So, my partners and I have been going back and forth over the conference room at our space for a while now, and I wanted to get some insight from everyone here on how you use yours. For some background, we’re a small-ish space with about 25 members, we could probably accommodate 50 at the most. We have a pretty nice conference room, but it almost NEVER gets used, and when it is reserved, it’s almost always just for phone calls (we don’t have a phone room right now). We’ve been open for a year, and I’m honestly not sure if a single member has ever held a meeting or brought a client in. So this is where our disagreement comes in, my thought is that our member base clearly could care less about having a conference room (we’re going to be building a phone booth soon, so they’ll still have a good spot to take phone calls) so why don’t we turn it in to something that they might actually use? I think it could make for a really cool lounge area/game room, and that we could install a murphy bed style conference table that people could fold down if they wanted to have a meeting. My partners disagree, and say that even though nobody uses it, prospective members are going to be put off by the fact that we don’t have a dedicated conference room and that even if it never gets reserved, we can still just use it for overflow desk space.
My instincts are in line with yours - serving the members you already have better will help you keep them as members longer AND attract more members like them, vs. trying to sell the conf rooms as a feature to recruit new members. Especially at your size, you don’t have room to recruit people who just want to come in, use the conference room, and peace out.
In terms of convincing your partners - is there a way to experiment and do it temporarily? Set those expectations early with your members, too.
Here’s how I’d approach it: “Hey, we noticed that this space could be better used, so we’re looking to try a 3-6 month experiment. Any ideas? We were thinking lounge-sort of area but we’re open to suggestions. It might end up going back to a meeting room, but if we come up with something even more valuable that more of us can get value from…”
-Alex
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On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 11:28 AM, Jensen Yancey [email protected] wrote:
So, my partners and I have been going back and forth over the conference room at our space for a while now, and I wanted to get some insight from everyone here on how you use yours. For some background, we’re a small-ish space with about 25 members, we could probably accommodate 50 at the most. We have a pretty nice conference room, but it almost NEVER gets used, and when it is reserved, it’s almost always just for phone calls (we don’t have a phone room right now). We’ve been open for a year, and I’m honestly not sure if a single member has ever held a meeting or brought a client in. So this is where our disagreement comes in, my thought is that our member base clearly could care less about having a conference room (we’re going to be building a phone booth soon, so they’ll still have a good spot to take phone calls) so why don’t we turn it in to something that they might actually use? I think it could make for a really cool lounge area/game room, and that we could install a murphy bed style conference table that people could fold down if they wanted to have a meeting. My partners disagree, and say that even though nobody uses it, prospective members are going to be put off by the fact that we don’t have a dedicated conference room and that even if it never gets reserved, we can still just use it for overflow desk space.