This is a guest post from Randall Davidson of Audio Transcription.
Coworking spaces are often home to freelancers, small startups and consultants. Here is why you might want to try coworking.
In our early days, my company, Audio Transcription, was located in a coworking space, which is essentially shared office space. Unlike executive suites, however, coworking spaces generally do not require you to sign a long lease and they generally have more of a community focus. Coworking spaces are often home to freelancers, small startups and consultants. As someone who benefited immensely from coworking, here are 11 reasons coworking might be for you!
- It creates a routine. If you work from home, you probably know exactly how difficult it is to establish a daily routine. Coworking naturally does that for you because it forces you to get out of bed, shower, change (get out of your PJs) and travel to an office. If you value structure, coworking could be for you.
- You’ll meet people fascinating people. When you work alone, you only learn from yourself. When you work with or in the same space as other people, you learn all types of things.
- It creates work/life balance. You’ll actually be able to relax when you get home because you’ll have left work at the office (as opposed to working from your living room).
- You don’t have to make the coffee.
- You’ll be surrounded by other people. Not only will they likely be interesting (as discussed elsewhere in this list) and potentially helpful to your business, but they’ll also just take the loneliness right out of “working alone.”
- It’s a cheap way to get office space. This one is quite obvious, but I’d be remiss to leave it out.
- You’ll get an impressive address. While this sounds odd, your business address matters. It matters to local search, so having an address (that you post on your website and register with Google Places) in a big city means you’ll get a boost in ranking in search engines for terms related to that city. Having a business address that is not your home address also helps add credibility to your business. What looks better to a potential client, an unrecognizable address or one that is located in a high-end neighborhood?
- You’ll see other people bootstrapping it, just like you are. This is very important. There are many times in an early stage startup that you’re likely to doubt yourself or what you’re doing. At those moments, it’s helpful to be around other people who are also weathering the startup storm.
- You’ll get some of the perks of working for a larger office like access to training events, corporate discounts, holiday parties, etc.!
- Unlike working in a large corporate office, you’ll get a lot of exposure to a variety of industries. In one of our employees’ first coworking experiences, he frequently sat between a forensic accountant, a software engineer and a sex therapist. It’s a diverse crowd.
- You’ll free yourself of distractions that you find at home. Do a side-by-side comparison; try coworking for a day and try working at home for a day. See which environment yields better results for you.
Randall Davidson is the co-founder of Audio Transcription, a San Francisco transcription company that offers focus group transcription and conference transcription services. In Audio Transcription’s early days, the transcription company was located in a San Francisco coworking location. It benefited immensely from the space in the ways described above. In fact, Audio Transcription even found new transcription services clients among their coworking peers.
