Hello all. I wanted to follow the posting guidelines and introduce myself (Molly) and my business partner Heidi. We have been running our space since June of 2006, but I only just discovered this group yesterday. I will give a brief overview of our business, but you may get more of an idea by looking at our website: http://northstaroffices.com.
Our business is North Star Offices. We came up with the idea for our business in 2005, and opened our doors in 2006. We have a relatively small space - we started with 1000 sq ft, and recently expanded to about 3000 sq ft. We have a mix of private offices that we rent out mostly part-time (people rent for 1 or 2 days/week, mostly women or moms who are trying to get a business going on a part-time schedule), and a coworking space that started out to be about half of our square footage, but has shrunk to just 4 desks because we have been so much more successful renting our private offices than renting time in our coworking space. We have tried a lot of different ideas over the past 2 1/2 years to reach our customers, and have tried to offer plans that work the best for them, especially in the coworking area. We are unique (I think) in that a big percentage of our tenants are mental health therapists, largely because my business partner is a therapist and she was able to tap into that community successfully. The downside of this clientele is that they have to have private offices to do their work, and the coworking space has not been of any interest to them. We came up with this business idea because both Heidi and I were trying to get our own businesses off the ground, and we needed/wanted office space to work in, but we found that part-time office space was very hard to find in our area. Our tenants are others who want part- time office space, but also people who, like us, want to interact with others during their workday even though they are mostly working independently. Our tenants like getting to know the others using our office space, and we've been successful with having semi-regular "networking" meetings with our tenants where they can share ideas and resources with each other. I'm very excited to have found this group, and I look forward to reading through old posts in the next few days to find out more about everyone here, the issues you've been discussing, and to see what ideas I can get from all of you that can help my business. I also hope to be able to contribute something based on our experiences running North Star Offices for the past few years. -Molly, co-owner of North Star Offices --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
