Goodbye 2020, Hello 2021. A bit of reflecting.

2020 was a strange year. After opening our first Seattle location in 2015, and our Tacoma location in 2019, our best month to date was February of 2020. For five years we’d had a solid track record of continued growth and profitability. We had a great team in place, two thriving locations, and increasing demand for most of our services. Chris and I had been able to deliberately step back from being physically tied to our locations, and had begun focusing on scaling and expansion options.

Then March hit and the spread of COVID-19 began. Almost overnight, we lost 1/3 of our regular revenue as local companies at the forefront of epidemiology news canceled all meetings and events on their books. On March 15th, I gave birth to our third child while Chris listened alongside to Inslee’s emergency proclamation shutting down restaurants, bars, entertainment and recreational facilities. We spent the next few weeks trying to wrap our heads around the latest guidance and research, grappling with operational decisions, and changing a lot of diapers. Due to the structure of our Pioneer Square lease unrelated to the pandemic, we had a decision to make about whether to continue operating our original location in Pioneer Square. Around the same time in April, I lost my father. Fortunately Chris was at the helm of the ship solo and made the decision to keep our fourth baby, our business, going.

Our team spent the next chunk of time scrambling to figure out how to reconfigure our space to make it safer for users, offering discounted memberships and extensions to try to keep some of our membership base in tact, and trying to be a resource to members and the community. Sheila, Jamie, & Mel put together gift bags to thank our continuing members with items from local small businesses: bookstores, coffeeshops, and chocolatiers. We worked on applying for relief options and trying to be a resource to guide other qualifying small business members in doing the same. Chris designed and had fabricated a large order of custom maple desk dividers to protect dedicated desk members in our space from their neighbor’s aerosols. We were able to operate, but at a drastically reduced level.

In August, we signed on to a new project in Belltown. For many, it might seem like an odd time to expand. We’d been exploring this option prior to the pandemic, and because the building ownership group was flexible in structuring our arrangement, we felt as though it still made sense to press forward. We wanted to modify the existing offices at the new location and add more, in addition to making slight alterations to the main space. We embarked upon a construction journey, working with a local architecture firm to design what we needed while Chris operated as the Project Manager overseeing the sub-contractors. If we believed in our business model in the long term, we figured this could be seen as an opportune time to do construction: while our users were not utilizing our services as they normally would. We were optimistic, assuming a vaccine would ultimately be distributed and we would not be facing these restrictions in the medium/long-term.

Would we have done it again? Probably. A lot depends upon how these next 3-6 months go. And we feel optimistic and hopeful, particularly after the success this week on a national leadership level. If we knew things could only get better from here, we certainly would do it again.

We ended up slightly in the black in 2020 which we feel fortunate about. However, our revenue was less than half of what we had expected for the year and took us back to where we were a few years ago.

We love our work, the creative outlet it provides, and the community that has been created because of it. We miss the in-person interactions ourselves. We miss the smell of fresh coffee brewing all morning long, the milling about of members and impromptu conversations, the hustle of flipping a meeting room between bookings, and the excitement of new faces walking in the door.

Now here we are at the start of 2021 and it almost feels like the winter of 2015 all over again. We are back to spreading awareness about what we do and what we offer. We are spending lots of time on-site building out a space. Every new inquiry is seen by the whole team and brings a level of excitement it did a year into our business. In many ways, it has been grounding to be forced to not take anything for granted, to slow down and install some of the ductwork ourselves.

We certainly hope demand returns to pre-pandemic levels. We expect that as the makeup of the corporate office changes and companies downsize their footprint, we will see residual demand for flexible, part-time workspace options. We don’t think it is a far-fetched idea to see employers offer employees stipends for home offices or coworking spaces. We assume that post-vaccine, meetings and events will be desired and valued more than before the pandemic.

We believe in what we do and believe that there are others like ourselves that will long for the serendipity of real, human, in-person interaction again. The inspiration that comes from a new environment, from unexpected faces, sights, and sounds. And we know that the functionality of our spaces will prove valuable and preferable to the home office for many.

We are certainly grateful that we made it through 2020 and are still here today. We appreciate more than ever all of the people who have helped us along the way and have put us in the position to continue doing what we love.

See you in 2021 and beyond!