We’re going to have to be smarter.

Once we figured out how to do coworking, it turned into a pretty stable (and personally rewarding!) business for many of us.

Until March of 2020.

My brother (who works in a related industry) said to me once, “We all thought we were so smart. We weren’t so smart. It was just easy. Now it’s hard.”

So, as we crawl out of the hole of the last year and a half, those of us in the flexspace and coworking industries are going to have some hard scrambling, and we’re going to have to be smarter. And the first thing you need to work smarter is data—data in a form that is quickly accessible and easily usable. Oh, and accurate.

Each of us runs our spaces a little bit differently. You know best what information you need to make good decisions and run your space smoothly.

But there are some attitudinal things to keep in mind while analyzing the data you want to use.

Are you open to change?

Are you really fixed in the kinds of plans you want to offer? Maybe when you started, it was virtually impossible to really track usage or printing or whatever. But now it’s simple, so how can this impact your business positively?

Does it make sense to offer a broader mix of plans? Could you more easily hit the numbers you want without much more work? Don’t get stuck in an attitude of, “We tried that before, and it didn’t work, so it can’t work now.”

Does it seem to be too difficult and time-consuming to gather data?

Do you feel like you could spend all your time trying to put information together, leaving no time to actually run a center and take care of members? Maybe that’s changed, and with newer programs you can more easily set up the information you want to have at your fingertips.

If information is easier to gather, is it now worth it if you can make better decisions? If you know what percentage of time each of your reservable spaces is used, you can adjust space accordingly. Or if you find that some plans generate no revenue, does it make sense to gently retire them?

Are these decisions important enough to gather the relevant data—and have the parameters of the decision to be more data-focused changed, given software improvements?

Once you have the data and have a good sense of what it’s telling you, are you really prepared to make changes?

There’s not much point in putting together information if you aren’t prepared to make necessary changes. So seriously ask yourself this question!

An industry growing up

As an industry grows up, it operates less from a seat-of-the-pants mentality and starts putting in place relevant metrics. I hope this doesn’t make your heart sink, because a little bit of monitoring and tracking and measuring will actually make your life a lot easier!

Here with you,

Barbara

Barbara Sprenger

Founder & CEO of Deskworks

The new Deskworks KPI Dashboard makes business analytics easy. Choose which widgets are the most meaningful for your business and customize a dashboard that organizes them in an at-a-glance display. Want to take it for a spin? We’d love to show you around the new KPI Dashboard. Send us a message to schedule a free demo.