Slate reached out privately, but I thought that others might find my response useful:
Hi Slate, I can't speak for Julie (Hi Julie!!) or Tony, but I can tell you that we've paid one part time staff member a fixed amount of monthly compensation that covered them for their time spent with us, but also intentionally hired people who really wanted to work from Indy Hall on their own personal/professional development. Since it doesn't take even close to 40 hours a week to take care of the office management of our ~5000 square foot office and 100+ person membership, and it's totally up to them to create even more efficient ways of getting their work for us done, they can make as MUCH time as they like for their own projects and essentially get free access to explore their dreams. Parker, our current office manager, recently released his first iPhone game http://brainarang.com Prior to coming to Indy Hall, he never thought he could make a video game. In nearly a year of working at Indy Hall, he's learned communication, team building, leadership, creative collaboration, iteration, production, and more. It's like the best internship ever. In fact, we initially ran it as an unpaid internship, see: http://www.indyhall.org/blog/2009/08/20/the-indyhall-internship/ to work under our first office manager (who was my assistant). We used a ~3 month internship to pilot a successor to Dana, and found Parker, who's absolutely phenomenal and worth every penny we pay him (I wish we could pay him more)! Bottom line is: GREAT help is hard to come by, and they need to be compensated fairly. I don't personally think a commission is fair because a single staff member isn't going to make the difference between 20 and 40 members, so they don't really have realistic ways to increase their compensation to a fair rate. It looks to me more like you're trying to hire a sales person than what a coworking space really needs: *a den mother*. Finally, and probably most importantly, the BIGGEST reason we only need to pay one person a part time wage is because Indy Hall was built as a community first, and we heavily included all of our members in the construction of our clubhouse and continue to do so on a daily basis. So many of the things that most offices would have to have an office minion take care of get taken care of by our members because they're proud of the home they helped create and inhabit. That's more valuable than any "cost savings" approach we could have ever dreamed up. Best of luck on your new effort in Ct! Just remember: community comes first. Everything else is gravy. -Alex /ah indyhall.org coworking in philadelphia On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 2:21 PM, newhaven coworker <slate.ball...@gmail.com>wrote: > I was wondering if anyone has come up with a good formula for paying > staff? > > Is there a percentage of monthly membership income that goes towards > paying staff? > > Many of the posts on that have to do with paying staff are from > several years ago. If anyone has any insight into this area our > Connecticut coworking space would appreciate the input. Thanks > > SB > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Coworking" group. > To post to this group, send email to cowork...@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com<coworking%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To post to this group, send email to cowork...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en.
