London calling (just not necessarily calling it coworking)

Our friend and co-fan of coworking, Drew Jones of NotAnMba, travels to London often enough. He reported back, after a recent trip, that he’d visited a place called Le Bureau and that it sure was fancy. I checked out the website and sure enough, it looked mighty fancy. It also looked like, smelled like, walked and quacked like a high-end coworking place. Only I didn’t find the word coworking mentioned anywhere on the site. So I put on my Sherlock Holmes attire and sent an email of to Gemma Thomas, head of marketing for Le Bureau, to find out what’s up with the space. Here’s what she had to say.

Spike Gillespie: How long as Le Bureau been open?
Gemma Thomas: Le Bureau opened 18 months ago — we originally fitted out half of the space, which filled up fairly quickly. A freak flood set back progress slightly but we opened up the full space — with 99 desks — around six months ago.

Spike: Are you filling up?
Gemma: We are currently around 70-80% full. We are in the middle of a big marketing push at the moment and we hope to be full in the next month or so.

Spike: I notice that nowhere on the website is the word coworking. However, what you’re offering seems to mirror what some coworking spaces around the world are doing. Was it a conscious decision to not use coworking? If so, will you tell me a bit about that?
Gemma: The concept of coworking is not very familiar in the UK — until recently, smaller companies, startups, independents, freelancers, etc. would either rent out serviced office space or work from home and the local Starbucks. Our shared workspace model is a straightforward and flexible alternative. The all-inclusive rate makes life simple for everyone — there are no deposits, lengthy leases or contracts and there’s just a one-month minimum commitment. We’ve still got a lot of work to do though to let people know that we exist and some people remain put off by the still unfamiliar idea of ‘sharing’ work space or ‘coworking’. Our members seem to love it though (just take a look at our members’ area on the website — as one describes it, if you’re a small business, it’s a ‘no-brainer’).

Spike: Who has been using the space?
Gemma: Our members represent a really broad range of professional backgrounds including PR & marketing, event management, charity fundraising, video & music production, real estate, and recruitment. We also have several web-based companies, entrepreneurs and writers.

Spike: I see that clients can drop in and get started. Are there ever scheduling conflicts? How do you handle reservations?
Gemma: We rent our desk spaces on a monthly basis, which makes the booking system very straightforward — everyone has their own desk which they pay for upfront every month. When we have space, our members can rent out empty desks for colleagues or guests on a hot-desk or daily basis but otherwise we don’t do hot-desking. This also makes billing simple — we charge one rate for everyone with all the office services and facilities, meeting rooms and extras (coffee, tea, DVDs etc.) included which makes life super-easy for everyone.

Spike: How did you come up with the idea for the space?
Gemma: Peter, the guy who designed and set up Le Bureau, was renting a desk in a ‘pleasingly anachronistic’ shared office in North London a few years ago, when he realised that professional Londoners surround themselves with beautiful things; they go to beautiful restaurants, drive expensive, beautiful cars, furnish their houses with beautiful things — but when they go to work it’s a dump — ugly, soulless and unmotivational. He did lots of research on shared and coworking spaces around the world and set about creating a beautiful, motivational workspace for independent professionals and businesses.

Spike: You offer a lot of extras. I was particularly curious about the DVD Library — can clients watch DVDs there or is this just a take-away perk? How
did you come up with what to offer?
Gemma: While we’ve tried to make it as beautiful and comfortable as possible, so that people find it a pleasure to work long hours here, the idea is that people take the DVDs home with them.

Spike: Seems like you’re definitely a for-profit model. Some coworkers seem to eschew this idea and want to make their spaces about community first, with not much concern for profit. Any thoughts on this?
Gemma: As I said before, the whole ‘coworking’ ethos is not a big thing here in the UK and I’m not convinced that the majority of Londoners like the idea of lots of touchy-feely community stuff — especially if they feel it’s being imposed on them. I think some of our members would run a mile! Above all, our members are here to work hard and make their businesses work. We’ve considered putting on community-building events, lunch time seminars and the like, but we intuitively feel that our members prefer to build community in more subtle ways… and it does seem to happen naturally and work really well like that.

We’ve seen lots of collaboration going on which, in some cases is adding significant value to our members’ businesses. We’re also about to launch a Members Network to help this process along — a sort of intranet / online forum where each member will have a profile page and forums where they can share knowledge and ideas. Plus, we have a fridge stocked with beers so there are lots of impromptu drinks and little soirees that happen.

Spike: Anything else you’d like to tell me?
Gemma: We are aiming to assign a small number of desks to local young entrepreneurs who might otherwise not be able to afford an office or workspace. These young people will then benefit from all the facilities of a professional office and have the opportunity to work alongside our members, many of whom will have a ton of advice to impart about setting up and running successful businesses.