360. Three Ideas to Add Profit to Your Coworking Space in Q4

Welcome to the Everything Co-working Podcast. This is your host, Jamie Russo, good to be back together. It is the first week of September. Next week, I'm headed to Phoenix for the annual GWA Flex Forward Conference. So if you're going to be there, ping me in the app. I would love to connect. I love industry conferences and actually getting to see people in person. And on Thursday morning, I have the honor of interviewing a not yardie who is the founder and CEO of yardie. They recently acquired WeWork. So they have been in the industry for some time in 2017. They acquired one systems, which is now, I think known as yardie cube. They've had a few name changes. So many of you may be yardie cube users. And yardie has a full suite of software that supports the commercial and residential real estate industry. So it's a private company, but a pretty big country company. And I'm really looking forward to getting to know a not. My understanding is that he is really committed to getting to know operators and getting deeper into the industry. And though it's a fairly small portion of their revenue right now, but obviously with the acquisition of WeWork, things are different for them. So we're going to dive in with him on the why behind the acquisition and what that's going to look like going forward. Anyway, when we come when I come back, it'll be mid September, which means we will be staring down Q4 of 2024, which is totally crazy. And starting they'll get 2025. So if you are thinking, okay, what do I want to accomplish in my business for the rest of the year? We're just going to talk about that a little bit today. So I want to, I think this is a metaphor, not an analogy, but I have an entrepreneurial brain, just like many of you probably do. And I am most excited when I have many projects going on at one time. That does not always surf me well. And I'm wondering if you have the same challenge. So here is the metaphor that a coach gave to me one time. It is very simple, but I think about it when I spread myself to thin. And I thought it might be helpful to share with you. So it's also soccer season. And if you've been listening for a long time, I run our local AYSO soccer league. So I have an extra part time job right now in addition to all of my everything co-working work. So here's the visual. You're standing in the middle of a soccer field at the halfway line. And you're facing the goal that you're going to score in. And you have five soccer balls in front of you. So the question is, how do you get the five balls in the goal? Do you dribble them one at a time down the field and then shoot and score and come back and get the next one? Or do you dribble the first one a little ways and then come back for the second one, dribble a little ways and come back for the third one? And then eventually by dribbling each of them a little ways down the field every time and rotating through, you get them in the goal at the end. But it takes longer to get any one of them in the goal than if you started with just kicking one straight down the field and into the goal. So the question is, do you want to focus on one goal at a time and get that across the finish line and score and win? Or do you want to have a lot of things that you're juggling at once and moving them slowly down the field? But then hopefully you have kind of a big wrap up of all of these projects and get them all in the goal at the same time, but at a much slower pace. I really actually think that's a personal choice. Have a style that works for you. People will advocate that it's better to have a win more quickly. And I will also say that when you're in a business like co-working and the goal you're trying to score relates to increasing your monthly recurring revenue, that is compounding. Right? So the sooner you start hitting that, you either initiate or grow that monthly revenue, there's a compound effect on that revenue. And so waiting and pursuing a bunch of projects at once and moving them slowly down the field to go back to our metaphor works less well when it comes to recurring revenue because you want that recurring revenue to start or grow as quickly as possible so that the growth can compound on top of that base. So it makes more sense to focus on one thing at a time and you just have to pick the goal that will have the or the ball in our metaphor, the ball that you're going to get in the goal that has the biggest impact on your business. So I'm just going to share a couple of ideas around what if your goal is to add profit to your business, what some soccer balls might be that you're going to dribble into the goal in Q4. Things like focusing on demand products. And when I say focus, this is what I'm going to add to this metaphor, this dribbling metaphor, when you're only focused on one ball, you're putting all of your effort into this one ball. So you're doing everything that you need to do to optimize to get this goal. So you're not just like like half-assed kicking it down the field and hoping it goes in the goal and moving on to the next one, you are making sure it crosses the goal line. So you are for example, if one of the projects that you could work on that would add recurring revenue to your business would be focusing on demand. So let's say you're going to put up a part-time private office product. You have an open office and it's not selling maybe the interior office, something that takes you longer to sell, maybe it's a larger office. And so you're going to make this a part-time private office. This is for only one person at a time, by the way. So this is an alternative. This is for the segment of people who want private space when they come in, but don't want to commit to the monthly fee of having permanent office. So it's shared, but never shared at the same time. So you will figure out how to sell this on your billing and booking platform, so Office R&D, proximity, desk works, whatever you use. You figure out how to price this and then you will create a landing page on your website. You'll create campaigns to go out to your email list and your social media list. You'll train your team on how to talk about it when somebody comes in and might be a fit for it when they give a tour. You will do everything that you can to make this successful. You'll update keywords on your website. You might run a Facebook ad against this product. So you're not just throwing it up on your website and hoping for the best because that doesn't tend to work in our industry. You really need to make sure that you are thinking about it across all of your channels where you might sell. So you're putting it on liquid space. You're putting it on wherever makes sense as a channel and that you're doing all the aspects that go into launching something new to make it successful. Again, not just, okay, check. It's on the website. Move on. On my Google business listing, the team doesn't really understand it. We never email our mailing list about it. That's not really giving everything you have to make that successful and give yourself the chance to focus on one thing at a time and really go all in and do everything you can to make it successful. I would also consider having somebody, not you and not on your team, go through the sales funnel for the product. Because I often see things on websites, experiences, user experiences that probably make sense to the owner when you're doing it and we all have this problem, right? Make sense in our own brain, but it's actually not that clear to the end user and the process has some barrier in it. Like you're making the customer fill out a form instead of e-commerce enabling the experience or calendar link or whatever it is. So have somebody go through the process and just double check that it's a really good, easy user flow. So pick something and just go all in on it. So it might be on demand part time private office. It might be really focusing on meeting rooms. Most operators are experiencing significant growth in meeting room revenue, most pandemic. So if you are not on that train or haven't fully leveraged that opportunity, then again, this is the time to really look at what are you offering are your meeting rooms the right size? Are they priced correctly? Could you apply dynamic pricing to these meeting rooms? Are they easy to book on your website? Can a user book really easily without having to get approval from you? Or is the do you have complete details on all the meeting rooms on your website? What about the amenities to your meeting room? Could you offer catering? Do you have reviews about your meeting rooms? Are you running campaigns? your current email list and your social media following about meeting room packages or meeting room specials. What can you do to really focus on growing that revenue and go all in? So those are a couple of specific things. Just in general testing your sales funnel and optimizing conversion is always an opportunity and something that it's hard to get to in our business. So even if you don't have something new that you want to add or offer, go through your current sales funnels. What can you make easier for the user so that you get a higher conversion rate? What can you update on your website so that the percentage of visitors on your website that Book of Tour goes up? How do you make sure that you don't miss phone calls when they come in? So this is a little bit tactical, but adding a sales bot to your website. So a sales bot that immediately jumps in and handles phone calls that come in if your team is otherwise occupied, text back and forth with prospective members, even having a better live chat system on your website will absolutely improve conversion rates. And then what's the follow up? We talk about sales funnel a lot on the podcast, but taking some of those insights that you're hearing and saying, okay, we're going to sit down and commit to making this a project for Q4 and we're going to really focus on it and we're going to really optimize something so that it adds revenue and profit to our business. What else is on the list? SEO is something that's always an opportunity. I back to the meeting room and on demand products. I often will do a search and operators will come up for office space in a market, but not for meeting rooms, not for events, not for virtual offices. So you really want to go in and make sure that the keywords for the products you're selling are optimized on your website, on your landing pages, on your Google business listing so that searchers are finding you. The easiest way to get business is to get business from people who are looking for you and not when you have to get in front of people and talk them into what you're selling. So you want to show up for the keywords that people are searching for. So make sure that is absolutely happening for meeting rooms, virtual plans, and events, anything else that's extra in addition to office space and co-working. And then the other opportunity that we've been talking about lately is virtual office and business identity packages. If you don't have those in place or they're not optimized, you have a great opportunity to build a revenue stream that compounds every single month by starting or adding to that program. So if that is the ball you want to kick down the field in Q4, we are here to help with that one. We have a lot of resources for the other ones as well, but specifically in Q4, we are now opening the doors to our Q4 money maker mail challenge where we will help you build or optimize a virtual mailbox program that will include other services like business identity packages if you so choose. So we'll help you get that set up. We'll help you figure out all the logistics. We walk you through step by step how to get your CMARA status. Make sure you're in the new post office database. So they're all up to date with compliant. And then we work through with you packaging, pricing, how to work with referral partners, the logistics of an operational aspects of managing mail, how to simplify that. We have standard operating procedures. We have job descriptions. If you need help with doing the mail, we it's really a done for you package and we walk you through every step of the process for 10 weeks. So live training, coaching calls, Slack group, we review landing pages, pricing, packaging, we are really here to make sure that you're successful and that you get an ROI on doing the challenge, which is pretty simple to do in order to get an ROI and doing the challenge. You just have to have six new customers and you'll pay for the challenge over three months. And we the challenge is active for about two months. So it shouldn't take you long to do that. And then you have a system in place that will help you add revenue every single month. ongoing. Now I would say this one, don't pick this one if you were in a very small market. You might want to test and see if you can sell some organic mail packages before you decide that this is what you're going to go all in on. You might choose a small goal, just to set up an organic package. If you're outside of the US, then we absolutely can help you with packaging and pricing and optimizing your website. This is a lot of what we do in the program. We'll look at your landing pages. We'll make suggestion about the order in which you put things the ease of use for the customer. We're trying to increase conversion rates for you. And to making sure that your SEO is optimized, we have a list of keywords. We have blog posts that you can put on your page. So a lot of support materials that you can just grab and use in order to put all your focus on building that revenue over Q4. If you're outside of the US, you don't need our help on the CMARA and the database process, which is awesome. So you can just jump right in and keep running. And if you don't have your CMARA done yet, that will take, it could take a couple of weeks. It could take longer. That's totally fine. You can continue through all the steps in the program. And you will just have a limitation here there until your CMARA is done. But it'll take you some time to do all the other steps and just you'll flip it all on as soon as you get that CMARA status. So if you want to learn more about that program, and if it makes sense for you to focus on that as your Q4 goal, you can get all the details at malchallenge.com. And certainly reach out if you have any questions. And we'd love to hear which goal you choose for Q4. And again, if you're going to be at the conference next week in Phoenix, I would love to see you there. Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you like what you heard, tell a friend, hit that subscribe button, and leave us a rating and review. If you'd like to learn more about our education and coaching programs, head over to everythingcoworking.com. We'll see you next week.