Welcome to Coworking Values the podcast of the European Coworking Assembly.
Each week we deep dive into one of the values of accessibility, community, openness, collaboration and sustainability. Listen in to learn how these values can make or break Coworking culture.
Audience, Community, or Village? The Framework for Real Connection with Rose Radtke
jeudi 5 février 2026 • Durée 29:29
“Community is a really irritating word to me right now. We ask it to carry too much. Everything’s a community.”
Rose Radtke
Tired of running yourself into the ground?
Then stop running alone.
On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.
Rose Radtke is a brand strategist, writer, and community manager.
She positions herself as a “smart connector”—someone who finds the links between brand, community, and marketing.
Six years deep in community building, she’s watched the word “community” stretch thinner each year.
Everything became a community. Discord servers. Email lists. Substack comments. The word stopped meaning anything specific.
Rose makes a distinction that matters.
Audience, community, and village are not the same thing.
One lets you lurk. One expects participation. One demands mutual care.
Bernie and Rose unpack the framework. They move from COVID’s online community boom to the messy reality of engineering community in coworking spaces.
The lines between workspace and third space blurring.
Pop-up markets in coworking spaces. Coworking desks in bookshops and gyms.
And she’s asking a question that hospitality venues should be terrified of:
Why don’t they have community managers?
This episode is for operators tired of using “community” to mean everything and nothing.
It’s for anyone trying to work out whether they’re building an audience, a community, or a village—and what the difference actually means for the people who show up.
Timeline Highlights
[01:51] Rose describes herself: “I’m actually a bit of an octopus. I am a brand strategist, I am a writer, and I’m a community manager.”
[02:12] What she wants to be known for: “Being a real connector, being someone that’s really smart and that connects people up in interesting ways.”
[03:04] The frustration: “We ask it to carry too much. Everything’s a community. We want everything to be a community, and it just carries an awful, awful lot.”
[04:49] The distinction: “Participation is optional. You can either be a lurker... but then you can fluidly move into being a participant.”
[06:46] Village versus community: “In a village, there’s an expectation of care. You extend to each other and everyone has their part to play.”
[08:49] COVID’s turning point: “Communities were lifelines for people in COVID. Most of those communities were online.”
[11:31] Engineering community: “Your branding and your marketing and your community have to work as one for it to work.”
[13:34] Bernie on his favourite spaces: “Started by people who are scratching their own edge.”
[16:25] Rose on 2026 struggles: “Coworking spaces seem to be struggling a bit more this year... a shift towards more flexible memberships.”
[19:46] The blurred lines: “The lines becoming blurred between work space and third space in coworking spaces.”
[21:27] Multi-use strategy: “I want to create reasons for people to stay beyond their work day... and ways to make additional revenue.”
[22:53] Hospitality insight: “I’m really interested in whether or why hospitality venues don’t have community managers. I feel like that’s madness.”
[24:19] Multi-use excitement: “Really make it multi-use. That’s a really interesting and exciting space at the moment.”
[26:38] The future is now: “Lines are being blurred in lots of areas, and I think spatially, that’s the case as well.”
The Three-Type Framework
Rose has been working in community for six years.
She started through branding—branding communities, finding the work fascinating.
Then the word stretched.
“Over the last 6-8 years, we ask it to carry too much. Everything’s a community. We want everything to be a community, and it just carries an awful, awful lot.”
She’s right.
The word “community” used to mean something specific. Now it means anything a brand wants it to mean.
Rose thinks we need to go back to basics.
Stop calling everything a community. Work out what you’re actually running.
An audience is passive.
They consume what you produce. They might engage, but they don’t expect to be part of the thing.
A community is fluid.
Participation is optional. You can lurk. You can absorb what you’re reading, overhear conversations, eye things up.
Then you can fluidly move into being a participant when you’re ready.
No pressure. No expectation.
A village is different.
Everyone’s participation is needed. Everyone has a role. There’s an expectation of care.
You extend care to each other.
Even if your role is just taking your rubbish out on the right day, you have to participate.
Rose thinks coworking sits somewhere between community and village, depending on how the space is designed.
Some members want to get out of their house. Leave behind the mess and the half-eaten Rice Krispies. Work somewhere clean and tidy.
Get their head down. Leave at the end of the day. Go home.
That’s valid.
Other people want to network. They want to go to a place where people know their name.
They want to be part of the programme, learn stuff, be all in.
That’s valid too.
Both are community. But they’re not the same kind of community.
Calling them both “community” without distinction makes the word useless.
COVID Broke the Word
COVID was a huge turning point.
Community went online. It had to.
Online communities became lifelines for people. They were essential, not optional.
“We piled a lot on the word community during COVID,” Rose says.
“That is where it all became a bit stretched and misshapen.”
She’s not wrong.
The word community used to imply something physical, something local, something you could walk to.
COVID made it mean “any group of people who talk to each other online.”
Online communities are just as important and valid as in-person communities.
But they’re very different.
The expectations are different. The rhythms are different. The care structures are different.
We’ve never quite come back from that.
The word “community” now has to work for both. It has to mean your local pub and your Discord server. Your coworking space and your Substack comments section.
No wonder it’s irritating.
Engineering Community in Coworking
Rose makes a distinction that matters.
Some coworking spaces start because someone needed a place to work. They had extra space. They built something around what they were doing.
The Skiff in Brighton. Coworking Lisboa in Lisbon. Indy Hall.
Other spaces start as a brand first.
Someone decides to start a coworking space. They build the brand, then they build the community.
Both can work. But they’re different.
When you start as a brand, you have to engineer the community.
Your branding, your marketing, and your community have to work as one.
Otherwise, your community just isn’t going to happen.
Rose thinks that’s fine.
“Things change, times change, people change. If we just accept that that is what community is now in coworking, cool, that’s fine.”
I’m not sure I agree.
I think my favourite coworking spaces have been started by people who were scratching their own edge.
People who needed something, so they built it.
The community formed around their intention.
But Rose is right that engineering community can work.
It just requires a different kind of discipline.
You can’t fake it. You can’t market your way into authentic connection.
You have to build the conditions for it.
Your space has to attract the people you want.
Your brand has to signal clearly who this is for.
Your community manager (if you have one) has to facilitate without forcing.
The 2026 Pricing Puzzle
Rose has noticed something.
Coworking spaces seem to be struggling a bit more this year.
There are indicators.
More spaces offering flexibility. Lower hour memberships. Modular memberships.
Day blocks instead of monthly commitments.
Maybe it’s because people want more flexibility in their lives.
They don’t want to be tied down.
Or maybe spaces are struggling to make rent and they’re trying anything that might bring people through the door.
Tom Ball at Desk Lodge has nailed the pricing.
You can buy a block of days. If you go over those days, you can get a better deal on more days.
It’s flexible, but it’s simple.
Most spaces haven’t worked this out yet.
They’ve got 57 different pricing options on their website.
That exhausts the buyer. It exhausts the accounting system. It exhausts the space operator trying to manage it all.
Rose thinks the trend is hybrid work meeting economic pressure.
People work from home some days, coworking some days, client offices other days.
Fixed monthly memberships don’t fit that pattern anymore.
The spaces that survive will be the ones that make flexibility simple.
The Blurred Lines Between Workspace and Third Space
Rose is watching a trend that excites her.
The lines are blurring between workspace and third space in coworking spaces.
Spaces are becoming multi-use.
At the weekend, they become a pop-up market or a supper club. They have a café open to the public. They host community events that draw people who aren’t members.
Kemp Town Bookshop in Brighton just added a coworking option.
You can pay for a desk for the day. You’re sitting in the café, surrounded by books.
People come to a vintage flea market on Saturday and discover that the space also offers coworking.
Boom, new member.
David Lloyd gyms have been doing this for years.
You can go to the gym, pay for two hours of childcare in their crèche, do some work upstairs, then have lunch in the café.
It’s all under one roof. It’s corporate, but it works.
Rose thinks this is smart.
“I want to create reasons for people to stay beyond their work day or if they’re not working, for them to come in anyway. And ways to make additional revenue.”
It’s not just coworking spaces adding third space elements.
It’s third spaces adding coworking. Cafés. Bookshops. Gyms.
Rose thinks being able to plan your day around one space is becoming important to people.
Time is pressured.
Killing two birds with one stone is appealing.
Hospitality Venues Need Community Managers
Rose drops a question that should terrify every pub, café, and restaurant owner in the UK.
“I’m really interested in whether or why hospitality venues don’t have community managers. I feel like that’s madness.”
She’s right. It is madness.
If Rose was running a pub and wanted it to be really successful, she’d hire someone part-time to be a community manager.
Create a great programme. Survey the local residents. Find out what they want from the space.
Bring in all the clubs from around the area—book clubs, chess clubs, everything.
Make the pub a hub.
That role used to be called sales and marketing.
But the person with that job title now has a very different headspace.
They’re focused on acquisition, not community building.
Rose sees the crossover between brand, community, and marketing.
It’s all communication. It’s the “co” in communication.
But most hospitality venues are stuck in lead generation mode.
They’re obsessed with getting new customers through the door.
They’re not thinking about how to make the people who are already there want to stay longer, come back more often, and bring their friends.
A community manager in a hospitality venue would programme activity. They’d build loyalty.
They’d create reasons for regulars to show up even when they’re not hungry or thirsty.
Rose thinks multi-use spaces are where the opportunity is right now.
As a community manager, that’s where she’s looking.
The Social Post
Most coworking spaces claim to be communities.
But Rose Radtke argues they’re often audiences. Or sometimes villages.
And it actually matters which one you’re building.
In her conversation with Bernie, Rose breaks down the three-type framework that changes how you think about participation.
An audience is passive—they consume. A community is fluid—lurking is fine, participation is optional. A village demands care—everyone has a role.
Coworking sits somewhere between community and village, depending on your design.
Some members just want a clean desk and to leave at 5pm. Others want to know everyone’s name and be part of everything.
Both are valid. But calling them both “community” without distinction makes the word useless.
Rose also unpacks why 2026 is the year spaces are blurring the lines—pop-up markets in coworking spaces, coworking desks in bookshops, gyms with work areas.
And she asks the question hospitality venues should be terrified of: Why don’t they have community managers?
Listen to the full conversation between Bernie and Rose to hear the framework that helps you diagnose what you’re actually building—and how to engineer community when you start as a brand, not a need.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit coworkingvaluespodcast.substack.com
How Childcare Plus Coworking Becomes Social Infrastructure with Georgia Norton
mardi 3 février 2026 • Durée 32:04
“What concerns me most is this idea that we’re returning to the norms from before... when we tore down the walls between home and work and childcare.”
Georgia Norton
Tired of running yourself into the ground?
Then stop running alone.
On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.
Georgia Norton spent spring 2024 interviewing founders, childcare workers, and parents across co-located childcare and coworking spaces.
What she documented wasn’t a pandemic oddity for affluent families.
It was a structural shift in how people want to arrange work and care.
The report, “The Case for Childcare plus coworking,” argues that these spaces should be treated as essential social infrastructure, not premium amenities.
Georgia calls it social infrastructure because that’s what it functions as:
* Places where work happens alongside childcare
* Where childcare workers gain professional development opportunities shoulder to shoulder with laptop workers
* Where bridges get built between people who’d never otherwise meet
But Georgia’s facing pushback from two contradictory directions.
Front one:This is elitist. How could this ever be universal childcare?
The spaces look too nice, too intentional about natural light and materials.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
How the 10-Minute City Creates Freedom with Szilvia Filep
jeudi 29 janvier 2026 • Durée 30:23
“If freelancing is the future of work, then coworking is the future workplace.”
Szilvia Filep
Tired of running yourself into the ground?
Then stop running alone.
On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.
Ten years ago, Szilvia Filep quit her multinational job in Budapest because they wouldn’t let her work remotely.
Back in 2016, that decision meant becoming a freelancer when Hungarian society viewed freelancing as code for “can’t get a proper job.” It meant moving from the capital to Veszprém—a countryside city—with her husband and young daughter. It meant choosing time over salary, proximity over prestige, freedom over the illusion of security.
Today, Szilvia runs the Hungarian Coworking Association, operates a coworking space in Veszprém, and serves as Communications Manager for Coworking Europe. Everything she needs—her kids’ school, her coworking space, the city centre, supermarket, her mother-in-law for childcare—sits within a 10-minute walk from her front door.
She calls it her “10-minute city.” Where Paris has Professor Carlos Moreno’s ambitious 15-minute city vision, Szilvia built her own version through strategic decisions about where to live, what to prioritise, and how to structure work around life instead of life around work.
The contrast with her previous existence is stark. One to one-and-a-half hours each way in Budapest traffic. Now? She chooses how to spend that reclaimed time. Not stuck in traffic jams. Not at the mercy of delayed trains. Freedom to prepare for her day on her own terms.
But here’s what matters for you as a coworking operator: Szilvia’s journey from corporate employee to freelancer to association founder mirrors the transformation happening across Europe right now.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
Why Small Businesses Are the Real Heroes with Tom Ball
mardi 27 janvier 2026 • Durée 28:48
“The unsung heroes are the smaller companies who are… They’re not trying to raise a billion pounds... Being a home where they feel happy, safe, productive is a good thing.”
Tom Ball
Tired of running yourself into the ground?
Then stop running alone.
On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.
Tom Ball has been banging the drum for micro and small businesses longer than most people have been paying attention.
While everyone else obsesses over billion-pound unicorns and corporate flex contracts, Tom’s been quietly building DeskLodge in Bristol—a coworking space that actually makes money whilst refusing to become a soulless corporate service provider.
The tension he lives with daily is the same one every independent coworking operator faces: you can’t be a purist because you can’t pay the bills that way. But you also can’t rip out everything that makes your space special just to chase higher margins.
Tom chose a third path. He runs a financially viable business with a diverse tenant mix—freelancers, small firms, and corporate teams—whilst maintaining what he calls an “indie-friendly culture” and refusing to compromise on the values that matter.
The conversation covers what the last brutal year has done to small coworking spaces, why government and big corporates consistently fail small businesses despite calling them “the backbone of the economy,” and the practical frameworks Tom’s developed over a decade to stay solvent without losing his soul.
He shares DeskLodge’s award-winning flexible pricing model, including the “Flex One Plus” membership that changed how they think about belonging. The environmental design philosophy that treats productivity as a design problem, not a community-building one. The “Pay It Forward” scheme that gives free hot desking to well-connected people between jobs—not out of charity, but as strategic network investment.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
Why Your Superpower Is Being Hyper-Local with Rosee Shrestha
mardi 20 janvier 2026 • Durée 25:14
“Inclusivity basically doesn’t mean that you have to include everybody. It’s just making sure that the space that you’re offering is where people can feel safe... it’s about who feels comfortable staying or speaking up or knowing that whatever opinions they have to give will be heard.”Rosee Shrestha
Tired of running yourself into the ground?
Then stop running alone.
On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.
The best version of your space is being specific about who it’s for.
Being for everyone is a recipe for building somewhere nobody belongs.
Rosee Shrestha writes and creates content at Cobot, where she documents what actually works in coworking. Through her newsletter and interviews with operators across Europe, she’s noticed a pattern. The spaces that thrive aren’t casting the widest net. They’re being specific about who they serve—because that’s the only moat they have.
In an industry where the rent keeps climbing and corporate chains can outspend you on marketing, your community is the one thing they can’t replicate.
Bernie and Rosee unpack her recent piece featuring perspectives from Ashley, Silia, and Hector on what’s shaping coworking in 2026.
The thread connecting all their insights? Hyper-local spaces that know exactly who they’re for.
Ashley talks about returning to first principles—community hubs that serve multiple purposes, not just desk rental. Hector describes members choosing an ecosystem that fits into their daily lives, not just a place to sit. Rosee shares what she learned from Selina at Werkhain in Berlin about what it means to be “seen” in a space without anyone forcing interaction on you.
Bernie brings his own observations from FENTO coworking near Vigo, where Camino pilgrims walk past speaking German, Dutch, French, and English—and from a hostel café in Kathmandu where travellers and locals found each other without strategic community programming.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
The Cure for Coworking Space Imposter Syndrome with Jerome Chang & Jackie Latragna
jeudi 15 janvier 2026 • Durée 26:18
“For an industry that professes to be about community, that’s the co-part of coworking, it sure doesn’t include the entire community. We owe it to ourselves, practise what we preach...”
Jerome Chang
Tired of running yourself into the ground?
Then stop running alone.
On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.
Jerome Chang started coworking in 2008.
He runs the oldest coworking brand in America. He’s a licensed architect. He also plays aggressive adult slow-pitch softball.
That last part surprised Bernie, too.
Here’s what didn’t surprise him: Jerome stopped going to the big conferences.
In London, over 51% of coworking spaces are owned by operators with one to five locations. Jerome calls them “people in the trenches.” But walk into a major industry conference, and you’ll hear the National President of WeWork talking about strategies for hundreds of sites.
After the top three or four brands—WeWork with around 200 locations, Regus with 1,000, and Premier with 120—everyone else drops to fewer than four locations.
That’s the actual industry.
Nobody was building events for them.
So Jerome built one. The Coworking Operators Weekend. Now in its second year. Rotating through secondary cities: Los Angeles, then Raleigh, then Detroit in 2027, Denver in 2028.
Jackie Latragna handles marketing for Pacific Workplaces and helps organise the event. She came from logistics two years ago and is still shocked at how genuinely helpful people are in this industry. Her takeaway from last year: “You walk away from an event, and you know every single person’s name.”
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
The Ground Is Moving Under Coworking with Hector Kolonas
mercredi 14 janvier 2026 • Durée 35:03
“Anyone who tells you to have this little bit of code, do this, is lying. Nobody knows exactly how to optimise towards it.”Hector Kolonas
Tired of running yourself into the ground?
Then stop running alone.
On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.
That’s Hector Kolonas on AI search strategy.
Not the consultant version. The honest version. The version you get from someone who’s been watching coworking patterns since 2013 — not because he planned it, but because the Cyprus banking crisis wiped out his business overnight.
Banks froze. ATMs stopped. His advertising clients axed his contracts.
What he found himself staring at: empty ad agency offices, Herman Miller chairs gathering dust, and a new class of displaced workers with nowhere to go. So he filled those offices with freelancers. Not as a business plan. As survival.
That’s why he sees fragility where others see trends.
When he talks about the shifts happening in coworking right now, he’s not predicting from a conference stage. He’s pattern-matching against what happens when systems fail. Three shifts are reshaping how people interact with coworking spaces.
Not abstract trends. Real changes happening now.
The first shift
People aren’t choosing a single office anymore.
They’re building an ecosystem of workspaces based on what task they’re trying to complete and what else is happening in their life that day. A coworking space for collaborative work. Home for deep focus. A hotel lobby for client calls.
The question isn’t “Should I join?” It’s “Does this space fit the specific thing I need right now?”
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
How Contingent Works Educated Their Local Council on Coworking – From Invisible to Indispensable with Ewan Buck
vendredi 2 janvier 2026 • Durée 32:14
"It wasn't because they weren't listening – it was because they weren't educated. Once that penny drops, they're super helpful."Ewan Buck
Tired of running yourself into the ground?
Then stop running alone.
On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.
Ewan Buck has been working on Contingent Works since 2018. The space opened on Bromley High Street in late 2020, weeks before England’s second lockdown.
For the first four years, the council didn’t get it.
Not because they were hostile. Because they’d never seen what a coworking space actually does. They work in dull corporate offices. They don’t know what it looks like when freelancers and micro-businesses find each other, share leads, and build something together.
So Ewan did what Gerald from a Brixton coworking assembly told him worked: he educated them. Slowly. Persistently. For four years.
He dragged councillors into the space. He introduced them to members. He let them see faces light up over laptop screens on a Friday afternoon when central London offices sat empty.
Then the personnel changed. Someone new arrived in the department and asked the obvious question: “Oh, you’ve got a coworking space on the high street? That’s really handy.”
Once the penny dropped, they were super helpful.
Now Contingent Works runs an accelerator programme with Goldsmiths University. Ten scaling companies get monthly mentoring. Regular networking events bring local businesses together. The MP is scheduled to visit in February.
But here’s the part that stopped Bernie mid-conversation:
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
How Coffee Shops Accidentally Created Coworking with David Walker
vendredi 26 décembre 2025 • Durée 32:46
“If coffee shops could have innovated a bit, the coworking industry might have never even happened, honestly, because coffee shops have all the ingredients that coworking movement wanted. It just needed an extra layer of intentionality.” — David Walker
Tired of running yourself into the ground?
Then stop running alone.
On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.
David Walker is back on the podcast, and this time he’s got a provocation that might sting.
That indie coffee shop you love? The one where you spend eight hours nursing a single flat white, running speed tests on their wifi, hunting for the corner seat with the working plug socket?
It could have been a coworking space. Should have been, perhaps.
The ingredients were all there: the energy, the ambient productivity, the regulars who recognise each other but never speak because it’s against social norms. What was missing was a membership model and a barista willing to connect people instead of just pulling shots.
In our first conversation back in August, David talked about the bias towards design over engagement — how spaces get the aesthetics right but miss the human facilitation that makes community actually happen. This episode picks up that thread and runs with it: what does intentional community facilitation look like when you strip away the fancy furniture?
David has been in coworking since 2008, back when Conjunctured was a refurbished house in East Austin with beer in the vending machine. He’s watched the industry grow from grassroots movement to asset class. He’s always working between two worlds — the grassroots ethos in one side of his brain, the future evolution of the industry in the other.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
"This Is a Very Lean Business, Incredibly Lean" with Karen Tait
mardi 16 décembre 2025 • Durée 32:05
“If we can make people feel like anything is possible, anything is solvable, together... We can find a way together.” - Karen Tait
Tired of running yourself into the ground?
Then stop running alone.
On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.
Karen Tait’s electricity bill has tripled in four years.
The reality of running an independent coworking space in 2025 is about to get worse.Karen founded The Residence in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, after years of commuting to London while affordability kept pushing her further out. She went from investment banking to building the kind of space she desperately needed: a place where small business owners could find energy, support, validation, and community—not just desks and Wi-Fi.
She knows both worlds. The City, and the country lane.
Now, a single policy change threatens to undo it all.
The UK’s business rates reclassification—specifically the stripping of Small Business Rates Relief from private offices within coworking spaces—could force operators like Karen into an impossible choice: absorb costs they can’t afford, pass them on to members who don’t deserve the hit, or close.
The same policy that strips relief from Karen’s members gives breaks to distribution warehouses on the edge of town.
This episode is part of our ongoing series on the business rates crisis, following conversations with Jane Sartin from FlexSA and Roland Stanley from Dragon Coworking.
What makes Karen’s perspective essential is what she reveals about the hidden economic engine that coworking creates.
The Residence doesn’t just provide workspace.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
Front two:
Not everyone wants work and care integrated.
Some people prefer separation, long commutes, and wrap-around daycare.
Both critiques miss what Georgia is actually arguing.
She’s not trying to universalise a single model.
She’s pointing out that thousands of families restructured their lives during the pandemic and don’t want to return to the way things were.
They’ve tasted something different—messy, overlapping, human—and the old binary (office or home, parent or professional, boss or employee) feels like a lie.
The teens who kept wearing sliders and pyjama pants to school after lockdown?
That’s the same cultural shift.
We loosened our grip on “how things are supposed to be” and got more realistic about what actually matters.
Georgia names fixable barriers:
* Licensing rules that block grant access
* Outdated funding structures
* The assumption that childcare innovation requires private equity backing
She’s taking these findings to the House of Lords in June.
She’s exploring intergenerational models that integrate eldercare alongside childcare.
Her next horizon isn’t scaling Playhood into a chain—it’s asking smarter policy questions about how to fund site-specific, adaptive models that serve neighbourhoods.
This episode is for:
Space operators are wondering if childcare integration makes sense.
Parents who’ve felt the guilt of separation and want to explore alternatives.
Anyone asking whether coworking can do more than rent desks—whether it can actually function as civic infrastructure that builds bridges across differences.
⏱ Timeline Highlights
[02:07] What Georgia wants to be known for: “Making an impact... putting that report to work to help inspire entrepreneurs, to defend the childcare workforce.”
[03:34] The provocative question that drove the report: “So many people wanted this... Why aren’t we funding models to pilot this?”
[04:56] Why the report’s lens was American: “I’m sitting on more of a global picture.”
[05:53] The tension Georgia feels most: “What concerns me most is this idea that we’re returning to the norms from before.”
[09:10] On loosening standards: “We all loosened our standards... But I think we just got more realistic about, let’s not waste any time on that separation.”
[10:20] The power of bridges: “We need bridges to other people... not binary employee versus boss, teacher versus parent.”
[11:11] What the pandemic revealed: “The pandemic let us see childcare workers as key workers... We should hold on to models that integrate with families.”
[14:03] The contradictory feedback: “Two key pieces of feedback contradict one another—how is this equitable? And also, this isn’t for everyone.”
[15:21] On not dismissing the model: “If there’s a model here that could work in other neighbourhoods, we’ve got to look at smarter ways of funding.”
[16:48] Georgia on fixable problems: “The barriers to making this more accessible—things like you can’t get grants without the licensing. Really old-fashioned things that get in the way. Fixable problems. I like those.”
[17:42] Why childcare changes everything: “When you add or integrate with a childcare offering... there’s something next level going on.”
[19:11] The workforce development story: “One of the strongest stories... is the workforce development that occurs here.”
[24:09] On species needs: “Openness, open-heartedness and open-mindedness to being around other people is absolutely critical to our social cohesion right now.”
[26:30] Small solutions matter: “Microschools, micro-nurseries with coworking show you don’t need the private equity-backed chain—there have to be entrepreneurs trying things out.”
[27:56] What adaptive means: “We need to be site-specific and grow and adapt to meet each other’s needs... potentially even go into the House of Lords in June to share policy ideas.”
The Two-Front Fight
Georgia’s fighting two battles at once.
And they contradict each other completely.
Front one:This is elitist. How could this ever be universal childcare?
The spaces she profiled look gorgeous. Full of plants, natural light, and intentional materials.
People see that and assume expensive, inaccessible, designed for the 2.5% with disposable income.
Georgia pushes back hard: “It’s really sad to me that people assume we can’t all have nice things.”
Why should designing for human thriving automatically signal exclusivity?
Front two:Not everyone wants this.
Loads of parents are perfectly happy with the separation between work and care.
They want to commute, drop off, access wrap-around daycare, and keep the worlds distinct.
Georgia’s not arguing against that choice.
She’s arguing against the assumption that integrated models shouldn’t exist because some people prefer separation.
The contradiction exposes the real problem.
We’ve built a system where innovation in childcare is assumed to be the preserve of premium membership models.
And simultaneously, we’ve normalised the idea that “for everyone” means erasing specificity and choice.
Georgia’s not trying to universalise one model.
She’s documenting what happens when you give families actual options—and then asking why we’re not funding more experimentation.
The answer involves fixable barriers like licensing and grant eligibility, not inherent inaccessibility.
What the Pandemic Actually Taught Us
Some people untethered completely after the pandemic.
Sold everything, joined travelling villages with six other families, became world-schoolers.
That’s the extreme version.
But thousands more made smaller, lasting changes.
They recalibrated. Decided work isn’t fixed to a location. Stopped pretending that being a parent and being a professional are separate identities you swap between.
Georgia keeps coming back to this: “What concerns me most is this idea that we’re returning to the norms from before.”
The norms are:
* Work happens at the office
* Childcare happens somewhere else
* You commute between identities
Teens in sliders and pyjama pants kept challenging that at school.
Parents working from neighbourhood cafés with prams parked nearby kept challenging it.
Coworking spaces with nurseries next door kept challenging it.
The dominant culture for so long said there’s a way to show up to work. A way to be a boss. A way to be a parent.
The pandemic tore those walls down.
And lots of people haven’t rebuilt them.
The settings Georgia profiled were founded by people who experienced that shift and decided to build something that reflects it.
The question now: do we dismiss these as pandemic oddities, or do we get serious about funding models that serve the families who’ve moved on?
Bridges Not Binaries
There’s a sociologist Georgia references (the name escapes her mid-conversation, but the framework sticks): bonds versus bridges.
Bonds are the logical connections.
Your next-door neighbour, your family member, and people you went to school with. You’re already in each other’s lives for clear reasons.
Bridges are what coworking uniquely provides.
You’re sitting with people who didn’t grow up like you, don’t do the work you do, and don’t share your background.
But you’re in the same space.
Empathy grows. You become reciprocal. You support one another.
When you add childcare workers into that mix—working shoulder to shoulder with parents, freelancers, remote workers—something shifts.
The binary breaks.
It’s not employee versus boss anymore.
Not teacher versus parent.
Not “them” taking care of “my” child while “I” do “real” work.
Co-location makes care visible as work.
It puts the people doing that work in proximity to others doing different work.
The threshold gets crossed.
Childcare workers use the desk space on breaks, after shifts, weekends, to get qualifications, do training, look for new roles.
Georgia found consistent stories of respectful working conditions and better remuneration in co-located settings.
The childcare workforce is overwhelmingly female, often shockingly devalued with minimum wage or agency contracts.
But when those workers are on-site, seen, and respected as colleagues in a shared space, things change.
This is infrastructure work.
Not programming events or mandatory icebreakers.
Just conditions for bridges where walls used to be.
The Workforce Development Story Nobody’s Telling
Georgia didn’t expect this finding when she started the research in March.
It became one of the most compelling threads.
The early years sector—preschoolers, nurseries—is struggling to recruit.
Not enough people are entering degree programmes. Not enough people are getting qualifications.
Recruitment across all care sectors is brutal right now.
The work carries immense emotional labour and pays terribly.
But in co-located spaces, something different happens.
Childcare workers aren’t isolated in a separate building, clocking in and out of shifts with no room to grow.
They’re embedded in a workspace where professional development is normalised.
They’re watching people pivot careers, take courses, network, and problem-solve.
They’re part of that culture.
Georgia describes it as working shoulder to shoulder.
Parents tapping away on laptops, yes—but also childcare workers using that same space to level up, explore mobility, and access opportunities.
This isn’t anecdotal fluff.
It’s workforce development infrastructure.
The care sector desperately needs appealing workplaces, positive cultures, and pathways for growth.
Co-located models offer all three.
The story matters because it flips the script.
Instead of “premium childcare amenity for laptop workers,” it’s “professional development ecosystem that benefits everyone on-site, including—and especially—the people doing care work.”
That’s a policy argument.
That’s a funding argument.
That’s the story Georgia wants to take to the House of Lords.
Fixable Barriers (Not Insurmountable Ones)
Georgia loves fixable problems.
She says it twice.
The barriers to making childcare-plus-coworking more accessible aren’t inherent to the model.
They’re old-fashioned structural things:
* Licensing rules that say you can’t get grants without specific certifications
* Funding mechanisms designed for traditional nurseries, not hybrid models
* Tax structures that treat childcare costs as personal expenses, not business operating costs, even when you’re running your family like a business to make work possible
These are policy choices.
They can be changed.
Georgia points to microschools and micro-nurseries as proof that you don’t need private equity-backed chains.
Small, site-specific solutions work.
Social enterprise models like Work + Play Hub in Edinburgh serve neighbourhoods that previously had no coworking spaces.
A mum saw the gap and built something.
That’s the journey over and over—someone becomes a parent, their eyes open to the barriers, and they scratch their own itch.
The question isn’t whether these models can work.
They’re already working.
The question is whether we’ll fund them intelligently so they don’t get dismissed as pandemic anomalies for affluent postcodes.
Smarter grant structures.
Licensing pathways for hybrid settings.
Tax relief that acknowledges childcare as infrastructure, not a luxury.
These aren’t moon-shot ideas.
They’re fixable.
Site-Specific, Adaptive, Alive
Georgia keeps returning to the mycelium model.
(Her colleague Karen teases her about it, but it’s the right metaphor.)
Hybrid businesses that break down walls also grow and adapt to meet each other’s needs.
They’re not franchises replicating a formula.
They’re site-specific, responsive, evolving with their neighbourhoods.
The innovation curve says serve 2.5% of your potential audience really well before you scale.
Understand their needs intimately. Build something that uniquely serves them.
That’s business development 101.
But when a setting is intentionally small, serving a finite number of people in a specific way, where’s the push to scale coming from?
Georgia identifies this tension throughout the report.
A tiny minority of the spaces she profiled decided to franchise. Most didn’t.
They’re asking: what’s working here, could it work in other neighbourhoods, and how do we share this without losing what makes it work?
There’s a big question there about being intentionally small versus spreading the love.
About staying local versus influencing policy.
About building one brilliant thing versus creating pathways for others to build their own versions.
Coworking brings communities together, helping people find and share their voices. Each episode of the Coworking Values Podcast explores Accessibility, Community, Openness, Collaboration, and Sustainability—values that shape the spaces where we gather, work, and grow. If this resonates with you, rate, follow, and share the podcast. Your support helps others discover how coworking enriches lives, builds careers, and strengthens communities. Community is the key 🔑
What seemed risky in 2016—outcome-based work, autonomy, side projects, choosing flexibility—has become mainstream. In Hungary, the average person under 35 now spends just two years at one company. The future Szilvia bet on has arrived.
And if freelancing truly is the future of work, then coworking genuinely is the future workplace. Not because of hot desks or good coffee. Because people working flexibly still need human contact.
They need spaces designed around connection, not just productivity. They need to know they’re not alone “slogging it out” trying to make WordPress work or deciding whether to invoice before or after completing the work.
Szilvia’s experience in smaller cities reveals something corporate chains can’t replicate: 60% of her coworking members joined when the space opened two-and-a-half years ago and are still there.
That loyalty stems from limited options, yes—but more powerfully, from genuine belonging. In smaller towns, you run into each other outside the space. The connections run deeper. The community isn’t strategic; it’s real.
This episode is for operators building local coworking spaces, running regional associations, or wondering whether European Coworking Day matters beyond marketing. Szilvia shows how grassroots movements gain credibility through continental connection whilst maintaining fierce local loyalty.
You’ll leave understanding how to design a life that actually fits your values, why freelancing skills translate directly to coworking operations, and how European Coworking Day on 6th May gives your local work the visibility it deserves.
Timeline Highlights
[00:04] Bernie announces European Coworking Day is on the sixth of May
[01:26] Szilvia introduces herself: founder of Coworking Hungary Association, runs a space in Veszprém, recently joined Coworking Europe conference team
[02:07] Coworking Europe 2026 will be in Paris on sixth of November
[02:39] “I’ve created my life, my basic needs in a way that everything is just 10 minutes walk from my home”
[04:52] On reclaimed commute time: “It’s freedom”
[08:34] The brave 2016 decision: “I had to quit. That was the time when I became a freelancer to be able to create the life I wanted to live”
[11:49] Essential freelancing skills: “Creativity... you have to be quite brave... good in marketing and pretty much in sales... personal branding... Very, very thoughtful on financials”
[13:54] Szilvia’s realisation: “It’s just the future of work”
[16:38] On selling outcomes: “It’s not the time what you sell, but it’s the results what you sell”
[17:57] Job tenure in Hungary: “The average time a younger person under 35 years spends at one company is two years”
[21:03] The defining quote: “If freelancing is the future of work, then coworking is the future workplace”
[22:38] Why European Coworking Day matters: “This gives an extra credibility and visibility to the things that we do here in Hungary”
[25:21] On loyalty in smaller cities: “60% of the coworkers who are currently using the space, joined at the very beginning when we opened the space two and a half year ago”
[29:59] Bernie’s reminder: “Collaboration over competition”
The 10-Minute City You Can Build Today
You don’t need municipal permission to create a 10-minute city.
Szilvia designed hers through decisions: choosing Veszprém over Budapest, paying more for a flat near the city centre instead of cheaper suburbs, opening her coworking space within walking distance of her home.
The trade-off was clear. Living centrally costs more. But the return—time, autonomy, presence with her children—proved worth every forint.
Before moving, Szilvia and her husband sat down and asked: “How do we want to lead our family life together?” Both had spent their childhoods travelling to school in different cities. Both commuted 30-40 minutes one way to university in Budapest. Both wanted something different for their kids and themselves.
What makes this relevant for coworking operators? Your members face the same calculation. They’re weighing commute time against flexibility, corporate salaries against autonomy, prestige against presence. The operators who understand this friction—who position their spaces as infrastructure for freedom, not just desks for rent—win the loyalty Szilvia describes.
Sixty per cent retention over two-and-a-half years doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when your space solves a life design problem, not just a workspace problem.
When “Freelancer” Meant “Unemployed”
In 2016, telling people in Hungary you were a freelancer translated roughly to: “I can’t get a proper job.”
Szilvia heard it constantly. “Poor freelancers, it’s how hard for them to get a job, how it’s just not stable, it’s just unpredictable. It’s unsafe financially.”
She could count on her hands how many people she knew doing the same work. So she organised a freelance conference. She ran events for freelancers to meet and learn from each other. She told everyone she could about this emerging way of working.
Ten years later, the world has caught up. Remote work. Outcome-based projects. Side gigs. Portfolio careers. These aren’t fringe anymore—they’re how most knowledge workers operate, whether officially freelance or not.
But here’s the insight that matters: the skills Szilvia needed to succeed as a freelancer in 2016 are exactly the skills coworking operators need today. Creativity. Courage. Marketing yourself (or your space). Sales and personal branding. And critically—being “very, very thoughtful on financials.”
If you can’t plan for income volatility, freelancing becomes genuinely precarious. If you can’t market your value, you struggle to fill your pipeline. If you’re not brave enough to make unconventional choices, you default to copying what others do.
Szilvia’s freelance foundation prepared her perfectly for coworking operations. Both require building community from scratch, explaining a concept people don’t yet understand, and staying financially resilient through uncertainty.
The Future of Work Has Arrived
Szilvia saw it coming in 2016.
She researched freelancing, trying to understand where it fit on “the map of the world of work.” Her conclusion: “It’s nothing extraordinary. It’s just the future of work.”
How people worked as freelancers in 2015 is how most people work in 2026. Remotely. With autonomy over their schedules. Selling results, not time. Managing multiple projects or clients. Doing side gigs alongside main employment.
In Hungary, Bernie notes that COVID revealed how fragile employment security really is. The “job for life” their parents’ generation expected simply doesn’t exist. Under-35s switch companies every two years—essentially living project-based careers even within traditional employment.
This transformation changes what coworking needs to provide.
It’s not about replicating corporate offices. It’s not about professional addresses or meeting rooms. It’s about solving the core freelancing problem: isolation. As Szilvia puts it, home office “turned out it’s also not enough because you don’t have the interaction with people and that has a negative impact on creativity, cooperation, and many, many other things.”
The solution? Flexibility and the idea of coworking. Multi-purpose community hubs where work happens but community forms. Spaces that fit into daily life—Hector’s “ecosystem” insight—rather than requiring members to build their lives around the space.
If freelancing is genuinely the future of work, your coworking space isn’t competing with WeWork. You’re building civic infrastructure for how humans will work for the next fifty years.
Why European Coworking Day Isn’t Just Marketing
Every May 6th, coworking spaces across Europe open their doors for European Coworking Day.
In Hungary, the Coworking Association runs it as part of their “Open Coworking Week”—an extended celebration that’s been happening for six years.
Szilvia explains why they participate: “This gives an extra credibility and visibility to the things that we do here in Hungary.
We are not just saying that, okay, here it’s springtime, let’s visit some coworking spaces in Hungary. But we can say that, hey, there’s a European Coworking Day. All the coworkings in Europe are celebrating this new movement.”
It’s easy to be cynical about coordinated awareness days. But for operators in smaller cities and regional associations, European Coworking Day solves a real problem: legitimacy.
When you’re explaining coworking to local government, potential members, or sceptical family members, being part of a European movement matters. It signals this isn’t just your quirky local project—it’s a continental shift in how work happens.
Bernie captures the power of seeing “big shiny spaces in Berlin and little villages in Portugal and a place in Copenhagen and a place in Basingstoke in the UK all do the same thing.” It’s solidarity. It’s proof. It’s belonging to something that matters.
For you, this means: don’t sit out European Coworking Day thinking it’s someone else’s initiative. It’s yours. It’s how you connect your local work to a movement that’s reshaping European work culture.
And it’s how operators like you find each other, swap ideas, and remember: collaboration over competition.
The Loyalty You Can’t Buy
Here’s what surprised Szilvia about running a coworking space in a smaller city: the loyalty.
Sixty per cent of her members joined at the beginning two-and-a-half years ago. They’re still there.
In bigger cities, members might have ten coworking options within a 20-minute radius. In Veszprém, there’s Szilvia’s space and... that’s largely it. Limited choice breeds loyalty, yes. But that’s not the full story.
“They really belong,” Szilvia explains. “They really feel like that this way they are part of an additional community in their city, and they really value it.”
In smaller towns, community isn’t strategic. You run into members outside the space. Your kids go to the same school. You shop at the same supermarket. The boundaries between coworking community and actual community blur—and that’s the point.
Bernie connects this to his experience in Vigo versus London. In London, you can be anonymous. In Vigo, everyone knows each other. The coworking space isn’t separate from daily life; it’s woven into it.
This has direct implications for how you operate. Stop trying to compete on amenities or price. You’ll lose to corporate chains. Compete on something corporate spaces can’t replicate: being genuinely embedded in your locality.
Know the surrounding area. Partner with local cafés, libraries, schools. Show up at neighbourhood events. Make your space feel like it grew organically from the community rather than being imposed upon it.
The operators winning in 2026 aren’t running coworking spaces. They’re building infrastructure for local resilience. And loyalty follows.
What Skills Actually Matter
Szilvia learned quickly what freelancing demands: “Creativity. You have to be quite brave. You have to be good in marketing and pretty much in sales, personal branding. Very, very thoughtful on financials.”
Strip away the inspirational talk about freedom and flexibility, and freelancing requires hard commercial skills. You’re selling yourself constantly. You’re managing cash flow through income volatility. You’re building a brand whether you think in those terms or not.
Bernie admits he’s good at everything except the money part—he always needs help with finances. That honesty matters. Most coworking operators are brilliant at community and hospitality. Many struggle with pricing, financial planning, and sales.
But here’s the parallel: running a coworking space requires exactly the same skill set as freelancing. You need creativity to stand out. Courage to make unconventional choices. Marketing to fill your space. Sales to convert enquiries. Financial discipline to survive lean months.
Szilvia’s freelancing journey prepared her for coworking operations. If you’re struggling with any part of your business, look at what successful freelancers do. They niche down. They build personal brands. They focus on outcomes, not hours. They plan financially for volatility.
The operators thriving in 2026 stopped thinking like landlords and started thinking like freelancers: outcome-focused, community-driven, financially resilient, and brave enough to do things differently.
Coworking brings communities together, helping people find and share their voices.
Each episode of the Coworking Values Podcast explores Accessibility, Community, Openness, Collaboration, and Sustainability—values that shape the spaces where we gather, work, and grow.
If this resonates with you, rate, follow, and share the podcast. Your support helps others discover how coworking enriches lives, builds careers, and strengthens communities.
This episode is for operators who are exhausted from pretending the last year wasn’t brutal. Who want to support freelancers and micro-businesses but can’t figure out how to make the maths work. Who know their space needs corporate revenue but refuse to become WeWork.
Tom doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. What he has is a decade of making it work whilst staying honest about what it actually takes.
Timeline Highlights
[01:24] Tom on what he’d like to be known for: “They’re actually really productive and we love small companies”
[02:26] The unsung heroes: “I think the unsung heroes are the small companies... Where you spend your money matters. We should be doing more to support these people”
[04:11] The brutal year: “Small coworking spaces... huge verbal hug to everybody out there running a space because the last year has been brutal... The build-up to the last budget was basically creating paralysis and nobody was making decisions”
[05:48] How to support small businesses: “Use small businesses, pay them well... Pay them on time... And give a good fair shout out. Don’t ask for makes rates. Just treat them well”
[07:02] The purist trap: “I don’t think you can be a purist because I don’t think you can pay the bills... We would make more money if we ripped out a load of the hot desking... but we choose not to”
[09:50] Being home for small companies: “The unsung heroes... are the smaller companies who are… They’re not trying to raise a billion pounds... Being a home where they feel happy, safe, productive is a good thing”
[13:24] Environmental design matters: “We’ve got a silent zone... places that are designed for doing video calls... open plan areas... We deliberately designed these different spaces for doing different things”
[16:58] The Flex One Plus insight: “You pay a monthly membership and it gives you one day a month, and then you get a discount rate for other days... having that one a month means you feel that you belong and you’re leaning forward slightly”
[17:31] The pricing breakdown: “It’s 30 quid for a day pass, 25 quid a month with one day included, and then it’s 25 for the extra days”
[21:50] Community acquisition strategy: “The best thing that we do is let other people host their events in our space... free hot desk for free as a group... as a way of pulling in new people”
[23:55] Pay It Forward: “If somebody well connected leaves their job, then I give them a few months free hot desking... It’s a lovely thing to do... what goes around comes around”
[25:29] The Gap defined: “The Gap is from when you realise you’re doing the wrong thing to when you start doing the right thing... We’ve got the wrong energy around it... it’s a time when people want, deserve, need help”
Nobody Actually Believes in Small Teams
Tom doesn’t waste time being diplomatic about this.
Labour is big government. Tories are big corporate. Nobody in power actually believes in smaller teams, despite the rhetoric about small businesses being “the backbone of Britain.”
If you look at government, it’s small teams that make stuff happen. Massive hierarchies spend more time in meetings. Yet policy consistently favours large organisations because that’s where the power sits.
The same pattern shows up in coworking. Everyone talks about community and supporting freelancers. Then they optimise for corporate contracts because that’s where the reliable revenue lives.
Tom’s watched this play out across his members. The two-person consultancy doing brilliant work. The small coffee shop. The slow-growing companies that have been with DeskLodge for a decade, slightly bigger now but not chasing unicorn status.
These are the actual lifeblood of local economies. And they’re systemically unsupported.
Where you spend your money matters. Not as a moral statement—as an economic one. When you choose the indie coffee shop over Starbucks, you’re keeping wealth circulating locally rather than extracting it to shareholders.
The challenge for coworking operators is you can’t run on ideology. You need revenue. The question becomes: how do you build a business model that supports small companies without going broke yourself?
The Brutal Year Everyone’s Pretending Didn’t Happen
Tom offers what he calls “a huge verbal hug to everybody out there running a space because the last year has been brutal.”
Not just tough. Brutal.
And it wasn’t Indies getting picked on whilst chains thrived. The whole market struggled. The build-up to the last budget created paralysis—nobody was making decisions. That meant nobody was moving into spaces. Clients’ pipelines delayed. Projects stalled.
Small coworking operators felt it hardest because they don’t have the cash reserves to weather extended slow periods. One bad quarter threatens survival.
Tom’s point isn’t to wallow. It’s to stop pretending.
Knowing everyone’s finding it tough helps. It’s not you. It’s not your pricing. It’s not your marketing. The external conditions have been genuinely difficult.
You’re in the right place doing the right thing. It won’t be like this forever.
That acknowledgment matters. Too many operators are quietly drowning whilst scrolling past other people’s Instagram posts of “sold out” events and “record months.” The isolation compounds the financial stress.
The indie coworking community needs more honesty about when things are hard. Not as resignation, but as solidarity.
Use Them, Pay Them Well, Pay Them On Time
Tom’s call to action for corporates is blunt.
If you’re a big company working with small vendors, do three things:
* Use small businesses. Choose them over the big agency or corporate supplier.
* Pay them well. They’re already cheaper than the alternatives. Don’t beat them up on price. Don’t ask for “mates rates.”
* Pay them on time. Or early. Not 60 days. Not 90 days. Not “were you short of cash?” when they chase payment. On time. They’re paying their bills on time. How are you doing?
It used to drive Tom “nuts” when big companies insisted on ridiculous payment terms, then had the audacity to act surprised when vendors needed paying.
This isn’t charity. It’s basic decency. And it’s economic sense.
When small businesses thrive, they hire locally. They spend locally. They create resilient local economies. When they’re squeezed by poor payment practices and exploitative pricing pressure, they fold.
Then everyone wonders why high streets are dying and local economies are hollowing out.
The same principle applies inside coworking spaces. If you want to maintain an indie-friendly culture whilst taking corporate revenue, you need to be intentional about how corporate members interact with smaller members.
Are your corporate members hiring your freelancers? Paying them fairly? Treating the space as a genuine community rather than just cheap desks?
The tenant mix isn’t just about revenue diversification. It’s about economic ecosystem design.
You Can’t Be a Purist, But You Can Choose Not To
Here’s Tom’s central tension: “I don’t think you can be a purist because I don’t think you can pay the bills.”
DeskLodge would make more money if they ripped out the hot desking and filled the space with high-paying dedicated desks and private offices. Tom knows this. He’s run the numbers.
But they choose not to.
Because the hot desking is where the magic happens. That’s where freelancers sit next to small company founders. That’s where someone awkwardly working through a WordPress problem at lunchtime realises they’re not alone.
Tom calls these people “the unsung heroes.” Not trying to raise a billion pounds. Just building something sustainable. They need a home where they feel happy, safe, and productive.
That matters more to Tom than maximum profit.
But—and this is critical—he’s not pretending you can run on values alone. DeskLodge has a diverse tenant mix. Corporate teams. Bigger companies that have grown with them over ten years. That revenue subsidises the ability to keep hot desking available at prices freelancers can afford.
It’s not purity. It’s intentional compromise.
You can’t be everything to everyone. But you can decide what you’re willing to sacrifice and what’s non-negotiable. For Tom, the hot desking stays. The indie culture stays. The corporate revenue makes that possible.
The operators struggling most are the ones who haven’t decided. They’re drifting toward whoever pays, then wondering why their space feels soulless. Or they’re holding rigidly to an ideal that’s bankrupting them.
Tom’s found a third path. It requires constant tension. But it works.
Environmental Design as Productivity Infrastructure
Most coworking spaces think about design as aesthetics or brand. Tom thinks about it as productivity infrastructure.
DeskLodge has distinct zones designed for different tasks:
* Silent zone for deep focus work
* Call booths specifically for video calls
* Open plan areas for collaborative work
* Kitchen with music for breaks and informal connection
This isn’t about pretty Instagram content. It’s about acknowledging that people need different environments for different kinds of work.
You can’t do deep focus work in an open plan space where someone’s on a video call three metres away. You can’t have an energetic client call in a silent zone. Trying to force one environment to serve all purposes creates constant friction.
Tom’s observation is sharp: “You make more money by giving a worse product because people don’t know to look for it.”
Most coworking spaces optimise for maximum desk density. They don’t create call booths or silent zones because that’s “wasted” space. Members don’t know to demand these things because they’ve never experienced them.
But once you’ve worked in a properly designed space, you can’t unsee it. The spaces that get this right create measurably better conditions for productivity. Members stay longer. They’re happier. They refer others.
It’s not about community programming. It’s about respecting that knowledge workers need environmental diversity to do their best work.
The Flex One Plus: Building Belonging Through Tiny Commitment
This pricing model deserves its own section because it’s brilliant.
Day pass: £30Flex One Plus: £25/month includes one day, then £25 per extra day
The maths makes no sense for anyone using it once. You’d just buy the day pass.
But that’s not the point.
Tom explains: “Having that one a month means you feel that you belong and you’re leaning forward slightly.”
It’s a tiny financial commitment that creates psychological ownership. You’re not a visitor buying day passes. You’re a member. You have a recurring relationship with the space.
That small monthly anchor shifts behaviour. People come back more often because they’ve already “paid” for their day. Then they book extra days at the member rate. The friction of deciding “should I go to the coworking space today?” drops away.
Compare this to day passes. No commitment means no habit formation. Members stay transactional. They evaluate every single visit. They never fully integrate into the community because they’re perpetually guests.
Flex One Plus creates the smallest possible commitment that triggers belonging.
It won’t work for everyone. Some people genuinely just need occasional day passes. But for people who want to feel part of something whilst maintaining flexibility, it’s perfect.
This model won an award. Not because it’s financially revolutionary, but because it solves the psychological problem of how you create belonging in a flexible work world.
The Gap: When You Know But Haven’t Started Yet
Tom named something that doesn’t get talked about enough.
“The Gap is from when you realise you’re doing the wrong thing to when you start doing the right thing.”
That liminal space between jobs. Between identities. Between “I can’t keep doing this” and “I’ve figured out what’s next.”
We’ve got the wrong energy around it, Tom argues. We treat it like failure or waste. It’s actually a time when people most need support.
DeskLodge runs a “Pay It Forward” scheme. When someone well-connected leaves their job and enters The Gap, Tom gives them a few months of free hot desking.
Not out of charity. Out of strategic abundance.
These are people with deep networks. They’re between things, so they have time. They’re grateful for the support. They show up. They connect people. When they land their next thing, they remember who supported them in The Gap.
“What goes around comes around,” Tom says simply.
This only works if you choose people carefully. Well-connected doesn’t mean famous. It means genuinely embedded in communities you want to be connected to. People who reciprocate. People who value the space and will treat it well.
But done right, it’s one of the highest-ROI things a coworking space can do. You’re not buying advertising. You’re investing in relationships with people during the moment they’re most available and most grateful.
The Gap is real. People in it need somewhere to land. Coworking spaces are perfectly positioned to be that place—not as charity, but as ecosystem strategy.
Let Other People Build Your Community
Tom’s clearest marketing insight is about what DeskLodge doesn’t do.
They don’t run elaborate community programming. They don’t have a community manager organising yoga and lunch-and-learns.
What they do: “The best thing that we do is let other people host their events in our space.”
Third-party events bring new people in. Those people see the space. Some convert to members. The event organiser does the marketing. DeskLodge provides the venue.
They also run one big annual event to reconnect current and former members. And they offer 2-3 free trial days for acquisition.
That’s it.
The community builds itself through the people who choose to be there and the work they’re doing. The space’s job is to create the conditions—good environmental design, diverse tenant mix, operational reliability—not to manufacture connection through programming.
This is deeply countercultural in coworking. Most spaces assume community requires constant programming. Operators burn out trying to be camp counsellors whilst also running a business.
Tom’s approach: build a productive place that people want to work in. Attract interesting people. Let them find each other. Support third-party events that bring in new networks.
The community that emerges from that is organic, self-sustaining, and doesn’t depend on one person’s energy to exist.
If your community collapses when you stop programming events, you don’t have a community. You have an events business.
The Coworking Operator’s Dilemma
Tom embodies the central challenge independent coworking operators face.
You can’t make money only serving freelancers. Their budgets are too constrained. But if you only serve corporates, you lose the culture that makes coworking meaningful.
The solution isn’t picking one. It’s intentionally designing for both whilst being clear about what you won’t compromise.
For Tom, that’s keeping hot desking. Maintaining environmental diversity. Supporting small businesses even when it’s not financially optimal. Using the “Pay It Forward” scheme to invest in relationships.
The corporate revenue makes this possible. But it doesn’t dictate everything.
This requires constant negotiation. It’s not a set-and-forget business model. It’s an active practice of choosing what matters most and building the financial engine that lets you keep choosing it.
The operators who thrive aren’t the purists or the pure profit-maximisers. They’re the ones who can hold the tension between values and viability without collapsing into either extreme.
Tom’s been doing this for over a decade. Companies have grown with DeskLodge—started as freelancers, became small teams, are now slightly bigger. That slow growth is the dream.
Not unicorns. Not billion-pound exits. Just sustainable businesses that employ people, serve clients well, and contribute to local economies.
If coworking is going to survive as something more than corporate flex space, it needs more operators like Tom. People willing to do the harder work of building something viable that doesn’t sell its soul.
Coworking brings communities together, helping people find and share their voices.
Each episode of the Coworking Values Podcast explores Accessibility, Community, Openness, Collaboration, and Sustainability—values that shape the spaces where we gather, work, and grow.
If this resonates with you, rate, follow, and share the podcast. Your support helps others discover how coworking enriches lives, builds careers, and strengthens communities.
This episode is for operators tired of competing with everyone for nobody in particular.
Timeline Highlights
[01:35] Rosee on what she wants to be known for: “Write in ways that it feels honest and helpful for every operator or just anybody who wants to learn about the industry”
[02:29] The hyper-local thread: “One thing that was in common between every perspective... you really were betting on hyper local coworking spaces”
[03:37] On Ashley’s first principles: “The essence of coworking was just having a hub where people can come together instead of having to work alone at home”
[04:47] The buzzword confession: “Meaningful human connection... it does sound like a buzzword a little bit. But when it comes to coworking, I definitely feel like it’s true”
[05:49] Bernie on foundations shaping communities: “How you build the foundation of your community in the beginning will help shape what happens later on”
[06:15] The Urban MBA example: “Community is basically the Caribbean kitchen at Urban MBA or people taking care of Elena Giroli when she had to be away”
[07:08] Hector’s ecosystem insight: “Work just now happens across so many different settings... does it really fit into everything that I try to do”
[08:42] On Werkhain in Berlin: “It didn’t feel like a coworking spaceship that had landed in the neighbourhood unannounced”
[09:30] What being “seen” actually means: “Having these daily interactions... being supported without really forcing interaction”
[11:06] Bernie on coworking’s grounding effect: “You’re sitting in a room with other people doing the same thing. It’s really grounding”
[12:30] The “for everyone” trap: “Inclusivity also not saying we are open to everybody. It’s just about making this safe space for people, like-minded people”
[16:23] The hostel in Kathmandu: “There was so much cultural exchange going on... one person brings somebody there, then it’s like oh, it’s open for everybody”
[19:56] On travellers with intent: “There’s this energy you get from people travelling with intent”
What “First Principles” Actually Means
Ashley’s phrase stayed in the conversation: getting back to first principles.
Rosee frames it simply: “The essence of that is based around the connection between each other, like how you form the community in a space.”
It’s not nostalgia. It’s recognition that AI and remote work have stripped away so much human contact that the original premise of coworking—gathering with others instead of working alone—matters more than it did five years ago.
When everything else becomes commoditised, the irreducible core remains. People need to see other people. Not through screens. Not in managed corporate environments. In spaces where they can sit with their own thoughts while knowing they’re not alone.
Bernie nails what this actually feels like: sitting in a coworking space knowing you’re not the only one “slogging it out, trying to work out how WordPress works and whether I use ChatGPT for this or Claude for this, or do I send my invoice now and then do the work or do the work and then send the invoice.”
The spaces getting this right aren’t trying to be WeWork. They’re becoming what Rosee calls “multi-purpose community hubs”—places where the coworking is almost incidental to the gathering.
Why “For Everyone” Creates Nobody’s Space
Bernie pushed Rosee on language that matters.
She used the word “tolerant” when discussing inclusion. Bernie picked it up immediately: “If you said to me, you’re going to have to tolerate three women in your coworking space today, I’d be like, I’m not really… that makes me feel like I’m putting up with them.”
Rosee clarified what she actually meant: “It’s about just making this safe space for people, like-minded people who can just be there for each other instead of having to tolerate each other.”
Inclusion doesn’t mean inviting everyone. It means being clear about who your space is for, then making sure those people feel genuinely welcomed—not tolerated. A space for gamers includes gamers. A space for climate activists includes climate activists. A space that supports caregivers considers childcare. A space designed for neurodivergent members considers sensory needs.
Rosee mentions this in her recent article on neurodivergence—”just creating a space where you can actually recognise those people.”
When someone says “our space is for everyone,” they’re really saying “we haven’t thought about who we’re actually serving.”
The Ecosystem Fit
Hector’s contribution reframes how members evaluate spaces.
It’s not: “Is this a nice place to work?”
It’s: “Does this fit into my actual life?”
Rosee explains: “Work just now happens across so many different settings, like home, coworking spaces. Instead of being like this is my main office, does it really fit into everything that I try to do.”
When billing is confusing, when booking is painful, when the systems feel unreliable, members don’t just get annoyed—they lose trust. As Rosee puts it: “When the system at the coworking space doesn’t feel so reliable, it’s easy to lose that trust a little bit. People do tend to disengage.”
Members are evaluating your space against every other option: home, cafés, libraries, other coworking spaces, client offices. If you make their life harder rather than easier, you lose.
Being Seen Without Being Forced
Rosee learned something from visiting Werkhain in Berlin—a space that transformed a former gym into a fully booked hub. What struck her was how they were “definitely well known in the local area” and hosted community events that drew visitors, not just members.
Being “seen” doesn’t mean constant interaction. It doesn’t mean organised networking events or mandatory icebreakers.
Rosee puts it simply: “It’s about knowing... just being supported without really forcing interaction. That is what being seen to me means.”
The magic isn’t in the programming. It’s in shared presence.
The best spaces create conditions for connection without mandating it.
The Kathmandu Café
Rosee’s story about working at a hostel in Kathmandu offers something useful about organic community.
A hostel with a café and bar. Backpackers passing through. Local young people discovering it. No strategic community programming.
“One person brings somebody there,” Rosee explained. “Then it’s like, Oh, it’s open for everybody. We can all go in and then meet other people as well. Then bigger groups of Nepal people start coming in, and then the tourists are always coming because it’s a hostel.”
She went there wanting to learn German before moving to Berlin. She ended up in a cultural exchange with a traveller wanting to learn Nepali.
Bernie connected this to FENTO coworking near Vigo, where Camino pilgrims walk past speaking German, Dutch, French, and English. And to Patricia’s coworking and co-living space on the Camino between Vigo and Santiago, where digital nomads mix with locals.
The pattern: spaces that welcome movement naturally develop community. Not because someone planned it, but because the conditions were right.
Travellers With Intent
Bernie made a sharp distinction near the end.
There’s a difference between people travelling with purpose—Camino pilgrims, backpackers seeking cultural exchange, digital nomads building lives abroad—and tourists seeking cheap consumption.
“There’s a difference between the people we’re talking about because if you’re doing the Camino, you’re essentially backpacking... versus, which I used to be, someone who’s gone to Ibiza to drink as many pints of cheap lager as they can in 48 hours, that travelling is not as intentional.”
This applies directly to coworking membership.
Some members join with intent: to build something, to connect meaningfully, to contribute. Others are looking for the cheapest desk with the best wifi.
Knowing which audience you’re attracting—and being honest about which you’re designed for—determines everything about your space’s culture. You can’t build a community of citizens from customers hunting deals.
The Caribbean Kitchen Test
Bernie and Rosee keep coming back to a simple test for whether community is real.
Bernie names it: “Community is basically the Caribbean kitchen at Urban MBA or people taking care of Elena Giroli when she had to be away for some time and just knowing that you’re missing that connection when they’re not present.”
Not events on a calendar. Not member counts. Whether people notice when someone’s gone. Whether the kitchen has a specific smell. Whether there’s a story attached to the space that members tell each other.
If you can’t point to something that specific, you might have a workspace. You probably don’t have a community.
Coworking brings communities together, helping people find and share their voices.
Each episode of the Coworking Values Podcast explores Accessibility, Community, Openness, Collaboration, and Sustainability—values that shape the spaces where we gather, work, and grow.
If this resonates with you, rate, follow, and share the podcast. Your support helps others discover how coworking enriches lives, builds careers, and strengthens communities.
The conversation goes somewhere uncomfortable too.
Jerome points out that Biznow—a traditional real estate publication serving one of the most conservative industries in America—manages diverse speaker lineups at every event. Coworking, built on community, does worse.
Bernie shares his own awkward moment: telling a conference organiser that 70% of their lineup was men. The response: “The women just don’t call me back.”
Bernie’s answer: “You have to call them more. They’re not hanging around waiting for you to call.”
One attendee last year opened her space within the previous twelve months. She came to confirm she wasn’t doing everything wrong. She brought her dog.
She left knowing she belonged.
⏱ Timeline Highlights
[00:00] Bernie opens with the stat that frames everything: 51% of London coworking is owned by operators with one to five locations
[01:27] Jackie’s introduction: marketing at Pacific Workplaces, wants to be known as an epic baker, got a KitchenAid mixer for Christmas
[01:58] Jerome: started in 2008, oldest coworking brand in America, licensed architect, and “a very greedy bass runner” in adult softball
[02:50] Bernie: “It’s the aggressive part in that sentence that threw me off.”
[03:28] Why Jerome created the summit: big conferences shifted toward macro topics, leaving operators in the trenches
[05:40] Jackie on connexion: “You walk away from an event, and you know every single person’s name.”
[07:25] Jerome: Smaller rooms mean every conversation is accessible, even if you know no one
[09:21] The industry reality: after the top three or four brands, “everyone’s under three or four locations.”
[10:56] Jackie’s most anticipated session: using your space for events as revenue—” I haven’t seen this topic anywhere else.”
[13:07] A new operator came to confirm she was on the right path. She brought her dog. She left knowing she belonged.
[14:13] Jackie on why this industry is different: “Somebody in the room is going to help you, and they’re going to help you genuinely.”
[17:03] Bernie’s COVID memory: the daily Zoom calls where the peacocking operators finally asked for help
[19:13] Jerome’s sharp comparison: Biznow does diversity better than most coworking conferences
[22:15] Bernie’s confrontation with a conference organiser: “The women just don’t call me back.” His response: “You have to call them more.”
[23:16] Jackie: “Maybe they’re just scared to be the first one.”
[24:14] Event details: February 6-7, 2026, Raleigh, North Carolina
The Actual Industry
After the top three or four brands, everyone’s under four locations.
Jerome lays this out plainly. WeWork has around 200 sites. Regus has 1,000. Premier has 120. Then there’s a cliff.
The majority of people running one, two, three spaces are. Bernie adds London data: over 51% of coworking spaces there are owned by operators with one to five locations.
These aren’t hobbyists.
They’re the actual industry—but they’ve become invisible at events designed to attract sponsors and impress investors.
The Operators Weekend exists because someone finally said: the majority are still in the trenches. They deserve content that meets them where they are.
Events as Revenue
Jackie flags something most conferences miss entirely: using your space for public events as a revenue stream.
“I haven’t seen this topic anywhere else,” she says.
The logic is obvious once stated. Meeting rooms sit empty during off-peak hours. Workshops, pop-ups, markets—each represents income and visibility.
But obvious doesn’t mean easy.
How do you price event space without undermining membership? How do you promote to the broader community without alienating members who value quiet?
The Saturday session tackles this directly. For operators watching margins, this could change their financial model.
Why Small Rooms Work
Jerome and Jackie both circle around something counterintuitive: smaller events create better connections.
When you walk into a room of 300 people, existing relationships look like cliques to newcomers. Jerome puts it simply: “Unless you’re very socially outgoing, you’re not breaking into those tight-knit groups.”
In a smaller room, every conversation becomes accessible.
Jackie saw this firsthand last year. She’d spot someone new, learn their background, pull over someone relevant. “Then you just fade into the background after that conversation starts, and you just watch it blossom.”
The choice to rotate through secondary cities—Raleigh, Detroit, Denver—serves the same purpose.
These aren’t glamour destinations. The focus stays on the room, not the location.
The Diversity Problem
Jerome doesn’t soft-pedal this.
He’s watched coworking conferences stay predominantly white and male for years—despite an industry built on community rhetoric. His comparison lands hard: Biznow, a traditional real estate publication serving one of the most conservative industries in America, does better.
“If they can do it, my gosh, we are overdue.”
The problem isn’t just optics. Jerome notes that he—and others—stopped attending certain conferences because they didn’t want to aid the situation by being there.
That’s lost ticket sales for organisers who refuse to change.
Bernie shares his own uncomfortable moment. He pointed out a 70% male lineup to an organiser. The response: “Well, the women just don’t call me back.”
Bernie’s answer: “You have to call them more. They’re not hanging around waiting for you to call.”
Jackie adds the quiet truth: maybe women and minorities aren’t responding because they’ve never seen anyone like themselves on stage.
They don’t want to be the token.
The ask has to be both authentic and persistent.
Coworking Space Imposter Syndrome
Bernie introduces a phrase that deserves circulation: “coworking space imposter syndrome.”
He’s heard it roughly a hundred times.
Operators with 70 desks saying, “Oh, I’m not a real coworking space.”
His comparison lands: “It’s like the artisan coffee guy on the corner going, I’m not a real coffee shop because I’m not Starbucks.”
This syndrome has real consequences. It keeps independents from attending events where they’d find support. It stops them from contributing knowledge. It makes them vulnerable to copying what chains do rather than building what their neighbourhood needs.
Jackie shares a testimonial.
One attendee opened her space within the previous year. She came not for strategies but for confirmation she wasn’t doing everything wrong.
She left knowing she was on the right path.
Sometimes the most valuable thing a conference offers isn’t new information.
It’s knowing you belong.
What COVID Revealed
Bernie recalls March 2020.
Daily Zoom calls. Nobody knew whether to stay open. Whether to paint the building in bleach. What was coming?
What struck him wasn’t the panic.
It was the person who showed up asking for help.
People who’d been peacocking at conferences—claiming fifth-location expansions, talking big numbers—suddenly revealed the truth: “My mum lent me the money for the building and she wants it back because this has happened.”
The crisis stripped away the performance.
This matters because peacocking creates imposter syndrome. When someone tells you they’re opening their fifth location this year, you feel like a fraud struggling with your second.
COVID revealed that many of those claims were theatre.
The Operators Weekend seems designed to keep that honesty alive.
Small rooms. Operational topics. People who actually want help, not people performing success for an audience.
Cities as Strategic Partners
One session in the programme points to something most operators haven’t explored: partnering with municipalities.
Cities need activated buildings, supported entrepreneurs, and community hubs. Coworking spaces need legitimacy, visibility, sometimes planning permission or rate relief.
When the relationship works, both gain.
The session promises real examples: spaces that have partnered with economic development teams, tourism boards, and city planners.
For Bernie, this connects to his broader mission: educating MPs and local authorities about coworking’s value as civic infrastructure, not just desk rental.
Too many officials still see coworking as fancy hot-desking.
The work of changing that perception happens one partnership at a time.
The Practical Details
The Coworking Operators Weekend runs February 6-7, 2026, in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Friday: Managing Multiple Locations, Automation and Integrations, Mail Solutions, City Partnerships.
Saturday: Sustainability and ESG, Selling Space for Public Events, Career Development, AI for Operators, Referral Partnerships.
Tickets available through the LUNA event app.
Find the organisers on LinkedIn under Coworking Operators Weekend.
Coworking brings communities together, helping people find and share their voices.
Each episode of the Coworking Values Podcast explores Accessibility, Community, Openness, Collaboration, and Sustainability—values that shape the spaces where we gather, work, and grow.
If this resonates with you, rate, follow, and share the podcast. Your support helps others discover how coworking enriches lives, builds careers, and strengthens communities.
Who pays and how billing works is becoming the silent killer.
When employers centralise workspace spending, they gravitate toward spaces that make accounting simple. If your billing creates friction, members stop showing up — not because they don’t love the community, but because finance said no.
This is a power shift disguised as a logistics problem.
The third shift
Discoverability is fragmenting.
Google Maps still matters. But AI search is producing queries so specific that traditional SEO can’t answer them:
“I need a workspace with a podcast studio near Abby’s soccer training on Tuesday afternoons that I can book on a per day basis.”
“I need somewhere quiet to get some deep work done that has great coffee, isn’t too busy on Wednesday mornings and is within five minutes walk of Tottenham Court Road Station.”
That’s what people are typing into OpenAI, Claude, Perplexity, Comet Browser.
If your space can’t be stitched together from Reddit conversations, podcast appearances, and member testimonials, you’re about to become invisible. And invisible doesn’t mean you’re competing with WeWork.
It means you’re competing with someone’s kitchen table.
What else this episode covers
Hector unpacks what “operational AI” actually means.
Not chatbots or content generators, but systems that prompt your team: “This is Bernie’s 200th day pass. He’s coming in tomorrow.” That’s hospitality meeting data. The community manager still decides what to do.
The AI just ensures they know the opportunity exists.
The conversation takes a turn into vibe coding — describing what you want a system to do and having AI build it, without knowing how to code. Bernie asks Hector to explain it “to an eighth grader.”
After a proper answer, Bernie says: “I’m so glad I asked.”
Hector’s warning for operators tempted to chase every AI trend: in the early days of coworking, every space built their own software. Now, many spaces are building their own AI agents and database infrastructure without expert guidance.
They’ll learn the same painful lessons about maintenance, security, and technical debt.
Bernie’s version is blunter: “It’s tempting to solve problems you don’t have yet. You see, I can launch aeroplanes in AI. It’s like you’re a blogger in a three-site coworking company in Birmingham. Stick to what you’re doing.”
By the end, when Hector finishes describing This Week in Coworking — the newsletters, the undercurrents, the games, the leader profiles — Bernie’s response is honest:
“I’m so jealous. Anyway, did I say that out loud?”
If you’ve been wondering whether all the AI talk is hype or something you need to act on, this episode gives you a framework for deciding what matters now versus what to file away for later.
Timeline Highlights
[01:14] Bernie introduces the “second best coworking podcast in the world.” Hector immediately: “How many guests have asked you what the number one podcast is?”
[01:18] “According to all the AI engines, This Week in Coworking is an encyclopaedia for the coworking industry. It’s not how I would have called it, but it’s an interesting way to think about it.”
[02:03] Bernie: “I thought it was earlier than that. I thought it was the economic crash in Cyprus.” Hector: “Yeah, that was in 2013, man.”
[03:07] The ecosystem shift: “This idea that you don’t have to be in a specific physical place to achieve a task, but there are physical spaces that make certain tasks easier to achieve.”
[06:01] The billing reality: “The easier it is to access the space from a billing perspective... is changing how people interact with space. They’re leaning towards the ones that are easier to pay.”
[07:32] The AI prompt that should worry you: “I need somewhere quiet to get some deep work done that has great coffee, isn’t too busy on Wednesday mornings and is within five minutes walk of Tottenham Court Road Station.”
[09:49] The anti-b******t moment: “Anyone who tells you to have this little bit of code, do this, is lying. Nobody knows exactly how to optimise towards it, but good fundamentals is what we are recommending right now.”
[14:01] The hospitality AI enables: “Being told that this is Bernie’s 200th day pass, he’s coming in tomorrow... there is so much you can do with the right hospitality hat on.”
[15:51] Vibe coding explained: “I can tell it, I need this outcome, and I’m not really fussed about how you do it.”
[20:47] Bernie on AI search: “I’ve had the luxury of hanging around Koffi since it all started... that Gemini enterprise thing, it surfaces so much from my Google Drive, which is now 15 years old.”
[24:22] Where to start: “What is the frog you would want to eat first? Or what is the thing that you have to do every day that puts that pain in your stomach? Automate that first.”
[27:02] Bernie’s warning: “It’s tempting to solve problems you don’t have yet. You see, I can launch aeroplanes in AI. It’s like you’re a blogger in a three-site coworking company in Birmingham. Stick to what you’re doing.”
[34:06] After Hector describes everything TWIC has become, Bernie: “I’m so jealous. Anyway, did I say that out loud?”
Why Nobody’s Choosing One Office Anymore
The first shift Hector describes isn’t about hybrid work policies.
It’s about how people mentally map their working lives. Pre-pandemic, most desk workers had one office. Post-pandemic, the narrative became “office versus home.”
But what’s actually emerging is more fluid.
An ecosystem where different spaces serve different purposes depending on the task and the day. Someone might work from home for focused writing, hit a coworking space for collaborative sessions, use a hotel lobby for client calls, and pop into a coffee shop for a change of scenery.
The choice isn’t binary. It’s contextual.
For operators, this changes the value proposition. You’re not competing to be someone’s primary workspace. You’re competing to be the right workspace for specific moments.
This also explains why fractional office models and day passes are growing.
People don’t want long commitments to spaces they’ll use inconsistently. They want access when the context demands it.
The Silent Killer: When Finance Says No
Here’s something most operators don’t track.
How many potential members quietly disappear because the payment process is a headache. Hector points out that as organisations become more “workspace ecosystem enabled,” they’re centralising accounting, reporting, and billing for employee workspace expenses.
This isn’t just about reimbursement.
It’s about tax implications, PnL visibility, and audit trails. When an employer gives staff a corporate card or workspace allowance, they want clean data flowing back. They want to know where money is being spent and categorised correctly, without their people having to upload invoices manually.
The spaces that make this easy win.
The spaces that create friction lose members — not because of the community or the coffee, but because accounting said no.
The deeper issue
When employers control where workers can spend workspace allowances, the worker loses autonomy and the indie operator loses direct relationships.
The same forces making freelance work precarious are now making indie coworking precarious. You’re not just competing on hospitality anymore.
You’re competing on whether you’ve integrated with the employer's expense platform.
The AI Search Problem Nobody Knows How to Solve
Google Maps isn’t going anywhere. Neither are booking platforms.
But Hector is tracking something new: search queries so specific that traditional SEO can’t answer them. Someone doesn’t just search “coworking space London.” They ask an AI for a workspace with a podcast studio near their kid’s soccer training on Tuesday afternoons.
That prompt combines location, facilities, schedule constraints, and booking flexibility.
No amount of keyword optimisation answers it. What does answer it is having content spread across multiple platforms — Reddit conversations, podcast appearances, videos, member testimonials — that AI can stitch together into a contextual recommendation.
The practical advice
Good fundamentals still matter.
Marked-up website, clear facility descriptions, Google Business Profile. But you also need presence in the places AI systems crawl for context. That means engaging in industry conversations, being mentioned in other people’s content, and letting your members talk about you publicly.
Here’s where Hector’s honesty cuts through.
“Anyone who tells you to have this little bit of code, do this, is lying. Nobody knows exactly how to optimise towards it, but good fundamentals is what we are recommending right now.”
The uncomfortable question
Who owns these AI systems? Who decides what surfaces?
If OpenAI and Google control discoverability, what happens to the indie operator who can’t afford to be everywhere? Hector doesn’t have the answer. Neither does anyone else.
But at least he’s honest about the uncertainty.
The AI That Tells You It’s Bernie’s 200th Visit
Most AI conversation in coworking focuses on two things.
Generative tools — write my marketing copy. Customer-facing chatbots — answer member questions automatically. Hector argues the real opportunity is elsewhere.
Operational AI that helps your team be better hosts.
His example lands: imagine your system notices that a member is about to hit their 200th day pass. That information is buried in a database somewhere. Nobody thinks to look.
But an AI layer could surface it as a prompt.
“Bernie’s 200th visit is tomorrow. What can you do to make it memorable?” That’s not replacing the human connection. It’s enabling it. The community manager still decides what to do — a handwritten note, a free coffee, a LinkedIn shout-out.
The AI just ensures they know the opportunity exists.
Bernie’s example
“That Gemini enterprise thing I sent you, it surfaces so much from my Google Drive, which is now 15 years old. Where did I talk about this? It will go back, ‘Oh, you and Hector had a conversation about coworking space software in 2014 or whenever it was.’”
The point isn’t the specific tool.
It’s that AI is better at finding context across messy data than humans are. If you’re still copy-pasting between systems — what Hector calls the “Toggle Tax” — you’re not positioned for what’s coming.
Your Next Community Manager Expects AI to Work
Here’s the workforce shift operators should be planning for.
The next generation of community managers will arrive expecting AI-native tools. Hector draws the parallel to earlier technology transitions. Millennials entered the workforce knowing how the internet worked. Gen Z arrived with mobile-native skills.
Generation Alpha will expect AI to be woven into their daily work.
If your space still requires community managers to manually copy-paste data between systems, you won’t attract or retain the best young talent. They’ll go to operators who’ve built infrastructure that lets them focus on hospitality instead of admin.
This isn’t about immediately replacing your tech stack.
It’s about building the data foundations that will let you adopt AI tools when they’re ready. If your member data lives in fourteen different spreadsheets with no integration, you’re not positioned for what’s coming.
The trap
Building everything yourself.
In the early days of coworking, every space built their own software. Now, many spaces are building their own AI agents and database infrastructure without expert guidance.
Hector has watched this pattern before.
The same painful lessons about maintenance, security, and technical debt are coming for the AI builders.
Eat the Frog First
Bernie asks the practical question.
At what stage should an operator actually start thinking about all this?
Hector’s answer scales by company size.
If you’re a one-person operation
Start with the “frog.”
The task you dread doing every day, the one that puts a knot in your stomach. That’s your first automation target. Don’t try to solve your biggest problem.
Solve your most annoying one.
If you’re larger — five-plus locations
The question shifts to building an “operating stack” rather than just a tech stack.
That means thinking about how systems connect, how data flows, and how you’ll integrate AI tools when they mature.
Bernie’s addition is worth hearing.
“It’s tempting to solve problems you don’t have yet. You see, I can launch aeroplanes in AI. It’s like you’re a blogger in a three-site coworking company in Birmingham. Stick to what you’re doing.”
The vibe coding opportunity
It’s real — describing what you want and having AI build it without knowing code.
But Hector flags around 15 risks to your data and organisation that vibe-coded systems can pose if you’re not careful. This isn’t production-ready for most operators.
His advice: learn by building something adjacent.
He built Coworking Words, the word puzzle game on This Week in Coworking, as a way to learn AI tooling. Close enough to be useful, separate enough that failure wouldn’t damage anything important.
The 30-Year Shift: Paying for Outcomes
Hector frames the current moment as the biggest technology shift in thirty years.
The progression: buying physical products (CDs), buying cloud access (subscriptions), buying seats in cloud products (per-user pricing), and now — paying for outcomes.
The future isn’t paying for access to a CRM system.
It’s paying for leads generated. Not paying for an accounting tool. Paying for invoices processed. Not paying for a community management platform. Paying for member retention improved.
This is still early.
Most tools still charge subscription fees. But the operators who think in terms of outcomes rather than features will be better positioned when pricing models shift.
Coworking brings communities together, helping people find and share their voices.
Each episode of the Coworking Values Podcast explores Accessibility, Community, Openness, Collaboration, and Sustainability — values that shape the spaces where we gather, work, and grow.
If this resonates with you, rate, follow, and share the podcast.
Your support helps others discover how coworking enriches lives, builds careers, and strengthens communities.
A member, Jack, wrote to the MP. Without telling Ewan. Without being asked.
“I don’t know why you’re not here. I don’t know why you don’t support this place. It’s absolutely brilliant. I couldn’t work without this place.”
The parliamentary office responded.
That’s what four years of patient, connected, ecosystem-minded work actually produces. Not just a profitable space. A space that people fight for.
Timeline Highlights
[01:34] “I like to be known as a connector, someone who connects people together.”
[02:20] Bromley’s identity: London borough since ‘68, but “the post office couldn’t be bothered to change all the codes.”
[04:23] Why “Contingent Works”: “We wanted to align ourselves with disruptors that embrace the new.”
[05:49] The toilet wall photo and Simon Barker’s response: “I’ve made it from the gutter to the toilet.”
[07:04] How Ewan met his co-founder, Stephen, at the school gates of David Bowie’s old primary school. “We sat in all the chairs, hoping it might be in the same chair.”
[09:56] Discovering Soho Radio: “Someone must have thought this is a great idea. I’m just going to do it.”
[11:34] On London changing: “Cities always change... Maybe people take fewer risks. I don’t know.”
[14:45] Gerald’s lesson from Brixton: “It wasn’t because they weren’t listening – it was because they weren’t educated.”
[14:55] “Once that penny drops, they’re super helpful.”
[16:11] What the council partnership produced: “An accelerator hub with Goldsmith University... a really tight cohort of 10 companies that are all scaling.”
[17:33] “That took four years. More importantly, it took a change of leadership in the council.”
[18:15] “You need a backer. You need an advocate in the council to help you.”
[18:54] The method: “You have to drag them, kicking and screaming, into your space.”
[19:30] GLA team visiting on a Friday: “Oh, this is where all the people from London work.”
[22:24] Jack writes to the MP: “I don’t know why you’re not here... He did that off his own back.”
[25:30] High street reality: “2019 was the worst retail year ever... they’re going ‘Oh, we’re nearly at 2019 levels’ – forgetting that it was terrible”
[26:54] The infrastructure case: “Every single bus going through Bromley stops opposite our building.”
[29:45] What success means: “It only really works if everything around you is successful as well.”
[30:45] “You can’t just live in isolation.”
Identity as Connector
When Bernie asks what Ewan wants to be known for, he doesn’t say “successful business owner” or “coworking operator.” He says: “A connector. Someone who connects people together.”
This isn’t branding. It’s how he moves through the world. He works with the council “quite a lot” because it lets him meet other groups of people. He introduces people “in a positive way.” His value isn’t the desks – it’s the relationships.
Deep Local Roots
Ewan didn’t parachute into Bromley as a developer. He lives there. His kids go to school there. He met his co-founder Stephen at the school gates, where they discovered David Bowie had also been a pupil.
“We sat in all the chairs, hoping it might be in the same chair.”
That’s not a businessman. That’s a neighbour. And neighbours think differently about what a high street needs.
Learning From the Community
The breakthrough insight came from Gerald at a coworking assembly event in Brixton. Ewan went. He listened. Gerald explained that councils aren’t hostile – they’re uneducated. “You have to educate your councillor. They don’t understand. They don’t know what a coworker is.”
Ewan took that lesson and applied it for four years.
This is what coworking assemblies and peer networks are for. Not just moral support – tactical intelligence from people who’ve already made the mistakes.
Physical Presence as Strategy
The method is specific and replicable:
“You have to drag them, kicking and screaming, into your space. They work in an extremely dull corporate environment. It’s a council office. They’re never glamorous. They walk into somewhere like Contingent and go, ‘Oh, right. Wow. These people work here. This is amazing. It’s like a hotel lobby.”
Then, introduce them to members. Let them see what actually happens. Let them feel the energy.
The GLA team walked in on a Friday and said, “Oh, this is where all the people from London work.” That’s the moment understanding shifts.
Finding Your Advocate
Ewan is clear about what made the difference:
“More importantly, it actually took a change of leadership in the council. Not the top leaders, but in that department. It took a change of personnel in that department for someone new to come in and go, ‘Oh, you’ve got coworking space in the high street. That’s really handy.’”
And once you find that person:
“You need a backer. You need an advocate in the council to help you. As long as you can get in there and educate them, it should be a reciprocal relationship. It has proved so, so far.”
The lesson: keep educating. Keep showing up. The right person will eventually arrive.
Creating a Space Members Fight For
Jack didn’t write to the MP because Ewan asked him to. He wrote because the space mattered enough to him that he couldn’t understand why it wasn’t recognised.
“I don’t know why you’re not here. I don’t know why you don’t support this place. It’s absolutely brilliant. I couldn’t work without this place.”
You can’t manufacture that. You can only create conditions where it happens: a space so good, so connected to people’s working lives, that they advocate without being asked.
Ecosystem Thinking
Bernie asks what Ewan hopes for 2026. He doesn’t say “profitability” or “growth.” He says:
“You want things to turn over and be settled... But it only really works if everything around you is successful as well.”
And later:
“If everyone’s doing that and if we’re supported and we can all survive, then there’ll be a real buzz to the town. You’re part of something bigger. You can’t just live in isolation.”
This is why he’s a trustee of The Hub (Greener & Cleaner’s sustainability charity in the Glades). Why Contingent Works hosts Talk Club for men’s mental health. Why does he go to coworking assembly events and learns from people like Gerald?
Success isn’t Contingent on Works thriving while Bromley struggles. Success is the whole ecosystem working.
The Business Rates Context
Bernie frames this conversation against the UK’s business rates crisis – a policy mess threatening coworking spaces and the small businesses inside them.
The Valuation Office Agency is reclassifying flexible workspaces in ways that strip Small Business Rate Relief from member businesses. Operators across the country are fighting for survival.
This is where member advocacy becomes tactical. When operators lobby alone, they’re easy to ignore. When members like Jack independently write to MPs saying, “I couldn’t work without this place,” politicians pay attention.
The call to action: email your MP. But the deeper point is structural. Spaces like Contingent Works aren’t just businesses – they’re civic infrastructure. Policy that undermines them hollow out the local economies everyone claims to want.
The High Street Argument
Retail is finished. Ewan says it directly:
“2019 was the worst retail year ever. Now they’re trying to get back to post-COVID, and they’re going, ‘Oh, we’re nearly at 2019 levels’ – forgetting that it was terrible.”
So what replaces shops? Destinations. Leisure. Healthcare. Coworking.
The infrastructure argument is compelling: every bus going through Bromley stops opposite Contingent Works. They’re five minutes from a mainline station, twenty minutes from Victoria. The connectivity exists – it just needs someone willing to occupy the empty units.
Bromley is investing. A local developer has put £10 million into restoring an old hotel. The council is opening a new library in the old Topshop. But these investments only matter if the people building community infrastructure can survive long enough to benefit.
The Bromley Contingent Thread
The name isn’t marketing. It’s values.
The original Bromley Contingent were Sex Pistols fans from this south London suburb who walked through the high street in mohicans, appeared on Bill Grundy’s TV show, and accidentally birthed British punk. Siouxsie Sioux. Billy Idol. Steve Severin.
Ewan chose the name because he and Stephen “wanted to align ourselves with disruptors that embrace the new.”
The famous squat photo is blown up on the toilet wall – “cheaper than tiling.” When Ewan sent Simon Barker a picture, the reply was: “Brilliant. I’ve made it from the gutter to the toilet.”
David Bowie underpins everything. The Blitz Club. Ashes to Ashes. The cultural explosion that came from suburban misfits gathering in overlooked spaces.
The hope – unspoken but present – is that suburban coworking spaces might be where the next version of that happens. Not Zone 1. Bromley. Places are cheap enough and overlooked enough for connection to happen.
Coworking brings communities together, helping people find and share their voices.
Each episode of the Coworking Values Podcast explores Accessibility, Community, Openness, Collaboration, and Sustainability — values that shape the spaces where we gather, work, and grow.
If this resonates with you, rate, follow, and share the podcast. Your support helps others discover how coworking enriches lives, builds careers, and strengthens communities.
This time, he’s looking backwards and forwards simultaneously.
Backwards: to the coffee shop owners who watched laptop warriors colonise their tables without ever figuring out how to monetise them. Who posted “no wifi” signs and two-hour table limits instead of building the community hub they were accidentally creating.
Forwards: to how AI might be the “permission slip” that lets small operators embrace the complexity of hybrid models.
Bernie’s been thinking about this too. There’s a café in Vigo where he’s got a sticker on his phone to show his commitment. It looks like a coworking space. It functions like a coworking space. But the people in there would never call it that.
There’s something in that gap between what we call things and what they actually are.
The conversation spirals into territory that matters right now — especially for UK operators watching the business rates crisis unfold. If your model isn’t sustainable, you’re vulnerable. And sustainable doesn’t just mean profitable. It means generative. Building something that creates value for everyone in the room, not just extracting rent from them.
What David loved about the original coworking world was precisely this: it was a business with an element of social activism. A sustainable model that enabled community. The Cluetrain Manifesto’s “markets are conversations” made real in a room where people actually talked to each other.
The episode closes where all the best coworking conversations do: with a reminder that talking to AI all day will get you high on your own fumes. This is when we need to be talking to other coworking people in our area. Get together. Maintain that human connection.
This conversation touches something fundamental to why the Coworking Values Podcast exists: the belief that Accessibility, Community, Openness, Collaboration, and Sustainability aren’t nice-to-haves but the actual point.
Uncertain times. Exciting times. A jungle out there.
Timeline Highlights
[00:04] Bernie announces Unreasonable Connection going live on 24th February in London — tickets on sale in January
[01:37] David on bridging two worlds: “always having the ethos of the grassroots mindset in one side of my brain and the future evolution of the industry in the other”
[02:28] The provocation: “if coffee shops could have innovated a bit, the coworking industry might have never even happened”
[04:43] Bernie’s pricing puzzle: “How do I charge? Is it like you can only sit here if you’ve got a membership?”
[06:31] David on the business model wall: “You saw these coffee shops struggle with this new influx of a new type of customer, but they could never figure out how to properly monetize the customer”
[08:05] The disconnect: “the average user of a coffee shop has never been a member at a coworking space”
[11:57] The unlock: “if a barista was at an hour or two out of the day, almost like a light community manager where they tried to introduce people or catalyse conversations”
[13:33] David’s blueprint: “one phone booth, some external monitors, reliable power, a membership fee for free drip coffee, and a barista who cared to connect people — there, you got a new business model”
[17:17] AI as permission slip: “open up Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT and tell it everything about your business and say, How do I get from point A to point B? It’s going to have a plan”
[20:37] Bernie’s shock: “I was shocked at how many people where they used AI was like spell check in a newsletter”
[21:50] The hard truth: “at the end of the day, if it’s not going to create more money in the door, then it’s just a volunteer effort”
[24:17] David on what made coworking special: “it was a business, a quote, unquote business. But it had this element of social activism... we were enabling community through a sustainable business model”
[27:03] The vision: “A business owner or a coworking space owner has the ability to build a microeconomy in their own coworking space”
[29:15] Bernie’s closing wisdom: “this now more than ever is when we should be talking to other coworking space owners and community people in our area”
The Coffee Shop That Almost Was
Walk into any indie coffee shop and you’ll see the ghost of what coworking could have become.
There’s the guy who’s been here since opening, laptop slowly murdering his thighs, running speed tests every hour. There’s the woman who recognises the regulars but hasn’t spoken to any of them because that’s not what you do in a café. There’s the owner watching their tables occupied by people spending a tenner over eight hours, unable to turn them for the lunch rush.
David calls this the coffee shop’s collision with the wifi revolution. He remembers when not every café had wifi, when you had to scout for plug access like a detective. Now the infrastructure exists everywhere, but the business model never evolved to match.
Coffee shops had everything the coworking movement wanted. The energy. The ambient productivity. The sense of being around other humans doing their own thing. What they lacked was intentionality — a membership model, a mechanism for connection, a way to monetise the all-day laptop warriors without resorting to passive-aggressive “no laptops” signs.
Bernie sees this playing out in Vigo right now. His friend’s café has a huge event space upstairs. He keeps trying to convince Josh to put a big table up there, add some monitors, create a coworking area. The blueprint is obvious. But there’s that gap between knowing what could work and actually building it.
The ingredients were all there. The recipe was never written.
The Barista as Light Community Manager
David’s blueprint for the café-coworking hybrid is disarmingly simple.
One phone booth. Some external monitors. Reliable power and wifi. A membership fee that includes free drip coffee (espresso upsold separately). And crucially: a barista who cares enough to connect people.
That last bit is where most coffee shops fall down. They’ve never thought of their staff as community facilitators. The barista makes drinks, handles payments, maybe asks how your day’s going. But what if, for an hour or two each day, they deliberately tried to introduce people? Catalyse conversations? Unlock the latent community that’s been sitting there all along, held back by social norms that say you don’t talk to strangers?
We’ve created an entire class of workers who spend eight hours in cafés pretending not to be working. They recognise each other. They nod. They never speak. The social code says: we’re all here alone, together. Breaking that code feels transgressive — unless someone gives you permission.
David studied sociology alongside business. He’s fascinated by how you take a retail environment centred on purchasing a product and transform it into something that functions like a community centre. The early coworking spaces did this intuitively. They had that extra layer of intentionality that coffee shops never quite achieved.
The purchase of coffee is actually part of the problem. When you buy a drink at a coffee shop, it codes the space as transactional. This is retail, not community. But if there was some membership fee — even something tiny — that shifted the relationship?
Membership changes everything. You stop being a customer. You become a citizen.
AI as Permission Slip
David’s worked with coworking spaces that have embedded coffee shops and restaurants. He knows firsthand that running food and beverage is already complicated — inventory, spoilage, staff management, massive menus. Adding workspace operations on top feels impossible.
But AI changes the calculation. Not by automating the human connection that makes community work, but by giving operators the tools to manage complexity they previously couldn’t handle.
David’s advice is direct: open up Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT. Tell it everything about your business. Ask how to get from point A to point B. It’ll have a plan.
Bernie saw this when talking to people about AI in the London Coworking Assembly. He was shocked how many people — working in spaces at the heart of fintech innovation — were only using AI for spell-checking newsletters. They were overstretched, so they never committed the time to learn what AI could actually do for them.
The retail world is struggling. Coffee shops are struggling too. Maybe the complexity of a hybrid model isn’t the barrier anymore — maybe it’s just the existential leap required to try a new highway.
AI doesn’t replace the human facilitation. It handles the operational complexity so humans can focus on what actually matters: connecting people.
The Revenue Conversation We Need to Have
David remembers sitting in business school, thinking about societal impact and change, when his professor dropped the hammer: “The purpose of a business is to maximise shareholder value.” It felt wrong then. It still does.
But here’s what David’s learned from a decade working with real estate developers and building owners: at the end of the day, if your community initiative isn’t going to create more money through the door, it’s just volunteer work that puts more burden on you.
That doesn’t mean becoming soulless. What David loved about early coworking was precisely that it was a business with an element of social activism. A sustainable model that enabled community rather than extracted from it.
The problem comes when the public loses faith that businesses are doing good things with their money. When they see shareholder payouts while train services collapse, when privatisation becomes extraction. Bernie brings up Thatcher selling off the trains and water and everything — even hardcore capitalists are now furious at what that “maximise shareholder value” mindset produced.
This is the tension at the heart of indie coworking. The dominant business logic says scale beats community, transaction beats relationship, extraction beats generation. What David’s describing — a café that becomes a membership hub, a barista who becomes a community facilitator — that’s not just a different business model. It’s a different economic philosophy. One that says sustainable can mean generative, not just profitable.
And at a moment when UK business rates are threatening the viability of independent spaces — when the Valuation Office Agency is reclassifying coworking in ways that strip Small Business Rate Relief from member businesses — the question of sustainable models isn’t theoretical. It’s survival.
There’s a sweet spot though. Business models that tick all the boxes including profit, whilst doing something genuinely valuable. Coworking at its best lives in that space.
Markets Are Conversations
This is where everything David’s been saying clicks into place.
Bernie resurrects the Cluetrain Manifesto, published in 1999/2000, with its provocative thesis: all markets are conversations.
At the time, it felt revolutionary. The internet had unleashed a way for humans to connect that bypassed corporate gatekeepers. We could either use it to blast horrible marketing messages at each other, or we could actually talk.
Coffee shops missed this. They had the physical space for conversation but treated every interaction as a transaction. Buy coffee, sit down, leave. The “market” was the till, not the room.
What early coworking understood — what David’s been circling this whole conversation — is that the room itself can be the market. Not in the extractive sense, but in the generative one. A business owner has the ability to build a microeconomy in their own space. Not just renting desks, but enabling transactions, connections, collaborations between the people who gather there.
This is what gets David excited — disruption, thinking in terms of “this is how things were, but now they can be something else.” AI gives us new ways to think philosophically about our businesses because we can essentially have a conversation partner helping us open new neural pathways.
The warning though: you can ask AI all day, and David loves it, but if you’re not also talking to actual humans, you’ll be high on your own fumes.
This is when we need to be talking to other coworking space owners in our area. Getting together. Maintaining that human connection. Because markets are conversations — and conversations require showing up.
From Point A to Point Z
David’s been in coworking since 2008, working between two worlds.
One side of his brain holds the grassroots ethos — the messy spaces, the beer vending machines, the collaboration that felt like social activism. The other side watches the industry evolve into an asset class with NOI calculations and franchise disclosure documents.
The question he’s always asking: what are the parallels and evolutions between these worlds? How do we get from point A to point Z without losing the soul along the way?
The coffee shop question is really a proxy for this larger tension. Here’s an institution — the indie café — that has all the ingredients for community. It just never figured out how to sustain itself whilst serving that community.
David’s not prescribing answers. He’s suggesting we need to embrace uncertainty whilst moving forward anyway. You don’t always need to know where you’ll end up before starting the journey. Sometimes just having the conversations is the point.
Coworking brings communities together, helping people find and share their voices.
Each episode of the Coworking Values Podcast explores Accessibility, Community, Openness, Collaboration, and Sustainability — values that shape the spaces where we gather, work, and grow.
If this resonates with you, rate, follow, and share the podcast. Your support helps others discover how coworking enriches lives, builds careers, and strengthens communities.
It provides infrastructure for 150 members who would otherwise be scattered across home offices and coffee shops. It sources everything locally—coffee beans from Saffron Walden, cleaning services, IT support, catering—all within Hertfordshire.
Every pound spent circulates through the local economy rather than vanishing into Amazon’s supply chain.
Bernie cites research from an Islington Council social value impact report: for every £1 spent with a local business, that pound circulates through the local economy four times.
When money goes to national chains, it disappears.
Bernie asks about the hidden costs of running physical space—and Karen doesn’t flinch. She’s started being more vocal about the actual running costs.
It’s eye-watering, she says.
This is a very lean business, incredibly lean.
Every price rise, every vacancy, every increase in employment costs is a strain. And now this whole threat to how rates will be applied to the building... it really could be the final blow.
The episode isn’t all grim.
Karen shares how she’s fighting back—meeting with her local MP Josh, working with Jane at FlexSA, and refusing to accept that everyone else will deal with it.
If you run an independent coworking space in the UK, this episode is essential listening.
If you use one, it’s time to understand what’s at stake.
Timeline Highlights
[00:00] Bernie sets the scene: “The value it has to the local area is way beyond desks and WiFi.”
[01:42] Karen’s origin story: “The Residence” was born out of my own selfish needs of needing a place to work.”
[02:27] The energy you can’t bottle: “A level playing field for small business owners, a place where startup dreams can happen together.”
[04:01] Location context: “We’re actually on a farm development, a little bit tucked away down a country lane, but in the middle of our housing estate.”
[06:26] Why face-to-face support matters: “Connecting with all the businesses that are in your community who perhaps can cross-pollinate.”
[08:03] The Amazon boycott: “We will not use Amazon. We will work with people in our community to supply everything that we need.”
[08:03] Cross-pollination in action: “Lighting engineers working with interior designers, small business owners working with the VAs in our space, estate agents working with the local videographer.”
[09:41] The £200 challenge: “If every single person who lived in Bishop Stortford spent £200 on their local high street, their local high street could survive.”
[11:23] The reality of rates: “Whilst building valuations are going up, the rates multiplier is coming down, which means a higher bill, bottom line.”
[12:58] The electricity shock: “My electricity bill over the four years here at Bishop Stortford has tripled in price”
[13:49] The breaking point: “It’s just being penalising the system, penalising the very people that are the backbone of this country.”
[15:39] The truth: “This is not a highly profitable business. This is a very lean business, incredibly lean.”
[17:33] Taking action: “That’s talking to our local MP, engaging with Jane at Flexer... sometimes you just have to”
[22:48] The stakes: “The Residence” as a whole has 150 members. If The Residence closes, that’s going to be 150 people that suddenly have no space.”
[25:29] The beating heart: “We gave up a lot of space at the residence for a beating heart, the big kitchen area.”
[29:28] The closing philosophy: “If we can make people feel like anything is possible, anything is solvable, together... We can find a way together.”
Karen Built The Residence Because Nothing Like It Existed
Karen describes something that sounds almost utopian until you realise it’s just thoughtful design.
Dropping children off at school. Parking outside. Going for lunch in the café. Doing a workout. All woven seamlessly around a workspace.
The Residence sits on a farm development in Bishop’s Stortford—a market town of about 40,000 people, tucked down a country lane but surrounded by a café, gym, beauticians, and other businesses.
It’s intentional infrastructure for the way modern life actually works.
This “five-minute life cycle” isn’t about luxury.
It’s about making entrepreneurship accessible to people who can’t afford to disappear on a three-hour daily commute to London.
Karen lived that commute herself. She moved from the Docklands to Epping to Bishop’s Stortford as affordability kept pushing her further out—but she was still commuting back every day.
The space she built isn’t theoretical.
It’s the answer to a problem she lived.
The Residence Banned Amazon Two Years Ago
A couple of years ago, Karen made a decision that sounds radical but shouldn’t be.
The Residence would not use Amazon.
Everything they need—food, cleaning supplies, coffee, IT support, engineering, health and safety—comes from businesses within Hertfordshire.
When you spend with local suppliers, that money stays in circulation. When you pay with national or international chains, it leaves the community immediately.
Karen’s approach is intentional. She’d love to document what it physically looks like in terms of cash, because she thinks that, without realising it, you’re having an impact on the local community by spending your money.
But you have to be intentional about that.
The cross-pollination happens daily.
Lighting engineers working with interior designers. Small business owners are working with the VAs in the space. Estate agents are working with the local videographer.
When your members’ businesses grow, they need more services. When local businesses thrive, they need workspace. The interdependence is structural.
Business Rates Are Complicated — Here’s What Actually Matters
The business rates issue is complicated, even for people who’ve been studying it.
Karen listened to Bernie’s show with Roland from Dragon Coworking and admits that business rates are complicated even for Jane and her.
But she breaks it down to its essential impact.
Building valuations are going up.
The rate multiplier is coming down.
But the result is a higher bill.
There’s also a new five-tiered system, changes to how vacant buildings are treated, and—critically for coworking—the potential loss of Small Business Rates Relief for private offices within shared workspace.
Here’s why that matters.
When a small business takes a private office within The Residency, Karen protects them from rising costs. She sets their rates for a year or two, absorbing the uncertainty so they can plan their business.
If rates on those offices suddenly spike, Karen has no good options.
The cruel irony is that if those same members had taken space directly on the high street, they’d still qualify for Small Business Rates Relief.
As Karen puts it, the policy is penalising the very people that are the backbone of this country, taking risks, employing local people, growing their businesses from little acorns into big oak trees.
They Gave Up Space For a Kitchen Because That’s Where Community Happens
Karen gave up a lot of space at The Residence for what she calls a beating heart—the big kitchen area.
People come and have their lunch. They sit on the big sofa. They talk about what’s troubling them, what’s keeping them awake at night, what they’d love help with.
Then everyone gathers around. How can we help you? Do you need more clients? Do you need some funding?
It’s a place to build authentic relationships.
Bernie shares a moment that captures something most business discussions miss entirely.
When your business is failing at 9 AM, and you’re sitting at home, it fails for the whole day.
When your business is failing at 9 AM, and you’re standing in a coworking kitchen, someone asks what’s up. You say you can’t get your website to work. Someone offers help.
By 9:15, it’s no longer failing.
Karen builds on this.
The most important thing I have control over is how I can make people feel.
If we can make people feel like anything is possible, anything is solvable, together—you’re not living in your head. You’re not talking yourself out of it. You’re not telling yourself you’re a failure.
The WhatsApp group. The kitchen conversations. The visibility of other people trying hard at similar things.
All of it counteracts the isolation that destroys both well-being and businesses.
Running a Coworking Space Costs More Than Anyone Admits
Karen has started being more vocal about what it actually costs to run The Residency.
Her word for it: eye-watering.
Every single time prices rise, employment costs rise, or there’s a vacancy, it’s a strain. A huge strain.
It’s a constant juggle between giving and supporting the very people you want to, whilst managing your books, managing your profitability, making sure you have enough money to pay the VAT and the Corporation tax.
The business model is lean by necessity, not by choice.
And that leanness means there’s no buffer for absorbing sudden policy changes or cost increases.
When Karen says the business rates change could see a lot of people hanging on by their fingertips, go “Do you know what? I’m done,”—she’s describing the maths.
Karen Contacted Her MP Within a Week — Here’s What She Learned
Karen met with her local MP, Josh, within a week of reaching out.
She brought Jane from FlexSA. They laid out the concerns clearly.
Now Josh is taking the issue to the minister and trying to raise questions in parliament. He tried to raise a question recently but wasn’t chosen, which is why the more voices the better.
Her advice for other operators is practical.
In the pack Jane created, there’s a link to find your local MP and a templated letter.
But don’t just copy and paste.
Set out your stall. Explain how this will affect you—and the people you support.
Karen explained to Josh not just the financial impact on The Residency, but also what would happen to Bishop’s Stortford if 150 members suddenly had no space to work.
Where do they go?
They go back home.
And “back home” means back to isolation, back to living in your head with problems that feel unsolvable because there’s no one to share them with.
If you live in and around Bishop’s Stortford, Karen’s door is always open. Cup of tea always ready.
That’s the northern in me, she says. You’ll always get offered a cup of tea. Slice of cake. We’re well known for cake at The Residency.
Coworking brings communities together, helping people find and share their voices.
Each episode of the Coworking Values Podcast explores Accessibility, Community, Openness, Collaboration, and Sustainability—values that shape the spaces where we gather, work, and grow.
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