New Work Cities: bringing the New Work City mojo back!

Alarming Trend #1: All but a relative handful of spaces, it seems, are facing the same issue: trouble attracting and retaining members.

This is largely due to their struggles to build (or general lack of interest in building) a genuine community of people who are emotionally invested in the project.

Members talk about these spaces like they’re a temporary stop until something better comes along:

“yeah, the space is all right, but nobody really talks to each other. I’d go somewhere better if I could.”

Have you heard this a lot? I have.

Alarming Trend #2: The spaces that are building authentic community are almost all struggling to settle on a long-term sustainable model.

It seems the ones that are doing well with community are either burning out or facing existential (and unanswered) questions about their future.

These are big problems!

If something doesn’t change, we’re going to be seeing a lot of coworking spaces closing up over the next several years, and with them a lot of potential to show a clear contrast to the cookie-cutter chain workspaces that will continue to do their thing.

This isn’t the movement I was dreaming of!

It seems we got part of the way there… Coworking is everywhere! Hooray!

… but now we need to work on getting GREAT coworking communities everywhere, and making sure they’re here to stay.

I got out of the coworking space business myself in part because I wanted to focus on helping many spaces succeed.

To that end, I’m looking at all these issues and deciding it’s time to do something about it.

I can take what I’ve learned building New Work City, combine it with what I’ve seen from observing how tons of other spaces do it, and build something that helps people build better coworking communities.

Enter: New Work Cities.

With New Work Cities, we (because it won’t just be me) will develop new ways to help coworking spaces build better community, make their operations run more smoothly, and develop plans for the future.

As needed, we’ll call on the talents of some awesome friends, including Amy Segreti, Angel Meakins Kwiatkowski, Ashley Proctor, Craig Baute, Jacob Sayles, Oren Salomon, Peter Chislett, and Susan Dorsch.

We’ll identify the biggest challenges, craft solutions, and offer them up however appropriate.

We’ll help the struggling spaces get good, and the good spaces get better.

It’s early days, but already there’s much to be done.

If you or someone you know would like to talk, we’re open for business, as of right now.

Let’s build better coworking communities together!

Tony

See this post on Facebook here.