They Come for the Promise. They Stay for the Hospitality. with Dr. JJ Peterson

"They come for the promise. They stay for the hospitality."
— Dr. JJ Peterson

Episode Summary

JJ Peterson has spent eleven years inside the StoryBrand universe. He co-authored Marketing Made Simple with Donald Miller. He helped Will Guidara write the certification for Unreasonable Hospitality. He hosts the Badass Softie podcast — for leaders who are unapologetically driven but want to lead with their hearts. He is flying to London in June to teach at the first workshop in the world to bring StoryBrand and Unreasonable Hospitality together in the same room, two days back to back, in Holborn.

This conversation surprised me. I thought we'd spend an hour on frameworks and funnels.

We didn't. We talked about a failure mode that kills coworking spaces quietly, before anyone notices. The moment an operator puts community in the shop window — makes it the headline offer — they've already lost. JJ has a phrase for this. He calls it the wish dream. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about it in 1937. JJ applies it to every organisation that confuses the byproduct with the product.

Marketing makes the promise. Hospitality delivers it. Community is what emerges when both work.

That's the spine of this episode.

JJ is warm, wickedly sharp, and completely uninterested in jargon. He brings academic depth — he has a PhD in Communication and wrote his dissertation on Kierkegaard's theory of indirect communication — without ever sounding like a lecture. Nashville to London. June 10th and 11th. The discount code is at the bottom.

Timeline Highlights

00:00 — Intro: Bernie on why marketing in coworking is both essential and misunderstood — and why most operators are selling the wrong thing.

02:15 — JJ introduces himself: eleven years at StoryBrand, co-author of Marketing Made Simple, host of Badass Softie, and the man who helped Will Guidara translate Unreasonable Hospitality into a teachable system.

06:40 — "If you confuse, you lose." The core StoryBrand premise: customers don't buy the best product. They buy the one they understand fastest.

10:05 — The difference between service and hospitality. Service is transactional. Hospitality is relational. JJ: "Service is black and white. Hospitality is colour."

13:30 — Why you cannot sell community. JJ introduces Bonhoeffer's wish dream — the trap of falling in love with your idea of community rather than doing the actual work of it.

18:00 — How this maps to coworking: operators who lead with "we're a community!" as their pitch are often the spaces where no real community exists. The promise swamps the experience.

22:25 — The line that became the title of this episode. JJ, unprompted: "They come for the promise. They stay for the hospitality."

26:10 — How JJ helped Will Guidara write the Unreasonable Hospitality certification — and what surprised him about the process. Hospitality is not a department. It's a posture.

30:45 — The two-day workshop explained. Day one: StoryBrand clarity. Day two: Unreasonable Hospitality. Why you need both in the right order, and what breaks when you skip the first.

34:20 — Kierkegaard and indirect communication. JJ's PhD work, and why the best marketing never announces itself as marketing. Story does the work that argument cannot.

39:50 — The coworking operator's messaging problem: most spaces describe the building when they should be describing the transformation. JJ on writing copy that puts the member as the hero.

44:15 — Badass Softie: why JJ started a podcast for leaders who are driven and warm in the same breath — and why he thinks that tension is the most important thing to hold.

48:00 — London in June. The workshop, the people it's for, and why this is the only place in the world where StoryBrand and Unreasonable Hospitality land together.

52:30 — Closing: JJ on the one thing operators can do this week. Clarify who you serve and why it matters. Everything else follows.

5 Core Lessons

1. You Can't Sell Community. You Can Only Create the Conditions for It.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in 1937 about what he called the wish dream — the dangerous habit of loving your idea of community more than the actual people in front of you. JJ brought this into the conversation with zero fanfare and it landed like a brick.

Most coworking operators I know have a version of this problem. They put community in the headline. On the website. On the door. And then the person who walks through the door can't feel it anywhere. Because community isn't a product you deliver on day one. It's a byproduct of repeated human contact over time — and it requires hospitality as the infrastructure.

What JJ said is this: when you lead with community as the promise, you almost guarantee the thing won't exist. Because you've set an expectation the space can't meet immediately. The new member arrives looking for instant belonging. They don't find it. They leave. The operator blames the member, not the messaging.

Sell the desk. Sell the clarity. Sell the transformation your space makes possible. Let community emerge from the hospitality you build around it.

The wish dream kills more spaces than bad Wi-Fi ever will.

2. Marketing Makes the Promise. Hospitality Delivers It. These Are Not the Same Job.

JJ spent eleven years at StoryBrand teaching people to clarify their message. Then he helped Will Guidara systematise Unreasonable Hospitality into something teachable. What struck him — and what he shared in this episode — is how rarely organisations connect those two things deliberately.

Your marketing creates an expectation. Your hospitality either meets it or breaks it.

Most coworking operators do one of two things. They either pour everything into their marketing — slick website, sharp copy, clear call to action — and then the person walks in and the experience doesn't match. Or they run a genuinely warm, hospitable space but can't explain what they do clearly enough for the right people to find them.

The two days in Holborn in June are specifically designed around this. Day one is StoryBrand: get the message right. Day two is Unreasonable Hospitality: design the experience to match. One without the other is a half-finished sentence.

I've been saying for years that coworking operators undersell themselves. What JJ gave me was a framework for understanding why: they're not telling a clear enough story, and the experience isn't intentional enough to stick. Both are fixable. Both require work.

3. Service Is Black and White. Hospitality Is Colour.

JJ used this line in passing and I wrote it down immediately. It's the clearest articulation I've heard of something I've been trying to say for a long time.

Service is the execution of a function. The desk works. The Wi-Fi connects. The printer prints. That's service. It's binary: it works or it doesn't.

Hospitality is something else. It's the moment a member walks in on a terrible morning and the person at the front desk reads the room and says the right thing without being asked. It's the unexpected touch — the thing that wasn't in the contract. It's what Will Guidara calls unreasonable precisely because it exceeds rational expectation.

This is why you can't systematise hospitality completely. You can create the conditions for it. You can train the posture. You can build culture that makes it more likely. But it lives in the gaps between the processes.

For independent coworking operators — who will never have the marketing budgets of the corporate giants — this is the advantage. The Wellcome Trust. Eleven Madison Park. The best neighbourhood space in your city. They all figured out that colour is the thing you can't buy at scale.

4. The Hero of Your Story Isn't You. It's the Member.

JJ spent a significant portion of this conversation on a mistake he sees everywhere. Operators — and businesses of all kinds — write marketing that puts themselves in the hero role. We are a community. We provide workspace. We offer events. We believe in people.

Every sentence starts with "we."

The StoryBrand framework inverts this. In every great story, the hero is the customer. The business is the guide. Yoda, not Luke. Gandalf, not Frodo. Your job is to show the member what transformation is possible — and then position your space as the thing that makes that transformation happen.

For coworking operators, this is deceptively hard. We love our spaces. We built them. We believe in them. So we write copy about what we've built rather than about the person who needs it. And the person reading the website can't find themselves in it.

JJ's practical test: read your website homepage. Count how many times it says "we" versus how many times it speaks directly to the member and their problem. If "we" wins, rewrite it.

I've done this with spaces I've worked with. It changes everything. The enquiries get more specific. The wrong people stop enquiring. The right people start.

5. Clear Messaging Is Not Dumbing Down. It's Respect.

JJ has a PhD in Communication. He wrote a dissertation on Kierkegaard's theory of indirect communication. He is one of the most academically credentialled people I've had on this podcast. And his core teaching is: use the simplest possible language.

This came up in the context of coworking operators who feel that plain language makes them sound unsophisticated. They reach for words like curated, ecosystem, synergistic community experience. I hear it constantly. It's the Frankenspeak that Ann Handley has been warning against for years.

What JJ said — and what Kierkegaard actually argued — is that indirect communication works precisely because it doesn't announce itself. A story gets inside you before your defences are up. A jargon-heavy pitch triggers the "I'm being sold to" filter immediately.

Clear messaging isn't a dumbed-down version of a clever message. It's a more disciplined version of it. The work is in finding the sentence that a ten-year-old could understand and a CFO would respect. That sentence exists for every space. Most operators haven't found it yet.

I haven't always found it either. But this conversation reminded me that clarity is an act of respect for the person reading.

Links & Resources

Workshop — June 10th & 11th 2026, Holborn, London
StoryBrand & Unreasonable Hospitality Workshop with Dr. JJ Peterson and STORY22
Use discount code CoworkingValues for a mates rate on your ticket.

Dr. JJ Peterson
drjjpeterson.com

Badass Softie Podcast
badasssoftie.com

Books Mentioned

Community

London Coworking Assembly
Coworking Values Podcast on LinkedIn
LinkedIn Coworking Group — 8,000+ members

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Written by

Bernie J Mitchell