Get out of your garage: A shared office for your start-up company can improve your productivity and help keep costs low.
By Tom Searcy | @tomsearcy | Feb 8, 2012
In my recent outreach to keep costs low for entrepreneurs, "solopreneurs" and startups, a recurring suggestion from many of my "start-up warriors" was the idea of working in community.
Here's why:
I asked my friend Jeff Donaldson for the best things to look for in a shared work environment. Jeff works in Boulder, Colorado, at a workspace called “scrib”–short for “scribble,” because the walls are painted with dry-erase paint to spark ideas and collaboration. Here are his recommendations.
10 Things to Look For
1. Test drive: Ask for a free day to test out the office space.
2. Office tools: Make sure they fit your needs. Everyone will have printers, faxes, etc. but make sure the space provides the tools that help you get work done (conference rooms for client meetings, phone rooms).
3. Culture: Every space will have a culture and not everyone will fit in. Find one where you feel comfortable.
4. Inspiration: The people and the space should make you want to come to work–and be productive.
5. Lease terms: You want them flexible.
6. Room to grow: Look for multiple work zones that offer enough space to allow your company to expand and contract.
7. Good workspace management: You don't want to be the one dealing with printer problems, phone service outages, etc.
8. Collaborative community: Some co-working facilities allow members to contribute by giving presentations, making introductions or taking other actions that enhance the environment.
9. Productive workstations: Don't settle for just a flat table space. Look for offices that have put thought into a productive work environment.
10. Comfortable design. Collaboration can't happen as easily in a cubicle jungle. The most productive shared office spaces are ones that are built for collaboration.
If you've worked in a shared work environment, I'd love to hear your feedback. Post your comments in the comments section here.
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The coworking movement is fueled by people making connections - people who choose to collaborate and create so they can work productively, happily, successfully.
- MacWorld iWorld blog // click here for the full story
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Here is my take on Green Spaces which we visited on November 11…
What I liked: I like how Green Spaces has a free day pass that is easy to find on their website.
All co-working spaces that are looking to be inclusive should have a link to a day pass on their website.
Amy, the receptionist was very friendly and gave a detailed tour and overview of the space.
There is a decent kitchen, one pretty good lounge area that you could add chairs to yourself to accommodate any meetings. There are two fairly small conference rooms which could fit about 4-6 people max. There is free coffee and tea all day and 24/7 access to full time members.
There is one phone booth which can fit a laptop if you need to duck somewhere to have a phone call.
You don’t have to be a part of the Green community to work here but they are aiming to be the hub for the Green community so if you are a freelancer or business looking for desk space then this is the best co-working community match for you...
Special features:
Colorado and NYC locations
Event space rental, use of the space to host workshops for $175 an hour and events with a Green community focus
Curated connections, an intern program and a referral network
Costs:
The costs and benefits for each tier are outlined very clearly here
Click here for the full story.
]]>For our friends at Green Spaces, we helped them celebrate their 3 ½ year anniversary. Green Spaces gives social innovators, entrepreneurs, and freelancers a space to connect and grow. They’re doing great work! Happy 3 and 1/2 birthday, Green Spaces!
Click here for the full story.
The idea isn't new, but what you get for the money just keeps getting better.
In the very early days of your company, it might make sense to call your garage (or basement or kitchen table) headquarters. But at a certain point, it doesn't suffice. There are only so many times you can bring clients to the same Starbucks for a meeting. And even the most passionate entrepreneur is bound to see productivity wane when spouses, kids, dogs, or all of the above inevitably hover near your workspace.
This is precisely why coworking spaces were invented—and why they're increasingly popping up in more cities.
While coworking spaces aren’t new, what they offer to bootstrapped tech start-ups for the price keeps getting better. CoCo, for example, is a 16,000-square-foot, sunlit space that makes use of the architecturally-interesting and historic trading floor once used by the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. Membership starts around $50 a month.
Now instead of traders yelling bids and waving arms around, the place is serene—khaki or jeans-clad entrepreneurs working quietly at their laptops while Pandora plays softly in the background. There’s a concierge who makes sure coffee and pastries are well-stocked and will order you lunch and introduce new members to others.
And the people working there look weirdly content. Some are wearing headphones, which, I learned, is code for “I’m head-down at the moment.” Others are chatting quietly with a neighbor. No one has that glazed-over I’m-bored-to-death look you sometimes see in regular workplaces. If you're starting to think you might need a change of scenery, consider the advantages of coworking:
You can work alone or bring a team. At CoCo, for example, there are many people who pay to use a café style chair and table from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. But there are also start-ups with up to eight workers who have full-time 24/7 access to a “campsite” set up for a group. From an aerial view these campsites look like bee-hives with walls made up of white boards and transparent screening so as to not block anyone from what’s going on in the rest of the space. CoCo cofounder Kyle Coolbroth says walls and the territory they define keep chance encounters between members from happening. “Serendipity starts to dissolve when we can go back to our caves,” he says.
You'll build relationships. Frank Grazzini and Neal Tovsen, cofounders of AgSphere, an online platform that gives farmers real-time information about their farm equipment and inventories, say had it not been for CoCoco they wouldn’t have met several clients and potential investors. Not only that, but they’ve repeatedly tapped other start-ups there to bounce off ideas and get help solving problems. And unlike other office spaces, CoCo offers Happy Hour every Tuesday night to further encourage relationship building.
Coworking makes clients happy. Meeting with clients in a conference room is infinitely more professional than a coffee shop. Teicko Huber, founder and president of revenue performance management company Focus2Grow, says his team of seven uses CoCo space in either Minneapolis or St. Paul, depending on where the clients they’re working with on a particular day are located.
You could find your next start-up idea there. Web developer Toby Cryns runs two businesses out of CoCo—The Mighty Mo Design Company and Minnesota Wordpress Hosting. He founded the Web hosting company with someone he met there. Since moving into CoCo, his revenue has increased dramatically because other members have hired him to create websites. The beauty of it is they can actually see him working and walk over to review his progress at any point. He says the environment allows him to craft better sites.
Coworking spaces are reinventing communities. Tech startup communities outside Silicon Valley are thriving in some cases because of coworking spaces such as CoCo. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt even turned up recently in Minneapolis to check it out and talk with start-ups there. He was invited to CoCo by Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, who lured CoCo founders to the unique space because he had a vision of an entrepreneurial neighborhood in the city. Now he’s got one.
Coworkers have good attitudes. Michael Noble, who is launching the B2B social platform called Nitch, says one reason he uses CoCo is because of the positive energy the entrepreneurs there effuse. “Everyone is optimistic about what they’re trying to do. Sometimes you just need to be around other people who are wanting their own business to succeed and that’s kind of contagious,” he says.
Chances are there’s a vibrant coworking space like CoCo near you (Green Spaces!). Coolbroth suggests checking out Liquid Space to find one. Or visit this coworking directory, which lists hundreds of them all over the world.
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Think HEADLINES
What is the NEWS?
Timely
Events: elections, Occupy Wall St
Special days: Earth Day, Martin Luther King Day
Industry & trends
Studies: facts, figures
Announcing our NEW ____
Innovation, cutting edge
EFFECTS (reader, audience)
Behavior
Choices
Community
Industry
NOTE: Be mindful of the writing style of the publication & journalist you're pitching
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By: Cheryl Heller
To view the article on SSIR please click here.
Social innovation is all around us. From Paul Hawkins observation in Blessed Unrest that grassroots organizations make up “the largest movement on earth,” to c-suite executives who have expressed renewed interest in intra-preneurship, to the millions of startup social entrepreneurs being supported by forward-looking foundations, and the venture capitalists who are prefacing the word investing with impact—some days it seems that there is no one left in the world who does not want to change it.
It’s as if we have woken up all at once—not just to the scariness of the challenges we face, but to the realization that we are not powerless to fix social problems and that deep satisfaction and well-being comes from working for good instead of just working. Take this year’s fellows at PopTech, the annual ideas and innovation conference in Camden, Maine. There was Michael Murphy, who has re-imagined the practice of architecture to heal whole communities, and Rose Goslinga, who has designed a way to insure 22,000 small-acre farmers in Kenya against crop failure.
But because social innovation is everywhere, it’s also all over the place. New silos of experts crop up all the time, each slightly restating the jargon. Added to the confusion of similar words, conflicting methods complicate and make simple truths obscure. The race to impact and scale often ignore business fundamentals; and there is not enough focus on unintended consequences. We are accelerating, incubating, and funding on the fly—before we know what works. Talk of collaboration is constant, but talk is still cheap and we continue to struggle within the organizational boundaries of the industrial age we’re trying to shake.
Now add design: the ability to create what’s new, and lead diverse teams through the creative process; to connect, integrate, see systems; to simplify, identify, and convey meaning; to tell stories; to visualize the unimaginable; to build and introduce order through beauty and elegance. Design allows an outsider to be “stupid” in all the right ways—by listening and observing. And that’s just the invisible part, before designers create artifacts that speak to mass audiences and create movements.
So far, though, while the d.school at Stanford and Amy Smith’s D-Lab at MIT have pioneered interdisciplinary programs that teach design thinking, there has not been a comprehensive MFA program to prepare visual designers to enter the world of social innovation—no learning path to a fully integrated role. Design has been for the most part just one more siloed discipline, a “nice to have” input after the technology and business strategy are in place.
Design can make a game-changing contribution to social innovation, but to do that, designers need a way to immerse themselves in the contexts where social innovation happens, acquire the skills they need to play a leading role, and a means to facilitate the process and foster collaboration. The big opportunity is to apply the creativity, skills, vision, and methods of design to the entire process of social innovation—to work from inside the system, helping people see the same things, connect the silos, and make sense of problems by making them imaginable and accessible. Design helps define a path forward. It untangles the complicated processes and players, helping us map what’s working and where.
Design for social innovation includes the design of everything: from conversations, communication campaigns, experiences, structures, technology platforms, systems, products, business models, strategies, art, and culture. It incorporates all traditional and new design disciplines and mediums— identity, interactive, film, product, movement, and game design. It has the potential to be the single integrating force we need to take on the challenges we face—systemically and sustainably.
We’re launching the MFA Program in Design for Social Innovation at the School of Visual Arts in New York City for the most practical reason of all: we see a tremendous need, and no other way to get there. If social innovation is our relationship with purpose, design is the means and the method to make that purpose manifest. That’s what we plan for our graduates to do, from inside corporations, communities, governments, entrepreneurial enterprises, and nonprofits.
Author and thinker Daniel Pink said that MFA is the new MBA. We believe that the goal is not to replace one degree with the other, or to further divide those that earn them, but to see that creativity and visual thinking are equally important and vital to successful endeavors.
Social innovation needs practitioners who are creative, visual, passionate, broadly curious, generalists, integrators, listeners, systems thinkers and doers, and people who know how to create lives filled with both success and purpose. It needs designers.
From Holstee's blog : )
Last night, Dave joined a panel of amazing and inspirational champions of fashion and social change at the Be Social Change New York Meetup at Green Spaces.
The panel came together to discuss the question Can fashion be a catalyst for social change? And, if so, how can style and sustainable social impact merge to dictate a new future of fashion? This is a subject that is integral to the work that we do at Holstee, as we seek to create a more sustainable world through conscious design that makes a positive social impact. Here were some take aways of the goals in looking toward the future of fashion:
3. Explain how people within the fashion industry are developing innovative ways to create sustainable impact: Accountability needs to increase on the production end throughout the fashion industry. The goal is to create awareness through education, dialogue, and visibility to the supply chain so that we are more conscious of our impact. The more this knowledge is conveyed to consumers, the more you can hold us (the producers) accountable. As designers our greatest challenge is to create products that enable people to consume less. We can do this by designing products that last longer, that can be "tuned up" and/or in other ways easily upcycled and reused.
