Manchester does not go quietly to bed.

On the corner of Oxford Street and Portland Street, McDonald’s has spent decades feeding whatever the city sends through its doors. Buses grind past the windows. The air inside is thick with hot oil, salt, wet pavement and Coca-Cola syrup. Order numbers are shouted into the noise as the next crowd pushes in behind the last.

In my student days, you did not exactly decide to go there.
You ended up there.

It was the final staging post between the night you had planned and the morning you were now going to have.

It has a doorman.
Is that just a UK thing?

It is loud, brightly lit and mostly unlovely.

It may also understand hospitality better than half the luxury hotels we keep trying to imitate.

Order a Coca-Cola.

It arrives in a waxed paper cup with a plastic lid, packed with ice and sweating gently onto the tray. Push the straw through the cross in the top and take a drink.

It tastes exactly like McDonald’s Coke.

Not good Coke. Not bad Coke. McDonald’s Coke.

It is colder, sharper and somehow more aggressive than the stuff that comes out of a bottle at home. Even people who rarely drink it seem to know this. There are articles, Reddit threads and half-serious theories devoted to why it tastes better beneath the Golden Arches.

The answer is disappointingly practical.

McDonald’s filters the water. It pre-chills both the water and the Coca-Cola syrup before they enter the dispenser. The fountain system is kept cold, and the mixture is calibrated to account for the ice that will eventually melt into the drink.

Then there is the straw.

It is slightly wider than a typical straw, allowing more Coke to hit your taste buds with each sip.

Somebody actually thought about the diameter of the straw.

Not the colour.
Not whether it looked premium.
Not whether a customer might photograph it and tag the brand.
Somebody considered what would happen inside your mouth when you took a drink and altered a piece of disposable plastic accordingly.

You were never supposed to notice.

There is no little card beside the dispenser explaining the filtered water. The person behind the counter does not tell you that the syrup was pre-chilled for your enjoyment. Nobody points out the engineering of the straw as they place it on the tray.

You drink the Coke and think it tastes good.

That is the whole transaction.

McDonald’s is an odd place to look for lessons in hospitality.

It has none of the usual credentials. There is no concierge, no maître d’, no lobby scented with cedarwood and bergamot. Nobody is going to remember which side of the bed you prefer or arrange for your favourite bottle of wine to be waiting when you arrive.

There is usually at least one machine making an unpleasant beeping sound.

And yet, behind that counter, an extraordinary amount of thought has gone into ensuring that you receive the Coke you expected.

Flex offices rarely talk about this kind of hospitality.

We prefer hotels. The expensive ones, naturally. We pass around stories about unreasonable hospitality, handwritten notes and extravagant gestures. We visit private members’ clubs, take photographs of the furniture and return convinced that the answer is softer lighting and better soap.

There is nothing wrong with any of that.
A beautiful room can make people feel good.
A thoughtful gesture can rescue a miserable day.

But those are the visible parts. They are also the easiest parts to copy.

The harder work is deciding what the Coke should taste like, then building an operation capable of making it taste that way thousands of times a day.

The five minute fry

McDonald’s applies the same cold logic to its fries.

Cooked fries should only be held for up to five minutes. After that, they may still be warm. They are almost certainly still edible. A hungry person would probably eat them without complaint.

But they are no longer the fries McDonald’s intended to sell.

That is a more demanding standard than it first appears. It does not ask whether the product can still be handed over. It asks whether the product is still right.

Flex office hands over a lot of five-minute-old fries.

The meeting room is available, although the table is still carrying the rings from yesterday’s coffee cups. The screen works, provided somebody knows which loose cable to wiggle. The day office is ready, if ready means there is a desk inside it. The enquiry has been answered, although it spent two days ageing gently in a shared inbox first.

Nothing is completely broken. Everything is technically usable. The customer gets what they bought, more or less.

We have become very comfortable with more or less.

Weighing the bag

McDonald’s is now going further.

Across thousands of restaurants, it has introduced scales that weigh outgoing orders. The system knows roughly what the completed order should weigh. If the bag is too light, it warns the team that something may be missing.

There is something wonderfully blunt about that.

The business does not wait for a customer to arrive home, open the bag and discover the absent fries. It does not email them the following morning asking how likely they are to recommend the collection experience.

It weighs the bag.

The mistake is still allowed to happen. Human beings are involved, so mistakes always will. The clever part is that McDonald’s has built the failure into the operation and placed a tripwire before it reaches the customer.

Most flex businesses install the tripwire afterwards.

It is called a complaint.

Hospitality without the hero

This is where our view of hospitality has become confused.

We treat it as a quality possessed by particularly warm people. Hire somebody friendly, give them permission to perform the occasional small miracle and hope they are working when something goes wrong.

When they are, the business feels wonderful.
They remember the member’s name, find the missing adapter, rearrange the room and somehow get lunch delivered before the meeting starts.

When they leave, much of the hospitality leaves with them.

McDonald’s does not depend on every employee being a magician. Somewhere, at this exact moment, an exhausted eighteen-year-old is halfway through a Saturday night shift, surrounded by delivery orders and machinery that will not stop beeping. The Coke still has to taste like McDonald’s Coke.

The water is filtered whether the manager is charming or not. The syrup is cold on a bad shift. The straw remains the same width when the restaurant is busy.

That is the real achievement.

McDonald’s has built an operation in which an eighteen-year-old on their first week can deliver a more consistent product than many businesses manage with experienced teams, lengthy service manuals and three layers of management.

That is not soulless standardisation.
It is respect for the customer’s time, money and expectations.

Real hospitality is often invisible.

It happens before anybody walks through the door.

It lives in holding times, temperature controls, correctly weighted bags and a fractionally wider straw.

The customer does not need to see the effort.
They should not have to.

They should simply take a drink and know it tastes right.

Perhaps flex office does not need another lesson from a five-star hotel.

Perhaps it needs to spend a little more time beneath the fluorescent lights, listening to the fryers beep, thinking about the straw.

Consumer personalisation is largely driven by repeated behavioural signals. Look at Spotify - it “guesses” your mood from your recent songs and rolls into the next track. Based on your watching habits, Netflix suggests a film you’ll enjoy that you never even knew existed. The clever part of this isn’t the recommendation. It’s how little of it depends on you telling it anything.

But decisions and purchases in business, like finding a new workspace, do not work that way. A company might only take an office every three to five years. There’s no behavioural history to look at because there’s no behaviour to go on. Just one decision to make under conditions that will have certainly changed since the last one.

So personalisation in workspace sourcing must ask questions.
And most importantly: which questions you ask, and in what order.

“But I have an enquiry form!”

Most workspace enquiry forms will collect three data points:
how many desks, location and how long for.

Pretty reasonable.
But also close to useless for working out how well a space will suit.

Take two identical briefs landing in your inbox:
fifteen desks, Zone 1, rolling contract.

One is a legal practice.
That team needs rooms where confidential calls don’t happen behind glass, and a reception that reads as serious to visiting clients, and probably a floor they don’t share with a gym.

The other is a product design studio, which needs wall space it’s allowed to ruin.

Same form, same three fields, completely different outcomes.

What good brokers do

I’ve watched what numerous experienced brokers do with a brief. And maybe no surprise; they rarely start with desk count.

They will ask what the fifteen is based on.
Is it a ceiling or an aspiration.
Who’s signing off.
What didn’t work for them in their last space.
Do clients ever visit, and what the firm wants them to think when they walk in.

None of that is what the enquirer tapped into the form.
But it was made a part of the conversation because the broker has had this conversation two hundred times before and knows which threads to pull.

The order also matters just as much as content:
Ask about growth before term and you tend to get a fuller brief;
Ask term first and the conversation narrows before it’s begun.
Ask about budget first and you’ve capped the conversation before you understand it.

Very little of this is written down anywhere, and brokers don’t always find it easy to explain how they do it.

But two things are working at once here:

1. Guided asking: where different occupier types need different questions and experience tells you which.

2. Inference from outcome: where firms of a certain profile have consistently needed something they didn’t specify, so you raise it before they do.

Ask the structured questions without the pattern knowledge behind them and all you’ve done is make the form longer.

Enter the AI era

Software can hold these patterns at a volume no individual can match.
That’s a strong argument for AI.

A model with enough structured briefs and outcomes can learn which questions predict “fit” for which occupier type. Dependent on the occupier, this might be optimised for shortlist acceptance, viewings booked, deal completion, satisfaction or likelihood of renewal or contract extension.

But the all-too-common “AI-powered personalisation” is doing a lot of unexamined work in marketing copy.

An interesting benchmark called Know Me, Respond to Me examined how models use changing user information across simulated interaction histories. Frontier models recalled user facts reasonably well (60–70%), yet performed considerably worse when incorporating a user’s current situation into their responses (30–50%). The benchmark did not test workplace sourcing, so its findings cannot be applied directly to this market. They do, however, demonstrate the limitations of relying on loose context to produce reliable personalisation.

And the uncomfortable one.

Researchers at MIT and Penn State found that interaction context increased agreeableness in four of the five LLMs they studied, with condensed user profiles producing the largest effect.

Anyone using these tools today has hit the “You’re absolutely right” moment. Which is a problem here, because a system that agrees with the brief will never surface the requirement the occupier didn’t state, and the value of a good broker is that at some point they say, gently, that what you’ve asked for isn’t what you need.

Relationships aren’t data collection, as any experienced agent will tell you.

Trust, reading a room, knowing what a pause means; none of that goes in a form. And even if it could, I’m not suggesting it does. What I’m describing sits alongside the relationship: pattern knowledge that used to live in one head, made available earlier, so conversations can start from a better place.

Why this goes against how much of this market is being built

The flex and managed sector has spent a decade solving supply:
more operators, a wider spread of buildings and product types, and better listing data (sometimes) than we’ve ever had before. The assumption underneath all of this is that more options produce better outcomes for occupiers.

I don’t think that’s right.
A vague brief doesn’t sharpen against a bigger database.
It just misses more times.

Filters scale with the market. They don’t get smarter as it grows.

That’s the structural problem with competing on database breadth.
Adding another filter field hands the work back to the occupier at exactly the moment their decision got harder.

Scarcity has moved.

The hard part now is knowing which questions cut the list down before anyone opens a floorplan.

My bet is that the centre of gravity will move.

For many years the advantage has belonged to whoever held the biggest list. Increasingly I think it belongs to whoever asks the best questions. The growth in supply is driving that, not slowing it down.

Your enquiry form was never going to tell you whether a space is right for a client. That work is happening somewhere else, in conversations you don’t see.

I keep coming back to one question…

How many secondary offices are really prime assets trapped inside an obsolete product?

European office take-up fell 6% during the first half of 2026 and remains 3% below the five-year average, according to Savills’ latest European Office Leasing report.

But the detail beneath that headline is more interesting.

Average office vacancy across Europe is 9.4%.
Prime CBD vacancy is approximately 2%.

Prime rents increased by 3.7% over the past year.

Since 2019, average prime rents have increased by 27%.
Secondary CBD rents have grown by 9%.

Demand has become selective.

Companies still want offices.
They just have higher expectations around location, quality, sustainability and the experience their people have when they get there.

The quality gap is visible across the UK

The regional data tells a similar story.

JLL reported overall vacancy of 10.9% in Manchester during Q2 2026.
New-build vacancy was only 1.2%, its lowest level since 2020.

Prime rents increased from £45 to £48 per SqFt during the quarter.

JLL recorded Grade A vacancy of 2.7% in Edinburgh, 2.1% in Leeds and 1.9% in Glasgow.

There is plenty of office space still available.
But supply of offices companies actively want is much tighter.

That creates interesting questions for investors:

1. Do you buy the prime building at a price that reflects its success?

2. Or do you acquire the overlooked building and create the product the market is demanding?

Can you create prime?

We tend to treat prime and secondary as permanent labels.

But buildings evolve.
And so should the expectations placed on them.

This creates the potential for repositioning.

One finding in the recent Savills research stood out to me.

Using a self-financed, 12-month refurbishment model that includes the rent forgone during the work, Savills estimates that the payback period for turning a secondary City of London office into a prime product has fallen from ten years to five.

Savills also reports that prime rents in the City of London have increased by 49% since 2019, while secondary rents have fallen by 19%.

They describe this as evidence of a more visible “brown discount”.

The market is penalising buildings that have failed to keep pace.

Of course, each building still needs to work on its own merits.

The location needs to support demand.
The structure and floorplates need to be viable.
The acquisition price, CapEx, financing costs and achievable revenue absolutely need to leave enough room for a return.

Manchester also has 1.07 million SqFt under construction, all of it speculative. Today’s shortage of new space may change as that pipeline completes.

City-wide statistics can point us in a direction.
But they cannot replace asset-level underwriting.

Flexibility is becoming part of premium

The premium office also needs to respond to how companies are making decisions.

JLL’s Future of Work research surveyed 2,200 executives and corporate real estate leaders across 21 countries.

It found that 78% expect AI to affect their portfolio strategy significantly during the next three to five years. Only 15% are actively transforming their operations today.

Some 40% identified uncertainty about AI’s impact on their space requirements as a portfolio risk.

JLL also found that innovation-intensive businesses are moving towards planning horizons of 12 to 24 months. Many property decisions continue to rely on assumptions extending seven to ten years.

Businesses need room to adapt as their headcount, attendance patterns and operating models change.

Savills found that flexible offices still account for only 3% of European office take-up, unchanged from last year.

That 3% raises a question.

If businesses need greater flexibility, prime space is scarce and plug-and-play demand is growing, why has flex remained such a small part of measured take-up?

It could reflect the way flex transactions are recorded.
It could also point to limitations in the products, locations and operating models currently available.

The data cannot answer that yet.

A better product needs a better operating model

Premium is often discussed through the lens of specification.

I believe the definition is expanding.

A premium workplace should provide flexibility around how people commit to and use space.

It should make people feel looked after.
It should create reasons for people to connect, collaborate and return.
It should have an identity capable of changing how the market perceives the building.

That requires more than a refurbishment.

It requires Design-led Space, Technology, Community, Hospitality, Management and Brand working together as one operating proposition.

This is what I call the Full-Stack Office.

It is also the thinking behind Brave Corp’s Members Clubs for Lifestyle Working™.

We are building a model for acquiring and repositioning existing buildings around the way people want to work and companies need to operate today.

The Savills and JLL data do not prove that hospitality, amenities or brand caused the rental growth recorded across prime offices.

But they show us where demand is concentrating.

Our thesis is that a Full-Stack Office strategy can help the right secondary asset compete for that demand.

Some secondary buildings will always remain secondary.
Their location, structure or economics will limit what can realistically be achieved.

Others may be suffering from an outdated product and operating model.

Our question remains:
How many overlooked office buildings are waiting for someone to create the next generation of prime?

Ask any coworking operator for their numbers, and you’ll get occupancy, churn, and revenue per desk in about ninety seconds. Ask them how many people walked into their space last month who weren’t members, and most will guess. A few will check a paper log at reception. Almost none will have the number sitting on a dashboard next to the rest.

That gap has started to bother me.

I spend a fair amount of time looking at visitor data across coworking spaces, not membership data, the other kind. The people who show up because a member invited them, or because they’re touring the space, or because there’s an event on downstairs. It’s a category most operational reporting quietly ignores, on the assumption that if someone isn’t paying for a membership, they don’t belong in the numbers that matter.

I think that assumption is wrong.
And I think it’s wrong in a way that reaches further than front-desk efficiency.

The lobby is a market research report nobody’s reading

Here’s roughly what a few years of anonymised visitor activity across coworking locations shows.

• Around two in three recorded visitor arrivals relate to guests brought in by an existing member: a client, a collaborator, someone interviewing for a job.

• The rest is split across tour prospects, event attendees, and recurring service visits, like contractors and deliveries.

That’s internal data from Spacebring, the coworking platform I work with, not a market-wide survey, but consistent across the portfolio of spaces I see.

On it, the average space logs somewhere around 20 visitor arrivals a month, with the busiest running past 200. A meaningful share of all visitors come back to the same space more than once, and the ones who do rarely stop at twice.

Sit with that for a second.

Depending on the location, that’s dozens or hundreds of visitor arrivals a month at a flex space, and almost none of it shows up in the metric that’s supposed to describe how the space is performing.

They’re not in occupancy.
They’re not in churn.

At best, they’re a rounding error in an internal spreadsheet nobody outside the building ever sees.

It isn’t just an internal blind spot, either.

A 2018 Proxyclick survey of 2,000 US and UK office workers found that 40% said their opinion of a company had been shaped, negatively, by a bad experience in the lobby or at reception, most often down to indifferent staff.

It’s an old number, and tellingly, still the one the industry keeps citing.
The industry already accepts that a visitor’s few minutes at the front desk affects how a brand is perceived.

What it hasn’t caught up to is the other half of that same equation:
almost nobody is tracking who those people are, or what they’re worth, once they walk back out the door.

Why this is a finance question, not just an operations one

Flex real estate gets underwritten on the assumption that demand shows up as a signed membership or a booked desk.

But demand shows up earlier than that.

It shows up as a prospect who tours the same space three times before signing anything. It shows up as someone who starts working from the lounge on their own initiative, twice a week, because a friend’s membership got them through the door once, and the space did the rest of the convincing.

None of that is noise.
It’s the earliest, cheapest signal you’ll get that a location is actually working, arguably a more honest signal than occupancy, because nobody has to sign a contract to generate it. A person who walks in unprompted and then keeps coming back on their own initiative is telling you something true about the building and the neighbourhood that a membership agreement never will.

If you’re an operator reporting up to a landlord, or a landlord trying to underwrite the next flex deal in a building you own, that’s a data point worth having on the table.

It’s a leading indicator sitting a few feet from reception, going uncaptured, in an asset class where everyone claims to be starving for leading indicators.

What actually changes if you track it

I’m not arguing for more admin. If anything, the opposite.

The operators handling this well aren’t doing extra paperwork; they’ve simply stopped treating the visitor log as disposable. A visit gets recorded the same way a booking does. A repeat visitor gets flagged the same way an at-risk member does. Nobody’s job description changes. What changes is that a whole category of demand that used to evaporate at the door now shows up somewhere.

The commercial upside is straightforward enough on its own.
A visitor who’s shown up a dozen times is a warmer prospect than almost any lead you’ll generate through paid channels this quarter, and the natural next step, a day pass, then a part-time plan, then membership, tends to follow how they already use the space rather than requiring a hard pitch.

But the upside I find more interesting is what it does to the conversation between operators and the people financing them. “Our visitor-to-member conversion improved this quarter” is a sentence that belongs in an investment update.

Right now, almost nobody can say it, because almost nobody is measuring it.

The question worth asking at the next portfolio review

Every flex operator I know can tell you their occupancy down to the desk. Very few can tell you how many people walked through their door last month who weren’t members yet, or how many of those people came back. That’s an important oversight. It’s a signal about future demand sitting in plain sight, and most of the industry is stepping over it on the way to the reception desk.

If you’re a landlord backing a flex operator, or an operator reporting to one, it might be worth asking for that number at the next review. You may not love what it tells you about how much demand has been going unmeasured under your own roof.

That’s usually the sign you’ve found something worth paying attention to.

Walk into a beautifully designed hotel and you notice the interiors. Walk into a great restaurant and you notice the atmosphere. Step into a premium office and you admire the architecture.

But when you leave, those probably aren’t the things you remember most.

It’s likely you remember how you were greeted, or whether someone anticipated your needs without you having to ask. Or perhaps how easy it was to navigate the space.

I’ve come to realise that whilst buildings create first impressions, experiences create everlasting ones.

Working in commercial property has reinforced something that I think applies just as much to hospitality as it does to offices: every interaction shapes a brand, from start to end.

The website.
The booking process and system.
The arrival and greeting.
The reception.
The signage.
The wayfinding.
The speed of a response.
The tone of an email.
The warmth of a conversation.

Together, these small moments become the brand.

It’s made me think differently about the role of marketing.

The strongest marketing teams help shape the experience people have once they arrive.

That’s where customer experience, employer brand, internal communications, service design and brand strategy begin to overlap.

They’re different ways of designing how people feel.

Some of the world’s most admired hospitality brands understand this instinctively. Some of my favourite examples; Soho House, The Hoxton, and Gordon Ramsey Restaurants… (just to name a few!)

The secret behind building a memorable brand is choreographing lots of small details, with intention, frequently and consistently, to the point where guests don’t think twice about coming back.

I think commercial property has a lot to learn from hospitality.

As offices continue evolving into destinations that people choose to spend their time in rather than places they have to be in, the line between workplace experience and guest experience is becoming blurry.

Perhaps the future isn’t about solely about designing better buildings. It’s about designing better experiences.

Because people will probably remember a space.
But they’ll definitely remember how that space made them feel.

In our industry, it’s easy to talk about desks, amenities and square footage. But the reality is that what we provide is so much more than that. Workspace, at its best, is an extension of a business’s ability to survive and thrive.

At Mantle, and particularly at The Bradfield Centre, we work with technology and innovation-led companies. These are businesses that are very used to operating with uncertainty. The startup world is pretty much defined by it. While startup success rates vary significantly by sector, setting and market conditions, uncertainty and volatility are absolute defining features of many early-stage businesses.

And in that context, workspace can’t be passive. It has to actively support businesses through the moments that matter – the ups and the downs.

The real job is not just providing space when things are going well, but helping businesses navigate periods of change, pressure and uncertainty.

Rethinking space

There’s another fundamental shift underway that workspace providers need to acknowledge too. We’re seeing a wealth of new approaches to growth. Advances in AI and automation are allowing some businesses to achieve more without expanding teams at the same rate as startups used to. While experiences differ, we see how it’s prompting a number of operators to rethink assumptions about how workspace is used.

The role of the environment is evolving. It needs to become more community-driven and experiential, working harder to bring people together at a time when working from home is a viable option for many knowledge workers.

At the same time, the competition for top talent hasn’t gone away. If anything, in tougher markets it becomes even more pronounced.

Workspace therefore plays two roles:

1. Supporting how businesses operate

2. Attracting and retaining the people they need to grow

And so, it forces us to ask the questions:
If space is no longer the primary requirement, what is?
What is the real job of workspace today?

The answer lies in value beyond the physical footprint.
Flexibility isn’t about how many desks a business can take, but how effectively a workspace can respond to changing needs.

When times are tough, businesses become more selective about every cost and every relationship. That means workspace needs to justify its place within that equation.

The operators that will remain relevant are those that understand their role more broadly: participants in their members’ progress.

That means recognising that the real job of workspace often begins when a business encounters a challenge.

Support has to be proactive, not reactive

When businesses are under strain, the last thing they need is another relationship they have to manage. The role of an operator is not to wait for signals, but to understand them early on and check in regularly.

We’ve found that proactive support is most effective when it’s built into the day-to-day and not just reserved for moments of crisis. That means regular member check-ins, conversations with leadership teams, monitoring changes in space usage, understanding recruitment activity and keeping in the know when it comes to funding milestones, strategic changes and growth plans. All of these things really help identify changing needs before they become urgent problems.

It’s not unusual for us to see challenges coming before they reach a tipping point, which allows us to respond meaningfully.

It’s this responsiveness that becomes one of the most valuable things about the workspace itself. The lesson for operators is that support doesn’t always need a new programme or service. Mostly, it’s about spotting issues early and helping members access the right people and resources at the right time.

Community is important – but we have to take it a step further

When capital is restricted and growth is harder to sustain, just having proximity to other businesses can only go so far.

What companies actually need is access – access to investors, expertise and networks they wouldn’t otherwise reach. At The Bradfield Centre, this can include introductions to investors, ecosystem partners such as Barclays Eagle Labs, professional advisers and other more experienced founders.

In a climate where funding is harder to secure and competition for capital is intense, those connections can make a meaningful difference.

The broader lesson here is that community can really be measured by the quality of connections and support available when businesses face challenges.

This is the real role of workspace we talked about:
helping businesses overcome obstacles, not just providing them with space.

Stability looks different for startups

In some sectors, stability is often the goal, but for startups, that’s rarely the case. Growth, contraction and pivot after pivot – these are all part of the normal startup cycle.

So, of course, the consistency of support is more important than consistency of business circumstance.

Workspace operators need to be comfortable with that fluidity.
Your support won’t work for members if it’s based on fixed solutions.
Your offering needs to adapt alongside the business.

That adaptability might mean helping a business scale into larger space, providing access to specialist expertise, or adjusting community programming to reflect changing priorities among your members.

The important point is that businesses change over time, and the workspace offer has to change with them.

Knowledge-sharing isn’t an add-on

One of the most effective ways to support businesses under pressure is to help them stay informed and connected to what’s changing in the world around them.

At The Bradfield Centre, events and knowledge-sharing activities are an important part of how we support members. In recent months, we have hosted a large number of events focused on AI and emerging technologies. This was to meet the growing interest from our community.

This focus isn’t accidental.
In fast-moving sectors such as AI, access to emerging trends, expert insights and peer discussion can help businesses make better-informed decisions during uncertain periods.

Knowledge-sharing is a practical way of helping members respond to a changing market. It creates opportunities for learning, collaboration and problem-solving at a time when businesses across the wider community are all facing similar challenges.

Supporting international ambition

Of course, economic pressure isn’t the same across markets. For some businesses, growth means looking beyond their home market, and the UK continues to be an attractive destination for innovation-led companies.

At Mantle, programmes such as Launch Cambridge have highlighted the range of practical challenges international businesses face when entering a new market. These include things like establishing bank accounts, understanding local regulations, recruiting talent and integrating into the local ecosystem.

Providing support through these transitions is another example of how workspace operators can add value during periods of uncertainty and change.

Ultimately, difficult conditions strip business back to basics, and workspace is no exception.

That is why the real job of collaborative workspace starts when things go wrong.

On 16 July, Brave Ideas and Flexspace AI brought together around 25 sales and marketing leaders from flex and coworking brands for a roundtable disuccsion at Office Space in Town’s Liverpool Street site in London.

See Event Photo Gallery

View and download photographs from the event in the gallery above.

TL;DR

Prefer to skip the read and watch the highlights? Check out this Friday Five debrief with David Song, CMO at Flexspace AI

We wanted to explore one central question:

How can flex and coworking brands create a clearer path from audience, to qualified demand, to pipeline, to paid customers?

We structured the roundtable around two parts of that journey.

1. Filling the top of the funnel, with a focus on brand building and reaching customers before they enter the market.

2. Nurturing the middle of the funnel, with a focus on intent, response times, retargeting, sales and marketing alignment, and conversion.

Led by co-hosts Jamie Stuart (OSIT) and Sarah Sich (Work.Life) the format was peer-led and everyone in the room brought current challenges, experiments, and examples from inside their own businesses.

The value came from people sharing what they are actually doing, where they are struggling, and what they are learning.

See Event Photo Gallery

Here are my biggest takeaways from the discussion…

Start with why, then get clear on who you serve

The demand funnel begins long before the content calendar, campaign, event, or sales offer.

It begins with clarity around why the brand exists, what it believes, and who it is designed to serve.

Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle remains a useful framework:

Why, the purpose or belief behind the business.

How, the principles and behaviours that bring that belief to life.

What, the products and services the business delivers.

Flex operators often lead their communication with location, desks, meeting rooms, amenities, pricing, and availability.

Those details help an active customer compare options.
Purpose and values give people a reason to connect with the brand before they need the product.

A stronger starting point is understanding what the business believes about work, people, culture, and the role of the workplace.

Then comes the audience.

Who shares those beliefs?
Who is the product genuinely suited to?
Which customers will value the experience enough to choose it, remain loyal, and recommend it?

A useful ideal customer profile combines commercial fit, practical need, behaviour, and shared values.

Operators need to understand the type of companies they want to serve, how those companies think about work, the cultures they are trying to build, and what they expect the office to enable.

My takeaway was simple:

Start with why, define who shares that belief, then build the product and customer journey around them.

That clarity should shape the brand, content, events, workplace design, community, service, calls to action, and sales experience.

Filling the top of the funnel

Most future customers are out of market today

One of the most useful distinctions from the roundtable was the difference between in market and out of market customers.

In market customers already have an active requirement.
They may know the location, team size, product, budget, and move date they need. They are comparing operators, speaking with brokers, visiting websites, and booking tours.

This is immediate demand, and the audience is relatively small.

A far larger audience are out of market customers, which includes the founders, CEOs, operations directors, people leaders, and workplace decision makers who may need space in three, six, or twelve months.

They are already forming opinions about brands, locations, products, and operators.

This is where top of funnel brand building earns its value.

The goal is to build familiarity and trust before the requirement becomes active. When someone eventually moves into the market, your brand should already feel known, relevant, and credible.

Sarah from Work.Life shared that around 85 percent of their business comes through direct leads.

Those direct enquiries are usually the visible outcome of repeated exposure across multiple channels.

A future customer may attend an event, follow the company on LinkedIn, see a video from one of its leaders, visit a location page, read a customer story, receive a newsletter, speak to someone in their network, and use an AI platform to compare providers.

By the time they submit an enquiry, the brand may already have done months of work.

Turn attendees into followers, followers into fans, and fans into customers

We spent time discussing events as a top of funnel strategy.

Events create the first meaningful interaction.

People attend because the subject matters to them, the peer group is valuable, or the discussion addresses a challenge they are already trying to solve.

The commercial value develops through what happens after they leave the room.

The progression looks like this:

Attendee → Follower → Fan → In market prospect → Customer

An attendee experiences the brand through the quality of the discussion, the people in the room, the venue, the hospitality, and the overall format.

A strong event gives them a reason to stay connected.

They follow the brand on social media, subscribe to the newsletter, listen to the podcast, attend future events, and continue engaging with the content.

That turns an attendee into a follower.

The role of ongoing content is to keep stimulating the relationship.

The brand continues sharing useful ideas, customer stories, workplace insights, event highlights, and evidence of its values in action.

Repeated engagement can turn that follower into a fan.

Fans understand what the brand stands for. They trust its point of view. They recognise the people behind it. They feel connected to the community around it.

That creates affinity and preference before an active workplace requirement exists.

When the fan eventually moves into the market, the operator is already top of mind.

The prospect understands the positioning, recognises the people, and has a sense of the experience the brand delivers.

Conversion becomes easier because the relationship started months before the sales conversation.

This is why judging an event only by the number of enquiries generated on the day misses much of its value.

Operators should also ask:

• Did we attract the right ideal customer profile?

• How many attendees followed the brand afterwards?

• Did they continue engaging with our content?

• Did they attend another event?

• Did they eventually move into an active buying journey?

• Did the relationship turn into revenue?

The event creates attention. Content sustains the relationship. Consistent engagement builds fans. Top of mind awareness supports conversion when the customer is ready to buy.

Brand led social should create memory and preference

Social content plays an important role in moving someone from follower to fan.

The strongest content expresses the purpose, values, personality, and customer promise of the brand consistently.

Customers now research operators across more channels and over longer periods. They look at websites, social feeds, customer reviews, founder profiles, employee content, events, and recommendations from their networks. They are also using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other AI tools to research and compare providers.

The market is forming an impression of your brand before anyone speaks to sales.

Your content should help people understand who the operator is designed for, what the brand believes, what makes the product distinctive, what the workplace experience feels like, and why the operator is credible.

People connect with people.

Founders, sales leaders, community managers, and employees can all make the brand more visible, credible, and human.

The critical issue is consistency. The people representing the company need to reinforce a clear view of what the brand believes and who it serves.

Content should create a measurable next step

Reach, impressions, engagement, and follower growth can all be useful signals. Their commercial value depends on whether the right audience is paying attention and taking an observable action.

Content should communicate a clear point of view, tell relevant customer stories, demonstrate the workplace experience, explain specific use cases, and address common questions.

Social media rarely tells you whether someone is actively searching for space. The initial call to action should therefore be relevant and low friction.

That might include following the brand, registering for an event, subscribing to a newsletter, reading an article, listening to a podcast, or visiting the website.

Each of those actions creates a signal.

The role of the content is to generate enough interest for someone to take the next step and give the operator a clearer indication of what they care about.

Once someone takes that measurable action, the middle of the funnel begins.

Nurturing the middle of the funnel

Behaviour tells you when interest is becoming intent

A behavioural signal only becomes commercially useful when the operator can capture it, connect it to the wider customer journey, and decide what should happen next.

A CRM such as HubSpot can bring together event registrations, website activity, email engagement, enquiries, day pass bookings, tour requests, sales notes, and follow-up communication into one customer record.

That record should help sales and marketing teams understand how the prospect discovered the brand, which topics, locations, or products attracted their attention, what actions they have taken, what information they have already received, who owns the relationship, and what the next relevant step should be.

This creates the basis for more relevant retargeting, lead nurturing, and sales follow-up.

The technology only creates value when the data is accurate and teams use it consistently.

Duplicate records, incomplete notes, inconsistent lead stages, and conversations taking place outside the CRM reduce visibility across the journey.

The customer sees one brand. Their experience should remain connected across social media, the website, marketing communication, sales conversations, and the workplace itself.

Once intent is visible and ownership is clear, response time becomes part of the brand experience.

Response time is part of the brand experience

Once a prospect signals intent, speed matters.

A fast and relevant response maintains momentum and builds confidence. Every delay creates more time for the prospect to engage with another operator.

Teams need clear answers to several operational questions:

• Who owns the enquiry?

• How quickly should they respond?

• Which leads need immediate human attention?

• Which information can be delivered automatically?

• How is the conversation recorded?

• When does the opportunity move from marketing to sales?

The communication channel also matters.

Email and phone calls remain important. WhatsApp can be more effective when someone wants a quick answer about availability, pricing, a tour, or a meeting room.

It can support tour coordination, reminders, availability updates, and ongoing communication during the decision process.

Those conversations still need ownership and visibility. Important customer information cannot remain trapped inside an individual employee’s phone.

AI sales agents can improve speed and consistency

We also discussed the role of AI sales agents.

They can answer common questions, gather initial requirements, qualify prospects, recommend next steps, and respond outside normal working hours.

Their value depends on accurate information, clear commercial processes, and a reliable handover to a human salesperson.

An effective AI sales agent needs access to current product and availability information, a clear understanding of the ideal customer, qualification criteria, appropriate brand language, escalation rules, and CRM integration.

The measures should be commercial.

Did response times improve?

Were prospects qualified accurately?

Did more people complete an enquiry?

Did tour bookings increase?

Did human sales teams follow up faster?

Did more opportunities convert into paid customers?

AI sales agents are useful when they make the buying journey faster, easier, and more relevant.

Remarketing, remarketing, remarketing

David Song’s strongest takeaway from the session was repeated three times:

“Remarketing, remarketing, remarketing.”

One interaction is rarely enough.

Prospects are busy. Requirements change. Budgets need approval. Teams compare several options. Decision makers enter and leave the process.

The brand needs to remain visible while those factors develop.

Remarketing can happen through LinkedIn, paid social, search, email, telephone, WhatsApp, website journeys, direct mail, future events, and the physical workplace.

The message should respond to the prospect’s behaviour.

Someone who viewed a location page may need availability information.

Someone who attended an event may benefit from related content.

Someone who booked a day pass may be ready for a tour.

Someone who completed a tour may need a customer story, revised proposal, availability update, or further conversation.

A completed tour remains a high intent opportunity, even when the decision is delayed.

The timing may be wrong. The budget may need approval. The team may still be comparing options. The move date may have changed.

That prospect already knows the product and has shown meaningful intent.

The opportunity needs structured follow up.

Sales and marketing need to manage one revenue journey

Customers can feel the gaps created by disconnected sales and marketing teams.

Marketing needs feedback on which audiences convert, which messages lead to tours, where prospects become stuck, and which campaigns create commercially valuable demand.

Sales needs visibility into where the customer came from, what content influenced them, which behaviours signalled intent, and what information they have already received.

The handover should feel like the next step in the same conversation.

Shared data, clear ownership, agreed lead stages, and common revenue outcomes make that possible.

Matching online UX with onsite CX

This was one of my biggest takeaways from the day.

Being brand-led means creating consistency between what someone sees online and what they experience onsite.

The social content, website, digital booking journey, sales communication, arrival, tour, service, and follow up should all express the same positioning and values.

The online user experience creates the expectation.

The onsite customer experience fulfils it.

A brand that presents itself as welcoming, energetic, premium, community focused, or hospitality led needs to deliver those qualities when the prospect enters the workplace.

The tour should reflect the personality of the brand, the specific requirements of the customer, the quality of the service, the atmosphere of the workplace, and the value of the overall experience.

A consistent online and onsite journey strengthens trust and supports conversion.

The strongest operators design the digital and physical journeys as one connected brand experience.

Measure the full journey from audience to paid customer

The commercial equation behind all of this is lifetime value compared with customer acquisition cost.

Operators often focus on the cost of an enquiry or tour booking. A fuller view considers the entire relationship.

The acquisition journey may include events, content, paid distribution, remarketing, sales follow up, free day passes, several tours, proposal development, and ongoing nurturing.

The customer value may include the initial membership plan, the length of the relationship, additional products and services, expansion, referrals, advocacy, and future requirements. Jamie from OSIT shared their average member tenure is 4.5 years.

A high value customer can justify a longer nurturing period and multiple interactions.

The more useful question is:

How much did it cost to move this person from audience member, to follower, to fan, to in market prospect, to paid customer, and how much value did that relationship create?

That gives sales and marketing teams a common commercial outcome.

It also creates a more complete picture of return on advertising spend.

See Event Photo Gallery

View and download photographs from the event in the gallery above.

Final thoughts

My biggest takeaway was that demand generation in flex is a connected system.

Brand builds familiarity before the customer enters the market. Content and events turn familiarity into affinity. CRM, quick communication, and remarketing move people through the buying journey. The onsite experience determines whether the brand promise holds up.

Operators that design each stage deliberately will have a better chance of turning audience into paid customers.

Thank you to Flexspace AI, Office Space in Town, our co-hosts Sarah and Jamie, and everyone who contributed openly to the discussion.

The willingness to share practical examples, honest challenges, and current experiments made the roundtable valuable.

That is exactly what a Brave Ideas roundtable should deliver.

Happy Hour

Huge thank you to Jamie Stuart and OSIT for hosting the post-event happy hour in their super cool speakeasy bar.

“The GCUC Series” Season Finale

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Why disciplined growth, private office economics, and customer focus still matter in a market chasing more complex deal structures.

Coworking has always had a strong missionary streak.

Community, entrepreneurship, access, belonging, and impact are part of what make the industry powerful.

But mission does not pay the rent on its own.

Without strong unit economics, disciplined underwriting, operational control, and a clear understanding of the customer, even the best-intentioned operators can build something fragile.

In this episode, Brave Corp CEO, Caleb Parker sits down with Chiko Abengowe, Founder and CEO of Perfect Offices, to unpack why simplicity can still be a competitive advantage. While much of the industry has moved toward management agreements, hybrid leases, and increasingly complex partnership structures, Chiko has continued scaling through disciplined lease deals, private offices, and a deep understanding of the entrepreneur customer.

The Commercial Shift

1. Why mission without margin can create a fragile coworking business.

2. How private office economics can support more durable cash flow and operational resilience.

3. Why disciplined lease deals can still work when the operator understands the customer, the landlord, and the market.

4. How knowing exactly who you serve can create focus, pricing discipline, and stronger growth decisions.

Watch or listen wherever you get Brave Ideas.

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Why occupier demand, hospitality, and landlord-operator partnerships are changing how companies choose office buildings.

Enterprise occupiers are not evaluating flex the way they used to.

It is no longer just a short-term fix at the end of the real estate process.
It is becoming part of how companies think about portfolio strategy, building selection, team gatherings, services, and optionality.

That changes the role of the flex operator.

In the right building, flex can support conferencing, events, hospitality, front-of-house experience, overflow capacity, and even broader facilities management. For landlords, that means the operator is no longer just filling space, they may be helping the building compete.

In this episode, Brave Corp CEO, Caleb Parker sits down with Shay Bolton (Corporate Managing Director) and Kirill Azovtsev (Vice Chairman) from Savills to unpack what enterprise occupiers are really buying when they choose flex. They discuss how companies evaluate flexible workplaces, what they value in a building, why hospitality and customer experience matter, and how landlords are responding to changing demand.

The Commercial Shift

1. Why enterprise occupiers are using flex as part of broader portfolio strategy, not just short-term overflow.

2. How flex can help landlords and operators respond to what enterprise customers actually value.

3. Why hospitality, conferencing, amenities, and customer service are becoming part of how occupiers compare buildings.

4. How deal risks such as security deposits, entity strength, and construction costs can still derail strong operator-landlord partnerships.

Watch or listen wherever you get Brave Ideas.

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Why team autonomy, shared infrastructure, and flexible workplace networks could reshape how companies use office space.

The traditional office was built for a more predictable world.

Modern work is becoming more fluid, more team-led, and harder to contain inside one fixed workplace model.

Work is increasingly organised around teams, projects, skills, and changing priorities. But much of the office market still assumes stable headcount, fixed space requirements, and long-term occupancy patterns that no longer reflect how many businesses actually operate.

In this episode, Brave Corp CEO, Caleb Parker sits down with returning Brave Ideas guest Phil Kirschner, Founder of PK Consulting LLC, to unpack why traditional offices remain misaligned with modern work. They discuss full-stack flex, enterprise demand, team autonomy, workplace infrastructure, shared space, employee choice, and why buildings need to support movement, not just occupancy.

The Commercial Shift

1. Why traditional office products may struggle when companies need more variable, team-led space.

2. How full-stack flex can support movement, optionality, and better use of workplace assets.

3. Why shared infrastructure could become more important as occupiers rethink headquarters, satellite space, and third places.

4. How landlords and operators can create buildings that support changing work patterns instead of forcing customers into fixed assumptions.

Watch or listen wherever you get Brave Ideas.

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Why brand, design, customer focus, and private office economics matter in a market where too many spaces still feel interchangeable.

Generic coworking is easy to copy.
Premium positioning is much harder to replicate.

For years, much of the serviced office and executive suite market competed on convenience and price. Coworking then added energy, community, and brand. But as the market becomes more crowded, customers need a stronger reason to choose one space over another.

In this episode, Brave Corp CEO, Caleb Parker sits down Flip Howard, CEO of Lucid Private Offices, to unpack how Lucid evolved from a traditional executive suite operator into a more intentional, premium private office brand. They discuss brand positioning, design consistency, customer experience, community, private office economics, and why Lucid chose to sit between the old executive suite model and the more casual coworking model.

The Commercial Shift

1. Why premium positioning can help operators move beyond commodity office space.

2. How design can attract the right customer before the sales pitch even begins.

3. Why private offices remain one of the strongest revenue drivers in coworking and flex.

4. How knowing your niche can create pricing power, stronger retention, and a more durable brand.

Watch or listen wherever you get Brave Ideas.

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Why flex operators need to prove their business model, not just sell their brand, to win the next generation of landlord partnerships.

Winning landlords used to be easier.
Pay the highest rent, show proof of funds, sign the lease, and deal done.

That world has changed.

As flex moves from lease arbitrage to hybrid leases, management agreements, and revenue share structures, landlords are no longer just evaluating the rent. They are evaluating the operator, the strategy, the capital stack, the customer demand, and the probability that the business will actually perform.

In this episode, Brave Corp CEO, Caleb Parker sits down with Christine Wyckoff (Head of Americas Flexible Office Solutions ) and Justin Halpern (Managing Director) from Cushman & Wakefield to unpack what landlords are really looking for from flex operators today.

They discuss enterprise demand, speed to market, hybrid leases, management agreements, revenue share, landlord selection, and why operators increasingly need to walk into landlord meetings with the discipline of a company raising capital.

The Commercial Shift

• Why landlords are evaluating flex operators as strategic partners, not just tenants.

• How hybrid leases, management agreements, and revenue share structures are changing the operator pitch.

• Why operators need to understand the landlord’s ownership structure, capital stack, and investment priorities before pitching a deal.

• How enterprise demand is making flex a building-level advantage, not just an operator-level product.

Watch or listen wherever you get Brave Ideas.

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Why tenant-level intelligence, customer behaviour, and retention may define the next office cycle.

A rent roll tells you who occupies the building. It does not tell you whether they are engaged, using the space, or likely to stay.

Office landlords used to manage leases. In a more predictable market, that was often enough. But when occupiers are reassessing how much space they need, how their teams use it, and whether the building still supports their business, the rent roll only tells part of the story.

In this episode, Brave Corp CEO, Caleb Parker sits down with Brandon Medeiros, CEO of Rekalibrate, to unpack why office real estate is becoming a customer intelligence business. They discuss tenant-level data, retention versus renewal, occupancy signals, amenity performance, AI, and why landlords need to understand what is happening behind the lease long before the lease event arrives.

The Commercial Shift

• Why rent rolls can create false comfort when customer behaviour is changing.

• How tenant-level intelligence can help landlords identify retention risk before it becomes vacancy.

• Why understanding the people using the building now matters as much as understanding the company on the lease.

• How amenities, technology, and engagement need to prove their value through measurable customer outcomes.

Watch or listen wherever you get Brave Ideas.

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In my experience, most conversations about town centre regeneration start with the building.

That is understandable. Property is visible. It can be photographed, valued, funded, refurbished, and put into a plan. Buildings give people something tangible to rally around.

People are harder to underwrite.

A person with an idea rarely looks like economic infrastructure at the beginning. They look like someone trying to work something out, often before anyone else can see the shape of it.

Yet that is where growth starts.

That distinction matters, especially for towns and smaller cities.

For years, too much regeneration thinking has treated people as something that happens after the property strategy. Build the thing, improve the public realm, attract the anchor occupier, then hope the local economy responds.

Sometimes it does.
Often it does not.

The building opens, the launch photographs look good, the ribbon is cut, and then the harder question remains.

Who is actually being helped to succeed?

Making Local Ambition Visible

Several years ago, when I was Founder and CEO of Bold, I had the great privilege of speaking at our launch event for Bold Bauhaus in Manchester’s Spinningfields area.

We were just getting started, and there was real energy around the building. The launch event attracted significant local interest. Bold opened at approximately 60% occupancy and reached approximately 90% occupancy within its first 90 days.

That mattered commercially. Any operator opening a new building wants demand to show up quickly. Occupancy gives you confidence that the market understands the offer.

I remember the invitation described Bold as Manchester’s newest flex space. In the speech, I corrected that framing.

“Bold is not a flex space, we’re a community for entrepreneurs and innovators.”

That line carried the reason we built the company.

We created Bold to champion and support entrepreneurs and innovators, especially people with ideas big enough to challenge the status quo. We wanted to build a place for people who believed there had to be a better way, and who were prepared to do the difficult work of proving it.

In the launch speech, I spoke about Manchester’s creative people with ideas to improve the world. That was the belief behind the brand.

What happened over the following months and years confirmed that belief.

Brave Ideas

Bold Bauhaus Launch Speech

This is a special episode to celebrate the 1 Year Anniversary of the launch of our Bold Bauhaus community in Manchester, England…

Listen now

3 years ago · Caleb Parker

Bold Bauhaus attracted the kind of people we hoped it would attract. Some arrived with companies. Some arrived with early stage ideas. Some were still working out whether the thing they were building could stand up in the market.

The building became more interesting as the people inside it became more interesting.

You would see someone at an event, then see them again a few weeks later deep in conversation with another founder. A small team would arrive, take an office, start showing up, and slowly become part of the place. The useful moments were rarely dramatic. They happened through the steady repetition of people being in the same environment.

That was when the original idea behind Bold started showing up in the day-to-day life of the building.

That is why I struggle with the way coworking is often categorised.

From a real estate perspective, the product is easy to reduce to desks, offices, memberships, meeting rooms, and event space. That language is useful for pricing and operations. It is less useful for understanding what a strong coworking community can actually do.

The best coworking communities make ambition visible.

In many towns, ambition is already there, but it is fragmented. A good coworking community changes the daily pattern. It gives people proximity to others who are also trying. It creates a rhythm of interaction. It makes progress observable.

None of this looks dramatic from the outside.
But over time, it changes the psychology of a place.

When Growth Becomes Visible

One of the clearest examples I saw at Bold was Jack Frimston of We Have A Meeting.

Jack joined Bold with a small office for his team. He became active within the community. He attended events, built relationships, and became part of the building’s entrepreneurial life.

The company grew.
As it grew, the team expanded their office three separate times.
Eventually, they outgrew the available space.

From a narrow occupancy perspective, a growing company leaving the building creates a gap for the operator to refill. A stronger reading of the situation recognises the growth that happened before they left.

I felt proud of that growth. I also wished we had more space available for the next stage of their journey. That experience changed how I think coworking communities should measure success.

Retention matters, of course. No operator can build a sustainable business if everyone leaves. But the best coworking communities also measure how many businesses grow beyond them.

The Graduation Economy

I think of this as the Graduation Economy.

The Graduation Economy is what happens when coworking communities become part of a local growth pathway. People arrive with ambition, ideas, early revenue, small teams, or simply the need to be around others who are also building. Some stay small by design. Some grow steadily within the space. Some expand, outgrow their office, and move into larger premises elsewhere in the town or city.

That should be celebrated.

A business growing beyond a coworking space is evidence that the environment helped create momentum. It means the community supported a company through a formative stage, gave it a professional home, exposed it to other ambitious people, and helped create enough confidence for the next step.

For local authorities, landlords, and economic development teams, this changes the questions worth asking.

If coworking is treated only as workspace, the questions become narrow. Occupancy, rent, lease terms, and desk sales all matter. Yet they are incomplete measures of value.

A better assessment would look at the businesses being supported, the relationships being formed, the confidence being created, and the number of companies graduating into larger premises nearby.

Confidence Is Part of the System

Confidence is not a soft metric when you have spent time around entrepreneurs.

Most early stage business growth involves uncertainty. Founders are constantly making decisions with incomplete information. They are trying to keep themselves moving forward before the full picture is visible, even to them.

Being around other people doing the same thing helps.

No, that does not remove the risk. It does not make weak businesses strong by magic. But it does normalise the act of building. It makes ambition less lonely. It gives people access to practical conversations that can change the trajectory of a business.

Sometimes the value is simply seeing someone else a few steps ahead. Someone in the same building has dealt with a problem you are now facing, won the kind of client you are trying to win, or made the kind of decision you have been avoiding. That proximity can change how a founder reads their own situation.

Local ecosystems compound through these small interactions.

They rarely compound because of one beautifully designed building, although design matters. They compound because people repeatedly come into contact with other people who expand their sense of what is possible and help them act on it.

The High Street After Hybrid Work

This is where high street coworking has become more relevant.

Hybrid work has redistributed economic activity.

The old assumption that knowledge workers must travel into major city centres five days a week has weakened. Sure, many people still value cities, networks, culture, customers, and great offices. But many people also now spend more of their working week closer to where they live.

A high street coworking space has to offer more than a convenient alternative to the commute. Convenience may get someone through the door once. Community is what makes the space matter.

Operators such as Patch and Foundry are interesting because they are building around this broader idea.

Patch talks about creating opportunities for people, work, and communities on every UK high street.
Foundry positions itself around freelancers, startups, established businesses, and local business community, including locations outside the biggest traditional office markets.

The details of each operator will differ, and each town will need its own version of the model. The broader pattern is worth paying attention to.

Coworking is moving closer to where people live, and in doing so it has the potential to become part of the civic and economic life of places that have often been treated as secondary to major city centres.

The Role of Local Authorities

This should matter to local authorities.

Many councils are trying to solve difficult problems with limited budgets. They are dealing with empty space, changing work patterns, pressure on services, and the need to show credible economic growth. They are also expected to support entrepreneurship while making town centres feel active again.

Too often, these responsibilities sit in separate boxes.

The regeneration team thinks about buildings.
The economic development team thinks about business support.
The property team thinks about leases.
The inward investment team thinks about employers.
The skills team thinks about training.
The planning team thinks about use classes.

Entrepreneurs experience the local economy more practically.

They need a place to work, people to learn from, useful relationships, access to customers, and a reason to believe they are building in the right environment.

A strong coworking community can sit at the intersection of those needs.

This does not mean every council should become a coworking operator. In most cases, they probably should not. Operating a community is a specialist skill. It requires hospitality, sales, programming, local knowledge, brand, management discipline, and commercial accountability. A space can look good on opening day and still fail if nobody knows how to animate it.

Local authorities can be better partners.

They can back capable operators, bring landlords and investors into the conversation, use public assets more creatively, and direct business support into places where entrepreneurs already gather. In some cases, they can subsidise access for people who would benefit from being inside a stronger entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Most importantly, they can start treating coworking communities as local economic platforms.

Why Landlords Should Pay Attention

This matters for landlords and investors too.

A coworking operator with a strong community is doing more than leasing space from a building owner. They are creating demand, relationships, events, local relevance, and business formation. They are increasing the building’s connection to the local economy.

In weaker town centre assets, that may be the difference between a building that sits outside the life of the town and a building that becomes part of its daily rhythm.

The best operators understand that this is about more than aesthetics. Hospitality matters. Design matters. Technology matters. Management matters. Brand matters.

But all of it has to support the creation of human momentum.

A beautiful coworking space with no community is still just a nicer room.
A strong coworking community can make an imperfect building feel alive.

Every Town Already Has Ambitious People

This is where the argument for high street coworking comes back to people.

A healthy coworking community gives local ambition somewhere to gather, become visible, and move through the wider economy. Some members will stay for years. Some will grow beyond the space. Some will become customers, collaborators, mentors, or examples for the next person trying to build something.

That movement is part of the value.

When people talk about town centre regeneration, they often talk about bringing life back. Usually that means footfall, retail activity, events, cafés, culture, and public realm.

All of that certainly matters.

Economic life is also built through ambition becoming organised.

That requires a more patient view of coworking. It cannot be judged only by launch occupancy, desk sales, or fit-out photography. The real evidence appears over time, in the businesses that grow, the relationships that form, the confidence that spreads, and the companies that eventually need more space than the community can provide.

I still think about Jack’s company outgrowing Bold.

There was pride in seeing the business grow, and frustration that there was not more space available for the next stage. Those mixed emotions say a lot about what coworking can become.

For local authorities, landlords, investors, and operators, the opportunity is to create communities strong enough that members grow beyond the original container, then build local pathways that allow them to keep growing nearby.

A town that understands this will think differently about its vacant buildings.

It will start seeing them as possible homes for ambition that is already there, waiting for the right environment to make it more visible, more connected, and more likely to succeed.

High street coworking matters because every town already has people trying to build something, and many of them would go further if the place around them made growth feel a little less isolated.

Firstly, Convene’s marketing team: Take a bow

The Knicks won the title.

First in fifty-three years. And New York celebrated the way it always does, which is to say it poured into the street and climbed anything that would take the weight. Bus shelters, scaffolding, traffic lights. Edges turned into balconies. Signage turned into part of the night.

Outside Convene at One Liberty Plaza, the sign took a hit.
A letter came off.
The N.

For a moment Convene wasn’t a hospitality brand with a clean sign on the wall. It was part of the street. Not the backdrop to it, not the sponsor of it. Part of it.

That’s what made me stop scrolling and sit forward.

Not because damage is good, or because anyone should be hauling themselves up onto a building’s signage, or because chaos makes a marketing plan. It was that every so often a brand gets dragged out of the controlled room it built for itself and into something real, and you get to see what it’s actually made of.

And most brands are terrified of that.

They spend money trying to look lived-in, but panic the second life actually touches them. They want the atmosphere, but not the fingerprints. They want culture, but only once it has been approved, edited, captioned and resized for Instagram.

Convene did the smart thing.

They did not pretend it had not happened.
They did not bury it under a corporate statement about safety and repair works.
They folded the moment back into the brand.
They let the broken sign become the story.

That matters.

Because the best brand moments are not always the ones you planned.

Brand Authenticity

A few years ago, Shohei Ohtani hit a foul ball at Citi Field and damaged a Coors Light LED ad. The screen was displaying a can. The ball killed a section of pixels and left a black square sitting awkwardly on the image.

Most brands would have fixed it quietly.

Coors Light made it the campaign.

They took the damaged pixels and put them onto cans, billboards and the wider creative. The flaw became the asset. The broken bit became the proof that something had happened. No apology. No quiet repair. It worked because it understood something most brands forget.

A scar is often more interesting than polish.

The same thing happened with the Convene sign.
The missing letter was not the point. The point was that the brand had been caught in the path of actual public energy.

That is rare now.

Most hospitality and workspace brands are built to look like life happens there, while being carefully protected from the full force of it. We create warm lighting, curated playlists, plants, coffee spaces , event programmes, community language and photography of people laughing at laptops. Then we try to control every possible variable around how that life appears.

Nothing too messy. Nothing too weird. Nothing too honest. Nothing that might make the building look like it has been used by actual humans.

But cities do not work like that.

Neither does culture.

Culture is not a campaign calendar.
It is not a launch plan. It does not care about your brand guidelines. It spills over, stains things, changes the meaning of objects, gives places nicknames, turns corners into meeting points and makes certain rooms matter for reasons the operator never predicted.

The Convene sign became memorable because, for a few hours, it stopped belonging entirely to Convene.

It belonged to the city.

That is the uncomfortable part for brands.
The moment something becomes culturally useful, you do not fully own it anymore. People touch it. Rename it. Misuse it. Mock it. Celebrate around it. Build a story on top of it.

That loss of control is frightening.

It is also where the good stuff lives.

The flex industry should pay attention to this.
We talk endlessly about community, but often what we really mean is managed engagement. We want the warmth of belonging without the unpredictability of people. We want activation, but not interruption. We want members to feel ownership, but not so much ownership that they change the place.

That is a weak version of community.

Real community leaves evidence.

It moves chairs. It fills corners you did not programme. It makes one table more important than the rest. It turns a coffee machine into a gossip point. It turns a roof terrace into a ritual. It creates habits you did not design. It gives a room a name that is better than the one on your floorplan.

And yes, sometimes it scuffs the paintwork.

There is a version of flex that would see the Convene moment and only think about facilities. Repair costs. Liability. Brand consistency. Risk assessment. The sign needs fixing. The photo needs removing. The messaging needs controlling.

Fine.
All of that exists.
Nobody sensible is saying ignore the operational reality.

But if that is all you see, you have missed the valuable part.

Because for once, a workspace brand was not trying to insert itself into culture. Culture inserted itself into the workspace brand.

That is the gold.

The mistake would be to reduce this to reactive marketing.

Reactive marketing is usually a brand moving quickly with a topical joke. Some of it works. Most of it is just companies trying to sound like people for six minutes.

This was different.

This was physical. Public. Unplanned. A real asset being changed by a real moment, then a brand having enough confidence not to flinch.

That confidence is the lesson.

Everyone in flex wants to call themselves hospitality now. Fine. But hospitality is not just nice lighting, decent coffee, a scented lobby and someone greeting you by name.

Hospitality is tolerance.

Tolerance for noise. Tolerance for rhythm. Tolerance for people arriving in different moods. Tolerance for the fact that the best moments in a building might not be the ones on the events calendar.

Hospitality without tolerance is just styling.

And that is where a lot of flex gets stuck. It wants the aesthetic of hospitality but not the temperament. It wants the warmth, the rituals and the language, but still wants the product to remain perfectly intact.

You cannot have both.

If your space is alive, it will get marked.

That does not mean accepting damage for the sake of it. It means understanding that the marks, rituals, interruptions and strange little stories are often what make a place believable.

Nobody falls in love with a render.

Nobody remembers the generic shot of a meeting room with a carafe of water and three identical notepads.

People remember the table where something happened. The view from the place they always sat. The team member who knew their order. The event that got slightly out of hand in the right way. The sofa, the corner, the ritual, the running joke.

Brands do not become meaningful because every asset remains pristine.

They become meaningful when people can attach memory to them.

That is why the broken Coors screen worked.

That is why the Convene sign worked too.

Both had proof of life.

And proof of life is becoming more valuable than polish.

Polish is easy. You can buy polish. You can brief polish. You can render polish before the building even opens. Every operator can get the nice chairs, the soft lighting, the decent coffee, the plants, the podcast room, the wellness language and the curated community copy.

What you cannot easily buy is a place in the public imagination.

That has to be earned.

Sometimes it is earned slowly, through repeated daily usefulness. Sometimes through great service. Sometimes because your sign happens to be in the right place when the city decides to lose its mind.

That is not a strategy you can manufacture.

But you can build a brand with enough confidence to benefit when it happens.

A nervous brand protects itself from the public.
A strong brand lets the public leave a mark.

So yes, the sign needed fixing.

But for one day, it was probably better broken.

Sponsorship Opportunities

Office real estate is being rewritten.

That’s no longer a grand statement by industry commentators.

It’s literally being rewritten.

In the financial models being underwritten.
In the deals being negotiated.
In the buildings being repositioned.
In the way office customers are using space.
And in the operators proving that flex is no longer an afterthought.

This is Brave Ideas Season 18

“The GCUC Series”

Over six conversations, we sat down with operators, brokers, consultants, and workplace strategists to ask a bigger question…

Because GCUC’s 50th edition was about more than coworking,
and this Brave Ideas season brings a taste of that conversation straight to you.

This season is about office real estate.

It is about value.

What creates value when long leases are harder to rely on, vacancy is still a risk, and customers have more choice than ever?

It is about demand.

What do enterprise occupiers actually want from flex today,
and how is that changing the way landlords think about their buildings?

It is about hospitality.

Not as a buzzword, but as an operating layer that can improve experience, engagement, and retention.

It is about brand.

Who are you for, what do you stand for, and why should a customer choose your building over the one across the street?

And it is about underwriting.

Because no matter how good the story sounds, the math still has to work.

This season explores the tension sitting at the heart of the market.

The tension between the missionaries and the mercenaries.

The missionaries who believe deeply in community, belonging, entrepreneurship, and creating places people actually want to be.

And the mercenaries who know that without disciplined underwriting, strong margins, rent coverage, and operational control, the business does not survive.

This season asks whether the future belongs to one side or the other.

Or whether the real winners will be the operators, landlords, and investors who understand both.

Because mission without margin is fragile.

But margin without mission is just real estate with better furniture.

Some operators are moving toward management agreements, landlord partnerships, open plan communities, and highly activated spaces.

Others are winning by going back to the foundational basics of the industry, private offices, disciplined leases, clear customer focus, and simple economics.

Neither side gets a free pass.

Because the real question is not which model sounds most innovative.

The real question is:

Which model works,
for that customer,
in that building,
with that landlord,
in that market?

Season 18 Distinguished Guests

With Brandon we get into tenant level intelligence, engagement, retention, and why landlords need to understand their customers far better than they have in the past.

With Christine and Justin we unpack enterprise demand, hybrid leases, management agreements, and why pitching a landlord today can feel more like pitching an investor.

With Flip we explore the value of premium private offices, brand positioning, lease arbitrage, and why the fundamentals still matter in a market chasing new structures.

THE Phil Kirschner returns to this podcast to help us zoom out into the future of work, team autonomy, shared infrastructure, full stack flex, and why traditional offices are still misaligned with how modern companies actually operate.

The Savills duo of Shay and Kirill helps us look at flex through the occupier lens, how enterprise customers are using it, how landlords are responding, and where deal structures are really changing.

And with the inspirational Chiko we go back to the entrepreneur, private office economics, disciplined growth, and the power of knowing exactly who you serve.

This is a season about the next chapter of office.

Not the hype.
Not the headlines.

The actual operating models, deal structures, customer behaviours, and investment logic shaping where the market goes next.

HUGE THANK YOU to Liz and the GCUC team for the collaboration.

And to Zac, Jack, and the team at The Podcast House for making our guests look and sound as good as they deserve.

Brave Ideas Season 18, The GCUC Series, drops July 1st.

Sponsorship Opportunities

Subscribe now

Presented by

Learn how Flexspace AI is transforming coworking with their ecommerce revenue platform, featuring SmartPricing Agent, an AI-powered dynamic pricing engine. Tap here

De-Risking Flex Starts Before the Doors Open

Opening a new flex location is hard enough.

Opening your first location around 85% occupied before the doors officially open is something different.

In this episode of Brave Ideas, is joined by Mark Gregson, CoFounder at Juntos, to unpack how the new coworking and flex office brand de-risked its first deal, took over a former WeWork location in Holborn, and launched with strong demand already validated.

Mark teamed up with his CoFounder, James Hennessy to launch Juntos House.

That deal structure helped make the investment case more attractive, shortened the expected payback period, and gave the business early cash flow to support future growth.

Mark explains why Juntos is not following a standard copy-and-paste expansion model. The team is already looking at opportunities in London, Amsterdam, and New York, while also exploring coffee shops, play cafes, and family-friendly work concepts that respond to changing customer demand.

This conversation goes deep into what makes a flex deal work commercially, from CapEx efficiency and investor alignment to lease structure, revenue quality, customer covenant, retention, and community.

Mark also shares a strong view on what community should actually mean in a coworking environment. For him, it is about understanding the people in and around the building, designing around their non-negotiables, and creating a place where members feel happy, productive, and connected.

Listen to the full episode to hear how Juntos is thinking about the next generation of flex, the opportunity in former operator spaces, and why de-risking a deal starts long before the first member walks through the door.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• How Juntos opened its first location around 85% occupied.

• Why Juntos took a 12-year lease with no breaks on its first flex deal.

• How taking over a former WeWork site helped reduce CapEx and speed up launch.

• Why existing infrastructure can materially change the risk profile of a flex deal.

• How early demand validation helped support the investment case.

• Why Mark and James Hennessy are looking at London, Amsterdam, and New York.

• How Juntos is thinking about coffee shops, play cafes, and family-friendly work environments.

• Why revenue quality matters alongside occupancy.

• How longer customer commitments can create more stable early cash flow.

• Why community should connect into the local area around the building.

• How workplace experience, happiness, and productivity are linked.

Key Takeaways for Operators

• De-risking starts with the building, the fit-out, and the demand.
  Juntos House worked because the team found a building where demand had already been validated and the existing infrastructure was strong. That meant lower CapEx, faster launch, and a more attractive investment case.

• Former operator spaces can create a faster path to market.
  Taking over a former WeWork location gave Juntos a fitted platform to build from. The team still had to rebrand, reposition, and soften the space, but they avoided the cost and time burden of a full fit-out from shell and core.

• Opening at 85% occupancy changes the cash flow story.
  Strong pre-opening demand gave Juntos early revenue visibility. For a new operator, that matters. It supports investor confidence, reduces early trading risk, and creates a stronger base for future growth.

• Revenue quality is more than filling desks.
  Mark talks about the importance of customer covenant, contract length, and cash flow stability. Occupancy matters, but the quality and durability of that revenue matters just as much.

• Community needs to be built around real human needs.
  For Mark, community is about more than events. It means understanding the different ways people connect, what makes them happy, and what keeps them coming back to the workplace.

Key Takeaways for Real Estate Investors and Landlords

• CapEx efficiency can make flex more investable.
  A lower upfront capital requirement can improve the risk-return profile of a flex deal. In the case of Juntos House, inheriting existing infrastructure helped create a more efficient launch model.

• Lease structure still has a place in flex.
  While many operators have moved toward management agreements, Juntos took a 12-year lease with no breaks on its first location. That decision was based on confidence in the building, the location, the demand, and the economics of the deal.

• Former flex spaces can be repositioned without starting again.
  Landlords holding fitted space from a previous operator may have an opportunity to bring in a new brand, refresh the product, and reactivate demand without a full reset.

• Occupancy is only one part of the underwriting story.
  The stronger question is whether the income is durable. Contract length, customer quality, retention, CapEx burden, incentives, and investor cost of capital all shape whether a flex location can generate sustainable returns.

• Experience can support retention and long-term value.
  Mark’s argument is that people stay in places where they feel good, supported, and understood. For landlords and investors, that has a direct link to churn, renewal probability, and income resilience.

Behind The Scenes

This episode was recorded onsite at Juntos House in Holborn, just before the building officially opened.

That’s a wrap for Brave Ideas Season 17!

Thank you for tuning in all season!

Season 18 drops 1 July

Want a sneak peek?

Watch Season 18 Trailer

For decades, it went a little like this:

A landlord owned a building, found a tenant, got them to sign a lease often for ten, fifteen, twenty years. Job done.

The relationship between landlord and tenant was transactional.

You didn’t need:

→ a brand strategy when your tenants were legally committed to you for the better part of a decade

→ to think about experience, community, or belonging.

You needed a building, a legal document, and a managing agent who could keep the lights on, water running and the boiler functioning.

But that world has changed.

The rise of flexible workspace operators changed the baseline expectation for what an office could feel like.

Then came the pandemic.
The shift that shook the foundations of the office entirely, forcing businesses and their people to ask a question that had never really been asked before: “why come to the office at all?”

The answer to that question is what has reshuffled the deck for everyone in the built environment.

The data is speaking… but is the industry listening?

Offices that have remained merely functional with four walls, a lift, and a reception desk have steadily lost customers. On the other hand, buildings that invested in experience, community and a distinct identity held onto their tenants longer, attracted new ones, and commanded better rents.

JLL’s 2024 Future of Work survey found that 70% of companies now consider workplace experience a key factor in their real estate decisions.

What this tells us is that brand (the way a building feels, the story it tells, and the community it fosters) is now a commercial lever. It isn’t a nice to have, nor is it a soft consideration. The building experience is a hard, measurable driver of performance.

We’re now in the hospitality industry

At TSP, we’ve been making this argument for a while.

Our whole operating model is built on the idea that the hospitality industry worked this out long before the property sector did. A great hotel gives you a consistent, and intentional experience, designed to make you want to come back.

So, this begs the question:

Why should an office building be any different?

Today’s landlords are operating in a market where customers have a plethora of options and are not afraid to use them. The average UK office lease length has been declining steadily for years.

Flexibility is no longer a premium, it’s an expectation.

And the landlords and operators who are winning are the ones who have realised that the question is no longer “can we fill the building?” It’s “can we keep it full?”

Keeping it full requires something the industry has never really had to develop before: a reason for people to stay.

The reason?

It’s that sense of identity, belonging, and care for the people inside a building. This is exhibit A of what a good brand strategy can do.

What comes next

This is the first piece in a four part series I’m writing on brand, marketing, and the evolving world of offices.

Over the next three articles, I want to dig into what tenants actually want now, why brand is your most underrated retention strategy, and what it really means to run a building with a clear sense of purpose.

The industry is waking up.

The question is, is it waking up fast enough?

I asked a panel about weaponising community.

Not building community. Not nurturing community. Not creating meaningful connection.

Weaponising it.

Using community to hold higher rates. Using it to reduce churn. Using it to make the commercial strategy sharper, harder, more defensible.

A few people hated the phrase.

Good.

They should hate it a little. It is an …

Read more

Flex operates with one of the most fragmented technology stacks in commercial real estate.

A typical operator runs at least a CRM, a property management system, an access control layer, a billing tool, a community platform, sensors and comms, and each of those tools has its own opinion about what a “member” or a “renewal” or an “occupied seat” actually …

Read more