Page 21 - BusinessWest March 31, 2021

Co-work
Continued from page 20
complex at 98 Lower Westfield Road for 25 years, and faced a series of vacan- cies over the past couple of years the departures of Pier One Imports, Kaoud Oriental Rugs, and a series of mattress stores. For six months, two brokers assigned by a large, national real-estate firm had been trying to fill the vacan- cies, to no avail. That’s when Barowsky was inspired to by the co-working model.
“I had done a couple franchises in the past; I was familiar with franchis- ing, so I started looking at co-working spaces,” he said. “I just knew that everything was being shut down, and when people come back out, they’re not going to go back to these five-year leases, 10-year leases. People aren’t going to do that anymore. They’re going to want flexible plans — ‘I want to be here for a month, three months, six months, a year, and with a smaller footprint.’”
When he started researching a few companies, he was “blown away” by Venture X, which tags itself “the future of workspace.”
“That’s our tagline, but it literally is the future of workspace. It’s flexible — you decide how many of each kind of office you want,” he said, noting that some franchisees opt to emphasize shared space, but his facility includes fewer shared stations and about 65 offices, in several sizes, to house any number of workers. “I wanted more offices, so that’s what I did — I put in more offices.”
Sauser sees the potential, too, in companies downsizing their space and offering more flexible arrangements to workers — partly because of what they learned during the pandemic, when they saw how productive employ-
ees could be while working remotely. And that has implications for entire communities.
“I think co-working spaces are
very well-positioned to receive those people,” he said. “I’m an urban plan- ner — I’ve been thinking about this stuff long before the pandemic hit. A lot of trends show that, if people can work more flexibly, and make decisions about where they live based on lifestyle and not where the jobs are, people can move where they want to.”
He pointed to surging real-estate sales in Western Mass. and in the sub- urbs outside large cities like Boston.
“People are saying, ‘I’m sick of liv- ing in the city and running the rat race. I can live where the living is good but keep my big-city job,’” Sauser said. “I feel co-working spaces are an early indicator of trends that will benefit towns, especially towns with great, walkable downtowns.”
A lot of towns in Western Mass. offer that already — Greenfield has a walk- able downtown, with opportunities to work in a co-working space, so it can be more competitive attracting new residents,” he went on. “I think of it as
economic development for communi- ties, not just for businesses like ours.”
Several years ago, Sauser and Gold- sher met at a Franklin County Com- munity Development Corp. event and were soon talking about the co-work concept, which Goldsher had seen flourishing while living in New York City. They say members are attracted to co-working for a number of reasons, among them lower prices than tradi- tional office rent, flexible leases, and shared resources ranging from a print- er, projector, meeting space, and wi-fi to a kitchen with free tea and coffee.
The pandemic actually revealed new opportunities for co-working
spaces, Sauser added, from remote workers who live in rural communities with poor broadband access to college students who needed the space when campuses were closed, to working parents who craved a break from their suddenly bustling house.
“And we were honored to see a lot of members choose to stick with us and extend their membership even when they weren’t using the physical space,” Goldsher added. “Before this, the con- cept of co-working was a novelty, but we brought an urban concept to a smaller community and showed the model does translate in a different way. Now a lot of other opportunities are
presenting themselves.”
Bills, Bills, Bills
Yun had a broader vision as she grew Click — one centered around the arts as an economic driver, with gal- lery shows, music performances, liter- ary events, and the like, to emphasize Northampton’s cultural heritage while exposing new faces to Click’s eclectic space. That aspect of the complex has been wiped out during the pandemic.
“It’s been a hardship for the people who have been coming in — there’s
Co-work
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