So, you have a business that you manage online. You have procured the resources you need, and you have a steady flow of revenue. You run your business just on your laptop either at the comfort of your home or a personally rented office accommodation. But wait, is it that simple?
Not really! The challenges of running a small business or a startup are numerous. Specifically when you are operating from your home, missing the benefits of a healthful working atmosphere impends. You may have some family responsibilities to fulfill, a few guests to attend and several distractions to deal with. This is where you begin to face the perils of stagnating productivity.
If you found yourself in this scenario, it may be a good time for you to consider switching to a coworking space. A coworking setup offers you several productivity-boosters like an environment conducive to work, a community promotive to growth and a spate of collaborating opportunities critical to your networking!
Productivity for a startup/small business may often take a nosedive, which is concerning. Let us discuss some ways in which coworking combats the much-talked-about problem:
The traditional office, however popular, may often cause monotony, rigidity, and lack of interest. All these problems are big motivation-killers and compromise productivity. By the same token, something as simple as flexible working hours boosts employee motivation. In an extensive study on flex-time by Society for Human Resource Management, more than 30% of the respondents reported a drop in absenteeism after flexible working schedules were incorporated.
Granted the dynamic environment of coworking spaces, coming across like-minded people with varying perspectives and ideas is inevitable. More the number of discussions with professionals from different backgrounds and schools of thought more will be the likelihood of constructive and innovative ideas to spawn.
An office, be it a startup or an established one, comprises a bunch more than laptops and chairs! Pesky little concerns along the lines of security, internet connection anomalies, electricity supplies and cleaning get conveniently quashed in a co-working setup. You can focus on your key business tasks because most of the trivial yet important tasks will be taken care of by your coworking host.
Paraphrasing Tim Ferris, author of the best-seller, “The 4-Hour Work Week”, the amount of work you have to complete will automatically fill the amount of time you have available to complete it.
This means that your productivity suffers when you don’t time your tasks well, which in itself becomes challenging when you have several important tasks to accomplish. A logical solution to this conundrum is to simply focus on your salient tasks and outsource the other important, yet not-so-constructive tasks.
If your office management comprises ten tasks on a given day, eight of which are basic administrative tasks that do not add any additional value to your business, you can make your coworking host handle those eight tasks. Now, you have only two key tasks to beat! Efficient! Right?
So, you see how better things get for your startup when you join a coworking setup in terms of productivity?
What you may not have thought of yet is that a coworking space can actually make your business grow through referrals!
Here are two most common ways in which Co-working can shoot up your business referrals:
Say, you have a business that does marketing for hotel packages. Say, you also do a good job at marketing. However, the lack of a dedicated content-creating staff has necessitated hiring more personnel for more quality content.
A Co-working platform may extinguish this problem for you. You may even have a content-creating entrepreneur sitting next to you in your Co-working space! Imagine how easy it will be then, for you to replace your hiring process with a simple collaboration to get your job done.
“But how does that help referral business generation?”, you may ask.
Business is all about give-and-take. Since collaborations create ‘win-win’ scenarios for businesses where all the collaborators benefit from each other, an innate desire to promote each other’s business is likely to set in. This is better than investing a bunch of your hard-earned money into crafting customer loyalty programs which may only seldom make your customers feel an urgent need to refer you to their peers and acquaintances.
Several Co-working hosts organize frequent corporate events which engender healthy community building, interesting interactions with like-minded peers and a platform to discover common business interests.
Such interactions dramatically aid your business promotion by way of word-of-mouth referrals. Let’s accept it. Nobody understands an entrepreneur better than another entrepreneur. Hence, your peers understand how important every single referral is to you. What’s more, all this may happen quicker than you can imagine!
The coworking landscape brings with it a deluge of growth potential for your establishment, apart from its obvious efficiency dividends. The wave of startups is hence, moving towards this trend. So should you!
For more information on to get more referrals, make sure to go through how to go about business networking in the event.