Well, it’s official – we’re moving! We weren’t able to come to an agreement with our landlord about our monthly rent. The rent right now is $3123 a month and our current lease has it scheduled to go up to $3600 if we were to renew in April. The revenue for the space, as it stands right now, can afford rent of about $2000 a month. So, as of the beginning of April, our address will no longer be 108 King William Street. We’ll be moving to a new space with a new address. Both of those things depend on you.
Coworking is About Community
C4 Workspace needs our community to inform our location search and selection. Two factors are really important: reign in our overhead costs so we [finally] break even; and sustainability, meaning keeping our revenue level at or above where it is now. Keeping these search parameters in mind…
Must Haves:
- Rent at or below $2000 a month
- 1500 to 2000 square feet of space
- Little or no finish out or construction needed
- Some enclosed spaces for conference room, office(s) and storage
- Room for lounge or break area/kitchen
- Easy access from freeways
Like to Haves:
- Accessible bathroom
- Outdoor seating
- Nearby (walkable) restaurants
Where?
Ah, good question. This gets to the sustainability factors we need to consider. Here’s the situation. The community with the first priority is our Residents. They’ve made a commitment to this coworking space by making their business home here. Our second priority community is our Coworkers. They’ve chosen to use C4 Workspace as their primary place to work and do business. That’s about 10 people with first dibs on where we move. They are the people that have voted with their wallets to keep C4 Workspace afloat until now.
The Residents would like a location just south or just north of downtown, definitely not further north than 410. We ignore that preference at our own peril. Ignore it and our established community bails and our sustainability model disappears. C4 Workspace would close and coworking in San Antonio would be limited to the Dominion Business Center outside of Loop 1604..
Why Not Outside 410?
Well, first, current Residents won’t go. But more importantly, C4 Workspace hasn’t ever received a commitment from Northsiders to work in a coworking environment. The research and outreach we’ve done hasn’t amounted to a hill of beans. Our survey last spring brought forth a lot of “Yes!” but the followup from people was a lot of “no.” We held four Jelly coworking days at La Taza Coffee House last fall with invitations to come and talk about opening a Northside coworking space. No one showed up. No one.
Coworking depends on community support for sustainability. C4 Workspace has survived to date by incrementally increasing community support (and a whole bunch of personal savings.) Theres is community support in place to sustain a smaller space. But there hasn’t been community support for moving the space away from downtown to the northern suburbs. Wish there was because a majority of the people who have joined as members live north of 410. But it takes more than “joining” to keep this thing afloat. It takes between $2500 and $3000 of revenue (in a smaller space) to break even. As soon as we get that level of commitment from a community of people we could consider moving north. There’s nothing stopping anyone from venturing to open another coworking space. We would love to help build this concept across the city.
So keep your eyes and ears open for us as we search for C4 Workspace’s next incarnation.
