How to Generate More Revenue For Your Coworking Space In 2023

During their early stages, most coworking spaces rely on one or two proven revenue sources, like standard monthly memberships. However, the spaces that manage to expand and grow more profitable eventually branch out and find other revenue streams. 

In this article, we’re going to discuss some of their strategies and how you can apply them to increase your space’s revenue and add value for your members.

First, let’s start with the classic — membership plans. These can help you accelerate your sales pipeline. 

Diversify Your Membership Plans

When it comes to memberships, the first, and most important rule, is to build plans that suit both your business model and the type of clientele you want to attract. 

On that basis, there are many possibilities for diversifying your plans, like:

• Offering monthly, weekly, and daily memberships (day passes). This variety lets pretty much everyone — from solopreneurs and freelancers to remote employees and larger businesses — try your space on their terms.  
• Creating different plans for fixed and shared workspaces. Fixed workspaces provide more stability and freedom for personalization, which is why they’re typically more expensive. Shared workspaces, on the other hand, encourage people to socialize and switch up their work environment. Since they don’t provide the same stability as fixed workspaces, they’re usually the more cost-effective option. Again, having this variety is important for attracting different types of customers.
• Differentiating between private and shared offices. This is the same idea, but applied to office space — private offices are more expensive as they provide opportunities for customization and are more secure by design, while shared ones are cheaper and encourage more socialization.
• Creating virtual memberships. These memberships help businesses establish a legal presence and get a reliable correspondence address. You can even offer discounts to your regular offerings for virtual members who want to come to your space occasionally. Here’s an example from CampusX — a company that offers flexible workspaces for both individual professionals and companies:

Quick note: If you’re struggling to get people through the doors, try offering a cheaper (or even free) 5–day trial period. This will lower the barrier to entry and get more people in your space, which can eventually lead to more memberships.

Provide Additional Services For Members

The revenue generated from your space is ultimately finite since, beyond a certain point, you won’t be able to accommodate more people. Fortunately, renting out space and equipment isn’t the only way to make money as a coworking business. 

Providing useful services is another great way to diversify your revenue streams while delighting your community. If you have the chance, consider offering:

• Printing and copying services
• Mailroom services
• Secure lockers
• Places where people can leave their bikes or scooters
• Office relocation services and custom office design for businesses that want to move to your space long-term

You can list, sell, and manage many of these services within OfficeRnD Flex.

Additionally, some extra services can be used to further diversify membership plans. For example, printing services may be free for all members, while secure lockers can be free for larger customers, but sold as add-ons to smaller ones.

Now, if your space is still small, you likely won’t be able to implement all of these ideas. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t accommodate your members’ needs. You can, but you’ll need to do so by forming partnerships with service providers.

Want to really boost your coworking space revenue? Then watch this expert-led video on how to do this with the power of SEO!

Partner With Local Businesses And Digital Service Providers

In our article on pre-selling your coworking space, we discussed the importance of making mutually beneficial relationships with local businesses. Offering useful services to your members is one area where these relationships are massively beneficial.

For example, say you want to create a gym for your members, but your space isn’t big enough. In that case, you can partner with a local gym and refer your members to it. The gym can provide a discount or maybe even kick back some of the profits generated by your members.

There are also tons of other businesses that can be useful to your customers, including:

• Law firms and accountants, since pretty much anyone doing business needs their services at some point.
• Interior designers and movers for companies that want to make your space their permanent office.
• Marketing, and SEO agencies, as many of the members inside your space need marketing partners to promote their services.
• Daycare facilities

You can also go beyond physical services and look for digital service providers that offer discounts. For example, most tech businesses use a cloud service provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure. These companies have various programs to attract startups, so you can negotiate free credits for your members.

Again, OfficeRnD Flex Marketplace allows you to create a digital marketplace and add various products and services to it. This lets your members easily view and purchase these services through the member portal.

Optimize Meeting And Conference Rooms Usage

By design, meeting and conference rooms will take up lots of space, so it’s crucial to utilize them properly to maximize revenue.

One way to do that is to rent conference rooms out on a pay-as-you-go basis to businesses that just need them for an hour or two.

Many coworking spaces include meeting room credits in their membership plans. However, you can still charge members beyond a certain point of usage, depending on their usage and needs.

For example, say you offer a membership plan that provides access to a private office and 4 hours of meeting room usage per day. When customers on this plan go beyond those 4 hours, you can charge them on a pay-as-you-go basis (maybe at a discounted rate for loyal customers).

If you’re interested, check out our eBook on measuring and improving meeting room performance for more details on this topic.

Don’t forget that you can do all that with the right coworking software.

Host And Manage Events

Hosting and managing events can be a huge revenue stream for many coworking spaces.

For example, iQ Offices — the largest independent Canadian-owned co-working operator — has a special “Event Venues” product for companies looking for a place to host parties and other social events.

However, you don’t have to be a giant business with hundreds of locations to host events.

COhatch has a “COhatch Concierge” service for businesses looking to host meetings and events. Not only do they provide the space, but they also help their customers with the planning, amenities, and other details to ensure everything goes smoothly.

Put simply, there are different ways to generate revenue from events. You can only provide the space, or offer additional organizational services that make things easier for your clients. Regardless of the specifics, events can be a big alternative revenue source to traditional memberships.

Unlock The Potential Of Your Space With OfficeRnD Flex

OfficeRnD Flex helps thousands of coworking and flex operators build thriving communities and keep their spaces running smoothly.

Our platform can help you:

• Collect more revenue by automating billing and payments.
• Create a workplace experience that your members will love.
• Visualize and communicate resource availability across locations to keep everybody on the same page and scale your business.
• Keep track of all of your customer data, so you can make better decisions and much more.

If you’re interested, book a live demo using this form and our team will show you how OfficeRnd Flex can benefit your space.