Dear Desk Diary
Ever felt overwhelmed by the challenges of creating the perfect workspace? You're not alone.
Your employees are likely to spend around 90,000 hours of their lives at work. I'm here to help you make every hour better. Whether you're leading a team, managing an office, or creating spaces people want to work in, join me, Hollie Sanglier, in solving real workplace dilemmas.
Each week, I'll bring in experts to tackle all your issues from boosting team creativity, boosting productivity to designing welcoming workspaces.
As your Workspace Agony Aunt, I'm here to bring insight, solutions, and a touch of calm to your office.
Got a question? Email helpme@deardeskdiary.com or drop me a note on LinkedIn.
Join me on Dear Desk Diary – where we turn workspace woes into workplace wins.
Dear Desk Diary
Could this be the future of how we rent workspace? With Tom Wordie
Unlock the secrets of transforming underutilised spaces into thriving work environments with our special guest, Tom, co-founder of NOHQ. Learn how Tom and Sanj Mahal started with &Co, helping freelancers find remote workspaces in hospitality venues, and shifted gears due to the pandemic to create NOHQ, a flexible, Airbnb-like model for office spaces. Discover the meticulous curation process for these spaces and how valuable data from Wi-Fi infrastructure is revolutionizing hospitality operations.
Ever wondered how you can maximize the potential of your empty office spaces? Tom reveals the concept of mini co-working spaces and how they can compete with traditional setups, especially in cities with high vacancy rates like London. We explore practical examples and potential earnings for landlords, offering insights into customizable occupancy agreements that benefit both landlords and tenants. You'll be surprised at how flexible terms can yield significant revenue streams.
Get the inside scoop on the nuts and bolts of pricing, the matchmaking process for clients and spaces, and the landlord-tenant dynamics. Tom breaks down the commission-based model that ensures risk-free hosting and the benefits of co-working environments, such as fostering collaboration and networking. Tune in to find out how this innovative approach is meeting the demands of modern workforces and creating new opportunities for both startups and multinational corporations. Join us for this enlightening discussion on Dear Desk Diary!
Welcome back to Dear Desk Diary. This is a podcast where we answer your workspace problems. My name's Holly and I am your host, and today we're talking about a very interesting topic. There is so much empty space in London. This is something that my guest is passionate about. There's also a real demand for office space and also a load of people who have way too much space in their offices and don't necessarily know what to do with it, so I'm very excited to introduce my guest today.
Speaker 1:Tom has been working in startups for the last 10 years, starting his career as account manager for digital brands in ad agencies. He then joined the commercial team of a social media startup, where he managed various customer acquisition campaigns, where he met his now co-founder, sanj Mahal. Inspired by the co-working industry and the lack of versatile workspace options for freelancers and remote teams, tom and Sanj co-founded Andco in 2017 and, more recently, knowhq, a platform that connects companies with design-led office space. You can book by the day, week or month. So whether you're a large team, a small startup or working solo, knowhq has a space for you.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:So over to you. How did this all start? What was your? Tell us about your journey.
Speaker 2:So I guess the best place to start is Andco. Probably I met Sanj at this social media startup before Andco, but we started looking at what was out there for freelancers in terms of remote work and where they could work from, and found that it was really limited.
Speaker 2:You either work from home, which not that many people actually like doing it might be quite nice on a Monday, on a Friday, but for the rest of the week, especially as a freelancer, you start to feel quite isolated and you lose kind of creativity and and you're staring at the same four walls every single day in, day out. It's either that or you go and work from a coffee shop around the corner where you know it's crowded. You don't know what the wi-fi is going to be like. A lot of the coffee shops at the time were turning their wi-fi off because they didn't want people sitting there for six, seven hours and having one coffee and you're not guaranteed a space where you can sit and work, etc, etc.
Speaker 2:The other end of the spectrum was co-working spaces and they seemed to be popping up on every single street corner at the time. You look at the we works of the world, the office groups, etc. Etc, etc. You know you couldn't walk 100 yards down the road in london without kind of coming across a new one. So we looked at what they were doing to attract this kind of new demographic of people working remotely and found that they were just mimicking the hospitality sector.
Speaker 2:If you walk walk into, say, a WeWork or any of them.
Speaker 2:To be honest, any of the communal spaces of these workspaces look and feel almost identical to walking into a restaurant or a hotel lobby or even a pub sometimes.
Speaker 2:So our argument was why aren't we using existing space that already exists all around us in the form of hospitality venues? And so we launched andco, which is basically a remote work booking platform where we partner with now mainly hotels that have kind of spare capacity in their lobby spaces or in their meeting rooms where our members can book through the platform and book a workspace where they can sit and work, and we go and put in our own wi-fi and and all that kind of stuff so we make it a really decent place to sit and work, and we go and put in our own wi-fi and and all that kind of stuff so we make it a really decent place to sit and work that isn't a crowded coffee shop, isn't at home, and it gives you that kind of third option and it's only 20 quid a month as well so we launched that business, um, yeah, about seven, seven and a half years ago now.
Speaker 2:Obviously then lockdown hit. It hit us pretty hard working with hospitality venues. I mean it hit a lot of businesses very hard, but hospitality obviously just shut down for a couple of years basically. So we kind of lost our workspaces overnight. We were still, they were still on the platform, but we just had to put everyone on pause.
Speaker 2:And what started happening, especially in between the two lockdowns, was that a lot of teams started getting in touch. So previously Andco was built for individuals looking for workspaces, normally freelancers or very, very small businesses and then almost overnight we started getting a lot of teams get in touch saying that we need spaces to sit and work together as a team. We've got rid of our big office space. We just need somewhere to get the team back together every once in a while that we can sit and work from. We realized that Antico wasn't quite the right product for them. We started putting them in a load of meeting rooms in central London in hotels, where we literally had companies booking the same meeting room for two days a week for the next six months, which was great for us.
Speaker 2:But, at the time we looked at the space that we had available and found that actually a lot of central London hotels, the meeting rooms, are shoved underground and they're just not great places to sit and work for two days straight.
Speaker 2:You don't really have breakout areas and there's no natural light and they feel very sort of conference building-esque. So we started looking at what was out there in terms of space that could potentially accommodate this new behavior that we were seeing in teams booking basically a desk or a meeting space or an office by the day, and found that, because of lockdown and a lot of hybrid working, that a lot of offices now, or a lot of companies, weren't going to their offices every day of the week anymore. They were maybe using their space two or three days a week, but that meant that they had two or three days a week, that that space was just sitting empty and it's an expensive asset and and we found that we could connect the companies looking for super flexible solutions with companies that had the space to spare but didn't really know what to do with it.
Speaker 2:And one of our first ones it kind of came came about as a bit of an accident because one of the first ones the best businesses. Yeah, it was well it was the beauty of it was there was it was completely designed that demand led, I should say and we had all this kind of demand sitting there.
Speaker 2:But we just didn't really know initially what to do with it until a friend of mine works for a fashion brand down in Brixton. They'd invested a lot of money in this beautiful office space pre-lockdown. Lockdown hits. They realized they weren't using it.
Speaker 2:And so initially she contacted me to say can we rent out the meeting room on Andco and make a little bit of extra revenue that way? So I went down and checked out the space and it's an unbelievable office sitting empty. And while this was going on I had all this demand suddenly coming in from one side, looking for space, and I said look, I think I could probably rent out your entire office. And within days we had someone sign a contract for the next 12 months, for I think they go in a Monday and Tuesday, and we made that office, you know, tens of thousands of pounds overnight. So suddenly obviously penny dropped. We thought, god, there must be way more of these types of spaces around.
Speaker 2:So we started looking at offices that we knew had really nice or companies that we knew had really nice offices. We really only work with design-led spaces and, as you can imagine, there are hundreds, if not thousands, around london that aren't using their space to the full capacity anymore because they don't go in on a monday, on a friday, or they have their kind of set days that they go in and for the rest of the time that that space is just sitting empty. And so, long story short, that's how nohq was born. We sort of separated out the brands, because andco is still and still is very much for kind of individuals and nohq, which stands for no headquarters, is for teams looking for space that they can use on a regular basis, and that's grown from strength to strength.
Speaker 2:We've got, I think, about 75 offices that are now signed up. We're very picky with the types of offices we work with, just because we want them to be as sort of design led as possible and we feel like if you're going to get the team back into an office environment, you may as well make it a really nice place to be in a bit of a destination. Otherwise people just aren't going to, aren't going to come, and we also, as a kind of side side project, we do a lot of kind of typical broker-esque things as well. So if someone's looking for a full-time office in a co-working space or in a serviced office, for example, then we'll broker that deal for them as well.
Speaker 1:So people rent out like banks of desks or is it like meeting rooms?
Speaker 2:So it can be anything really.
Speaker 2:So we have a lot of companies that will rent out banks of desks in their offices.
Speaker 2:They might be going in for full time anyway, but they've got because they've maybe scaled back on the number of employees they have or whatever they will have spare desks kicking about their office that they can now rent out.
Speaker 2:And so we have we place a lot of individuals in those that will just go and hot desk in there for a monthly basis, or we have teams of people that will take banks of desks and it becomes a really nice kind of shared office environment where we we always try and match up the demand with the supply as well, as much as we can when it comes to the kind of the type of offices or the sorry the type of the type of companies that are that are taking the space and the type of companies that are posting, and. And then, on the flip side, there are companies that will take the entire office space for a full day and they'll book it in for the next six to 12 months, for example. So it's a bit of everything. And then, as you mentioned, meeting rooms, we have a lot of companies that will go and book individual meeting rooms in company offices as well, which?
Speaker 2:is also a really nice use of the space in the offices as well, which is also a really nice use of of the space. We've got a lot of clients that have gone fully remote, post lockdown, are now looking for somewhere that they can get the team back together. Every once in a while, you know, even if it's just on a quarterly basis, they'll come and do a big team away day. We've got a client that has 130 employees. They go and book out one office space for a day a quarter. They do all their workshops, big team events wow, a workspace that's someone else's workspace?
Speaker 2:yep, and that team's just not in that day they're just not in that day and you know they're making thousands of pounds from the space that they're not using and and the beauty of it is that these spaces that are sitting empty are perfectly designed for companies already.
Speaker 2:It's not like we're trying to change the layout or change the. You know the way the space is used. They're already set up as offices, so obviously on the website you can see what they look like. We go and take all the photos of the spaces, make them look beautiful, which is very easy because they're all very photogenic design-led spaces, but you can see exactly what they have on offer. You can go and view the space as well, if you want to, before. So it's really and I hate using this as an example, but it's a bit like an airbnb, but for yeah, for workspace and in that sense obviously airbnb next level.
Speaker 2:But we are looking to build it out into much more of a kind of live availability type platform where you know you can literally go on and find an office for next week that you can go book by the day, rather than getting tied into long leases so you manage the kind of operations, operations around it, rather than the office.
Speaker 1:Do you know what I mean? So Airbnb is obviously self-managed in a way. They do their own bookings and whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah so at the moment we will.
Speaker 2:So inquiries come to us through the website and then we have a discovery call.
Speaker 2:We find out exactly what they're looking for, because they might have been on the website and seen one space and thought that's perfect for us, but actually we know that there's one waiting in the wings, or there's another one that's maybe geographically not quite correct for them but is perfect in terms of the size and the meeting rooms that they have in the breakout spaces, or you know they've got outdoor areas for a summer party or whatever it might be, and so we do quite a lot of matchmaking in that sense, I think, with the way AI is going and all the rest of it, not to to use any buzzwords, but you know, there will be a lot of matchmaking that can happen without us necessarily being involved going forward.
Speaker 2:But at this moment in time you know we launched NoHQ just over a year ago we're basically in sort of data gathering, fact finding mode, where we're seeing the type of inquiries that are coming through. You know the type of companies that are looking for this space. You know I had a I actually had a call yesterday with a company that has 355 000 employees worldwide and the lead came through the website and I thought you know wow what?
Speaker 2:yeah, exactly, but you know it's it's. What was interesting to me is that you know the the demand is there across the board. It's not like you know we yes, we work a lot with startups because it works well for them to have that flexibility. But you've got these multinational corporations that are looking at flexible work and flexible work setups. In the same way, their leases might be coming to an end and now you know that they don't need a space to call an hq anymore, necessarily. But what no hq does is it gives that kind of reliability of booking and you know you can book for the next 12 months if you wanted to. So you know that you've got it every Monday and Tuesday or Tuesday, wednesday, whatever you want it to be, but you've got it booked in. You've got that space that you can be really proud to call your own as well, because we're very picky.
Speaker 2:As I've said, we curate the spaces on the platform and we'll go and see all the spaces that come on and and we we build long-lasting relationships with the clients and the spaces as well. So it's a real mix of different inquiries that comes through and with. At the moment we're kind of priding ourselves and trying to cater for everyone, which is, you know, potentially a dangerous route to go down. But you know, for us it's really valuable to place an individual because of the feedback we get, but also a team, team of 150, because we get their different use cases and their different scenarios and their different findings for us.
Speaker 1:So you must have so much data.
Speaker 2:So we get a lot of data on the Andco side of things as well because we go and put in our own Wi-Fi and infrastructure. In that sense it sounds a little bit scary, but we can actually see any smartphone that could have connected to our wi-fi. So we can start to see kind of footfall data, how people are using the spaces and all that kind of stuff. So you can start to build kind of data patterns on how people are moving around the city and you know, jumping from space to space, which is really cool seeing any good trends.
Speaker 1:I suppose that's more the anko side with.
Speaker 2:Yeah I mean the. The most obvious one is the days of the week that is busy. You know, friday is dead that's washing day, yeah exactly.
Speaker 2:It's basically the day that you spend at home doing other things that you haven't been able to do at the weekend or at the start of the week. So there's that. But also what's quite interesting is the is. The day is the time of the day as well. What we help our hospitality venues with is you know when they should be running offers, for example, or when they should be opening during the, during the morning. So obviously lockdown hits, but we were through the data that we were gathering through the, the wi-fi boxes. We could tell them actually, you've got x amount of footfall between the hours of 8 and 10 am. Why don't you open early, even if it's just for a coffee initially?
Speaker 2:and just see how it goes, and they they just didn't have that data there before or a really nice one that I always try and make venues do as possible is an andco happy hour. You know, turning that someone used this expression the other day which I loved. It was turning the nine to five into a five to nine. So these people that go and work from spaces from nine to five then tie them in for the next three hours because you're going to do a really nice 50 off drinks and then they're there from five to nine in the evening and it's a really nice way to drive more foot full into hospitality venues and kind of boost, boost traffic and sales that way as well yeah, I find it so interesting and we've actually talked about this loads it's like that, like blend of hospitality, yeah, and workspace and how much it's changed for sure, for sure people just don't need to sit at an in an office like do you remember?
Speaker 1:the days when, I mean, I was too young, but when offices were just like pods yeah and you'd have like walls around you and just like a desk and it was like solo mission yeah working nine to five, like where did you even come from?
Speaker 2:yeah, that's that classic kind of image of like cubicle yeah exactly, and and you know the phone's ringing and all that kind of stuff, but that's.
Speaker 2:That was an interesting shift that we saw with the rise of we work and you know who have done amazing things for the industry in terms of the way the you know the offices are set up.
Speaker 2:But they and we're kind of talking more on the andco side here, but they were, they were basically just mimicking hospitality and they talk about hospitality a huge amount on their website.
Speaker 2:They talk about concierge, they talk about you know the feeling of the space and I think that has really trickled over into private offices and that's what we're finding with nohq for sure. I mean, we see, obviously, hundreds of offices on a on a kind of monthly basis and there's people take real pride in how they're, how they're set up and and you know how great they look. Now, and I think you know if you're going to get, as we've kind of mentioned before, if you're going to get get people out of their homes, off their kitchen table or off their sofas and into a work environment again, then you really do need to make it a super nice place to be and a place that really fosters community or yeah, or somewhere that, if you're a freelancer, that you're going to get potentially your next job from, you know. So it's sort of it becomes much more than it's a cliche, it's much more than an office, but it has to be office managers could probably come from.
Speaker 1:Should probably come from like hospitality background yeah, and a lot of them do right a lot of them become.
Speaker 2:You know, we've I've met loads of office managers that worked in hospitality, worked in hotels, have had that kind of hospitality training and then you know understand how human beings work you know, that's and and offices are becoming a much more transient place to be.
Speaker 2:They're like hotels. Hotels are very used to business, transient business people that will sit there on their laptops doing work, and that's what a lot of co-working spaces are like now. So it makes complete sense for the receptionists or the office managers to come from that kind of background, because they know how to communicate with people.
Speaker 1:So the future what's? Your plans?
Speaker 2:So we've got quite aggressive growth plans across Europe, obviously into the States. We've done a bit of work in New York. We've done a lot of research into cities that are similar in terms of their kind of working arrangements when it comes to hybrids, as London. So we've got places like Amsterdam, lisboncelona, madrid, berlin, paris, and the beauty of no hq is that it is unbelievably scalable you know we don't own any of the spaces.
Speaker 2:It's not like we have to go and spend a fortune opening them up. We can get a team on the ground there that can go and onboard beautiful design ed offices that people want to rent by the day very quickly. So the scalability of it is definitely there and we've basically spent the last year, as I said, on this kind of data gathering mode and fact-finding mission and just making sure that the concept works and it's luckily touch wood. It's working well.
Speaker 1:It's a brilliant idea Mini co-working spaces.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's you know. We actually always said it's a really nice way for private offices to be able to compete with co-working spaces. Now, you know, you've got this kind of huge space that you're potentially not using and rather than someone going down to to a co-working space, you can, you know, attract them into yours and and, as I said, you know, we don't we don't necessarily need to build anything new, especially in London, even though there seem to be buildings popping up everywhere, but there's an unbelievable amount of space that is just sitting completely dead.
Speaker 2:I think the office vacancy in London is about 9% at the moment, which might not seem like a lot, but that is genuinely empty. That is 9% of all the office space not being used and that's the highest it's been for a century.
Speaker 2:Wow, all the office space not being used and that's the highest it's been for a century. Wow, so it's. You know there's all this latent capacity that is sitting there doing nothing, and that's also, by the way, that figure doesn't include, obviously, the private offices that aren't using it, where you've got occupancy levels of maybe 30%. So, for you know, two thirds of the week that office is just not being used. You know the private offices aren't being used. So the actual issue is way bigger than that 9%, which is where we're trying to come in, and I'm not saying we have all the solutions to empty office space in London.
Speaker 2:We're trying to see empty space as a kind of more of a launch pad to the next big idea or the next successful startup. You know you have this ability now to be able to go and have a really nice, beautiful office for a fraction of the price, without being tied into a three or five year or ten year lease. You know you've got somewhere that you know, when you're hiring people, the space that you meet is important. So you need somewhere that the team's going to be really proud to go into work for, yeah, rather than sitting in a coffee shop or, you know, in a kind of dire co-working space. If you've got somewhere that feels like your own, and you've got it and you can use it as if it's your own, it's a really nice environment to foster.
Speaker 1:So we have four questions, okay, which we're going to listen to. I'm interested to know how much you can expect to make from spare office space in central london yeah, so this is a.
Speaker 2:This is obviously the million dollar question um that we get from a lot of a lot of spaces. The truth is, is it depends? Obviously I mean it depends on your geographic location, how big the space is, the amenities that you have within the space.
Speaker 2:So whether you've got meeting rooms, showers, changing rooms, you know, bike storage, all that kind of stuff. But we always say the kind of the golden. The golden rule is that you can probably expect to make somewhere between 30 and 50 pounds per day per desk. So that's that. Obviously that figure changes depending on the length of the contract that they sign. So if they, you know, if someone signs up for the same two days for the next 12 months, that's going to be a very different price to someone just taking an ad hoc office by the day next week.
Speaker 2:Obviously it depends on also if the, if the offices want to take individuals or if they want to only take teams or whatever the inquiry ends up being. Yeah, normally it's sort of it's 30 to 50 pounds per desk per day. If you're looking at it from a kind of a monthly price point, it's probably anywhere between kind of 250 to 300, up to six, seven hundred like amenities, so like if an office has like in our office we get a really big sainsbury's order every week and it's the best and we've got smoothies and it's amazing yeah would people be allowed to?
Speaker 1:do you have issues with that if people coming in and using all their stuff and it's like that's not been paid for?
Speaker 2:so a lot of this would be sorted out in the in the contract that assigned pre um. So basically the way it works is that there is a license to occupy agreement that sits between the client and the host, yeah, and the host can go to town and what they want to write into that contract.
Speaker 2:They can, you know, they can put the fact that milk and tea and coffee is included, because it'd be you know, it might get a bit tricky to kind of organize teas and coffees on a daily basis, you know, or they can say we'll chuck in x amount of hours of meeting rooms for you guys to use, or they do you know, anyone can use the meeting rooms whenever they want I mean, as a kind of crazy example, we've got a music management artist agency that we work with up in islington and they won a grammy a few years ago and they have the grammy out in the office and they've written into their contract that no one's, no one's allowed to pick up the grammy, take selfies with it, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:So you can, you can go super granular in in in that, in that initial agreement, and obviously then it's a case of negotiating that. So it's not something that we've had any issues with, because we try and organize all of that kind of stuff pre them actually starting and the first day that they're in. What we'd always suggest to offices to do is try and make it as a as much as a sort of all-inclusive package as possible. So the price that they, that the client's going to be spending per desk per month, for example, should be all-inclusive of things like teas and coffees and milk in the fridge and you know all that kind of stuff. Obviously great, you guys do sainsbury's order that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:I would probably exclude that that kind of stuff from the contract just because it just it could potentially get a bit, a bit messy but, yeah, it depends. It depends on the space. You know the I guess the beauty of nohq is that there are so many different options on there. The offices are all so varied, so it there is quite a lot of handholding, initially, and it's a case-by-case basis and on you know the type of space that they're putting available, the amenities that they have and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:Ready for the next one?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm keen to know how much spare space, you'd need to have to offer it for a no HQ. Yeah, so that one it can be. As I said before, we have inquiries from individual desks all the way up to hundreds of desks. So we don't really say no to anyone if they're a beautiful office.
Speaker 2:So if you, even if you, have a couple of spare desks, we'll happily list that on the platform for you obviously from a commercial standpoint is you know it's more, more efficient for us to have bigger offices on on the platform, but we have. I guess our sweet spot is probably, you know, anywhere from kind of five or ten desks upwards to you know, 50 or 60. Those are the ones that sell the best. We get a lot of individual inquiries through as well, and sometimes with those we tend to kind of bulk them together and say we've got perfect space for 10 of you. Do you want to go in as a bit of a collective where you can sort of create this beautiful community and work as freelancers together and that works really well for them in particular because you know isolation within the freelance community is massive.
Speaker 2:So if you're able to then suddenly have a space that you can go to work and there are 10 others of you there, then that's that's perfect. But yeah, in answers to the question, it can be anything from, you know one, two desks up to hundreds of them, if you wanted to.
Speaker 2:There's no, there's no figure that's too small. As long as for us, as long as the death of the, the spaces are kind of up to scratch and design led and worth someone going and spending time in and then meeting rooms are separate so meeting rooms can be separate? Yeah, so either you you kind of bake that into the contract and you say you know you can have 10 hours of meeting rooms a month or unlimited, or they come at an additional cost.
Speaker 2:Again, it's sort of case by case dependent. It depends on how much the host is using that space already. If, if the if the client is booking an office by the day and they're taking the entire space, obviously meeting rooms are included because they're already in there. If they're sharing and say a host has 10 or 15 desks sitting empty and we find a client for them that takes all of those desks, then typically they do it on a kind of credit system or they say there's 10 hours included for you. I think what we found, which has probably been the most interesting finding, is that meeting rooms actually aren't used as much as people think it's quite an interesting sort of dynamic people.
Speaker 2:They get obsessed with needing a meeting room but actually they're not really used as much as people think. And then when they are used, they're using exactly the same kind of time during the day. So that's what I think. That's why people think that they're always busy, because everyone's trying to book them in the morning or like mid-afternoon.
Speaker 2:Obviously they're empty over lunch or you know mid-morning but we always, we always say to the officers look, I would just chuck in 10-15 hours of meeting rooms and I can guarantee you they'll probably use 30 percent of that. So, yeah, it's, uh, it's case by case dependent, but we like any office that looks good okay, next one.
Speaker 1:What's the price range for the no hq spaces?
Speaker 2:yeah. So I mean we kind of kind of answered that one slightly without using the word.
Speaker 2:It depends too much, it really does it really does on on geographic location and and what they have on offer and are they close to you know, transport links, links and all that kind of stuff. But, as I said, the kind of the golden price that we always quote initially to clients is anywhere between £30 and £50 per desk per day. Obviously, the more desks they take, that's probably more towards the kind of the lower end. Or if it's a beautiful space in Soho where everyone wants to be, then it's probably more like 50, 60 quid a desk per day or five, six hundred pounds per month, that kind of thing we might have covered this, but the question, the first question, was how much can someone expect to make, assuming you?
Speaker 2:don't actually take a cut from that, yeah yeah, so the way our, the way, our model works is that we just take a commission from any of the business that we send to the host. So again, like an air, an Airbnb they obviously take a commission and we only get paid when the office gets paid.
Speaker 2:So, there's no risk for offices to be listed on the platform if they've got space to spare. It's only when inquiries come through. We then pass on those inquiries to the space and then, when everything is signed on the dotted line and the client is paid, that's when we then charge the host. The commission.
Speaker 2:So it's a risk-free sort of model, um, exactly like airbnb and it, and it seems to work well. We charge a little bit more than the kind of the typical broker does in in london, but we, as I said, we're sort of we like to think ourselves as matchmakers in in the kind of the workspace sense where we will try, and, you know, get a client into a space that could really work for them and vice versa. I mean, sometimes we get clients or offices I should say saying you know, we don't want any recruiters, for example, because they're always on the phones or or they're a rowdy bunch they're a rowdy bunch or whoever you know, whatever industry, or they don't want competition in there.
Speaker 2:That's, that's a a big one as well.
Speaker 2:So, you know, there is that kind of matchmaking side to it, which, for us, is actually probably the most exciting bit, and it sets us apart from typical brokers other than, obviously, the the offices and the private offices that we have on board but it means that we get to speak to a lot of really cool companies and try and match them up to really cool spaces. So it's that's the kind of the sweet, the sweet spot for us. And yeah, as you've said, we, we take a commission, we've got to make money somehow so we're, you know we're we've we, we just invoice at the end of the month.
Speaker 1:That actually leads us on really nicely to the last question. Should we be picky about who we rent our space out to?
Speaker 2:yeah, I think to a degree. Yes, obviously it's your space and it's a bit like letting someone into your home. You know they've got to be, they've got to be right for the space, and vice versa. It works both ways.
Speaker 2:You know the yeah the space has to be right for the client. You know, as I said, competition is a big one. You probably wouldn't want your competition being in there, but then you know, sometimes that can work in your favor. We work a lot with. You know digital marketing agencies, for example, that have. You know various different sort of touch points with clients and you know we might match them up with a creative agency and that works perfectly. Or you know a video production agency or whatever it might be. So you know it definitely works. It works in both ways companies could end up merging yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:I mean, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if that happens in the future where you know a smaller agency goes into a larger agency space and they get snapped up or bought or whatever.
Speaker 1:You know there's, there's definitely I I'd be amazed if there aren't case studies for that going forward yes, I just think the beauty because I used to work for a co-working space and the beauty of it was watching people come together and help each other, even if it wasn't in a like they weren't selling to each other necessarily or exchanging services through money.
Speaker 1:It was just like the free knowledge that they'd give each other and we had like a Slack channel yeah with like thousands of members on it and someone would just write like, oh, I'm looking for a, you know, a gardener, and there'd always be someone like, yeah, I can do that yeah you know it's just an amazing thing, people coming together and like same thing. You know, businesses being like, actually we can actually work together on these things and then you're just creating little mini versions of that definitely, and it's sort of yeah, we always.
Speaker 2:You know it's a bit like someone looking over your shoulder and you know you're able to ask for immediate feedback. If you're a startup, it's genius right.
Speaker 2:If you're, if you're building a product that needs some customer feedback quite quickly and you don't want to go into a user testing session or whatever. But you're in a you're in a peaceful office with 40 or 50 other people. Why wouldn't you go and ask them? Like, go and ask them what is the ux right, or is the ui looking good? Or you know what would you change if?
Speaker 2:if you were doing it is that kind of stuff is invaluable and that's what you don't get when you're working from home, obviously, I mean yes you can do it over slack and you can do it over various different things, but actually that in-person collaboration and co-working I mean the clues in the name it's you know that that's, that's a really powerful thing to be able to foster that community.
Speaker 2:And we're doing it, as you say, on a kind of micro scale because these are private offices that we're working with. But if we can match up marketing agencies with production agencies or architects with video production agencies or photographers even they're going to go and do interior shots for their latest projects you know, that kind of stuff is it's kind of gold dust to us and that's where we get way more excited about, you know, just brokering a deal where we put someone in a full-time office with gray walls, white walls, for the next 12 months. For us it's way more interesting if we've got a small company in with a with another company, that they can create business together that's awesome.
Speaker 1:I have a final question which isn't recorded and didn't come from anyone. Came from me, but I'm allowed to do what I like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're the host.
Speaker 1:Is there ever an issue with landlords?
Speaker 2:so it's a good question and it's, it's a, it's something that we, it's a bridge that we have to cross every day basically, and when we're onboarding new offices, it depends if they are, if if we work a lot with architects and architecture studios that tend to own their own space or a lot of them do anyway.
Speaker 2:In that case, the landlord perfect nothing, nothing needed. It's partly the reason why we have a license to occupy agreement rather than a sublease or a sublet. It's you're still, the host is still in charge of paying their rent. What they do alongside that is up to them as long as they have.
Speaker 2:You know they're obviously they've got to pay the check at the end of the month. What we'd always suggest is for the host to check it with their landlord anyway. What we found is that a lot of landlords now are very open to that kind of arrangement anyway, because actually it means that they're not having churn in their own tenants. You know if, if, if, they can create a new revenue stream that's going to help them pay rent like why?
Speaker 2:why would? As a landlord, why would you forbid that? I mean, it depends, obviously, on certain things like valuation of the buildings and all that, because there's there's a huge amount that you can go into. But we found that the licensed occupy agreement is the way forward with it and most, most landlords are happy with it. Obviously we've had, you know, occasional ones that have said we don't really want to go down that route and it depends on length of lease and all that kind of stuff, but 99% are happy to go with it because it's, you know, it's a way for their tenants to make money to pay the bills it's you know, it makes sense we've come to the end, we've done our questions awesome, that felt very quick.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much I know flies by yeah so you can connect with Tom on LinkedIn. The link will be in the show notes and also the link to ANCO and NoHQ, and we'll look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you so much, you.