388. Mailbox Money & More: 3 Quick Win Ways to Keep Coworking Cash Flowing All Summer
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Masterclass: 3 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets to Opening a Coworking Space
TRANSCRIPTION
388. Mailbox Money & More: 3 Quick Win Ways to Keep Coworking Cash Flowing All Summer
00:00:00,"Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast where every week I keep you updated on the latest trends and how to's 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 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."
00:00:44,"Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast. This is your host, Jamie Russo. Thanks for joining me. It is almost July. Lots of schools are already out for summer, which means your revenue or pipeline might be starting to slow down. Unless you are in a market where people tend to travel to during the summer holiday season, then you're in good shape. But you might not be ready to take advantage of that."
00:01:11,"So we're going to talk about some ideas to help you do that. And if you're in a market where things slow down, we've got some ideas for how to get a revenue boost and a boost that you can take with you into fall and back to school and beyond. Because it's always our goal to create revenue boosts that we can can benefit from over time. So we're going to talk about three ideas today that you might be able to use in your business."
00:01:42,"One is related to virtual mail, one is related to monetizing your phone booths, and one is related to part time private offices. Okay, idea number one is around doubling down on or starting your virtual mail program. And of course this is just in time because we are launching our Moneymaker mailbox challenge on June 16th. That is kickoff call day. So if you want to join us, doors are open to register only until Friday, June 13, so make sure you save your spot."
00:02:19,"Why now for virtual mail? Well, because the best time to start a virtual mail program or to put focus on yours was yesterday. First, I want to mention our challenge is for any operator who does not yet have a program or who has a virtual mail program but isn't optimizing it, which is probably most of you. So we've run this challenge twice now, twice last year, had great success."
00:02:46,"We'll be sharing some of the wins that our challengers had over our last two cohorts and about 50% of them already had programs in place but wanted to optimize them. So they wanted to get coached on their packages. They wanted reviews of their landing pages. In this challenge we are offering to build out a landing page for you if you're using a common platform and if you get your request in by a certain deadline."
00:03:13,"Because we want you to have success really quickly and we know one of the barriers is having to do that on your own. Okay, so summer is a great time to spin up or focus on your virtual mail program because you might have more time, your team might have more time, although you're probably going to drive a lot of those decisions. You can send a team member to our challenge."
00:03:37,"They just have to be able to make decisions so that the action actually gets taken and you get your roi. But some other reasons Traveling freelancers and solopreneurs still need a business address. This is a great time to help business owners understand why they might want to have their mail go to a business address and if they don't have their own business. So this is non members. This is fresh revenue coming from could be your email list, could be a Facebook ad that you run."
00:04:07,"This should be really simple to promote and set up. And when folks are traveling over the summer, it's a great time to remind them, hey, you can get your packages here. Hey, you can get your check sent and we'll get them deposited into your bank for you, which is a huge win. You have a place to send your business mail, so that's not piling up at home or piling up in a mailbox that is not being monitored or maybe somebody's coming every few days."
00:04:34,"But if you have important business mail that you need to get, great time to set up a virtual mail program. And that's for people who are local. The beautiful thing about virtual mail clients is lots of them will not be local and will need a business address in the city that you're in or in the town that you're in for various legal reasons, etc. So they won't ever even have mail sent to you."
00:04:59,"I have a virtual office address with Pillar Coworking in the East Bay in the Bay Area, and I have never sent them a piece of mail, but I use their address in my email newsletter and on client invoices, for example. And the beautiful thing about virtual mail is it's expensive to expand today. This is one of the things that we're struggling with, folks who are working on opening new spaces."
00:05:24,"We have to get really creative because construction costs are expensive and it's expensive to borrow money today. So this is a way, if you're an existing operator, to expand without additional rent, without additional investment in construction, without committing to another lease. So it's the perfect time. If you already have a business, it's a great time to run a campaigns to your email list or to run simple Facebook ads."
00:05:53,"We can help you with that in your challenge and it's a great time to spend the time that you need to get this up and running. And in our challenge it's nine weeks of full on support. So we give you templates, playbooks, reviews of your packages, pricing, we teach you how to price your packages, we teach you how to get leads from referral partners and we have office hours almost every week."
00:06:15,"We do take off the 4th of July and we are not trying to take away your summer Fridays. So the time investment is super reasonable and across nine weeks. So they have plenty of time to not make it feel like you're working too hard over the summer and yet get that program up and running and get an ROI. So one ROI example on this. For example, our mailbox challenge is $750 and if you get three new members paying $39 a month, that's $117 a month."
00:06:51,"You will pay back the Mailbox Moneymaker Challenge investment by the end of the year with three new members. So even if you already have a program and all you do is optimize something about your user workflow or get a new marketing tool that you can use to get more customers, you're paying for the investment with three new members at 6:39 bucks a month. Super easy. If you're ready to join the Mailbox Challenge, you can get all the details@mailboxchallenge.com"
00:07:24,"okay, the next idea. We've talked about this before on the podcast, but sometimes we need to revisit ideas when we have the mind, space and potentially the time or the drive to put something in place. Let's talk about part time private offices and the Summer Day Office package. I'm borrowing the Summer Day Office pack from one of our Operator Mastermind members. She operates in the suburbs of Chicago and she spins this up in the summer, promotes it on our website, promotes it in her newsletter and when people call in."
00:08:01,"It is a great solution for parents who need to get out of the house or are in town only for the summer and want use of a private office. Let's imagine that you have a four person private office or an interior private office that has been sitting open and you can't sell it and nope, you're not going to sell it for the summer. Let's style that bad boy."
00:08:27,"Let's give it A glow up. Let's go to home goods. Get some plants, get some artwork, get some desk lamps, get some rugs, go on your Pinterest spree. If it's this is not your skill set, get somebody to help you and don't spend too much money, but give your room an upgrade and then make it a part time private office and sell buckets of hours. An example from our operator in the suburbs of Chicago."
00:09:00,"Thank you, Sue. Summer day office pack 35 hours for 350 bucks. Valid only June 1st through Labor Day and has to be booked and used within that time frame. And it's valid for the shared private office. And you set that up by using your space management platform, putting your part time private office up just like a meeting room and letting folks book. And you could give only these users access to that asset to book."
00:09:31,"You could do a flex 50, 50 hours for 475, valid only for 60 days. Maybe this is good for remote project teams who still need to get together during the summer. If you've got a bigger office that's open. If you have an even bigger office that's open. I have a group that I'm working with in New Jersey and this is an idea that I just came across that I might try out for them."
00:09:56,"A weekly Sprint suite. So maybe you have a small business who usually works from home or even team from a bigger company and they have projects they still need to get done. Even though it's summer and we all want to take it down a notch, everybody still has business goals. Q2 and Q3 are still super important to the bottom line. So this is just another way to frame your part time private office or a meeting room to help people connect the dots that you have a solution that meets a problem that they have."
00:10:31,"So you could call it a weekly Sprint suite. Available Monday through Friday for 8.99. Must be used within a certain specific time frame and you can specify how many people the room holds. So you want to put. You want an a couple of extra ideas here. Make sure that you're putting an end date if this is not. If it's a summer promo like the Summer Day Office pack, that might be at a slightly reduced rate just to get people in for the summer."
00:11:00,"Make sure it's very clear when it starts and when it ends and that it's a special deal. But this might also just be a time you don't have to refer to it or frame it as something for the summer. If you've been sitting on this idea knowing you need to get this part time private office spun up. This is the time to do it. It's quieter out but there are lots of people who are in town using Airbnbs sitting in the in laws house or in hotels or they're at home and the kids are home and they might even have their own home office."
00:11:33,"But you know what it's like when the kids are home. If you have kids who are school age, even if they're at camp during the day or if they're not at camp, they have those gaps or they get home early or you have teenagers who are in that weird in between time when they don't go to camp but they like to interrupt you or you just feel like there's way too much going on at home."
00:11:54,"You might know that feeling, although you might not if you're at your coworking space the time. But absolutely parents are dealing with this problem and need to get out of the house even if they have their own home office. So it's a great time to promote to this crowd again. You might run some simple Facebook ads to promote this or you know, organic posts are good. I just want to remind you that organic posts on Facebook or Instagram and when I say Facebook I really mean meta."
00:12:21,"I should call it the meta platform. They your organic reach is 10% of your followers. So if you have a thousand followers, a hundred of them are going to see any post. And so it's, it's really hard to get a lot of eyeballs on any promotion that you're putting out through social media if it's only organic. So getting the ability to run simple Facebook ads on your own for simple promotions like this is a huge advantage."
00:12:48,"And also market to your email list. And if you haven't been building your email list, let's do that now. So the, the part time private office is super easy to set up. Again you're just making it a bookable asset in your space management platform. You can give certain people access to book it and then you start promoting it and again can go out on social, it can go out on paid social which would be great."
00:13:12,"It can go out on emails, it can be a pop up on your website, lots of ways to promote that. So you can might have a special landing page and explain to people how it works. Another great example if you want to take a look, I'll put this in the show notes is the post in Tucson, Arizona they've been running part time private offices for a long time and they oversell those private offices by many times."
00:13:41,"So it's much more profitable for them to have part time private offices. Theirs happen to be internal offices, but really nicely lit. They're smaller so they're not just like, you know, a four person office. They can't sell, but they're styled nicely, they have sit stand desks, they have a monitor. And I love the upgrade of including ring lights to make zoom calls really easy. And I love the idea of putting artwork behind or you know, where the zoom camera would be facing so that your users have just like a no stress, beautiful background for zoom."
00:14:18,"So give some extra thought to how you're styling and what you're including in the part time private office. The extra, the big monitor. So the second screen if somebody's bringing their laptop and the ring light can just be huge bonuses that people really, really appreciate because it makes it really plug and play. Okay, so one more idea and I'm not going to keep this from you. This is a chatgpt idea."
00:14:47,"I asked him for ideas above and beyond the virtual mail and the day pass or the part time private office program. And here's what they came up with. It's a little bit in the same direction of the part time private office. And some of you will say, that's weird, I'm not going to do it. Some of you might pick this up and run with it. Okay. It is a micro subscription for phone booth Credits."
00:15:15,"And maybe ChatGPT is listening to me because on our operator Mastermind call today I had pulled up, we have a cabin next to a lake and over the summer my daughter just had knee surgery and I was like, okay, well while we're away, I for sure have to join the coworking space because I need a place where I can go and just really focus and go in early and, you know, be done at a decent time."
00:15:40,"And I was on their website and they have a ton of phone booth hours included in their membership, which is so important to me because I'm on the zoom all the time with clients and folks that I work with on starting coworking spaces and helping them get more profitable. And I don't love to have those conversations out in the open. So I want to make sure I have a place to make a phone call."
00:16:05,"And your potential users and members are wondering the same thing. If I come in, how does this work? Where can I make a phone call? And ChatGPT is suggesting you just bypass the possible lack of clarity around having people buy day passes, but having phone booths available and just sell them time in Your phone booth. And you have to have a way to track this and bill for it."
00:16:34,"We've recently done a podcast episode on the Illumo which would allow you to do this, but you can do it with other ways you can manually track. Again, you can just make it a bookable asset. If you're using Nexus Office R and D, coworks, optics, et cetera, just put it up as a bookable asset and charge people. For example, five credits, which might be 30 minutes each for 45 bucks, expires in 60 days."
00:17:04,"You could certainly renew these packages if you want to make them available beyond the summer. But if we're just framing them as like summer deals, solutions to the summer pain points, then these are some ideas and the positioning, like for the five credits at 30 minutes each, five client calls, guaranteed silence. I love it. Or 10 credits, which would be 30. So 1030 minute phone calls good for 60 days cover the whole summer."
00:17:39,"So these are. That idea I think is really interesting. It removes the uncertainty around newer users not knowing if a day pass includes access to a phone room. If you don't have offices open that you want to sell as part time private offices, or if those part time private offices the your package pricing is going to be higher. Like no way are you selling a package in an office for 45 bucks."
00:18:07,"So this is a way to segment a little bit. You can get the people who, you know, really want time in an office versus people who are willing to just rent your phone booth. And maybe you don't have enough phone booths to do this. So again, take this with a grain of salt or, you know, make it your idea and run with it how it works for your space."
00:18:26,"Or maybe you do, or maybe you've been thinking about buying a phone room and you need a way to pay for it. So again, we've talked about this in recent episodes, but framing this as like a summer package to get you out of the chaos of home with guaranteed quiet zoom calls with clients or with colleagues, this might be a way to help you pay for that phone booth."
00:18:48,"Or if you have several phone booths, you could just reserve one phone booth for this use. Again, this is kind of a fun one. It's not going to make a ton of cash, but if you have, you know, underutilized phone booth assets for the summer months, could be a fun way to do that promo. The other takeaway I want to have there again is that if you're trying to attract people into your space who are not permanent members or even who are going to be permanent members make it abundantly clear that they have access to places to make phone calls."
00:19:23,"It's really hard to sell Flex memberships if you don't have places for people to make phone calls. And you need to make that clear on your website because people who haven't used coworking before don't understand how it works. And you need to really connect the dots for them. And people who have used coworking spaces before will wonder, hey, does this place have that available? I'm going to show you the one that I'm referring to on the screen."
00:19:51,"If you're watching on YouTube. Ready? I'm going to share my screen. If you're not watching on YouTube, join us, subscribe, and you can watch me talk at the screen. Sometimes we share things. It's more fun to watch my podcast with Giovanni because we always have a guest. Okay, so this is Lyft workspace. Shout out to Lyft if they happen to be listening. They have a lot of phone booths which you can see in this photo, and they're reservable."
00:20:23,"And this is their membership plan grid, which I love a lot because it's so clear and I really love it that they show how many phone booth hours they give away. They give away a lot of phone booth hours. Lyft, if you're listening, it's probably too many, but don't change this policy until I join for the summer. But what it does is it connects the dots. It removes that uncertainty for the end user."
00:20:47,"It's right here. Just put it on the website. And this is not a super sexy table that a designer was paid a million dollars to design. It is very, very simple and yet very, very effective because I can see exactly what my options are and what's included. And if I want more detail, I scroll down and get more detail. So make it really clear, remove that uncertainty and consider doing something creative for the summer with your phone booth revenue."
00:21:15,"I love this idea. Okay, so we're keeping it simple because we don't want you to get analysis paralysis. We want you to just pick one. Is it time to start your virtual mail program? Or to give it the focus it deserves so that it can grow and make you money? Nine weeks of support. Live calls. We have two live calls a week except July 4th. That's a ton of live support."
00:21:40,"And one of the things that our challengers always love is that they get to meet other peop. Other operators. So it's a way to grow your network. It's like a bonus. It's Fun in addition to making money. And it's an investment with an roi. You sell three male memberships that you would not have sold otherwise at 39 bucks a month, you sell three of them and those will pay back the investment by the end of 2025."
00:22:10,"So it's a pretty low bar to join us. And if you light on funds and you have no mail program, that's an easy way to justify investing and getting the accountability that you need to generate this revenue. Because mail, the way it works is you're going to get a few memberships every month. So the first month you're going to have three, and then the next month you're going to have six, and then nine, and then 12."
00:22:35,"So it takes time for it to compound. But then, you know, in 18 months you have a bunch and they're bringing in a nice stream of revenue. And we're going to teach you how to optimize your packaging. We're going to teach you how to offer higher end packages that will generate even more cash. And we'll teach you how to market. We've got all sorts of playbooks and templates for you to make this really easy and all the live support you need while you're going through it so that you can really demystify it and just get to it."
00:23:04,"Okay. If you're ready to join the Mailbox challenge, you can get all the details@mailbox challenge.com and our next idea was putting up that part time private office. Okay. ChatGPT had one other creative idea around the part time private office. So the part time private office concept is absolutely proven. I work with a number of members who do very well with this product. I love this product because accessing a part time private office when you don't have access to a full time one, if you're in a really expensive market, there's a whole segment of people who cannot afford you."
00:23:39,"The I haven't looked super recently at office prices, but the space closest to me, the last time I looked, which was right after the pandemic, a one person private office was $2,000. So I would love access to a part time private office instead of committing to a $2,000 membership. So there's a whole segment of people who are not going to pay for a full time private office. And you can resell that office over and over again."
00:24:08,"And it doesn't matter if it's too big for one person. If it's inventory that you can't sell, put it up and sell it. And if you need to change it because somebody comes in and wants it. And having a permanent office member in there would make more money than your part time private office, then you can discontinue the program or you can move them to another office that has opened."
00:24:30,"You almost always have some room open that can be dedicated to this use and that helps you leverage underutilized inventory that's in your space. You can even get creative if you're in a building. Does your landlord have open spaces? Something else that you could monetize in the building? Get creative and think about how can I create part time private offices or how can I generate revenue out of a space that doesn't generate revenue because it's the wrong size or it's interior and it's hard to sell."
00:25:04,"And also do this instead of making a dedicated desk room. If you're doing a dedicated desk room and it's great, wonderful. That's very unusual. If you have a room that's a weird size or something and you're trying to make money by putting like making it a shared desk room, that's a weird product that not a lot of people love. So consider making it a part time private office and just price it so that you're making money."
00:25:31,"Don't underprice it. That's my tip. Okay, so ChatGPT's creative play on this one is ready. Sublet your members offices. So if you have somebody come to you and say hey, I'm going to be out of town for all of July and August, then you could say hey, do you want to remove your personal effects? And we'll do a rev share on your office. I'm going to like Airbnb your office and I'll give you half of the revenue or 40% of the revenue, whatever you want your split to be."
00:26:07,"So they make a little bit of extra cash, they keep the office as their full time long term office, but you make a little extra cash while they're gone. Or if they try to cancel because they're going to be gone for a few months and you're worried about you don't have a wait list or you're worried about downtime on that office, then you could immediately flip it over or you could say look, I'm gonna, you know, we need you to keep the office full time but we'll try to get somebody to sublet it for the summer and we'll do a RIF share with you so you get creative about that."
00:26:43,"I love that idea. Again, you gotta have somebody like lock up their personal stuff or stick it in your mail room or whatever. I know it's not, you know, logistically completely simple, but, but worth a try. Okay, and then ChatGPT's other really creative idea that I have never tested. Although there are operators who absolutely charge for their phone booths. The one I just mentioned, for example, I've just never seen a phone booth only membership."
00:27:09,"So that's untested, but it is like a micro part time private office membership. So I think it's close and worth a test. For those of you who like to try creative things and experiment a little bit, it. Okay, so those are the ideas. Hopefully that gives you some ideas to start. Okay, so here's the deal. Time goes really fast, right? It's already June, so our schools are not out, but they're out at the end of next week."
00:27:39,"So if you're listening to this and this is resonating, you gotta move on this right away, get your team in a room, make a project plan, which you can do with ChatGPT. ChatGPT is quite good at making project plans. Tell it what you want to do, tell it your pricing ask, you know, tell it to ask you questions to help you figure it out. What do I ask ChatGPT to act as today?"
00:28:01,"I asked it to act as for my ideas. Oh, let me find what I asked it. I said, oh, here we go. Act as an expert at optimizing revenue for coworking spaces. Now just in case you're worried about this, I do not use ChatGPT for all of my coworking business ideas because I have lots of experience in the industry and I work with so many operators every month that I do know what works and doesn't work."
00:28:29,"Except we should. All this came from the GWA Immersive this week. We should all think of ourselves as scientists. I think Teddy from Office R and D said it because we were talking about the growth hub and the data that it has in it and all the new technology that's coming out. We don't know what works for every operator in every market, but we can think of ourselves as scientists and experimenters and innovators and try new things."
00:28:58,"So I like to ask for new ideas and make sure you know when I'm telling you something that has not been tested. Okay? So use ChatGPT to do your project plan. Use ChatGPT to help you write promotional campaigns, write your emails, schedule out your email timing. You'll want to edit them and make them your own. One thing I love to do with ChatGPT is feed it things that I've written that I like that are in my voice and train it to use my voice."
00:29:31,"Again. I don't overuse ChatGPT for things like my newsletter etc, but there are times when it can be really useful to get you over that analysis paralysis and just get these things done and tell yourself, look, if I have time to tweak this a lot, I'll tweak it a lot. If I only have time to tweak it a little bit, I'll tweak it a little bit. So use it for project planning with your team."
00:29:56,"Use it to create a timeline that you follow. You can also those timelines that you create in ChatGPT, you can tell it to create it in a format that allows you to put it in Asana or whatever project management tool you use. We use Asana, so I will tell it to put it in a format which I think is just a CSV so I can download it from ChatGPT and then upload it into Asana and it creates a project with all the tasks and then you just assign the owners, et cetera, which makes the whole thing go much faster."
00:30:25,"But you have to commit to doing this right now if you want to see the revenue this summer and if you want to make an impact on these opportunities right away. And again, don't forget, these are things that you can frame as summer deals but that you can continue to use throughout the year. So if looking for ways to continue to nudge up your revenue for 2025, these are great ideas that again you can use as a summer promo."
00:30:55,"And then you can have another promo for each of these ideas for Back to School. And then you can use another promo for like November when holiday time's getting crazy. But you have to finish all the things for the year so you can just reframe and use something seasonal to create new promos for the same offer. So keep that in mind. It's not like this is a one time thing."
00:31:19,"And then next year in 2026 you can rinse and repeat if it works. And you can tweak what doesn't work. So get started on these right away. If the Mailbox Moneymaker challenge is compelling to you, feel free to message me if you have any questions. Make sure you sign up before June 13th because doors close and we kick off on June 16th. Okay, thank you for joining me today and we'll see you next week."
00:31:42,"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 everything coworking.com we'll see you next week."
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