Re: [Coworking] paying staff
Parker is round 2 of the experience, being a successor to Dana. Dana's story is a little different (I didn't bring it up because it didn't exactly address Slate's question). To keep it relatively brief, I met Dana through some friends early on in Indy Hall's existence. She was smart, friendly, extremely outgoing, and in her last year of art school completing a BFA. A few months before graduation, she came to me and said I have no idea what I'm going to do with a BFA after I graduate. Help! Having seen Dana at Indy Hall social events, it was pretty clear to me it was a place she wanted to be. Having also seen Dana run/curate/organize some art shows, it was also pretty obvious that she was organized, and type-A enough to help ME. At the time, Indy Hall wasn't in a position to pay anybody, but personally, I needed some of the things I was doing every day at Indy Hall ripped away from me. The simple administrava still needed doing, but I wasn't going to relinquish it to someone I didn't trust. So rather than Indy Hall hire her, I hired her as a personal assistant. Her #1 job function was to get me to do less Indy Hall work didn't need to be me (which let me focus on the stuff that DID need to be me). The catch was, as Indy Hall COULD afford more, it would. Long story short, she did a phenomenal job of directive #1 in showing me that Indy Hall could run without me, and how. That was a HUGE and important lesson in bringing on help. By virtue of her personality, she also found ways to streamline and optimize the processes I'd created for anything from attendance to billing to making sure we didn't run out of trash bags or paper. She also contributed to a significant improvement in office happiness (not that it was bad, it's just amazing with the right person there to greet you in the morning, or make your day go a little smoother). Again, a personality thing, but something that 2 years later, Parker does as well. *Here's the important part: * Even with Indy Hall's support, I couldn't afford her full time myself forever, so I said look at the rest of Indy Hall's members (probably ~40 people at the time). If someone's doing something interesting to you, ask them if they need help, and don't be afraid to ask to be paid for your time. I basically helped teach her how to be a freelancer. She found a niche in doing freelance customer support for a handful of the products made by people who work at Indy Hall. Again, by virtue of being smart, friendly, intelligent, and a good communicator, she could learn ANYTHING she wanted to and become a great first line of defense customer support person...and multiple part time customer support gigs gave her the flexibility to continue to support Indy Hall as well. Fast forward another 18 months - past Indy Hall's growth into it's new space - Dana tells me that she's got more paying customer support work than she does Indy Hall work...she could use some help for Indy Hall. (Enter the interview where we found Parker and Michelle). By the time we brought on Parker, Dana had actually been offered a full time position doing communications operations for one of the companies that bought a product built by an Indy Hall member. She left Indy Hall and all of her other projects to pursue this chance to focus on this one app, and spent the last 12 months with the company. She even brought on a couple of her other friends to help build her support team. Dana built something a little different than Parker...it's not an iPhone game, but she found an extremely valuable skill in leadership, communications and operations, that can be applied to any business she wants to work with, for, or even start herself. And most importantly, she has the continued support, mentorship, and friendship of Indy Hall where she started out...and still works a few days a month. -Alex /ah indyhall.org coworking in philadelphia On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 4:50 AM, santi martinez santifarr...@gmail.comwrote: Alex, Sorry for deviating the conversation, but do you have ( or any one else in the group ) any other story of success like Parker's one? Can this evolution be expected in a co-working environment, because of the co-workers attitude? I know that this is not 1+1=2, but the truth is that when thinking in starting a co-working space I would never imagine such a fantastic outcome Santi 2010/8/17 Alex Hillman dangerouslyawes...@gmail.com 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+
Re: [Coworking] paying staff
This is a great question - I'm working on it myself. At the moment, I've got the cost of a full-time admin factored into my monthly overhead (which also includes rent, Internet access, Utilities, etc). I determine my membership prices based on that total overhead cost and a certain assumption about how much usage Tech Liminal gets. If I were to be the full-time admin, I'd get to keep the money as profit - in the meantime, I consider myself a monthly member. Cheers, Anca. On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 11:21 AM, 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.comcoworking%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en. -- -=-=-=- Anca Mosoiu Owner, Tech Liminal a...@techliminal.com (510) 220-6660 -- 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.
Re: [Coworking] paying staff
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.comwrote: 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.comcoworking%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.
