Lessons in coworking after one year
Oh wow! It's been a year since I opened the doors for The Epping Connection! An important milestone for sure. As a novice to both operating coworking spaces, and being a local business owner, I have and continue to learn a lot about this particular niche.
Because our space is focused on hot-desking and coworking, rather than office space, it means having to let people know why working in an open space doesn't mean a lack of productivity. The flex use of our space, though, means I inadvertently designed this space to deliver a harder set of revenues than I thought. Traditional coworking spaces often have private offices available for use for teams, and hot desking as part of the mix. Here at TEC, we have hot desks as our main option.
Our coworkers and members enjoy using our space, because they realise just how productive they can be working from here. Sure they might have working from home arrangements, but when there are minimum ways for you to procrastinate, you get to focus on your work. Many people come back to us precisely because working from home and remote working isn’t the right solution for everyone. In particular, our ergonomic chairs and desks help people to also realise they don’t have the right furniture needed to work from home well.
We are doing many things to be known in Epping, as well as having a digital presence. When people come and use our space, we have about 80% repeat business, which is a good hit rate I reckon.
We've built a great Instagram presence, and many people let us know they remain aware of us because of our IG page. That continues to surprise me, cos I didn't think of IG as a place for people to go to learn or hear about coworking.
Google, and having a Google My Business profile specifically, continue to be the main way people find us. I spend a lot of time on the website to make sure it's SEO optimised, and we are often at the top of natural search results. It's funny when we get SEO firms emailing us to tell us our results aren't good enough - erm I don't think we can get any better than being first in search results!
We try and do what we can to cultivate community. As well as attending networking groups such as ScreenPop and Pop Connect, we also host the weekly Epping Forest Business Group meetings. We've now held our own networking events called Epping Ignites, which are open mic nights based on the Ignite Talks format, held a Xmas Market last year, and a couple of gaming nights for our members to come together and chill out.
Big shoutout to my two community managers who help keep the place in good running shape and are just as invested in continuing to make TEC a good place for people to come and work.
Onto Year 2!
