Ultimate Coworking Consultant Guide

Overview:

Ed Blunderfield, a strategist at Optix, shares how to plan and implement effective key performance indicators (KPIs) for your coworking business.

Expert Opinion:

“Make sure you’ve assigned an owner to each KPI to ensure nothing is missed and to help create a sense of ownership and engagement around the entire process. This will often lead to opportunities for improvement, as each team member begins working more closely with their respective indicators and begins to uncover challenges and opportunities to tweak or re-frame the approach.”

Resources:

• The Top 5 Growth KPIs for Coworking Spaces | Part 1: '7 Step to Develop Impactful KPIs'

• The Top 5 Growth KPIs for Coworking Spaces | Part 2: 'Member Sign Ups'

• The Top 5 Growth KPIs for Coworking Spaces | Part 3: 'Member Churn'

• The Top 5 Growth KPIs for Coworking Spaces | Part 4: 'Revenue per Member'

Overview:

Space is the one constant within this ever-evolving and growing market. The primary driver of your revenue is your space occupancy. Before you categorize the different revenue streams your workspace brings in, make sure you understand how to determine the value your space.

Expert Opinion:

"Measure space meticulously, being consistent about including or not including corridors, meeting rooms or common areas, thus ensuring accuracy when calculating conversion rates in your reports."

Resources:

• Effective Metrics for Your Shared Workspace

Overview:

Why does creating a seamless coworking member experience matter? Find out what member experience really means, why it’s important and how you can learn to improve it.

Expert Opinion:

At the end of the day, the important thing is to view your coworking member experience as a continuous improvement process, not an end state. Improving the member experience is an ongoing journey that should be integrated as part of your overall service strategy.

Resources:

• Harnessing the Power of Your Coworking Member Experience

• How Technology Can Transform Your Coworking Member Experience

Overview:

Learn how Incubate Venture's space quickly grew without marketing simply because the idea behind building Incubate Ventures was less focused on quantity and more focused on quality.

Expert Opinion:

"We didn't want Incubate to act as a coworking space. We wanted our space to grow organically and ultimately we were focused on the deal flow in the space, not how many butts we could get in the chairs."

Resources:

• How to Grow Your Coworking Members

Overview:

Wellness and work/life balance is craved for in modern workspaces today. This interview tells you how to improve the things you don’t necessarily think about.

Expert Opinion:

We recently saw that the Harvard Business Reviewpublished a survey, which found the number one office perk employees want is natural light. This was no surprise to us. People spend so much of their days indoors, they want to be able to have natural light and see the sun.

Resources:

• Wellness-Oriented Coworking Spaces

Overview:

What happens when three accomplished women from the advertising industry form a coworking community? They raise $315,000 in five month. Find out how they crowdfunded their space and what marketing practices you can apply to your own concept.

Expert Opinion:

“We started by planning.Which I think a lot of folks don’t think about when they jump into a crowdfunding platform. But if no one has a way to find it then you’re not going to raise any money.”

Resources:

• Interview with The Coven

Overview:

Expert Opinion:

"Always keep in mind that the serviced office industry is very successful; if that’s your main source of competition, whether it’s in your building or in your immediate neighborhood, adjust your space as needed to beat the competition."

Resources:

• How to Lay Out Your Coworking Space

Overview:

Coworking presents unique digital, intellectual and physical safety concerns for space owners. We suggest some ways you can keep your members safe and productive. Here we suggest a proactive approach and implementation of the best security practices.

Expert Opinion:

“Whether or not your place operates 24/7, installing an integrated alarm system and monitoring access is a smart decision.”

Resources:

• Key Security Concerns for Coworking Spaces

Overview:

We spoke with Condi about her typical strategy when working with new or existing coworking owners and she broke down the consulting phases for the majority of projects into three stages. While many shared workspace and coworking operators lease space from a landlord, those operators who both own the building and the business generally see two to three times the normal yield on their real estate investment compared to a traditional office lease tenant.

Expert Opinion:

“We believe in scale. We see a lot of small spaces, under 10,000 square feet, opening. This is not something we typically recommend, because it’s harder to enjoy profitability on a small space—we believe you really need to scale to make it.”

Resources:

• Interview with Workspace Strategies

Overview:

Kisi hosted a webinar with Melissa Schilo, a coworking consultant with over 12 years of experience in flexible workspace solutions. Melissa and Kisi's co-founder, Max Schuetz, discussed the future of modern offices and explained the key concepts of coworking. Melissa shared a consultant's perspective on different types of shared and flex spaces, as well as common oversights when planning and operating a coworking space.

Expert Opinion:

Today, tenants build working relationships with landlords to add more value to the building. Coworking company owners and landlords can collaborate to offer a range of levels of working. Property owners can harness this teamwork to take advantage of their underutilized spaces, getting the most out of empty spaces of any size, while coworking space owners can design the area and fill it with amenities to make a profit.

Resources:

• 9 Tips We Learned From a Coworking Consultant

Overview:

Being in a shared space can make it challenging to build a coherent team culture which is essential for employee recruitment, engagement, and retention as your company scales. This article talks about what elements your company needs to have in order to achieve this.

Expert Opinion:

"No matter your company’s size or phase, a strong culture is crucial to creating a great employee experience and attracting and retaining top talent."

Resources:

• Building A Strong Company Culture

Overview:

Chief Digital Officer at Talent Garden shares with us how to use technology to improve user experience, automation and tips to scale your coworking space to 20+ locations.

Expert Opinion:

“Scalability is a challenge. We are not strong enough, nowadays, to consistently manage every location. Sometimes we have to retrofit installations in order to align them with our new standards. We have reached a good level of standardization when it comes to basic services that we are able to replicate fast in every new campus.”

Resources:

• Interview with Talent Garden

Overview:

This article talks about suburban coworking, its contrast with spaces in city centers and the strategies Hauser took to make suburban coworking profitable.

Expert Opinion:

"The best thing about suburban coworking is the existing community. Having neighbors that inspire your work is a magical thing that you can’t get outside of the suburbs."

Resources:

• Suburban Coworking: An Interview with 25N Coworking

Overview:

Coworking management software have evolved tremendously over the past seven years. As many more options have been made available, it has been increasingly difficult to select the right one for your space. With Jana's experience of operating a space and working as a consultant, she shares four key points to pay attention to when you make your selection.

Expert Opinion:

"You want to be able to use the same software for your location as the number of members in your space increases. One oversight coworking operators have is that they do not consider the scalability of their software."

Resources:

• Choosing a Space Management Software

Overview:

Mike McDougal, the founder of McDougal Coworking, shares his journey of converting a 38,000 square-foot corporate headquarters into a successful coworking space that’s ready to scale. Here are three takeaways on his journey from corporate to coworking.

Expert Opinion:

“Individual spaces (i.e. the private offices) are leased at rates 60-70% higher (per square foot) than other office spaces in the market. After taking into account the common areas and additional overhead, our space nets a 25% premium over similar office buildings."

Resources:

• Converting Corporate HQ to Coworking