How do you find and play to your unfair advantage in the coworking market?
By being yourself! – It’s as simple or as difficult as that.
Since 2015, I’ve worked with so many people who have said something like,
We want to be the next “WooWork.”
We want to do what they’re doing!
Whatever you think about “WooWork”, they were homogenizing coworking.
The experience at “WooWork” is equally generic as TGI Fridays, McDonald’s, and Hilton, all employing a cookie-cutter approach.
It’s good for scaling and empire-building.
(But empire building is so late 19th Century!)
Jon Alexander talks about ‘Growing to spread’ vs ‘Growing to scale’ and coworking companies like TownSq, Patch, DeskLodge and Oru (to name a few) are growing to spread.
The best coworking spaces and people I love and admire are independently owned and doing their own thing.
The founders’ fiery passion is evident in the building, its activities, and the kind of people it attracts.
So, as my good friend Oscar Wilde said, “Be yourself because everyone else is taken.”
It takes guts to avoid the ’emergency of fitting in’, and no one makes movies about people fitting in, being bland and middle of the road.
