A quick story of ASPACE vs chaos

ASPACE was the first coworking project in the Philippines to blossom. It was, by design, a space to celebrate creativity and innovation, home to a cultural fringe and provocative minds. For ten years, it was my main adventure and successful on many counts: from influence to international accolades, piles of cash to kudos. By 2019, I had happy partners and teammates, a new CEO to take over the show from me, and my own exciting plan to elevate the brand through extensions.

Then in 2020, it all collapsed almost overnight.

Its taken me a good few years to truly process what happened and how; for a good chunk of those years, I found it quite difficult to separate my deep sense of responsibility / accountability from the many harsh realities that came cascading our way, most of which were outside of my control. I’m writing this post in part to think about the “how” and at the same time answer questions that I still get asked to this day. I've narrowed the dynamics down to four main factors : Chaos, Landlords/Place, Compliance, and Perspectives.

CHAOS

The pandemic response in the Philippines was particularly draconian, with rolling two-week windows of potential hope, culminating in regular two-week announcements of, well, not much really. For two years people needed permits to leave their homes and a good story to negotiate armed checkpoints when moving from town to town. Surfing was outlawed, face masks and acrylic face shields were required everywhere, and even acrylic full-body shields were mandated if a husband and wife rode on a motorcycle together. The former President's "drug war" rhetoric was fuel for an already-apocalyptic news cycle. Our world spun quite quickly into fear, chaos, and farce.

Of course, surviving as humans was priority one, and then staying somehow positive through imaginative community interactions became an essential lifeline to sanity, especially as those with power often seemed to make decisions on the advice of clowns, admittedly far above my pay grade. The fact that our once-thriving coworking hubs were now empty and padlocked seemed to be a distant disaster compared to the loss of jobs, life, and liberty that was our daily dose for over two years.

LANDLORDS

We had one forward-thinking landlord in Cebu who was entrepreneurial and flexible from the get-go; that flexibility gave us all the best possible outcome. Another landlord was corporate, intractable and litigious, which ultimately left them with an empty building for years and pretty much tolled the bell for ASPACE. Looking back, I know individuals within the group were personally sympathetic to collaboration, yet the idea of a corporation being seen to "go soft" during a time of chaos seemed to poison any lateral thinking.

There was no government assistance available, although you could choose to accrue debt instead, which is next to useless when there is no obvious end in sight and a dwindling cash reserve. We burned through a lot of our cash on hand providing severance to our amazing teams and trying to avoid the worst penalties from landlords. We also wasted some of it trying to stay afloat with some semblance of normality, expecting the next two-week announcement, and the next, to be the one to steady our ship.

We had another big landlord who was initially reluctant to cede ground on contracts signed during a boom market, but who later became, if not an ally, then at least sensitive to our shared realities and supportive of our specific goals. It took us a while to get to that point, too long probably, and yet the result is clear now: collaboration during times of chaos is easily as beneficial as opportunism, if not more.

After the collapse of ASPACE, it is with this landlord that a fresh team began conversations to develop the Astbury, the spiritual successor of ASPACE.

COMPLIANCE

The byzantine regulations and opaque back channels of doing business in the Philippines are tricky at the best of times, but during the pandemic, the bureaucrats had baseball bats in hand, mixed mandates from up-top, and if you didn't have the energy or muscle or contacts to push back, then "squish". The combative tactics of specific tax officials made it all but impossible to continue the ASPACE project in the Philippines and — almost — soured my appetite for any business dealings in this amazing country at all.

The basic formula seems to be this: whenever there's an issue, ready cash can solve it pretty fast, while pushing back through due legal process will always cost much more. As I'm not an expert in compliance, I am no doubt missing the nuance which would explain this logic. We did, however, thanks to clever work from my (much smaller) team and sterling support from my (also beleaguered) investment partners, manage to retain our ethics if not our company.

PERSPECTIVES

I'm quite sure we would all have acted differently in 2020 if the length of the pandemic lockdown were somehow clear. I naively assumed it would last no more than six months to a year (in the UK that's what happened), and most of my partners felt, if not the same, no certainty either way. I did have one advisor who confidently predicted a much longer shelf-life for the recently uncanned chaos; I now listen to them a little more closely.

At the time, though, it took a few months to deal with the enforced lockdowns, closing spaces, severing both employment and emotional ties. There was no clarity, but there was still activity. Once that dust had settled, the long haul of protracted negotiations with parties above began, and my slower realization that Covid-19 was here to stay for as long as it could.

If we'd known what was to come, we would have chosen two options: take a much, much, much stronger argument to landlords to ride out the storm with us, or we would have dropped the keys through the letterbox and moved on with our lives.

LEGACY AND LEARNING

As I'm writing this, I think I'm answering a question I was asked recently from a startup founder — "why did ASPACE crash?". I don't think they were looking for tips on how to avoid crashing during chaos, they just seemed a bit shocked that a brand with recognition and momentum was unable to avoid a hard close. Tell me about it! To be honest I had avoided decoding too much of the drama for any future lessons, preferring instead to just "get on with it". In hindsight, that was not the healthiest decision for me personally, and so I would recommend others to take stock of their personal situation before trying to move on from chaos. At least that's what the Instagram memes tell me regularly.

The business itself in 2020 was athletic by all accounts: chunky cash floor, strong cash flows, signed contracts, positive relationships with suppliers and customers. Some of that mattered, but during a sudden global crisis, none of that mattered enough. We could never have had enough saved in the bank to continue business as usual for an indefinite period without cash flow. Neither could I have forced - litigated - our equally stressed customers to continue paying for access to a space when the government mandated it to be shuttered. Relationships with our main suppliers definitely helped soften blows or defer shocks, but the sheer unpredictability meant that no relationship could become a proxy for eventually making tough decisions ourselves.

I'm proud that we were able to pay our smallest suppliers in full and ethically say farewell to my team before the final days; and I'm grateful for immense support from specific partners and people around me, both on practical issues and for general solidarity. I'm also quietly pleased with my own steadfastness —?I didn't take the first flight out to safer locations, I stuck it out with my local community for as long as it took. It's also pretty cool to even now hear stories of love and respect for what ASPACE meant for the community, and to know that our efforts encouraged more bravery by founders and creators across the country.

That said, a better legacy would be, of course, to have made it through the storm. I'll always feel that there was something else I could have done, but for the life of me, I cannot pinpoint that one thing. I do at least have a relatively clear answer now to the question I'm most asked: "What happened to ASPACE?".