CubeSpace: hip to be square (an interview)

As we continue to bring you thoughts, insights, joys and challenges from our coworkers around the country, today we offer an interview with Eva Schweber, Chief Cat Herder and David Kominsky, Rabbi of CubeSpace in Portland, OR. In an act of brilliant coworking, the two co-answered my questions.

Spike Gillespie: When did you get started?
CubeSpace: We started seriously chewing on the idea in September of 2005, incorporated two months later and opened our doors for business in October of 2006.

Spike: What inspired you to start?
CS: Both of us have spent significant time as a consultants working from home. Eva is very good at staying focused at home, but was frustrated on those occasions when she needed office resources (e.g. large copiers) because the errands could suck up a lot of time. Eva also is not good at disconnecting from work (it is the flip side of being so focused) and never really had true downtime.

David is kind of the opposite. He was always more likely to find other things to do (gardening, laundry, dishes) until a deadline loomed large and he would work frantically to get it done. As a rabbi, he also needed a private space to meet with people, so we ended up renting him an office space that he rarely used except for meetings because there was no one else around and he got lonely.

We knew we were not alone in these challenges, because increasingly, we kept having the same conversations with people about how they wanted more community, and more resources, but didn’t want to go back to working for a company. We started playing with ideas, and came up with a very skeletal form of CubeSpace. The details have all been (and continue to be) fleshed out by the requests we hear from our members.

Spike: Since you started, can you describe how the experience has gone for y’all — has it been a nice, smooth ride/rise? Or did you hit a lot of bumps?
CS: Oh, it has been a very bumpy ride, but in a fun way. I think the most surprising challenge has been how difficult it has been for people to really understand CubeSpace. We are constantly struggling to refine how we explain who we are and what we do, but really people need to come in to the space to really get it. I love watching the light bulbs go on over people’s heads when they walk in, but it constantly surprises me how long it takes someone from the first conversation (either with one of us or with someone who has been in the space) until they actually come into the space.

Another challenge has been how hard the work has been. We both went from being freelancers with very flexible schedules to being tied to CubeSpace a lot. We can’t afford enough staff to give us reasonable work hours, so we pick up the difference. It means that we are often working from before 7 in the morning until after 9 at night.

Spike: What sorts of adjustments have you made?
CS: We discovered that there was less use of the quiet area than we expected, and that people kept asking for a larger meeting space than we had available. So during the summer of 2007 we cleared out about 20 cubicles and created a big open space. Most of the time, this space gets used as an extension of the quiet area: because people in the quiet area tend to be, well, quiet, the lack of the sound damping of the cubicles doesn’t matter so much. People enjoy working in the bright open space. In the evenings, especially, it often gets used as a large meeting space, for everything from computer user groups to company parties. That’s been the single largest change in the business since we’ve opened.

Additionally, we have learned a HUGE amount in the past 2 years and we are constantly tweaking what we offer and the best way to get the word out. We always listen to our customers and make adjustments based on their suggestions.

Spike: What’s your business model? Do you have anchor tenants? Are you for profit?
CS: Technically we are for profit, but we have not yet managed to sustain profitability (although we have had glimpses). Our business model is essentially offering a workspace community on demand or on and ongoing basis without any requirement of long-term commitment. We have a diverse business community ranging from freelancers, to small companies in growth stages to large corporations who have distance or telecommuters based out of CubeSpace. We don’t have anchor tenants, but we definitely do have members or companies that make up more of our revenue than others.

Spike: Y’all have actual cubicle spaces, right? I know that some people in the coworking movement seem to eschew the idea of cubes, as if this were something to be gotten away from. Will you comment on this and tell us why you decided to go with cubes?
CS: We went with cubicles for the same reason they were invented in the first place; they create a sense of privacy, while still allowing in natural light and some background noise (more on that in a minute) and are easy to rearrange as needed.

Some of the advantages of cubicles are that they create a focused workspace with few distractions. We find it easy to bring distractions into the places we work. To paraphrase Yoda, the only things to distract you in the cubicles are what you bring with you.

Cubicles have gotten a really bad reputation because they are often used badly. Who wants to be in a gray cubicle farm with beige walls and no soul? Who wants to hear all of the overly personal details of the family members on the other side of the wall? Absolutely no one.

We are not a cubicle farm. We very carefully chose lower cubicle walls in order to maximize access to natural light. We offset the noise issues by installing a pink noise generator. We then divided the space into “quiet” and phone cubes, so people who need to really concentrate don’t get the background noise of the people around them. However, the quiet area is the most under-used of our spaces because the phone area is so quiet that people go in there for the noise.

We do have an area of CubeSpace where people can work at tables by windows sans cubicles, but that is also not fully utilized. About 80% of our members choose to locate in the phone cube area. That is also where all of the requests for permanent cubes are located, so I guess when done right, cubicles are not the evil, soul-sucking devices that they are perceived to be. The devil really is in the implementation.

Spike: Is running the space your full-time job, or do you also cowork in another area? If the latter, what else do you do? If not, what did you used to do?
CS: Yes and yes. As I have already mentioned, CubeSpace is an incredibly time consuming job. And yes, David and I have still maintained some external work. David has been working as the interim rabbi (on a part-time basis) for Temple Beth Sholom in Salem, OR. Eva continues to take on small management consulting projects and, in fact, has folded her consulting business into CubeSpace in order to both better serve our customers and to create a vehicle for our members to join CubeSpace in bidding for opportunities.

Spike: What else do you want to tell me about CubeSpace?
CS: We have built an incredible community at CubeSpace and for that I am incredibly proud. We have members who have moved on to other positions or gotten their own office spaces who still come to CubeSpace for events or just to say hi. We have one member whose young daughter just finished a month of daily radiation treatments for a brain tumor who would come in just for hugs and support even though she wasn’t working at CubeSpace during that period. The fact that we have a community that extends beyond the time frame when people are paying to be there means a lot to us. It means that we have been successful in what we set out to do.