do so really for, for our business, for coworking, flexible office space, whatever you want to call it."
00:07:34,"This may not apply specifically to offices, although we're going to talk about some of the things that apply to like bigger purchases that you're going to make. We are seeing offices being bought online, a single office, for example, in a market where, hey, I know I want the place down the street, you know, I'm not willing to get on a train to, to go, to go to the coworking space."
00:07:57,"So I'm going to buy the office. But the most of the transactions are being done through for day passes or meeting room bookings. So we call those on demand products and if you have a website that makes it hard to buy one of those products, you have to create an account. For example, you have to put in your credit card info, et cetera, et cetera. It's not easy to pick the date and time and figure out which room you want."
00:08:21,"You have to, you know, you're opening another browser and you have to kind of flip back and forth to see what's what. You are losing customers for sure. Especially if somebody else in your market has a better user experience. So I want to talk about kind of updating your E commerce mindset, what's happening in the marketplace and some things that you want to think about in your business."
00:08:43,"Okay. So our first example is simply the booking process. So this would be on your website. So for example, if you're using the old version of Office R and D or you've got, you know, whatever platform you're using and is a little clunky, it's not very smooth. And if I come in and I'm not a member, I have a really hard time booking a room. I have to create an account is a big barrier because post pandemic, which is we're five years out of 2020 at this point."
00:09:21,"But the, the big shift we've seen is on demand purchases, that is the revenue stream that has hockey sticked. So you, we have not completely seen the enterprise user come in and take all of our offices and take all of our dedicated desks. But we are seeing a huge increase in demand in meeting room bookings, day passes, day offices, et cetera, gathering events typically. So that is absolutely a fact."
00:09:50,"Those are getting booked. And if you are not seeing that increase, it may be your product, it might be your website, it might be your location, it might be your parking, blah blah blah. But assuming you have a good location and you should have demand for meeting room space, then you want to make sure your customer journey is optimized on your website. And I can tell you I work with a lot of operators, landlords, etc."
00:10:14,"We set up systems from scratch, we assess systems that are in place and look for ways to optimize them. And, and the first place I go, well, the first place I go is your Google business listing and make sure that's optimized. But if folks don't take an action on that listing first, they're going to your website and they are not all that interested. Especially if they want a meeting room or a day pass."
00:10:40,"They don't want to read your story, they don't want to read about philosophically why, you know, you opened a coworking space. They don't want a bunch of stuff, stuff in the way of this transaction. They just want to see that you have the product that they need, a 10 person meeting room and they can order catering and you have the, you know, projector screen that they need and you have parking."
00:11:01,"Like they just want to check, check, check book. So you want to make this really, really simple. And spoiler alert in for my conversation with Miro next week, which you should absolutely listen to. We talk about a lot of e commerce aspects outside of the growth hub. So it is not purely focused on the growth hub, although certainly we talk about that. But Miro sees a lot of data, a lot of transactions, a lot of user journeys because they have thousands of people on their platform so they are looking at this all the time and figuring out what's optimized."
00:11:34,"So he suggests you absolutely need to have book a room on your main navigation potentially even before book a tour. So those might compete for real estate depending on the stage of your business. You know, if you're just ramping up and you're really trying to fill offices, then you might be prioritizing book a tour. But we have a good conversation about that. I'm interrupting for a second. Are you working on starting a coworking space?"
00:12:02,"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, you are in for a surprise."
00:12:35,"This business is really about making the right fundamental decisions that align with your individual personal and financial goals. So we want to 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."
00:13:13,"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, you can grab that training at everything coworking.com"
00:13:44,"forward/masterclass. Okay, so booking on your website, let's imagine this user comes, they start clicking around, they encounter some friction they might have to fill. What if they have to fill out a form? What if they can't even book the room directly? If you're listening and I cannot book a meeting room on your website, stop listening, hit, hit pause and go set that up right now. Because you're not going to last very long if that's the case or you are doing your revenue a huge disservice or maybe there's a pop up in the way or whatever."
00:14:21,"It's frustrating. They can't figure out where it is. They can't. They have to create an account, blah blah. It's difficult, it takes more than a few clicks. They're not doing it. So if there's any back and forth they have to have, if they have to fill out that form and wait for an email, they're leaving. So think about this. We are really optimizing for the number of people who come to the website and either book a transaction, like book a day pass a meeting room, a day office, or book a tour."
00:14:49,"Those are the two big activities that we want to have happen on our website. So anything that makes that conversion rate lower we need to address. And so you really want to be tracking that data. If you have no idea what the analytics are on your website, you need to get those set up ASAP and start tracking those. So let's talk about the cost of not being optimally set up for conversion."
00:15:13,"And here's one quick thing. I was thinking about this while I was walking the dogs this morning. I was listening to this podcast talking about is social media worth it in 2025? And I was thinking about recording this podcast and I thought, you know what, here's the problem. Most coworking space operators, although some of you listening, may be at scale and you're in good shape and you have teams that can handle every aspect of marketing, but some of you are not and you have to choose."
00:15:39,"So if you're choosing that your team is going to spend time on social media, but your website's a freaking disaster, that's not a good use of time because you're not getting leads from social media. Most likely organic social media run paid ads all day long. I'm all for that. But you're probably not getting leads from organic social. So if your team is spending 20 minutes a day doing social, it's probably more, let's call it 30."
00:16:01,"Or what if you were investing that time and those dollars into optimizing for conversions on your website? Because the people who show up to your website are ready to buy or book a tour. The people on social or not are not. And again, it plays a role. But. And I'm mostly talking about organic. But if you have to choose, you really want your website to be set up for optimization."
00:16:22,"And this does not mean you need an expensive fancy website. So when I work with clients, my favorite platform to use is co level, which is fairly new. It's a platform that is specific to coworking. It's built on an existing platform that's been around for a long time, but it is hyper customized for coworking. And I can put up a website in two weeks. Quickly, max, I'm putting some buffer in there because we have a great template that converts really well."
00:16:49,"And it's very simple. Most websites have way too much crap on them that get in the way of the customer journey and the conversion rate that you're looking for. Okay, so math, you get a hundred leads per month who visit your website to book a meeting room. Your current conversion rate is 5%. So five out of every a hundred leads convert into a booking. And let's say your average price for a meeting room is $250 per booking."
00:17:15,"So that means they're booking multiple hours, not just like a one hour meeting. And this is external people, this is not members because your members might be booking an hour here, an hour there. But, but let's assume you're pulling in revenue that is not from your membership, that is for multi hour meeting rooms. So at a 5% conversion rate, a hundred leads times 5% is five bookings per month."
00:17:40,"If each of those five bookings is $250 in revenue, that's 12, $51,250 in revenue per month. Okay, so what if we improve the user experience and improve the conversion rate. So we're optimizing for simple booking at a 10% conversion rate, you have a hundred leads, 10% conversion rate, that's 10 bookings per month. Ten bookings at $250 each is $2,500 in revenue per month. So that is double your monthly revenue and that is $15,000 more in revenue per year."
00:18:20,"By only changing the booking process. You've not changed your rates, you have not done dynamic pricing, you haven't done anything fancier than just make it easier to book by using an E commerce interface that is purpose built for making it really, really easy for people to book. That's a big deal. $15,000 annually is a percentages of margin in this business. Right. When we're talking about, I like to just down the middle a 25% margin business."
00:18:47,"$15,000 a year matters to most of you and that is a simple increase in conversion rate. If that went up to 15% then now you have 15 bookings at $250 each, 3,750 in revenue per month. That sounds nice. That's a $2,500 increase compared to the original 5% conversion rate each month. And that times 12 is a lot of cash. If you went up to 20%. I'm not going to walk through all the math."
00:19:16,"That is $45,000 more annually. And again, when we're talking about percentage of profit on your business, that is contributing. So that is really meaningful and that is just improving the conversion rate. Okay. So that's really important. Your user interface on your website is probably needs some work because I work with again, a lot of operators with suboptimal websites. They put them up years ago. They haven't looked at them."
00:19:43,"They used a web developer who had no idea what the business was and what they were optimizing for. So it looks pretty, but it's not converting. Those are two very, very, very different aspects of a website. So I totally get you want to look sexy, you want to represent your brand, but that doesn't mean that that website is going to make you money and that's what you need, money."
00:20:07,"So I've seen not so sexy websites that are very, very simple and easy to use. But boom, conversion rates are through the roof. So have your website looked at. That is part of what we do in our mentorship program. I am working with a client right now. We are not focused on the website and specifically we're starting with team and then we're moving through the sales funnel. The team, this may resonate with you, is not using the sales funnel, they're not using the CRM."
00:20:33,"They're not doing all the things that they're supposed to be doing to manage leads and fill up the space. So it's not specifically about the website, but I've already gone through and make made a bunch of simple tweaks to it and this website was already in actually quite good shape. But every website has opportunities for conversion improvement and we will track and we will see how those changes improve, which is something that you can do as well."
00:20:57,"Hey there I'm jumping in again. This time I'm speaking to those of you that are are either getting ready to hire a community manager or who have a community manager and you would like to support their training and development. We know how challenging it can be for coworking space operators to create their own training and development material to support their community managers. And this is so important in terms of onboarding new community managers and supporting the growth of your existing community managers."
00:21:33,"So the platform is really around a couple of things. One is access to a community of like minded folks. We have a very active slack group with really wonderful questions that are posed every single day and we find that's one of the biggest values we have community managers from all over the world. And this is an excellent group of community managers that have invested time and effort into getting better at that role and they are the kind of folks that you want your community manager to be by and hanging out with and they know their stuff or sometimes they don't and they ask questions and we help them out."
00:22:12,"So I'm in the group. We have coaches that are in the group to support them. So we love when they ask questions for things they need help with because the other aspect of the program is really around helping them get resources they need to make their jobs easier and to learn things that they can do use in their role to be better at their job. So we provide some done for you resources like Google business posts, detailed event ideas, et cetera that they can just kind of grab and go and use."
00:22:44,"And we also provide monthly resources that add to our training library so they can do our certification and then we have a lot of electives that help them kind of get better at all the things that that go with the role. So our community managers wear a lot of hats. So we break our content into industry knowledge for new community managers, community building operations, sales and marketing and leadership."
00:23:13,"So the leadership bucket is great for our more advanced community managers. We also have virtual office and digital mail training and coffee training for anybody who needs to know how to use commercial coffee brewers. So we have some of the I'm just going to give you kind of a sampling of content that we have. So in our community building modules we have hosting your first member events, building community with budget friendly events, member event swipe files, our sales and marketing modules, we have tour training, we have the training on the full coworking sales funnel so they understand what that looks like."
00:23:54,"We, we have social media planning frameworks, we have what else do we have? Three simple steps to an Effective Marketing newsletter. These are just some of our samples. Ooh. These are some of our best utilized topics. Demystifying the process of letting your coworking members use your address for their Google Business listing. How to close a tour operations modules, how to set up automations, how to do a new member onboarding audit."
00:24:22,"Simple ways to use AI to boost your productivity. We have over 40 courses in the program so we cover kind of higher level topics and then we also cover things that are timely like the CMRA updates, Google Business updates, etc so we get together monthly to do official training and we also host a best practice sharing call which is one of the fan favorites of the group and the Slack group."
00:24:51,"So if you have any questions at all about the program, don't hesitate to reach out. You can learn more and register at everything coworking.com forward/community manager now back to our episode. Okay, so now I want to talk about again zooming out around technological changes and an opportunity for you. So I want to revisit briefly our discussion last week with Kurt on phone on the alumo and that is E L U M O."
00:25:25,"It is so cool. It's this little device. It looks like, I don't know, an Amazon Alexa. Like the little dots. Is that what they are called? I'm trying to remember what those things are called. Like the little circle ones. That's what it looks like. But go to the website, we'll put the link in the show notes. And last week if you don't follow us on YouTube, we had a great demo edited in to the podcast."
00:25:47,"Thank you to our editor for doing that and thank you to Ascensus for sending that over so you can kind of see how it looks because I think you do need to see it. But I want to talk about phone booths because phone booths are the magic for selling open space dedicated desk membership. So some of you have those products and they don't sell. There might be other reasons for that, but one of the reasons probably is that you don't have enough phone booths."
00:26:13,"And so people come in and they see that this is if you've been in business for a while. Most people who are starting new spaces are loading up on the phone booths. As a matter of fact, I was looking at the Malin. I think I'm saying that right. M A L I N I toured their space in New York. Thank you Lizzy Shand it's beautiful. It's a premium coworking space."
00:26:32,"It started by furniture manufacturers. It's stunning. They do not do a Lot of private offices, they have a lot of open space and they have a very high performing event space or gathering space called the Living Room. So check out their website and you'll see how beautiful it is. And you'll see that when they're announcing new locations, they list the number of phone booths, which is brilliant because the educated consumer and they tend to be in markets that have high demand for coworking."
00:27:00,"They're in Manhattan, they're in Nashville. I have a client in Brooklyn, we are starting their coworking space from scratch. So we're building kind of recreating everything and we did a demand report for where they are in Brooklyn and it, it kind of matched Nashville, which blows my mind. So I've done a project in Nashville and did a demand report for that. And Nashville is cooking, as my 13 year old daughter would say, when it comes to coworking."
00:27:26,"So the Malin is also in Nashville. Anyway, they will list out the number of phone booths that they have. Phone booths. If you're not the Mullen are or if you're not, was I going to say. Anyway, buying phone booths is expensive and it's really great to buy the prefab ones because they are soundproof. If you build your own, it's much harder to make them soundproof. And people want soundproof generally, unless you can put them way off in a corner."
00:27:49,"But then your space is probably not as efficient as it needs to be. So phone booths are expensive and so the Malin is charging a lot for their memberships. They have wrapped the phone booths into their business model. But if you're an existing space, for example, or even a new space, you might consider a blend. Maybe you have some phone booths that are reservable and they, you can use your, you know, hour, sorry, meeting room credit to use phone booth time or they're just free to use."
00:28:19,"However, if you're in a place where you really need to monetize those phone booths in order to offer them and you need to offer them in order to sell your coworking memberships, like your open plan memberships or dedicated desks. Put in a Lumo on the phone booth, just like we saw at Juicy Room phone booth. A Lumo on the door. Let's do some math. So here's how you could monetize."
00:28:43,"If you charged $1 per 10 minutes of phone booth use and you get a hundred bookings per month with each person using the booth for 20 minutes, then you'd have $200 in monthly revenue. And if so, this is like a Tiny dollar amount. Right. So the user doesn't care. It's very small. It gets booked directly to their account. You get 200 bucks in monthly revenue. This is for 20 minutes."
00:29:10,"100 people doing this at a dollar per 10 minutes. So that's enough. If you were to finance a room booth over three years that's enough to cover the booth's monthly monthly cost. So I room used to finance. I don't know if they still finance but if that was the case then you could or you can buy it outright and you can pay it off using this monetization approach."
00:29:36,"If you keep that dollar amount low, people are happy to pay a little bit to have access to that amenity. Again, some people do not want to sell anything a la carte and some models they need to. Right. They want a lower monthly fee. So I want to be able to offer a 10 day a month coworking package which adds almost nothing to your bottom line. But you want to be able it."
00:30:00,"Okay, well to sell a bunch of those you need to have places where people can make phone calls. Because everybody needs to make phone calls. If you can't go to a coworking space and comfortably make a call, you're you, you're not going to get members because everybody needs to use the phone at some point. Right. Very few people only use their laptops and they don't coworking spaces in general unless you are work bar in Boston."
00:30:25,"They're not designed for people to take calls in the open plan. They're just not right. It's uncomfortable for everybody. That's where the issues happen that you have to deal with. You get the loud talker et cetera. So phone booths, put the illumo on and monetize it. I love it. And this is like very minor monetization just to cover costs. You could certainly make it a profit center. So that's just automated and it's so easy for the user."
00:30:51,"Walk up, tap pay so it can be tied to. They're doing an automation with Office R D that is upcoming. It's not in yet. So you can pull meeting room credits if you want to for the phone booth or you can just ask them to pay for it and it hits their account. So or they can, you know, Apple pay for it and that there's a lot of ways to set it up is what I'm saying."
00:31:14,"But you it's so simple for the end user and there's a visual aspect of it that tells you like is this booked in the next 15 minutes? Or the next hour, you, you can pop in and do your call. So again, it's not just. It is a convenience for your members and they appreciate how user friendly it is and it's essential to your profitability. So I. Hold on."
00:31:36,"I think we have one more example I wanted to go through here. Oh, you know what? I also. Well, I, I won't go through this in great detail, but on last week's episode, if you didn't listen to it, go back. Kurt talks through why the Illumo is helpful even on a typical meeting room that you might use for credits for members in terms of capturing lost revenue. So many of you do not have digital door access on your meeting room doors because it's very expensive, right?"
00:32:11,"If you're going to put key on every door, for example, the hardware, et cetera, is expensive. The illumo device is $500 per. You can put that on and you can tie it to your meeting booking platform. And when somebody books their meeting room, credits are deducted from their account. Now, again, not all these integrations are direct yet, so they're coming. Hang tight. You can check the Illuma website."
00:32:36,"You can talk to the folks at a census about what's in place for which software, space management platforms like Office, R D, Deskworks, Exodus, the ETC coworks. So I'm sure those are coming. But think about the number of hours that your members are squatting. So they show up to a meeting room early. They stay up to an hour after their meeting is over if no one knocks on the door and says, hey, you need to get out."
00:33:01,"They're using meeting rooms before the staff is in for the morning. They're using meeting rooms after hours and on the weekends. And you're not capturing any of that. And right now you might be saying, that's fine. You know, I want my members to be able to use the meeting rooms. But you are paying for those meeting rooms, right? You're paying for that space. It's in your lease. If you're paying $30 a month and the meeting room is 100 square feet, it's probably bigger than that."
00:33:25,"It's 200 square feet. That meeting room is costing you money every single month. And there's not only that, it's an opportunity cost if you're not monetizing it. So get out of your head that you owe your members the ability to squat in meeting rooms. You don't. So with the Illumo, it's a really inexpensive way to allow tap and pay. Somebody's there at 5 o' clock at night and they need to pop into a meeting room to do a zoom call."
00:33:52,"Great. They can book it for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, small increments. They can pay cash in quotes or they can deduct meeting room credits. So those all add up just like the conversion rate with the meeting room that we talked about. And Kurt does some sample math in the last episode, so go back and listen to that. But you can imagine if you're capturing those dollars every day of the week, several hours across meeting rooms."
00:34:21,"That adds up. And again, how do we get to our 25% margin? It's not by being loosey goosey about who's using the meeting rooms when it's about tightening this up, creating a great user experience for the end user, but also monetizing the space that you are paying for. And it's not just that you're paying for it, you're at risk for, for this business. Right. One of the big things that we forget about coworking is that yeah, your members could go out and sign their own commercial lease and that comes with a ton of risk."
00:34:50,"Think about how much risk you're taking to run this business. So you don't, you know, owe them what you don't owe them, you owe them a great experience and the ability to pay for the value that they're getting. So I want you to think about what the opportunities are in your coworking space to improve your conversion rates on your website, which means make it. Well, certainly the book a tour, but booking on demand resources for people who are not members."
00:35:24,"So incremental revenue, not your members who are, you know, redeeming credits, that's fine, you know that. Although I, you know, I think we say that's fine. And again, this goes back to the. It's okay for B2B to be a little clunky because while they already paid, they signed up for this membership and you know, it's okay if the software is not perfect, but they, you know, have expectations and if they're going, if they're in a market where they're, you know, sometimes visiting other coworking spaces and they see how frictionless it is to use other systems, then if you have a really strong community and if they have other reasons for being in your space, then, then they probably stay."
00:36:03,"But they may also think about migrating if they like the frictionless experience somewhere else. There's lots of phone booths and they can book them in 15 minute increments somewhere else. That might be enough for them. It's A big deal for me. The phone booth thing is it's probably a big deal for you too if you're using a coworking space. So the but for sure, in order to attract and acquire customers for on demand products, again, meeting rooms, day offices, day passes, that has to be super simple and frictionless or they will give up and go to somebody else's website."
00:36:38,"One other topic I wanted to include here, but I'm going to save it for another episode, is having on site support. So having an AI chatbot, and I don't mean just drift, because your team is probably not available when people are trying to book meeting rooms or trying to book a tour, etc. You need a chatbot that can quickly answer the questions that they have as they come up."
00:37:02,"And there are a couple options out there. So we'll do a separate episode on that. But I want you to start thinking about that as a way to uplevel your business too is capturing leads that are happening after hours in a way that's very user friendly. You can totally acknowledge that it's an AI chat bot. What your potential meeting room users or potential members want is to get the business done that they came to get done when they came to get it done."
00:37:26,"So it might be Saturday afternoon while they're watching something on Netflix. They're also looking ahead and booking some things they need to take care of for work this week, like booking meeting rooms for their team to meet or putting in a request to tour a bunch of coworking spaces because they know they need to get that done this week. If they want to do that on Saturday afternoon and your team is not around, you need to be thinking about how to address that."
00:37:48,"So we'll do another episode on that. So I want you to be thinking 25% margin. How can I do that? I gotta. Or how can I maintain it if you have it already? Or 30 if you're going gangbusters and have high goals. Meeting room revenue is going to be really important. Mail revenue is going to be really important. That's a bit of a side note, but while we're talking about margin, our Mailbox Moneymaker challenge."
00:38:11,"It's going to open soon, so stay tuned for that. So look at your website, get some help with conversion, work with somebody who is an expert at coworking websites and make sure that you're optimizing for booking meeting rooms and booking a tour and use the platforms that are out there, like Flexbase AI, like Office R&D's Growth Hub, like some of the other platforms that may already have good user interfaces."
00:38:39,"But make sure you're asking the question is the platform that I'm using up to date and is the user experience good enough that it's not impacting my conversion and test. There are a lot of tools out there that allow you to test what's happening on your website and make sure you're tracking your conversion. You can make a little tweak and track does it, does my conversion rate go up for the month if I'm, if I made this little tweak and spend invest time in this."
00:39:05,"You cannot go month after month without looking at your website and tracking conversions. So if you need help with that, our team does that work through our mentorship program. So we, we do it in the context of your full sales funnel. We don't do one off website reviews and projects. So if you're interested, if there are broader projects that you're interested in, sales funnel, training your team how to use the sales funnel, et cetera, we can do that through our mentorship coaching program."
00:39:34,"We are working with several clients on that today. So you can go and book a call with us and tell us what your challenges are@coworking mentorship.com and stay tuned next week. Don't miss it. My conversation with Miro, CEO of Office RnD. And he, he nerds out more than I do about all of this detail. That's what he spends, you know, he spends a lot of his time, he's an engineer by training even though he's a CEO."
00:40:04,"So enjoy our conversation next week. Don't miss it and 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. If you'd like to learn more about our education and coaching programs, head over to everythingcoworking.com we'll see you next week."
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