FlexSpace: People, Not Just Property

Flexible Workspace Association Annual Conference 2021, County Hall, London UK

Mark Kass, Full Speech Transcript

Wow! How nice to see everyone FULL SIZE again…although some of us are a little bit MORE FULL SIZED than we were at the last FlexSA Conference!

Welcome to Small Business Minister, Paul Scully, who we'll hear from shortly; Good morning everyone & a huge thanks to FlexSA for the opportunity today to talk to you about Enterprise4Good’s SOCIAL ENTERPRISE BUSINESS MODEL how we support local micro and small businesses in the communities we’re operating our flexible workspaces in.

 Just to clarify one thing before I go on, though…a social enterprise IS a business…it’s just one that’s defined by what we choose to do with our profits….remember those???

 We invest, speculate, trade, take salaries like “normal businesses” and of course focus on the bottom line.

 But ours is a TRIPLE Bottom Line.

1/.     We absolutely aim to deliver economic profit – obviously for ourselves but also for our clients;

2/.     We do what we can to encourage and contribute to environmental sustainability through our own operations & our supply chain and actively encourage our clients to do the same.

3/. Above all, our mission focuses on delivering impact and change on society by supporting the development of LOCAL enterprise cultures, supporting peoples aims and aspirations around entrepreneurship and enterprise survival & growth at all stages of the lifetime of thier business if they choose.

 As a micro-business in our own right, we operate TWO flexible workspace centres…The Hive Enterprise Centre in Southend-on-Sea, Essex and HiveHub Barking Roding Riverside, in Barking, East London our pilot centre for our new HiveHubLocal brand.

We’re privately owned and we work in partnership with local stakeholders such as Council’s & LEPs, colleges and universities to promote business start-ups & small business ownership as job creation AND creating opportunities for multi-& cross sector innovation.

We expect we will be VERY ACTIVE once the furlough salary support funding dries up….we’ll see business start-up numbers rise up from the plethora of redundancies we’re anticipating. Entrepreneurship and self-employment are a really important route to raising household incomes and as a social enterprise, we’re gearing up to support this!

Enterprise4Good likes working with Landlords on a Management Contract basis, establishing new LOCALLY BRANDED Centres often to help those landlords with their CSR/community investment commitment or increasingly, with architects and developers in helping them meet their planning gain obligations.

The Hive Enterprise Centre in Southend, is at the heart of one of Essex’s most important town centre regeneration programmes and we “partner” with our Landlords to occupy 16000 sq ft of hybrid flexible workspace on the top two floors of The Old Central Library in an iconic, Brutalist-style heritage asset and to serve what pre-pandemic - used to be one of the most important commuter towns for The City, Canary Wharf and The Thames Estuary

HiveHub Barking Roding Riverside is a 2500 sq ft hybrid flexspace in Barking’s Icehouse Creative Quarter on the rapidly regenerating banks of Barking Town Centres River Roding aimed at the abundance of local creatives who can no longer afford to work in Hackney, Stratford or Walthamstow

Providing affordable, flexible workspace across the two locations,– and particularly over the last horrendous 18 months - we can evidence that we’ve protected existing jobs, encouraged B2B collaborations for survival and for growth and for so many individuals, provided a solution to well-being and mindfulness for those that just CAN’T WORK FROM HOME.

Our business support offer is largely events driven. And almost totally focussed on COLLABORATION….

That’s why we went for THE HIVE reference in our brands!

Also,…in Southend, we’re the BEEcroft Art Gallery and across all our spaces we’re pretty good at stinging people for their rent! 😊

Our business support is always delivered FREE OF CHARGE to Clients and we ensure this support is delivered on a DEMAND-LED BASIS, not from off-the-shelf programmes like the old Business Links used to do!

We make this happen by talking to and working alongside our clients to listen to what they need rather than second guess what we think they want!

My teams thoroughly enjoy planning and organising the regular business networking events we offer our Members – usually Beer and Pizza gigs of course - but we up the ante by hosting client-driven sector specific training & development workshops, seminars and masterclasses…all delivered FREE by local, experienced – and vetted ! – experts.

Regularity of these events is key to exposing our Centres to delegates and they invariably come as open-invites to the WHOLE business community such as our Southend TechCityOnSea network and Networking & Cake events, a monthly, no-agenda excuse to get like-minded networkers into a room to stuff their faces with cake, swap business cards and war stories.

These can and - as we’ve proven more recently - still do attract significant audiences of passionate entrepreneur networkers!

 But “why bother”….I hear you mutter!....and FREE, for godssake!????

Importantly, we treat all these delegates as potential flexible workspace user leads.

We send invites to all businesses across the region, freelancers, local micro & SMEs – note MICRO - and local & regional Corporates across our extensive database to drive valuable fresh footfall into our Centres.

This is our best sales and marketing opportunity….successfully generating increased “bums on seats” first-hand visibility of our space alongside our glossy brochures, websites and social media posts and of course our broker ads. Our event spaces are located on the edge of the co-working space so EVERYONE gets to see EVERYTHING on event day…like it or not!

Cake and pizza is a good draw so we have never had a complaint in 7 years !

My Centre Managers are not Centre Managers. They’re Community Experience Owners. We empower them to build close but professional relationships with clients not only to generate more income for us but to help their businesses start-up, survive grow.

We recruit them from and ask them to operate as if they were  in the HOSPITALITY sector so we proudly promote ourselves as being “MORE THAN JUST A COMMERCIAL LANDLORD”

And naturally, through our relationship building with clients, and in keeping with our social enterprise model, we deliver more than just events and workspace…we get asked for help!

Fo 1-2-1 information, advice and guidance on a personal level and through the creation of peer-to-peer “virtual boards”, we’re delivering Free of charge business coaching, mentoring and counselling programmes to our residents.

So what are we??

To avoid confusions of definitions,  we've always described ourselves as operators of NEIGHBOURHOOD WORKPLACES and both The Hive Enterprise Centre in Southend and our new concept HiveHubLocal in Barking, East London are focused on integrating with the locals….providing them respite from dining rooms kitchen tables, cramped lofts and windy sheds, with cool places to work with others and places that alleviate any potential for murdering children, pets or that bloody Amazon delivery driver!

We’ve taken the serviced office model and the co-working model to a different level. Its not just about space or relaxed working spaces…its about collaborative, self-sustaining small business support for the people working there.

 As proud Members of Flexible Space Association, we can ALL provide the proverbial “engine rooms” for economic recovery and stimulus by providing workspaces for fledgling enterprises and of course those downsizing or rationalising their existing commercial real estate footprint.

Commercial Real Estate owners can benefit from our takeover of their workspace in a rapidly changing world

Micro and small businesses benefit from our worrying about how to manage that workspace they’ve just signed up for so they can focus on building their businesses back better.

And I intend Enterprise4Good to further build its brand off the back of this. We’re already recognised within the public sector as an economic growth solution provider,

Councils need to learn fast that converting empty space into flexible workspace IS NOT just about replacing lost cash income.

Our industry is not just full of property companies …we’re all specialist hospitality providers…despite not receiving any Covid support grants from our host Boroughs!

Improving relationships with local stakeholders allows for and encourages further affordable workspace to be created.

Not just offices, but makerspaces, light industrial units and other really important neighbourhood workplaces…even high street retail spaces…

The issue now is Business Rates but now is not the time to open up the can-of-worms that is Business Rates valuations and the absolute need for a complete re-design of that somewhat dated tax regime…or is it??

Just look at how few of us operators derived benefit from Covid Business Rates Grants because of the ludicrous £51k valuation threshold….hmmmmm???

Our buildings aren’t full of tenants or licensees, they’re full of an eclectic range of organisations and individuals from all walks of life and ones that can and do thrive from working together.

These aren’t just ecosystems….we call this The Hive SMEcosystem!

I said before, we - and I mean the COLLECTIVE “WE” - are the ENGINE ROOMS for economic recovery and we should all go away today and onwards into the future proud in the belief that we can and will make a difference....

Our business is the business of building business buildings that build and re-build businesses!

Thank You!

(c) Mark Kass 6th September 2021