Nowadays, the importance of remote work is growing. Hundreds of thousands in our country alone are engaged in programming, writing texts, typesetting books, etc., while being at home, and for work they need only a computer and an Internet connection.
Many people think that sitting at home and “getting easy money” is extremely simple, but far from it. And the point here is not only the absence of sick leave, vacations and other taken for granted office “goodies”, but also in relation to home ones. Households find it subconsciously difficult to realize that you are working. It is generally difficult for children to explain, and not everyone has a personal office.
The best decision
Of course, under such conditions, the productivity of your work drops sharply. Coworking can help solve this problem. What is it, by the way? Everything is simple. This is the name of an offer from a company or private person who owns an office space. This is what coworking is.
You can reserve a place in it for several hours, days, buy a monthly or annual subscription. The advantages are obvious: you have at your disposal a full-fledged workplace where you will not be disturbed by work, and the number of distractions (like a TV and a refrigerator) will be minimized.
These are the conditions that coworking implies. What is this if we talk about the possibility of opening your own business? If you live in a more or less large city, and the market is not saturated yet, then this is a great opportunity to make good money on the desire of people to work quietly away from home fuss.
Decide on the contingent
It is known that any human society is divided into hundreds of small subcultures, each of which has its own outlook on life and its own beliefs. Why are we all saying this? Yes, you just have to immediately decide who you will be guided by, basing your own coworking. What does it mean?
Visit city forums, figure out which category of "free cultivators" prevails directly in your case. Are they artists, designers, web optimizers or programmers? In any case, each of these categories needs its own conditions, and therefore you can immediately forget about universality.
However, there are common features. So, it is better to take care of the availability of a good room for relaxation, equipped with refrigerators for cooling drinks, comfortable furniture, a plasma panel with a game console. So you will motivate people to stay with you longer, spending more money to pay for your services.
What do you need to open a coworking center?
First, you need to decide on a place. Ideally, the coworking center should be located as close as possible to the central part of the city, since not everyone will go to its other end to some dubious neighborhood. The fact is that for a decent salary a person can generally go to another city, but if he pays for his workplace, the situation is completely different ...
In addition, for creative and enthusiastic people, it is undesirable to place the work area in some small and stuffy room. The most unfortunate step is to try to copy the offices of some large companies, separated by "corrals" into hundreds of jobs. You need a room with high ceilings, wide windows and enough space to accommodate sofas and comfortable office desks. Such a coworking zone itself will attract potential customers.
Forget about typical computer chairs for a couple of thousand! If you are planning to attract really solvent customers, get normal office furniture from good manufacturers.
Surely you will have to hire an intelligent administrator who can suppress any potentially conflict situations. So, immediately ban any noise and idle chatter: it will scare away serious customers.
How to start a project promotion?
There are few more specific business projects than what coworking is. What does it mean? It's simple: of course, you can paste leaflets with your unique offer on all the surrounding posts, but there will be little sense from this.
“Hunting” for potential customers is on social networks, selecting groups related to IT infrastructure. Among them there will always be people who need a quiet workplace where they could give all their energy to work. Do not forget to create your own personal page on the network, you can also create a YouTube channel where you live will show everyone who is suffering what benefits your workstation provides. The coworking project will be more successful in this case.
Do not forget about the sale of links to your site, posted in thematic articles. Having completed all these actions, one can fully expect to attract the first visitors to your center.
We are not hiding anything!
Immediately and as thoroughly as possible, write down all the conditions for renting a workplace. Relevant information must be posted not only on your website, but also directly in the office. It is advisable to indicate some favorable preferential conditions so that customers are interested in accumulating bonus points and more. Be sure to make a beautiful and original application form - creative people love this.
With large teams (developers of some promising project), you can generally agree not on a specific rent, but on a certain percentage of future profits. In this case, you assume all the difficulties with the organization of the workspace and food, hoping to get a return in the future. A risky approach, but it can pay for itself.
What does profitability consist of?
Your income will consist of paying directly for the rental of office space for work needs, reserving a room for holding any seminars and lectures. In the first months it is extremely important to provide additional services, otherwise you simply will not be able to survive in this market.
You can engage in your own master classes (if you have something to talk about), combine your project with a hostel or an entertainment cafe. In large cities, you can start to make tangible profits in about a year, but the project’s self-sufficiency is quite realistic within three to four months after its launch. Foreign coworkers write that almost every such project that has been afloat for more than two years, in any case, will start to make a profit simply because of its own fame and the accumulation of its own permanent customer base.
Pricing must be thought out in advance.
Firstly, let’s retreat right away: for people to come and pay you, you need to be open as long as possible. Foreign coworking companies sometimes even work around the clock. So, even when working from 7 to 23, you will still have clients who do not mind staying overnight. Subject to the copying of passport data and their full responsibility, you can hire a separate administrator and make a profit at some nightly rate.
In general, the approach to payment is strictly individual. You can focus on regular customers, but it’s quite realistic to set the hourly pay for everyone. For regular customers you need to do special subscription, you can give them particularly good jobs. Do not hope for a quick payback, since even in Moscow and St. Petersburg some entrepreneurs came to it only after a couple of years (or even three years later).
As a rule, coworking in Moscow (a monthly subscription) and in other large cities can cost about 10-12 thousand rubles, but in the regions it is far from always possible to find customers for even four thousand. Many people prefer to pay a couple of hundred for an hour or two to complete some important project than to buy a permanent subscription, which they do not always need.
What are the costs?
Firstly, from the cost of the lease itself. It is difficult to say something for sure, but you yourself imagine that renting a room in the city center is a very expensive pleasure. You can correct the situation by finding the owner of some not too presentable structure, then to make repairs on your own.
Despite the complexity, sometimes it is ten times more profitable than renting a finished office building. Initially, you need to focus on jobs for 10-15 people, but get ready for the fact that you will not gain so many clients right away. After all, coworking is a purely individual matter, so you can recruit people for a long time. So do not be discouraged right away, do not wait for an instant influx of customers!
Consider fees for electricity, water, and other utilities. Naturally, the business plan of the coworking center must take into account payment for the Internet, and you will conclude the contract on behalf of the company, so the cost will be rather big (at least 30 thousand). In a word, for the opening of the center you will probably need at least a million rubles.
What documents are required?
There is nothing particularly complicated here. First, register your IP. In addition, you will need a lease of premises, a contract with suppliers of electricity, water, as well as with your Internet provider. Everything you need can be obtained in just a month.
Thus, coworking is a relatively risky business, but the potential profits are worth it!