Crossing the Divide

Note: this chapter pertains to driving up interest physical workspace and cowering spaces

One of the biggest challenges for any entrepreneurship center, whether it’s in rural communities or major cities, is getting people through the door. While I worked in our IDEA Hub Main Street headquarters in Southwest Wisconsin, I often pondered our front door. It was a simple glass door, transparent and easy to push open. Everyone knows how to use it. It required no skill, no magic, and no experience with riddles to get through our door and come into our office.?

Yet for all that, our door often felt to me more like a stone gate, rimmed with poisonous barbs.?

Getting people through the door is really tough.?

The first challenge was that people simply didn’t understand what we were. Outside our office there was a large sign with our logo, and a tagline reading Start Your Company Here.

Ok, clear enough, right? Nope. We knew that people had all kinds of questions and misconceptions about us. Were we going to charge for our services (in their minds, of course we would. Nobody does this for free.)? Would they get sucked into some expensive 12 month plan if they came in? What if we told them their idea was no good??

In other words, there was enough uncertainty about us to convert that glass door into an intimidating barrier.?

If you’re reading this chapter, I’m guessing you are in a similar circumstance. You might be the recipient of a grant where you promised to serve X amount of people, and now it’s on you to meet that obligation and get those people engaged.?

There is a lot you can do to overcome this challenge. Let’s get started with a handful of things that work. But before that, let’s talk about what doesn’t work.

One of our challenges is that it was not feasible for us to be open on a drop-in basis, Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm. This was a big challenge for me as Managing Director, as some of our board members expected us to always be open for drop ins during all business hours.

This simply wasn’t realistic. We didn’t have a big enough budget to have the office staffed with someone who was able to simply sit at a desk, waiting for people to come in, then give them startup advice on demand. I was there, but I also served the entire Southwest region of the state, so I was often out of the office in other counties or at meetings.?

Instead, we tried office hours, being open every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 1:00pm to 3:00pm. The idea was that anyone could step inside and get startup advice during those hours. We communicated these hours on our website, social media, paper hand outs, and at events.

It was a huge failure. Over the course of a year we never had a single unique visitor just drop in during our office hours to chat about their startup idea. Oddly enough, we did have people drop in during our non office hours. On multiple occasions I had to pause a zoom meeting to hand somebody my business card and ask them to email me to set up a meeting.?

Regardless of all that, it's worth questioning the very idea of business hour drop ins. The coworking spaces I know do not offer drop in mentorship during all business hours (but some do offer tours twice a week).?

Anyways, with that out of the way, let’s cover some tactics that will work to get people into your office (you can imagine the soundtrack as that old 80s song; Get out of my dreams and into my coworking space).?

(NEXT: How to get people over the divide and into your headquarters)