CHAPTER 8
Finding space
As outlined in Chapter 4, I highly recommend you start the business from home to keep costs and commuting time as low as possible. This leads to a requirement for space both inside the house, and out, and multi-functional space, too. When starting out, you may need space from which to work, make sales, have meetings and collaborate. In this chapter, I offer a spacious range of options.
The home office
If you can, find dedicated space in the house from which to work. That way, you can close the door at the end of the working day and feel a physical sense of separation between what is work and what is not. Shoo Rayner is a children’s author and illustrator and works out of a garden office. It is something he recommends to others.
Try to work in a shed or outhouse, or at least a dedicated room, and tell everyone that, when you’re in there, you are at work so they should leave you alone. Ignore all attempts to draw you out – they will soon get the message!
At the outset, when budget is tight, the main pieces of furniture you need in the home office are a robust desk and chair. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, famously used an old door as his desk when he started the company from his garage in Seattle. Asked about the desks in an interview in 1998, the now billionaire explained:
These desks serve as a symbol of frugality and a way of thinking. It’s very important at Amazon.com to make sure that we’re spending money on things that matter to customers.
Back to your home office; the best way to keep costs low is to use furniture you already have but, if you would rather buy new items, there are deals to be had. Look online at IKEA, B&Q and John Lewis for the keenest prices or visit recycling community site, Freecycle (www.freecycle.org), to find a piece of furniture that you want and someone else no longer does.
A final touch to your home office in the early days and, indeed, as the business grows, is a vision board. This could be a virtual vision board, using a platform like Pinterest, or get a basic cork board, for as little as £2, and stick to it images of what you want to achieve in the business, and in life. It could be places you want to visit, targets for the business, maybe even people you want to hire! Pin them on the board and this will be your daily reminder of what you are working towards.
Corby Kuffor is a young entrepreneur running ThatSaleSite (thatsalesite.com) from his bedroom in the family home:
Starting a successful business from home is extremely convenient, but also distracting, with your TV, games console and bed within touching distance. So I advise to always keep your business goals and ambitions at an even closer distance, as these are the things that will keep you focused and determined to work hard towards success.
Space outside the home office
Head outside the home office to work in third spaces, co-working hubs, hotel lobbies or just about anywhere else with free Wi-Fi!
Of the thousands of home business owners I have met over the years, they all comment on how much they enjoy working from home, but the one challenge can be a sense of isolation; missing the water cooler moment of an office and not having anyone with whom to bounce ideas around. Achieve this, and more, from the list of locations on the following pages. Simon Jenner, whose Urban Coffee Emporiums Case Study follows shortly in this chapter, tells me two start-ups met at one of his hosted MeetUps and went on to marry. Working out of the home office may get you more than you bargain for!
Local library
In Chapter 2 I covered the benefits of visiting the Business & IP Centres in major libraries in your closest city centre. At them, you will find access to IT equipment and free Wi-Fi. Head to your local library to find a quiet work environment, free desk space and business books on tap.
Enter your postcode in the Department for Communities and Local Government website to find the library closest to you: www.gov.uk/local-library-services.
Coffee shops
Known as ‘the third space’, which is neither office nor home, coffee shops have become a popular stomping ground for start-ups. Laden with available sockets, all-day supply of whatever takes your fancy, and perfect perches for people-watching, no wonder the coffee shop is one of the preferred workspaces of the sociable start-up!
Simon Jenner is the entrepreneur behind Urban Coffee, which started with one store, known as an Emporium, in Birmingham, and has now expanded to four locations that have become the meeting place for local start-ups and entrepreneurs.
Name: Simon Jenner
Business: Urban Coffee Company
Simon Jenner had always loved coffee and, in 2009, while sitting with his business partner in a great independent coffee shop in London, questioned why he could not get similarly great coffee outside of London.
That was the eureka moment. Prior to Urban we were both working in IT, so knew nothing about coffee or retail. How hard can it be?
Urban Coffee has become successful and well-known on the back of its great coffee and on account of offering free space to start-ups wanting to host meet-ups and events.
In our business plan, we saw events and meet-ups as a key and a significant revenue generator, but the reality has been very different. People who come to meet-ups often don’t buy anything and therefore it often costs us more in staff wages to stay open late. However, we think it acts as a great marketing activity and really enjoy being at the heart of all these weird and wacky events.
These events are now happening across Birmingham and Coventry as Urban Coffee has expanded and continues to attract an entrepreneurial following.
We see each Emporium as being the urban equivalent of the village hall and we want lots of activity going on. I guess because we made it free and open to any meet-ups, it was likely to attract entrepreneurs, the free Wi-Fi helped as well. The key ingredients to attract entrepreneurs are good coffee, free open Wi-Fi, big tables they can work at, a relaxed environment and interesting stuff going on.
As the business continues to look for new locations, the founders are influenced by the demographics of a location and number of start-ups resident in it.
Our Jewellery Quarter Emporium has a good number of start-ups around it that regularly use it and we knew they were craving good coffee. After all, most start-ups are built on coffee!
@urbancoffeeco
Have a friendly local coffee shop to use as your ‘meeting room’ – it’s much better than inviting clients to come round for a coffee when the washing machine is on!
Oliver Bridge, founder, Cornerstone
Top tip 
View the WorkSnug video on ‘Coffee Shop Etiquette for Mobile Workers’ to be sure of working without disturbing! http://blog.worksnug.com/2014/07/15/video-coffee-shop-etiquette-for-mobile-workers/
Hotel lobbies
Rapidly filling with start-ups making their pitch, hotel lobbies, as with coffee shops with their free Wi-Fi and caffeine on call, present you with a professional space in which to meet clients and a home from home to get work done.
Shopping centres
Admittedly, not the first place you think of when thinking of where to go and work on your business, but shopping centre groups are increasingly looking to attract entrepreneurial footfall; as tenants in their malls and shoppers on the floor. For this reason, this is another place where you are likely to find free Wi-Fi and table space to touch down and polish up the business plan. See ‘Space to sell’ later on in this chapter for details of a competition run by one of the largest shopping-centre operators, offering start-ups free space from which to trade.
Co-working spaces
As the number of people starting a business has risen, so have the number of workspaces, too. There are national serviced office providers, of which Regus is the largest, and local hubs, so you can head out of the home office to work alongside others – and share resources.
The following table lists four options with the widest networks.
Regus Express
Seeing that start-ups wanted to work on the move, serviced office operator Regus formed a whole new division called RegusExpress, which is seeing office space popping up in service stations and Staples stores across the UK. Complete an online form to get a free one-day pass (www.regus.co.uk/express).
Hubs and co-working spaces are coming to life in local areas, too. The following entrepreneurs in Calder Valley and Farnham took matters into their own hands and started hubs in their areas to accommodate a rise in the number of start-ups looking for a desk and a place to connect.
Business: Made in the Valley
Made in the Valley is a cooperative of makers in the Calder Valley of West Yorkshire. With a building identified as a potential co-working and maker space, four entrepreneurial women came together to raise funds to heat the space and create a conducive work environment.
We’re a group of four designer-makers based in the beautiful Calder Valley of West Yorkshire. Katch, Rachel and Amy all have degrees in Art and Design and Sue, a generation older, helps out. For several years now we’ve patiently persisted in producing and selling lovely textiles, ceramics, prints and artwork at the same time as working day jobs to pay the bills. It’s hard competing with the work of many other talented makers in a crowded marketplace, not to mention mass-produced goods. You have to be good at, or at least competent in, so many areas – book keeping, marketing, selling, negotiating, the list goes on. We’ve learnt that doing things together is the way forward, so we’ve organised pop-up shops, run workshops and started to develop our own small range of sewing kits. Last year we organised an interactive Meet the Makers Market as part of the South Pennines Making and Doing Festival. We brought in small food producers and community businesses, as well as designer makers, and stall holders had to demonstrate their process and share their skills in some way with the customers. It was a great success and gave us the chance to tell the small business story. This year we got serious. We set up as a cooperative consortium to build on what we’ve already achieved.
We needed a bigger home and more facilities to keep going, so we went hunting for commercial property. We’ve found a factory that has been empty for years, easy walking distance from the town of Hebden Bridge with plenty of parking, in a quiet industrial area next to beautiful woods, fields and a river. At the same time, we discovered co-working and saw a business opportunity – we could share our good fortune! We talked about it on Twitter and Facebook and in our small town and circulated a questionnaire.
We’ve gathered a group of enthusiastic potential subscribers – as well as other makers we’ve got gardeners, community businesses, graphic designers, advice workers and many others expressing an interest and a need. We’re planning to offer screen-printing, photographic and sewing facilities and a tool library; space for meetings, workshops, packing, storage; office and kitchen facilities; support and advice for start-ups; opportunities to meet collaborators and make business contacts; joint marketing and selling events; and mutual support and friendship. Subscribers will be able to rent space daily, one or a few days a week or full time. We have prepared extensive figures and cash flow forecasts but we know that we need to stay flexible and respond to the needs of our customers. We have some funds from family and friends and we’re planning a crowd-funding campaign, but we know we’ll have to bootstrap this business and grow bit by bit.
At the moment our space is big and empty and we think it’s beautiful. We’ll make it even more beautiful, so that people will want to come and work here.
@madeinthevalley
Emma Selby had been running businesses from her own home before winning a building in a competition that has become a honey pot for Farnham’s entrepreneurial community.
Case Study
Name: Emma Selby
Business: The Farnham Hub
I was a freelance bookkeeper at the time of setting up the Hub, although I previously ran a sports underwear business from home (fun fabric tennis knickers and riding bras). I sold the business when I had little ones and it got too much –and when there was no Hub to connect me to support!
The Hub evolved from a previous incarnation called ThinkingBus. ThinkingBus was a weekly co-working morning and creche for business mums in a local hotel, something I had been thinking about starting since I was mum of two young children running the underwear business. I got some sponsorship from our local media mogul Sir Ray Tindle to conduct some market research, found business owners wanted their skills updating and started doing that on a weekly basis, too. Men started to arrive – we now have more men than women on board – and I persuaded experienced entrepreneurs to deliver the training in return for a stream of potential customers. Now we have 120 members and a co-working and training premises open six days a week.
Emma secured the premises by winning it in a business competition!
A garden centre was opening a massive retail space and the operator was looking for a local business to bring in extra footfall. The space is a self-contained room within a busy garden centre on the A325 between Farnham and Bordon.
At the Hub we offer workshops, networking, co-working and training as well as business advice and signposting. We have different membership plans for ‘innovators’ ‘collaborators’ and ‘contributors’.
Monthly memberships range from £50 to £200 and we offer an innovative training programme for entrepreneurs and their teams called ‘Hub U’ as well as the networking and co-working events. All our members can access business services and admin support at the Hub too.
The plan is to establish the Farnham Hub as a profit-making model and then replicate it and scale. There are home businesses in every town and they all need a Hub!
@thefarnhamhub
Space for growth
Apply to rent government office space for free. The Government has made available spaces including offices, workshops, retail and laboratory space that come with workstations, Wi-Fi and meeting rooms and are located across the UK. There are over 1,000 desk spaces available in total. The only cost to pay is £25 for a security check (www.gov.uk/rent-government-workspace).
Visit the 3Space website to find free office space in London. This company takes on space that is empty on a temporary basis, and lets small businesses move in for free. The only downside? You have to leave when the landlord says, ‘Time’s up!’ (http://3space.org).
For Birmingham start-ups, there is free space on offer from local company, Time etc, that comes complete with commercial connections (http://space.timeetc.com).
Space to make
There is good news for the growing community of makers and designers as space opens for you, too! If starting a business requires access to specialist equipment like 3D printers or precision equipment machinery, others are making the investment so you do not have to. Search for maker spaces where equipment can be rented by the hour and there are specialist services on hand. Here are five across the UK.
| Name | Offer |
|---|---|
| Building BloQs www.buildingbloqs.com |
‘Empowering makers and artists to invent and innovate’ is the line from this makerspace in North London, which offers access to bench space, wood work and metal work for a membership fee of £20 per month. |
| FabLab Manchester www.fablabmanchester.org |
An idea that started in the USA, the UK’s first FabLab to open was in Manchester in 2010, set up to ‘inspire people and entrepreneurs to turn their ideas into new products and prototypes by giving access to a range of advanced digital manufacturing technology’. Free to use on open Public Days with a pay-as-you-go system to prototype products. |
| Owned by the Manufacturing Institute, a foundation has been formed to promote the Fab Lab concept across the UK and develop a network of 30 facilities with over 30,000 users by 2020. | |
| Maker Space www.makerspace.org.uk |
A community-owned and run workshop in Newcastle Upon Tyne with membership starting from £10 per month. |
| Makerversity www.makerversity.org |
Based at the beautiful and historic Somerset House, this is a making and learning space, providing affordable and accessible space for makers. |
| London Hackspace https://london.hackspace.org.uk/ |
A not-for-profit member organisation with space and machinery in Hackney, open to members who pay what they can afford for membership. |
Space to sell
Find space to sell through entering competitions, approaching potential partners and generally being innovative in thinking about where your customers are gathering and how you can get in front of them, at no cost to the business. A competition to help start-up traders get to market is Retail Factor, which has proven a success for both the organisers and the winners.
Top tip
Are you aged 16 to 25 and do you want somewhere to host a launch, put on a fashion show, run a focus group? Check out www.somewhereto.com, which offers free options for young people looking for space.
One of my favourite businesses that I have profiled and followed from the start is Arianna Cadwallader of Saturday Sewing Session. Wanting to start a sewing class in her area of North London, Arianna had the vision but no budget. She approached the landlord of her local pub and asked to use the first floor of the pub, for free, on a Saturday morning, in exchange for bringing in people who would buy drinks on a floor that normally sat silent. He agreed, Arianna started her business, and now has a dedicated studio from which classes are run each day.
Without that free space when I started out, I’d never have got going. My advice to anyone needing space is to find the kind of space you’re after, see when it’s quiet, and ask the person who owns it if you can use it during that quiet time, in exchange for a benefit to them. If you don’t ask the question, you’ll just never know!
Competition name: Retail Factor
Host organisation: The Mall and Capital & Regional
The Mall launched Retail Factor nine years ago. We recognise that our success relies on the vibrancy of the surrounding town centre and the local community. The idea was to create a business competition that would offer local businesses the chance to test their business model and get a real taste of what the retail environment is like by trading for free in The Mall. Over 500 businesses have entered the competition since it launched and, every year, 10–15 start-ups get an opportunity to trade for free in the malls.
Historically, we focused on start-up businesses, but, with the growth of online retail, we see more and more online businesses wanting to test their offer in the physical retail environment, so we are now encouraging online businesses to apply. In the past, we ran the competition on Retail Merchandising Units, which are the kiosks you see in the malls and outside the shops but, this year, we trialled ‘share a shop’ in some locations and it worked really well for us and the participants. We are continually looking at ways to improve the competition to open up access to even more start-ups.
Anna Steyn, Capital & Regional
Space to collaborate
A common thread throughout this book is the appetite that big businesses have to open up their assets to start-ups. One of the ways in which they are doing this is by offering accelerator space. Here are four London-based accelerators, backed by big business that are free for you, the start-up, to access.
| Accelerator | Backed by |
|---|---|
| WAYRA www.wayra.org/en |
Telefónica If chosen to enter WAYRA, you receive six months’ space, mentoring support, up to €50,000 and access to the Telefónica customer base. |
| IDEALondon www.idea-london.co.uk |
Cisco, DC Thomson and UCL look for the brightest of digital companies. On entering the accelerator, you receive space, mentoring and introductions to corporate partners of the hosts. |
| The Bakery www.thebakerylondon.com |
Backed by brands including Unilever, BMW, Panasonic and Heinz. Brands come to the Bakery to find products and services to take to market. One of them could be yours! |
| TrueStart www.truestart.co.uk |
Accenture, Land Securities and White & Case are partners in this accelerator focused on retail technology start-ups. Benefit from six months of space, up to £50,000 in investment and business services to the value of £75,000. |
If an accelerator is not quite what you are after, consider approaching large corporates to ask about access to other kinds of space. If there is one thing that big business has by the bucket load, it is space! Approach with suggestions like these:
- You working from their office, in exchange for sharing your entrepreneurial energy.
- You hosting events onsite, with your job being to attract a crowd of the type the big business is after.
- You selling from a new development and filling a temporary gap, as the landowner finds a full-time tenant, etc.
Find what you are after on the Enterprise Nation Opportunities channel (www.enterprisenation.com/opportunities), where large corporates are profiling the assets they have that are on offer to you.
Whatever the space requirement, you will find it on a budget by looking out for deals, competitions and promotions and approaching those with space to ask if you can use it, in return for tangible benefit. You have just got to beg, borrow and barter!
Total costs of space:
| Home office | £20.00 (fixtures and furnishings) |
| Out of home work/trading space | £0.00 |
| Total: | £20.00 |