Staff and daily tasks

Hi to everyone,

Thanks
to everyone that contributes to this group, it has helped me enormously.

I´ve
been running a small (8 desks) coworking space since last December and now I´m
looking to open a second space of 30 desks.

What
are the daily tasks that come from running a small coworking? Do I need to hire
Staff people?

For now,
I´m planning on running by myself all the marketing and commercial matters. How
much time can this take me?

Also,
do I need to hire someone else that works as a community manager and takes care
of the daily stuff that coworkers require?

Any thoughts are appreciated

You don’t need staff. More on that in a second.

We recently onboarded our newest teammate and here’s a collection of the “tasks” and responsibilities we broke down for her to learn during onboarding. Funny enough, we never had all of this written down before a few months ago, so hopefully this helps you and others in some way!

Now, we started out with <30 desks, so I can imagine looking at this and going “jesus that’s a lot of stuff!” Just remember that what you see here is the result of many years of growth, practice, and evolution.

https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Stuff-our-team-does-rmP5YntPSxp3vajct3VAy

The bigger question is - do you WANT to hire someone? Can you afford it? Will it free up your time to work on higher value tasks?

When we were 18 months old I didn’t want to hire someone but I knew I needed to. I highly recommend listening to this story about that decision: https://listen.coworkingweekly.com/446e0ef4

Practically speaking, small spaces especially can do reasonably well by making non-member visits by appointment only and setting the right expectations with your members. Angel from Cohere has shared quite a bit about how she’s run her space as a solo founder with help from members.

You don’t need to hire a community manager. But that does mean your existing members need to be on board to help guide new members. Doing that successfully is all about setting expectations, and has a lot to do with the people you’ve got in the room. This also really depends on your long personal term goals.

But I would caution you against thinking that you can just put people in a room and things “just work.” Besides the day-to-day operations (which isn’t even a full time job with our 300 member community, thanks to good systems and member expectations) it’s pretty important to have someone there to listen, observe, and understand what’s going on in your membership so you can keep making things better.

Finally, in my experience, not a lot changes between 8 and 30 desks except for the amount of trash and dishes.

What does change is running multiple spaces. Is there a reason you’re thinking about a second location, rather than a single location that’s simply larger than the first?

···

On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 11:07 AM [email protected] wrote:

Hi to everyone,

Thanks
to everyone that contributes to this group, it has helped me enormously.

I´ve
been running a small (8 desks) coworking space since last December and now I´m
looking to open a second space of 30 desks.

What
are the daily tasks that come from running a small coworking? Do I need to hire
Staff people?

For now,
I´m planning on running by myself all the marketing and commercial matters. How
much time can this take me?

Also,
do I need to hire someone else that works as a community manager and takes care
of the daily stuff that coworkers require?

Any thoughts are appreciated

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.