Transcript for:
Small Town Co-Working

welcome so we are talking today about small town co-working i think today more than ever smaller towns and even rural areas want to support local entrepreneurs business owners and even remote workers who are now free to roam the country with workspace amenities and uh even the community they need to be productive and stay connected but we know it is hard to find a sustainable business model for smaller co-working spaces so my guest today is brian watson he is the co-founder of alt space and he is working on a model that is evolving over time that works to solve this problem of how do we support all the folks in more remote areas that want also want access to a great place to work but to make the business model work so brian is going to share his perspective today brian thank you for joining me yeah thanks for having me on so brian reached out and said let's you know do a catch-up and he caught me up in our pre-chat last week on what he's up to and i said we definitely need to share this because we have a lot of listeners who want to solve this problem so brian can you let's just kind of start with you know a little bit about your story sure your background and sort of the like how did this what was the moment when you're like i i see you know you had the vision for for making this work and tell us where are you uh dialing in from today dialing in so yeah well you're not dialing in so we're calling in from telluride colorado um which is a mountain town in the southwest uh portion of colorado um a little bit of my background you know we got to to talk a little bit last week and it was a fire hose conversation i feel like but totally i think this will slow it down today it's been a fire hose uh experience over the last couple years you know i think as we've seen so much of the industry change and so many of the consumer behavior shifts that we've seen take place and so i grew up in grand junction which is on the western slope of colorado and have always had a huge passion for entrepreneurship you know i believe that entrepreneurs are the greatest tool we have in society to solve some of these big challenges and we should do whatever we can to support them and so um you know i helped some buddies build businesses and ended up moving back to grand junction and when i moved back uh the question was was there anyone else like us and so um we didn't know and so we we actually started an organization uh my friend josh hudnall and myself uh called launch westco which was all about kind of building the ecosystem and trying to gather uh like-minded entrepreneurs um in western colorado we did tons of events tons of programming uh over two years we found 1500 entrepreneurs that no one knew existed and so um the question after that was sorry i thought it was on uh do not disturb i am now so um anyway so the uh we found 1500 entrepreneurs and we said what the heck are we gonna do with all these people and so that's when we actually found space in grand junction and okay you know i think through that experience you know um we've seen that co-working spaces have the ability to kind of um transform communities and have a transformative impact on communities and especially in rural communities um you know accelerate i was one of the co-founders of proximity and so helped kind of grow the company over the last several years i recently transitioned out in the end of last year which we can get into a little bit my wife and i have started co-working spaces um and and so anyways huge passion for rural entrepreneurship and um i think that co-working spaces play a vital part of transforming that and i think that you know right now we've seen this huge shift to zoo and talked about to remote work and we're seeing you know just so many people relocating to um kind of these rural areas within the state of colorado and i know you're seeing that all across the country which is really cool you know there's a lot of conversations in the economic development world of like how do we diversify these economies how do we bring in these new jobs and you know uh people did not think the answer was coveted but uh you know we're seeing that happen organically right and i think one of the advantages of living in in smaller rural communities is you know access to the outdoors is right at your fingertips and you know right outside and and so lots of people are choosing to live in communities like this or move back to the towns that they grew up in and they're bringing their big city jobs which is really cool and so the next question um is how do we build co-working spaces in rural communities in a way that is sustainable because i think that that's another big challenge that i've seen over and over and over again um not only in the spaces that we've run and operated but you know in with my experience with proximity and getting to work with so many of these communities across the nation that's always the big question right is like how do we run these things the scale is not on the same you know yeah in the same universe as like a wee work or something like that where you've got small space but huge heart and huge passion yeah right yeah it's it's almost like flipped so real quick before we go any further how do you how big was grand junction how do you define rural like that's a good question population ish because brian i grew up um in a town i would have to look at the population there were no stoplights and more cows than people i cannot help every time somebody says rural that's all i can picture and i keep i always think i don't even imagine there's not even like a grocery store there's like a in the town where i grew up there's like a combo like feed store grocery mart like something else yep so that's what i picture when you say rural so i feel like we should like love you know it's a good question and um is worth kind of defining scope right and so grand junction is the biggest city um on the western slope it's about 60 000 um it's 150 000 if you include kind of the adjacent towns which is fruit palisade which make up the grand valley um and then but we also have spaces in montrose uh ridgeway and telluride you know so telluride's like 2500 people so really um changes a lot my my wife runs a accelerator up here in telluride and um you know the the language that she uses is rural and frontier communities which is even smaller than rural and so yeah maybe that's what you're thinking about is uh you know the one stop by town or you know places that are are really small yeah okay yeah so six so sixty thousand and under like is that yeah and like montrose is you know smaller than grand junction you know ridgeway is uh i'd have to get you know is in that like yeah people live there yeah um same with tell you okay really small yeah yeah truckee which is the mountain town near us is i think north side of the lake is like 10 000 south side might be 30. so um yeah okay great so now we can sort of picture so how big how many square feet was the space um in grand junction so the spacing junction is uh about uh five you know it depends on the the areas that you're talking about there was a big event center but like 2500 um 5 000 if you include some of the [Music] other spaces building and stuff yeah um wow i think ridgeway is uh between two and three and our space intelligence is eighteen hundred okay there we go yeah so the range of kind of six and under again okay perfect i think that helps people kind of see okay so you like very kind of eloquently talked me through yeah the problems the challenges with smaller spaces like you have big goals in terms of what you want to solve and the economic i mean this whole conversation is so interesting right now because so many of these towns are trying to figure out housing right like all the things integrating people who didn't work here before and now they are and you know mixing with the locals and uh and i mean i'll let you color it in the fundamental challenge with a small space is that the economics just don't really work like it's if you're renting the space which you'll have to tell us if all of your spaces are leased then it's just a like a a rental arbitrage model and you need some more scale usually when i run a pro forma like if you don't own the building you can't pay a community manager is that one big issue sort of under 4 000 i mean it depends on a lot of things what's your rent you know all the things so maybe in these markets rent is cheaper although i suspect that problem is starting to maybe flip too and yes there's no real estate in those markets because the people who you know got in and took it and so now rents are probably going up so yeah hard to sort of profit pay someone to staff it and then you know you talked about i'd love you to dive into like when folks get grants to run spaces like this and that runs out then there's not really an underlying business model that can move forward so yeah talk a little bit more about like the challenges and then how you're going after dressing so yeah so again i think you know one of the things that we say a lot of times is that co-working spaces especially in rural communities are kind of required infrastructure for communities that are wanting to attract and retain professionals working in the digital economy right and so they're really important resources i think a lot of um conversations that you hear around rural communities also is like broadband and connectivity you know the economics are challenging in those towns as well and so because there's not density like you have in a city right and so it's really cost prohibitive to have fiber run to every home when there's you know acres or miles in between homes sometimes and so uh my parents got dial up like five years ago or broadband yeah like i can remember them for some reason my mom would like chase the internet guy and like plead with him to run the lines totally and like you know so you know as all co-working operators know fast reliable internet is so important and um is like the most important asset of your uh co-working space right and so in a lot of these um towns if there's not that infrastructure built in place then you know co-working spaces become either the gas station or the tesla's charging station for uh folks that are working um uh remotely in these areas and so you know i was talking with a guy who has a techstars company and he was like we're remote but remote is about flexibility and about lifestyle when i'm working if i'm pitching to investors or if i'm talking to our board like i can't be looking like a doofus because i'm remote right i need somewhere that's reliable i think that's a huge point brand right it's acceptable to be wherever you want but if you're trying to get business done and do deals the internet is the flexibility is important but you need that uh security and the ability to to have a reliable place to work um wherever you're at and so uh i think that a lot of that has has shifted too like as more people are going remote you know there's the the the utility of these co-working spaces are are more important than ever especially in a lot of these small and rural communities so um to go back to to circle back around to the original question i think we were talking a lot about sustainability right and so uh sustainability has a lot to do with the scale of these companies and co-working spaces are so dynamic which is one of the beautiful things about them but you know there are community centers they're places where people can get work done you know uh pre-covered they were a place where lots of entrepreneurial events and pitch competitions took place and stuff like that and so um your community managers had a lot of different roles um and and so the question is like how do you do all the things with such a small space and so what we saw is you know especially in rural communities i think co-working spaces um are owned or operated by kind of two personas one is real estate developer who you know likes the idea of having a co-working space and so they they incorporate it into a larger project they have the scale they have the scope um the the other one is um in rural communities that we see a lot is economic development entities whether that's a chamber a government entity an incubator whatever and so i think one of the challenges that we've seen there is you know a lot of economic development entities may have a building that already has fiber hooked up right how it works a lot of times and so it's like cool we can get a grant and convert this building that's not being occupied that much into a co-working space one of the challenges that i've seen take place there is that you know economic developers wear a lot of hats and have a lot of roles and so you know when when you convert a building into a co-working space and stuff like that again co-working spaces are dynamic there are supposed to be there's events community building management of the space management of the people and so that's another hat that they take on in addition to their existing role which comes back to the whole sustainability thing whether it's financial sustainability or time management sustainability if that makes sense um and so this is this is just this is a big challenge you know uh running rural co-working spaces is hard work um but it's but it's important work and we've seen um we've we've seen the benefits of communities that invest in kind of co-working and the entrepreneurial community that it attracts right and so um the question is how do you do this sustainably um because what happens a lot of times in rural communities is you get this like cyclical nature where we kind of talked about that where it's like when we moved back and started launch west coast to kind of help boost the entrepreneurial ecosystem in our town were in college you know so it was like volunteer a lot of volunteer time and energy and work and we built a lot of critical mass but then we started companies and weren't able to focus on that stuff as much and so then you go back and like a lot of that momentum has jumbled over the years or whatever or you get a grant which you may not get the next grant cycle and so then does it stay there you know and i think what's what's really important to build entrepreneurial ecosystems there's a really good book called um startup communities by brad feld and he talks about uh building entrepreneurial ecosystems is a 20-year commitment in that you have to commit 20 years every single day you never get closer but it really needs to be this long-term consistent commitment to doing the work and building something if if you don't have those 20 years committed you get the cyclical cycles that we're trying to break and so that's a big challenging uh problem that's always uh eaten at me i guess and and um you know i've gone to conferences with people all over the nation and i always think like okay someone's gonna have this like magic bullet solution and everyone's always dealing with the same problem is like the the sustain the sustainability of these things and so um really the goal with alt space is to try to build a model that um creates sustainability for running and operating these spaces that can lay a foundation of sustainable revenue so that we can hire and put people in long-term solutions to do long-term work once the co-working spaces are running and and we were able to kind of scale up our operations and we'll talk about how we're doing that we can hire people to do regional programming long term and we've built a sustainable model and so that's what we're working on cool so um wait i have a guy roz question for you did you have entrepreneurs in your family you're like a entrepreneur problem solver guy or was that my so i guess kind of two things my grandpa was a business guy and um we would my um we would always go to chicago and i always loved the kind of business lifestyle they lived in like a high high-rise tower uh right across the street from lincoln park and um okay you know so i was always really interested in that he had built companies and and done a lot of that stuff and then my dad was a pastor and so is a pastor and so um growing up in the church we did you know have done community building forever yeah that's interesting yeah and so much you know there we were throwing events we were doing concerts we were doing like all the community building work um and so and i would help out with like the youth group and doing all these things and so um there there was a lot of transfer i guess yeah that's yeah a little bit of both solving business problems sometimes through community yeah um okay so yeah so talk about the model and how you're approaching this and it's a work in progress right like you mentioned well we're trying this and we're still trying to solve this but totally and and talk about the you know the bigger vision and kind of where you are now because you have five how many five locations five locations yeah and so you know this really came out of cobid um you know there so to give a back story my my wife got a job up in telluride she runs the tell your adventure network which is a small business support organization they have they do a lot of different things um i was remote uh we started working out of a co-working space in telluride um that closed at the beginning of covid uh we're in a mountain town and so everyone's got you know tiny little condos that we're living out of and and doing the work from home shared at the kitchen table when the kitchen table is also in our kitchen living room like you know we didn't have any space and so it was challenging uh the the first few months of covid we found there was a real estate company that had three locations in town and they didn't need that and so it was really set up to be turnkey a turnkey you know co-working space and so we talked to the landlords and did a rev share with them a management agreement which i know there's been a lot of innovation on uh management agreements through covet and stuff and i think it's been really good it it allowed us to go in and kind of de-risk the whole situation which we would not have been able to do otherwise and so you know i had a full-time job my wife bonnie has a full-time job and so we wanted the co-working space to get out of the house and it displaced everyone else in the co-working space that we were working out of and so um but the the goal had to be kind of automation from the start because we were working full-time well i think that that's a great point is because smaller spaces they don't there's a lot of like whys to do them right people get passionate and they need to be a part of their communities but if they can't kick off a lot of profit then the people who run them to your point have other roles be it economic development or they have the job that pays the rent or the mortgage like that's the reality right and so probably whoever was running you know the the one before close was like well we got other stuff we're dealing with here we can't keep doing this and not really probably making money yeah so totally we can't do sustainability or like the opportunity costs of doing the thing that you're passionate about versus doing the thing that pays the bills you know right something's going to give a lot and so anyway so we opened the co-working space with kind of the goal of can we build this thing to be as automated as possible it was the question and it was a great test space it's the space that i'm in today it's 1800 square feet um you know and so uh one of my the hunches i guess that we started or the hypotheses is that consumer behavior had changed during covid you know the qr code got its comeback you know everyone's um uh used to doing more like self-service through covid and stuff like that and so we thought that there was maybe potential um to implement more processes that allowed people to kind of sign up themselves we could implement like triggered emails that walk them through how to do that and how to get into the spaces and stuff and so that's how we started um a few months after that i uh spoke with um with the prox team about the locations that they had because we started as as co-working spaces and then built software for managing them you know during the evolution of the company really a lot of the focus has been on building the software company and so you know we saw that a lot of the spaces kind of really slowed down during covet as you saw all across the country and so it was like cool we have this one location we're interested in this model in order to make this thing sustainable we need to scale it up and so what if we took the spaces off the hands of the software company which created a clear line of delineation which was nice uh yeah and so um so we spent last year kind of rebranding all the locations and tying them together one of the things that we've seen in rural areas is that a lot of people have regional jobs or whatever travel a lot and so being able to seamlessly access all the different locations we do our grocery shopping in montrose uh because it's so expensive to do grocery shopping up here so we drive down we work for the day get our groceries head back to junction or head back to telluride or whatever and so it creates this really fluid dynamic way of working um which i think is really valuable and so yeah so over the last year we've gone from one to five locations um we're running all of them um automated uh which has done a couple different things um i think choosing the automation strategy has um allowed us to develop systems we may not have developed before or test things that we may not have tested before but i think ultimately ended up being a lot better right and i think the the trade-offs were a lot better and now you know as we're as we're scaling that up we're building something that we do have the square footage uh capable of building something that's more sustainable if that makes sense um you know just to kind of talk about the the strategy or testing things you know when we first started you know there was more than one uh frustrated conversations with people not being able to get into the space easily or whatever um but after those kind of uh conversations and iterating the communication and the emails that we're sending we've had over 250 drop-ins in the last year that have successfully got in uh that are using the space that give good feedback you know i'm so happy this resource was here i'm visiting my family i didn't have a place to work or whatever i'm really glad these are non-members these are not people who like have sort of stumbled through the tech process and forgive you because they're members they're like coming in right as sort of cold consumers yep yeah which is often the most challenging membership type to onboard is your job totally when i have those conversations sometimes with small spaces like don't do the drop-ins because it's so high maintenance and how do you handle it right if you're because oftentimes the owner will say well i can't be there all day right so what if the drop-in comes when you're not there hey i just wanted to jump in really quickly before we continue with our discussion if you're working on opening a co-working space i want to invite you to join me for my free masterclass three behind-the-scenes secrets to opening a co-working space if you're working on opening a co-working space i want to share the three decisions that i've seen successful operators make when they're creating their co-working business the master class is totally free it's about an hour it includes some q a if you'd like to join me you can register at everythingcoworking.com forward slash masterclass if you already have a co-working space i want to make sure you know about community manager university community manager university is a training and development platform for community managers and it can be for owner operators it has content training resources templates from day one to general manager the platform includes many courses that cover the major buckets of the community manager role from community management operations sales and marketing finance and leadership the content is laid out in a graduated learning path so the community manager can identify what content is most relevant to them depending on their experience and kind of jump in from there we provide a live brand new training every single month for the community manager group we also host a live q a call every single month so that the community managers can work through any challenges that they're having or opportunities uh get ideas from other community managers build their own peer network we also have a private slack group for the group so if you're interested in learning more you can go to everythingcoworking.com forward slash community manager i would love for you also to talk about i was thinking about this after a conversation there's like a lot of sort of framing around um what makes a co-working space and like the community piece of it people expect there's a staff person and so this idea of having like automated there's no community manager which makes it more sustainable but did you have to sort of talk yourself into like that's okay it's like like so talk yeah talk about kind of the bigger picture because i think i talk to people who want to do this and i start with saying you should probably figure out but loosely because i'm not sure i would have believed it myself after like i think to your point there's a lot of like conversations about how do you solve this problem but no one has really taken a stand there may be others yeah i've heard of models here and there frankly i think people sort of dismissed that idea that like we could have a space and it's not going to be staffed so totally yeah yeah tell me more about how you are getting over that and helping members shift their expectations so again i think you need to be clear on like what to expect in expectations yeah and and co-working spaces need to be clear on expectations anyways right like are you doing the dishes or am i doing the dishes like totally there's so many am i picking up your coffee mug or are you scale yeah sliding scale right and anyway so um you know i think being clear about here's who we are here's what to expect and in order for this to work this is what we need you to do as well um so i think that that is an important thing to be able to communicate um you know the although we don't have full-time space managers we do have ambassadors at um each one of our locations um which is great for um uh it's great to have that presence in the space right and our ambassadors are selected because um they have a vision of the purpose of the co-working spaces as well and and want to engage the community they want to connect with the people that are moving into town and get them plugged in and stuff like that and so we're aligned philosophically with our ambassadors um it's it's not someone just there to get someone online because we've solved for that already we talked uh the other day about kind of the three roles of a space manager which is cleaning is one-third of the job the other third is you know events and you know getting people signed on and then the last is really the community development effort we've tried to eliminate the the two um the cleaning portion and the um the onboarding portion and really just allow them to focus on the funnest part of the job which is community building and and getting to meet friends um and so that's one of the ways that we've kind of helped um bring people in and get also the job description for that ambassador role is then laser clear right because this is the hard part about hiring community managers is those three roles and their you know can it's like are they good at marketing are they good at you know equi you know bringing in members are they are they all do they also have a little ocd and they notice when the conversation needs to be clean it's like no nobody is great at all those things and so you've just like narrowed it down to i just need you to do one thing yeah well and again it's like when you start a business with a hypothesis which is like i think we can do this we've got to be laser focused on nailing that first before we spread ourselves too thin on trying to accomplish these other things that we haven't you know all these things are pandora's boxes basically and so yeah um i think you know the to kind of go back to the community building piece you know i think one of the biggest challenges that every co-working space has dealt with for the last two years is like this huge portion of our business and the huge the why of our business was taken away you know and i think that that's been a huge challenge for co-working space operators because space operators are community builders when you talk to them you know like that's who they are that's why they got into the business and uh that's been the i think the biggest challenge over the last two years and so where we've really focused is like okay the game changed and we have you know this this window in time to focus on just the mechanics of like getting people in and functionally working in the space uh which is kind of the utility part of the business it's not the sexy part of the business it's not even you know the really fun part of the business but it is an important part of the business and if we can nail that it will allow us you know the thing that i'm i'm really excited to go dive back into as we've kind of built up these systems and and things are working pretty good you know um is okay well how do you start doing community engagement and building more at scale right and which i think leads us kind of into the next the next hypothesis of this thing which is uh is this possible and how do you do it and i think you know my my answer to that would be yes you know i think um we've seen virtual communities pop up everywhere over covid we've seen accelerators that you know support businesses run virtually over covet and so the question is not whether it's possible because we're seeing it take place all over um i think the question is uh what am i going to do to shift my strategy to make this possible and the way that we did it before is not gonna work because the world changed around us you know and so um so i think that that's the next biggest question is okay well under the new context of how we're operating our co-working spaces and how communities building and even the the community members that are coming into our co-working spaces have changed you know like when we were first starting we did three events a month every month for two years straight they were all focused on entrepreneurs and all of that stuff you know all of my members now when i call them i'm like where are you from what do you do they're remote workers that are relocating here not the entrepreneurial community that we had originally right and so the services that we provide the programs that we do you know maybe these folks are more interested in going mountain biking with a bunch of new people right because yeah they're humans too remote workers are humans too but they don't have the same why as an entrepreneur totally they want to meet people that right that align with this new lifestyle which is a problem you know that co-working spaces can solve too so yeah totally and you know i think as an entrepreneur it's not my job to dictate whatever you know it's my job to to observe and see where do i need to move in order to provide value to our customers and who are our customers and what are they looking for right and so i think that that's really important um i never want to lose the entrepreneurial bend like that's what i have a big passion for yeah um however you know i think so many of the conversations especially in rural communities comes back to how do we diversify our economy how do we do all these things and it's like the men and women who are moving to these places bringing these jobs are diversifying the economy in a profound way you know that that no strategy has ever really had success um like this you know and so we are um uniquely situated to engage in all these new people coming to town and get them plugged in and maybe they work for linkedin today but maybe we get them plugged into a startup tomorrow you know and so um i don't know i think that that's co-working spaces are like i said like uniquely positioned to to connect with that new asset that's coming to these communities and engage those folks so i'd love to dive a little deeper i so i also love you're doing what is i think challenging for people with uh your personality which is a lot of folks listening which is like nail the logistics right like you said the sort of not sexy part get people in the space smoothly and then layer on the community piece so um i'd love to hear how you're automating like what does the workflow look like yeah and you you we sort of glossed over this but you come from proximity we're one of the co-founders yep so i'm sure that proximity plays a big part in your tech stack so yeah yeah so share a little bit about that and then we could go into the okay what do we what do you think that that community layer looks like because i'm sure people are like what do you mean automate and who handles it who does the onboarding it sounds you know automation sounds scary right and and uh and and complicated but you know i always joking like we live in the future you know there's there's technology today that's available that was not available 10 years ago and and for relatively inexpensive um cost right and so you know it's our job again as entrepreneurs to say what is the technology that's available to me that's going to uh leverage my capability right and so you know in order to do all this stuff we use proximity um you know one of the things that's been really helpful and we could never do it without them is you know they have door access system they have automated billing they have um you know everything is a digital app on your phone and so you know by using their technology and we can tie all of our spaces together which create that seamless travel capability we can tie all of our wi-fi networks together so you sign up once and get instant access to all the locations and so you know proximity is our number one tech stack that we use to allow us to kind of lever leverage up the scale of our of our business the other nice thing is because all of our spaces are using the same infrastructure which is uh proximity store access system their billing system the the integration that they have with meraki that means we can unify the user experience and the onboarding experience because everyone's doing it in the same way same thing yeah and so really it's okay what are the you know how do we you know maybe we need to layer on some communication on top of that when people are coming in and walk them through how to sign up on the proximity system and how to download the app and how to where they need to go when they get in the building right because the community manager is not sitting at the desk explaining that six times a day yep right but again as going all in on this process allows us to refine the exact same experience over and over and over again and so you know it when when we first started like i said you know there was people like angry calls like i can't get in or whatever but because we had the same user experience then it was just my job to say we're going to iterate that we're going to make it better we're going to make it better and now cool someone signs up i get it emailed trigger goes off walks them through the whole process no questions every everything works right and so we can continue to to iterate on that process and make it more and more streamlined so i'm curious about the lazy human problem because the lazy human problem is why members you know walk up to the community manager and say how do i book a conference room when there's an app for that and they could do it on their own so do you get people who just like won't won't read your emails or won't like follow along your automation path yeah so can they call someone is there like customer service somewhere okay yep they can so um i would say eighty percent ninety percent of you know the initial questions like this goes back you've done consulting with co-working spaces all the time right and it's like you know if there's problems or challenges it's the it's my fault because they didn't communicate it well um right and so if we communicate it well if we onboard people well we don't have those issues and that's the nice thing about kind of a templated email is i can continue to refine that and make it better you know i still have like things that i'm like cool we could you know substitute this text with a video eventually or make it more high fidelity you know and and and communicate more information in in one spot right which uh you can't do with tours you know because you really get one shot and every tour is a little bit different and so you know refining that process over and over and over again in some ways is easier in the way that we're doing it but yes you always get people that are not going to read something or they missed it or whatever you know and so for those folks you know they they can call us or they can text us and we answer the phone and and we walk them through that stuff and we can troubleshoot virtually right uh because of the proximity system and and some of the other things that we've put in place you know um one of the the things that we spoke about last time is uh tours right so like what what do you do with the two or whatever and yeah um this uh we didn't mean to do this during covid but you know we had places where people could schedule tours online for all of our locations you know so book a tour which location what date and um there was like several times where i was supposed to be in grand junction or in telluride or in montrose or whatever and life happened and i couldn't get there you know guess what we've got cameras in the spaces and we just called the people unlocked the door so they could walk in and we could give them a audio tour and i was like huh that worked pretty well you know lots of people were like this is great you know we'll sign up and so was that you know can that be refined yeah probably you know but i think that there's there's just different ways of doing things that if we're dogmatic on the way that it's supposed to be done that has to be done um it's it's it has the opportunity to prohibit us from new ways of doing things totally so is the virtual tour a default now or does the ambassador do a tour it just kind of shows up um okay you know we have a form that people fill out when they book a tour and so often times if no one's going to be there or whatever i'll just call them and say hey i'm not going to be in town that day um you know i can i can call you on the phone or we can reschedule or i could set up an appointment with our ambassador what works best for you honestly a lot of times they're like oh i'm three blocks away from the co-working space i could just walk over there right now if you can let me in sweetie just sailing yeah you know so it's like they scheduled it for a week in advance because that was the process they didn't really care you know so it was like oh well that's right expedited the onboarding and stuff like that you know and so um you know i think that that's that comes back to like if we if we can reach out to those people and and say here's the options what's best for you then they can select and and we can kind of go from there so you also mentioned um centralizing sort of the back end support because not everything is automatic right there's a human that still has to do some things in terms of onboarding and whatnot yeah talk about talk about what that looks like or and maybe will look like over time yeah so i think you know there's a there's a couple different things i think uh when i when i think about it there's two roles um one is onboarding you know do our members get into the space get online understand how to do everything and i think that that's been pretty streamlined you know whatever location you're at you can call someone and we can walk you through and get you all set up um so that's great you know the next layer of kind of triggered communication i think is um i i want to start doing more testing of like immediate like hey jamie thanks for signing up i'm the owner you know i'd love to book a 15 minute video call with you and like learn a virtual copy yeah totally because you know again it's like before i would have walked you to the coffee shop now i could send you like a five dollar gift card from starbucks digitally you know and get to know who you are and plug you plug you into the community or whatever you know and so it's it's really interesting you know again um though i i i get on more phone calls with people who i had two yesterday you know um new people who had moved to town were interested in co-working and so i just called them and said hey here's what's going on our spaces are automated yadda yadda who are you i'm an entrepreneur i just moved into town oh cool like we love entrepreneurs we want to support you guys my wife runs the accelerator right how can i help you and they're like this is amazing you know and um that was always the magic of the the onboarding walkthrough right was not how do you get online but can i make a genuine connection with you and support you and i think what i'm learning is that doesn't have to be in person i think that we can do that in this kind of hybrid world that we live right like do i have to be face to face with you to make a genuine connection get excited about who you are and what you're doing and and how we can support you no i don't think we do and connect you to others right and i talked about all the right i run masterminds for co-working space owners and sometimes they meet in person which has been happening more often post coven but you know oftentimes right their relationship is on and i i make those connections or somebody on our team or right you can do it's always great to see people yeah person but it's a competency that you can get transfer digitally yeah and i think it's that uh you know connection always comes back to empathy and do i have to see you you and i have never met in person but we've had very dynamic conversations and you know and and have genuine connection around our interests and stuff like that and i can send people to you and vice versa or whatever and we've done that without ever meeting face to face and guess what when we meet face to face we'll be like hey how's it going you know and so again i think the biggest thing is like it seems uncomfortable or weird or uh uh obscure maybe i'm like how do you do that you know um but i again i think i would say entrepreneurs main job is to wade through obscurity and and find this behind the rocks and keep moving forward you know yeah and so um and again the whole goal of like this crazy test that is seeming to work and we want to add more spaces and you know help support more small rural uh co-working spaces um by implementing a lot of these systems for them is the goal is to build something that's sustainable so that we have yeah you know something that that works long term that we can have long-term impact you know and if we don't build a strong foundation then we're not going to get there and so you know i think you know insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results and i think you know if we just throw the same playbook at it that we continue to do then then we're not necessarily going to get a different result and so we've got to take swings you know you we've got to apply different strategies and again i think i said this earlier but it's like we live in the future you know we have technology like proximity and and stuff like that and you know i'm like if elon can build driving cars then like surely we can get someone in a building online right like that shouldn't be that complicated i think the next thing is you know then how do we engage with people at scale right and how do we plug them into systems that we can help connect them to tools people resources you know there's a lot of programs accelerators you know angel investors that want to help support these people in a lot of rural areas and and if if we are the connector and we're building to connect to people at scale and we're implementing systems and databases that we can put them into then like we can actually be really effective at that yeah and i think that that's the stuff that make that where the long term impact and the thing that everyone wants to see um we can move the dial there so yeah paint the five-year picture yeah you um or you can you know do you do you operate spaces that you lease or management agreement can other people opt-in to this network yeah so you know our model has changed a little bit i think as everyone's as you know and really what we've done is spend the last year kind of streamlining systems allowing people to get in um benefit from the utility of the co-working spaces i would say um and so we're having a lot more conversations with a lot of these smaller and rural co-working spaces that are asking the sustainability question or the having the bandwidth conversation of like i've already got 10 jobs and now i have an extra job you know and so it's not necessarily making tons of money but has big impact on my community we want to continue to provide this resource we want to engage with these entrepreneurs and so we have um like uh managed service agreements where we can go in and implement all of our same tools um and which is great you know we're we're focused in colorado um right now and in rural colorado but not limited to that you know we're doing this for people all over um and so we can implement a lot of those same systems that have been really effective so in five years you know i think what you're really doing is adding kind of nodes on the map um and and databases of people that you are connecting with with the co-working spaces and stuff like that um you know i i think we'll have lots of uh spaces that we're kind of helping manage and you know as i had mentioned you know my my wife runs an accelerator that's gone remote you know there's all of these different tools there's you know uh coding schools that have gone remote like these are these are uh tools the economic developers especially in rural communities talk about all the time and yet they're trying to do it themselves in person yeah so the scale everybody's reinventing the wheel on their own right where if we lay a strong foundation and then we have the team to to support it and put in the infrastructure we can just start stacking those resources on top and now you have a database of entrepreneurs that are working in all these communities you have you know mentors from all these different communities that you can plug in and support regardless of where people are from right and it always goes back to my kind of my big why that i always talk about when i graduated um from university my favorite professor his his uh his feedback to you was you need to leave here and and you know there's nothing for you here and and uh he's an economist you know and so that's that's the the nature of a lot of these communities right and and we just believe that you can be successful regardless of where you choose to call home um and you know so much of success that you know the reason that people move to cities is because of density right and because of the density of tools and resources of people that they can connect and engage with and that has historically been a challenge in rural communities but it doesn't have to be and so if we can develop infrastructure for connecting people you know giving them places to check in connecting them to you know regional or virtual resources and people to support them then you get you get to have the best of both worlds right and so that's what we're working on um and that's what i i hope that we get to see over the next few years so yeah this is an incredible you know effort and story if folks are interested in what you're up to where's the best place for them to follow along yeah or reach out they can uh check us out it's allspacecowork.com um or just email me brianscottwatson gmail.com oh putting the email out yeah i love it we will put both of those in the show notes um and i have your linkedin linked up so i'm super excited i i think this is really smart i love you know your point about it's an opportunity to question how things get done and to say right we can't keep doing it the same way and watching small spaces not work and close and get out of you know out of the cycle but to be able to provide you know so yeah so how do we do it in a way that's scalable and sustainable um because the the end goal is to support the entrepreneurs and the remote workers who are who are living in those places yep totally i love it thank you for taking the time to share what you're up to it's a work in progress so we'll have to have you back on to uh to get an update but um i love it thank you for doing the work that you do i think it's going to have a huge impact thanks jamie and thank you for everything that you do love the podcast i listen to it when i run and uh i always get lots of good tips and tricks and all that stuff and you've just been such an advocate for the industry and helped so many different people and do such a great job so thanks well we're going to add this episode to the list looking forward to that thanks brian you