Marilee You've gotten some great feedback on the barriers to growth for the human/"community" aspects of coworking. Let me add a couple of thoughts regarding the physical and operational aspects. After all, coworking facilities are real places with real expenses, offering a real product to customers from whom we expect/need to be compensated. And, in many cases we owners/operators have ambitions for our coworking operations to be our primary livelihood. So while there may not be any barriers to growth of the human community, there are real practical challenges and barriers to the business operations.
*We should expect increasing competition in the marketplace.* The barrier to entry to open a cowork facility is relatively low. It is unavoidable that some communities will eventually be "overbuilt". We should expect the serviced office/executive suites industry (Regus et al) to wake up... at some point... and view coworking venues as competition. We should expect competition from new players in the commercial real estate world who are scrambling to figure out what to do with a massive over supply of high quality office space. *We need to be able to operate our facilities at a profit, however modest*. Facilities that are running at a loss or at just breakeven will not be able to sustain themselves against competition or unforeseen changes in the market. We need to to have sufficient profit margin to maintain our spaces, invest in generating awareness to attract new users as we experience turnover from our founding/first generation members, pay our staff and overhead etc. Yes the community - the people, left to freely interact and self organize ARE the culture, the heart and soul of our cowork facilities - *however the spaces we create and the administrative processes we establish for this interaction are the backbone. *How we design these spaces and the business model we apply, has an enormous influence on member productivity and have a substantial impact on our cost of operations. *To survive and grow as a movement* in a competitive marketplace we need to look for the same level of refinement and optimization that other real estate driven businesses have discovered. Look to successful hotels and coffee shops for inspiration. These companies are constantly looking for marginal gains in all aspects of their operations to survive and grow. This may sound like "going corporate" to some of us - but whether we remain individual independent operators with a single great facility or aspire to grow to have multiple locations in a region (as many of you do and or hope to!) scaling will demand paying attention to the myriad of small physical and operational details....efficient utilization of space, effective marketing, simplified administration etc. Mark On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 4:50 PM, marileebowlescarey < [email protected]> wrote: > What do people think are the key barriers to growth in coworking? > > Marilee > > -- > 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]<coworking%[email protected]> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en. > > -- Mark Gilbreath PO Box 2830 Ketchum, ID 83340 mobile 208-720-8107 skype mfgilbreath twitter markgilbreath -- 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.
