Hi Jen, Congrats on your soon-to-be-open space.
On Oct 22, 2009, at 10:08 PM, JeninVT wrote: > > One question (among the thousand ) on my list...some potential members > have asked if I will be providing mailbox services at the space. I > did a quick search in this group because I thought I saw some > discussion on this previously but couldn't find the thread. I *just* went through this just last week. We've had 3 members explicitly ask for it, and many others mention it (fyi, we have over 45 paying members as of today.) We launched less than 1 month ago and so we've not had lots of time to validate our approach, so take all of this with a grain of salt. > Pros I see in doing this include providing a great service for at-home > businesses (we've all been there) that need a professional address > other than a home address or a PO box address. What I've heard is that for certain members it is a huge plus to offer postal addresses that are not denoted with "po box." > Cons are: > - space constraint How much space do you have? Both inside and immediately outside of your facility? > - what if I lose mail > - liability That's a huge liability, unless you do what we did. > - I'm not open on Saturday yet If you do what we did, you can just give the post office access to your space, or have it delivered outside. > Anyone doing this successfully? Tips? Does the USPS care about this? Basically you need to be set up as a multi-tenant facility and get a USPS approved set of multi-tenant commercial post office boxes. That's what they require and AFAIK the liability essentially goes away because that is was the USPS "blesses." For examples: http://www.mailboxes.com/Commercial-Mailboxes.asp If you have the ability to mount one outside you could get something like these: http://www.mailboxworks.com/cbu-mailboxes.html One thing I think can be done, I'm assuming can be done, but don't know for sure is the ability to assign a "suite" number to each box and thus allow your members to have "Suites" based on the box number. We haven't verified that is possible with the USPS but if MailBoxes etc. can do it I'm not sure why we can't. Now we were super lucky; we found an indoor freestanding unit with 8 small boxes and 16 larges boxes on Craigslist for $400, delivered. Yeah! http://img88.yfrog.com/i/ryfb.jpg/ > What do you charge? We want to empower our members as much as possible so we are charging $5/month for the small boxes and $10/month for the larger boxes, on a first-come-first-serve month-to-month basis. That's much cheaper than most P.O. boxes but they do have to be members to get a box. If you have to buy a new unit you can probably get $15 and $25 respectively per month rental for your boxes, maybe? Hope this helps. -Mike Schinkel Ignition Alley Atlanta Coworking http://ignitionalley.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
