Written by Mike Kriel, CEO of Launch Workplaces
You’re a commercial building owner, and you’ve got a floor coming back. A tenant gave notice six months ago, you’re three months from empty, and you don’t have a prospect lined up for those 25,000 square feet.
As that’s unfolding, you keep hearing the same thing: good buildings should have flexible office space in them, and you’re starting to be convinced.
Now you’re weighing the options:
Do you stand up a coworking operation yourself, or do you bring in an operator who does this every day?
While a great operator can make coworking look easy, it’s harder than it looks. So, the real question becomes whether you can, should, and want to do it yourself.
This article explores everything that goes into launching, filling, and managing a successful location, so you can make an educated decision.
The two tranches of a coworking operation
Generally speaking, there are two buckets of work that apply in coworking:
- What you need in place just to open the doors
- What you need to run it and keep it full
They’re both vital, so missteps in either phase can be costly.
Tranche #1: the pre-opening elements
The first consideration you should make is all the pieces you need in play, just to open a coworking location.
For context, our opening checklist at Launch Workplaces runs more than 240 tasks, and it takes us 90 days to open a location.
For the purposes of this article, the first tranche breaks into three big pieces.
1. A technology backbone
You need hardware, fiber, and access points, at the bare minimum. A handful of companies in the industry supply all of it, so call a couple.
They’ll run a heat map of your space, recommend components, and give you options on how to pay: cash, a lease, or a 36-month term with a dollar buyout.
Then comes the part people forget: monitoring.
If you build it in-house instead of contracting it out, you’re now responsible for:
- Uptime
- Security
- A failsafe system
- Spillover capacity
- A second internet connection for when the first one drops
If you’ve never set that up before, it’s a headache.
2. Operating software
You need a platform that handles billing, onboarding, payables, reporting, and invoicing, sitting on top of your hardware.
The trick is knowing where to look and what good looks like.
This probably isn’t your world, and that’s fine. But it is an operator’s world.
A good operator runs the same systems at every location, which makes scaling and staff replacement easier.
3. The right staff on the floor
Whether you call them a community director or a director of membership, this is the person who runs the place day-to-day, and the role requires a specific skill set.
The right person:
- Is authentic
- Understands a budget
- Can sell a little
- Stays cordial
- Holds a professional environment together
It isn’t a rare skillset, but the right person makes a real difference.
So, where do they come from? You either ask someone internal to change their whole job, hire from outside, or train someone up.
The tech, the software, and the right person are your foundation.
Trache #2: Ongoing operations and management
Open doors aren’t the goal. A full, happy space is. This is where the work gets less obvious.
Generally speaking, there are four foundational elements.
1. Community-building
How do members actually meet each other? Are you running a food and beverage program? If so, you’ve signed up to answer a string of questions: how often, who buys it, who sets it up, who cleans it up, and are you stocking what members want or just the snacks you like because you own the building?
At a large center, that alone can swallow someone’s week.
2. Events and the rules around them
As an extension of the last point, events are generally accepted as a core element of a coworking community.
A happy hour every Thursday sounds simple until you’re deciding:
- Whether to serve alcohol at all
- What the rules are
- Who plays bartender when someone’s had enough
- Whether you’re doing breakfasts and holiday events, which holidays, and how each one runs
Defining how your space operates and to what standard is a skill in its own right.
3. The nuts and bolts
Typically, “nuts and bolts” feels softer than “the million technical elements required to run something.”
That’s been used here on purpose.
In this case, the “nuts and bolts” are the unglamorous layer that never stops:
- Printers
- Paper
- Office supplies, the phones
- Transferring a call without dropping it
The minutiae keep coming, and they collectively help prop up your entire member experience..
4. Marketing
Filling flexible space is its own discipline. Posting on CoStar and hoping a broker calls is not a plan.
You’ll need a plan (and a team) for:
- SEO
- Pay-per-click
- Google Business Profile
- Reviews and how you generate them
- How you measure whether any of it is working
- Where AI fits into all of this now, for better or worse
The list runs long.
So, back to the almighty question of whether you can, should, or want to open a coworking operation as a DIY endeavor…
The answer’s going to be largely subjective, but be honest about your means, your patience, and your expertise.
When a floor comes back, and you’ve got lead time, it’s tempting to dabble and dip a toe in.
But before you do, sit down and answer a few questions:
- Do you have the means?
- Do you have the patience?
- Do you have the expertise in-house, or the appetite to build it?
- Are you doing this in one building, or across your whole portfolio?
Here’s some perspective…
After COVID, when work-from-anywhere took off, some of the largest REITs in the country decided to build this as an internal capability.
They committed hundreds of millions of dollars and countless hours into making it happen, and the results vary widely, building to building and company to company.
If the biggest, best-resourced owners in the business find this hard, that should tell you something:
A good operator makes it look easy because that’s the job
Walk into a well-run space, and you’ll think, ” This isn’t that hard.”
It’s supposed to feel that way.
It’s the same reason a pro athlete makes their sport look effortless. You watch a clean golf shot and figure you could pull it off with a little practice and a bit of coaching.
When people do something well, it looks easy from the outside. So, don’t let that lead you into a project you’re not prepared for.
For transparency, none of this is a reason not to do it. It’s just a reason to do your homework first.
Go in with eyes wide open, because it’s not as simple as a good operator makes it look.
For a full breakdown of how to open, run, and manage a profitable coworking space, download the Commercial Landlord’s Guide.
