Tag Archives: Location

We’re On The Move

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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.

A Northside Coworking Space?

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We’ve been presented with an opportunity to open a C4 Workspace in the 281 corridor. But, before we do we want to see if you would be interested in using the space as your home base, full time office or as an occasional Daily Desk or Conference Room user.

So, here’s a link to a nifty Google survey. We’ve kept it pretty short and sweet.

We appreciate the time you’ll take to fill out the survey. If you leave your name and email we’ll send along a Daily Desk pass.

Coworking on the Road

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You can cowork anywhere. And sometimes you need to cowork “somewhere” near where you are right now. And that may not be San Antonio.

The good folk at Gangplank in Chandler, Arizona (near Phoenix) have come up with Wurkspaces, a directory of coworking space around the U.S. and internationally. There is an alphabetic listing of spaces but the handiest thing is the map view. They’ve mashed up Google maps with their diretcory to display locations around the world. Just click, click, click to find a nearby coworking space. Add this as a bookmark on your iPhone or other mobile browser.

This idea of a coworking location map has been discussed (and started) in the coworking community before but this is the first user friendly approach that I’ve seen.

Another idea that ahs been bandied about is the Coworking Visa. This is a program where members of one coworking space can access another coworking space at member rates. There’s more to come on that front.

With coworking, you can take it with you.

What's the Deal with Parking?!

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I’m going to use a little Spidey sense here and guess that when you come downtown you dread the cost of parking. Is that you?

Well, one cool thing about C4 Workspace is that our parking is FREE! Not $10! Not $8! Not even $5! FREE!  How do we do it? Well, we have nothing to do with it actually.

We are out of the main downtown parking melee, thank goodness. But for you skeptics, here’s the deal.

We have four parking options:

  • Out in front – We have a free, non-metered, 2 hour zone on the street in front of us. We spoke to Camelia the Parking Enforcement agent for our area. Her main beat is the Courthouse and when she is here she is looking for scofflaws (3 or more tickets) not parking violations. (Her supervisor sends her over here just before her lunch break when things are slow at the Courthouse.) She is not in the area long enough to write parking tickets. She DOES have a cool Tricorder thingie that reads your VIN number; we think it has GPS (and maybe a phaser built in.) Debbie and I park in front everyday, all day and have never gotten a  ticket. So, don’t sweat it.
  • Around the park – There is both free 2 hour and no limit street parking around the King William Park triangle. The no limit spaces are occupied by 8 a.m. though by, we think, workers at the courthouse.
  • Around the corner – There is free, no limit street parking down the block on Turner Street.
  • In our parking lot – Yes, we have a FREE parking lot! We have limited spaces in the shared parking lot around the other corner at Madison and S. St. Mary’s. It’s a pleasant stroll past the storefronts on S. St. Mary’s. While you’re walking you can window shop for that perfect trinket at Blink or Tres Rebeccas. We would like to reserve the parking lot spaces for Full Time Desk residents but since most of us park in front there are spaces open.

So, that’s the deal. Parking is FREE. And most spaces are closer to the front door than you’ll ever be at the mall or at a downtown office.

Did we mention we have FREE parking?

Day 15: Peek-a-d'oh!

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Fairly quiet day today. We had some visitors in the form of Derrick (@derrick on Twitter) and Augustin from Sterling Bank drop by. We had spoken to Sterling about our banking but eventually went with another local bank. But I showed them around and suggested they might want to consider doing a seminar on small business banking in the space after we open.

It was tough finding a “local” bank in our part of town. There are plenty of banks within a mile but they are all downtown in a highrise and mucho parking hassles. We settled on one that had a branch on the way to C4 Workspace from our home. Debbie opened the aforementioned bank account today and I signed the signature cards. (Is this too much detail for you?)

Andrew dropped by to take some pix and go over some color combinations. We still don’t have the quote from Manuel the handyman who will be doing work in the space (but it’ll be colorful!)

Early rendering of the C4 Workspace interior.

Early rendering of the C4 Workspace interior.

Andrew sent over one of the early renders of the interior of the space. What do you think? This is a view from the front door across the space to the conference room. The front windows are to the right. (Yes, that is “Finding Nemo” on the LCD screen.)

Debbie and I did some online shopping for tables and chairs. We’ll need to order and/or purchase soon to get them in for the opening.

We also had a neighbor drop in. Madeleine owns a house two doors down. She doesn’t live in the house but is in the neighborhood a lot and was curious about what we’re doing.

D’OH! Actually, April 20 was a red letter day. We had our first member join up on the website. Welcome to C4 Workspace Brian Dopp!

Day 12, 13 & 14: Houston, we have a business!

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The saga continues.

On Friday we had our second open house. It was the first day of Fiesta so it was a Fiesta Kickoff Breakfast Taco open house. I had posted it as an event on Facebook and did a little tweeting about it. We had 8 who RSVP’d and ended up with 5, not all from FB, and none of whom had been to the space before. (As I write this I realize it was a better turnout than I thought.) A shout out to Randy Bear, Bo Lora, Brian Dopp, Rob Leavitt and Gylon Jackson for coming by.

Andrew brought over his laptop and he showed wireframes and partial renders of the interior. It gave everyone a better idea of what the space will look like. Andrew and Debbie huddled over the laptop looking at furniture options. We’ll need to place orders for some of it if we want to have it for the opening. So we’ll be ordering this week. The three of us went furnitire shopping later in the day and saw a few nice pieces, leaning toward contemporary. Andrew has some distinct ideas on furniture and I do too; I think my tastes are simpler.  ;-)

The big news on Friday is that we signed the LLC papers with Perla Escobar, the third partner. So we are officially a business entity named “C4 Workspace LLC.” Next week is about opening bank accounts.

Over the weekend Andrew brought a handyman, Manuel, into the space to get an estimate on the floor, walls, paint and kitchen restructure. We’ll get the quote back on Monday.

On Sunday I worked a little in the space since I had taken off on Saturday to man our GreenCamp booth at the Earth Day event at Woodlawn Lake. (Which went pretty well.) I caught up on email but most fun was….demolition! I broke out “my leetle fren” the prybar and tore down the utility closet and removed the sheathing from the exterior walls of the kitchen. The kitchen won’t be reconfigured as much as planned just to keep the costs down and make the remodel of it simpler and faster. The next week will see lots of dust raised and we won’t be doing project work from here. So back to the home office!

Lots of little steps but we get closer every day.