Earlier this month the Workspace Association of New York brought together its members from the greater NYC metro area and across the United States for its 12th annual Day Conference. WANY President Ray Lindenberg put together a great group of industry expert speakers to highlight the important changes happening in today's workspace market. From Commercial Real Estate, to workspace design and community, the day was jam-packed with useful content for shared workspace operators of all shapes and sizes. Here's what we learned... 

GCUC 2017 in NYC raised the bar for industry conferences. From Convene, the impressive venue, to the refreshing content and panels from industry experts. It’ll be interesting to see how the organizers at GCUC will outdo themselves next year. But we won’t get ahead of ourselves...

BCA Executive Director Jennifer Brooke kicked off another flagship event with a rallying cry listing dozens of new workspaces up and down the UK and how, to sustain success, our thriving sector needs to rapidly respond to changing customer expectations.

essensys is gearing up for what will be an exciting season of events. We’ll join the ranks of Coworking owners, operators and industry gurus at GCUC in our own back yard: New York City. In a mere 12 months, the Coworking industry has grown and evolved more than we could have anticipated this time last year. With its expanding footprint, it’s brought new challenges to owners and space managers in the form of competition from ambitious market players, traditional office space operators and commercial real estate agents. 

In our continued series of events throughout the US, essensys visited Chicago, a city with a large footprint of shared workspaces. From WorkBetter in the soaring Willis Tower to 25N and LifeWorking in the suburbs, there is no shortage of workspaces to fulfill the growing market demand.

essensys partook in QTLY Chicago, a workspace industry event intended specifically for owners and operators of Coworking and shared workspaces in local markets. Much like the Atlanta event, attendees received a state-of-the-market update, insight into operational reporting and metrics for a profitable workspace business, and a very productive unconference session to share ideas and thoughts on the not-so-easy aspects of running a shared workspace.

Just because it’s the windy city, operators in Chicago aren’t throwing caution to the wind. The operators we met at QTLY are methodical and very measured about everything from ICT and operations to how they engage their community members. While many are still testing out tools and techniques, such as using slack for Community messaging and how to integrate members into community, on the whole Chicago is a mature and serious market with great potential. Much like Atlanta, each workspace seems to create a very niche community.

Here are our key takeaways from Chicago:

Last week essensys took to the road as sponsors of the QTLY Atlanta event. QTLY is a workspace industry event series intended specifically for owners and operators of shared workspaces and collaborative programs in local markets that will also take us to Chicago, San Diego, Los Angeles, Seattle and Portland.

Atlanta is a shared workspace market that boasts a gamut of Coworking flavors, from warehouse workspaces focused on e-commerce businesses to the traditional family-run serviced office. Hosted by JLL, QTLY Atlanta showed a strong turnout of ambitious and enthusiastic operators including Northpoint Executive Suites, Shared Space, Alkaloid Network and Roam Innovative Workplace. Because demand is clearly driving supply in the market, particularly in Atlanta, we found that there wasn’t a sense of competition among operators. That said, Atlanta operators are naturally creating niche workspaces and are inspired to build communities based on their members’ shared interests.

There was animated discussion around member engagement, creating community, helping companies to grow, value-added services, taxes, and human talent acquisition in the shared workspace, among others. Here are our key takeaways from Atlanta.

After a successful week at GWA 2016 in Las Vegas, it’s time to reflect. Not about the amount of money lost at the tables but about what it takes to be a successful workspace operator. This year there was a lot of discussion around how to monetize services and provide upsell and cross-sell opportunities in both coworking spaces, business centers, and executive suites.

With the event held at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Resort in Vegas, it occurred to me that there is a huge amount that flexible workspace operators could learn from Sin City. So, here are my thoughts on the top five things that workspace operators can learn from Las Vegas: