I am not sure how helpful this will be,as I seeem to be looking at different metrics than you are; and also becaue the demographics are all different. But I'll give it a whirl.
- Specifically I'm interested in the role of sales. Is the community manager expected to sign up members without members talking with the business owner? How do you hire a community manager who can do sales almost as well as, or better than, the business owner? I have contractors rather than employees. My contractor can sign up members without talking to me, but my signature is necessary for the contract. So I have a last review and theoretical veto, though I have never exercised it. I have had somebody (again on contract) just for sales, when I was going after specific target markets. He was better at that because it was what he did. He was paid an amount equal to the first month, just like a real estate broker is. But if you want to hire an employee for sales specifically, then you have to select, measure, and also pay on that basis I think. - Do you have staff who are paid full-time (or half-time or more) who do not do sales? See, this is where I am having trouble. If I want somebody for sales, because I want to develop in a specific market, I get somebody just for sales, and any other work I may ask them to do will be incidental. My current contractors were not chosen for sales and are not measured on it because it is incidental to what they do. They are paid the first month for sales, and one of my contractors can do that math pretty well and has found that she enjoys doing sales. - For every 10 people who visit to tour, or for a trial day, what % do you expect to sign up that day, and what % do you expect to sign up later on? (I'm especially interested in people who sign up for memberships that are over $175 per month.) The only people who sign up that day are people who already know they are going to when they walk in, barring its being a complete disaster that day; they usually have already reviewed the contract in concept before they get here and so on. This is not that many. But again, my main space is in a city of 50,000 people; in Amsterdam, signups that day are far more common. About half the people who come to visit sign up eventually, with eventually being defined as sometime in the next two or three years. Small town, remember? - Do any coworking places sign up more than half of members before the potential members visit? (I know that some places specifically want people to visit before signing up, but I don't have that as a requirement and sometimes people have signed up before visiting, which I always enjoy.) In my Den Bosch location, we have a pilot project in coworking for webshops, multilocation businesses generally, import-export, and so on -- businesss for whom the idea of location is more or less irrelevant. For this pilot, nearly all the businesses sign up sight unseen (other than I assume on Google street view and so on). - Which business owners integrate their coworking places into their second businesses, where the two businesses support each other and share the same vision? What issues have you had with that, and what successes? I integrate coworking into other people's businesses: two of my locations are shared space with an existing business (soon to be four! yay!). Both of the existing ones thought of it as a sort of shop-in-shop concept. One really does not trouble itself with the coworking at all but likes very much having the coworkers which are more or less in the same industry (it is a silkscreen printing shop; they like having the designers, creatives, and ad and graphics folks around) and the other is entertaininly enough a serviced/executive office. So I suppose it is fair to say they are trying out the vision. The new spaces in development are respectively an advertising/PR business and a shipping and logistics business. It is a little like having different teams in the same footie club I find, or having basketball and football teams for the same school. The focus and goals of the different teams will not be the same. The seasons may even be different. The funding will come from different sources. But at the end of the day they have to have a common identity/allied values and they have to be prepared to cheer each other on as it were, when tournament season rolls around. I do find it is very important by the way to keep an eye on the branding and identity aspects and keep those clear. In the shared spaces I have logos for the coworking which are similar to but not the same as that of the existing business. This is more important than you might think as a matter of communication. It is important to have your boundaries clear and to talk about them a good deal at least at the beginning. Just as in a good relationship, you do well to understand and accept the nature of each party and not use this as a way to change them. :-) Cheers, Jeannine -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
