coworking
At 30,000 Feet the Rules Work. At Ground Level They Don't.
LinkedIn Show Notes #36 from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen. 🎙️ Listen to these stories and hundreds of others on the Coworking Values Podcast At 30,000 feet, physics works. Checklists save lives. You follow the rules, you survive.At ground level, the checklists are rigged depending on who you are. This week from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen: We've been tracking how three people landed in broken human systems and built their own cockpits. Where marginalised people write the r
They Built Infrastructure for the Energy Money Can't Capture
LinkedIn Show Notes #35 from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen. 🎙️ Listen to these stories and hundreds of others on the Coworking Values Podcast. Three community builders. Three continents. One pattern: They stopped selling memberships and started building movements that run on relationships, not transactions. This week from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen: We've been tracking how coworking spaces can become laboratories for post-capitalist organising. Not in theory—in practice. W
They Host Church, Stop Brain Drain, and Won't Put Their Film on Netflix—And They're Winning
LinkedIn Show Notes #34 from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen. 🎙️ Listen to these stories and hundreds of others on the Coworking Values Podcast. Three different community builders. Two continents. One pattern: They stopped optimising for scale and started building for depth. And the people who needed them showed up. This week from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen: We've been tracking why some spaces feel like communities and others feel like expensive libraries with good Wi-Fi. T
Social Capital Isn't a Byproduct. It's THE Product.
LinkedIn Show Notes #31 from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen. 🎙️ Listen to these stories and hundreds of others on the Coworking Values Podcast. What three crisis stories from Armenia, Gaza, and London reveal about the invisible currency that keeps independent coworking spaces alive when everything else collapses. Sara Anjargolian 's coworking space in Yerevan had glass walls. Deliberate. Radical. In post-Soviet Armenia, where secrecy was a matter of survival, transparency was an ac
The Future of Coworking is a Career, Not a Gig
LinkedIn Show Notes #30 from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen. While you were running your space, we've been talking to the future—three FLOC leaders, one message: it's time to choose careers over gigs. I was once sitting at a table for lunch with a group of Coworking Space leaders, and a woman almost had to apologise as she presented her idea of creating an event where women who work in the Coworking industry in the UK could connect and support each other. A man at that table told her t
Virtual Office VS. Coworking Membership: Friend or Foe? (How to Make Them Play nice)
Right, here’s the big one. The question that gives London coworking operators sleepless nights: Does offering those cheap virtual offices actually pinch your valuable physical memberships? Or, could it be a clever way to draw businesses into your world, a sort of gateway drug to a full-blown desk? Loads of operators are terrified that a low-cost virtual presence will devalue their main offering, attract the wrong crowd, and suck up resources that should be spent looking after their dedicated
Beyond the Postbox: Building a Virtual Office Service That's Actually Valuable (and Compliant)
Right, so you’ve sidestepped the £30k illusion. Navigated (most of) the regulatory minefield. And faced the cold, hard truth about what this virtual office malarkey really costs. You get it now. Offering Virtual Office (VO) services in London isn’t the walk in the park, easy-money gig it’s often cracked up to be. So, what’s next? Pack it all in? Not so fast. The previous articles painted a pretty grim picture of the pitfalls, sure. But there is a way to offer a Virtual Office service th
Is Your London Coworking Space Bleeding Cash on Virtual Offices?
That's fifty quid a month virtual office client. Looks like easy money, doesn’t it? A nice little top-up to your coworking space’s income. Multiply that by, say, 50 clients, and you’re suddenly dreaming of a cool £30,000 dropping into your bank account each year. And for what? Just handling a bit of mail, right? It’s a tempting thought, especially when you’re battling London’s brutal market. But hang on a minute. Before you start mentally spending that cash, let’s ask a really uncomfortab
What Emotional Safety Really Looks Like in a Coworking Space
This week is Mental Health Awareness Week and European Coworking Day. So I've been writing nonstop about where mental health and coworking meet, with stories from Coworking Values Podcast guests and my direct experience of mental health and coworking. Below are four reads from this week: * Coworking saved my mind. But it can't save everyone. * The Loneliest People Walk Past Our Doors * Coworking doesn't save everyone. But it saves some of us. * You Can't Heal in the System That Made You
Virtual Offices: The Regulatory Nightmare London Operators Blissfully Ignore
So, you reckon offering virtual offices is just a case of assigning an address and popping some mail in the post? Dream on. For London coworking operators, especially the independents, it’s more like trying to cross a minefield wearing a blindfold. Under that shiny surface of easy cash lies a tangled, treacherous web of rules and regulations. The kind most operators haven’t got a clue about until it all blows up in their face. And we’re not talking about a bit of annoying paperwork here. W