Sunday, February 5, 2012
Tom Brandt is a web developer living and working in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is the owner and president of Northtech Systems, Inc., a web apps development company primarily working in Ruby on Rails. He is also one of the maintainers of Workantile, a coworking community in downtown Ann Arbor.
There has been some chatter on the global coworking Google group about the costs to start and run a coworking space. Alex Hillman of IndyHall discussed it on his blog, and I thought I would talk about Workantile here.
Workantile leases about 3,200 square feet on Main Street in downtown Ann Arbor. It is on the ground floor in a former retail space, and our rent reflects that at almost $25/square foot. This by far our biggest expense.
Our monthly expenses are:
Rent: $6,600 Internet: $190 Insurance: $111 Supplies: $50 Professional fees (CPA): $33 Total: $6,984
We have two internet connections, one from Comcast and one from AT&T. Both are 18mbps. The Comcast connection costs $95/month, the AT&T $85/month. They are connected to a bespoke dual-WAN router with load-balancing and failover. Now that the kinks have been worked out of this arrangement, we never have a problem with internet connectivity.
The insurance is paid quarterly and CPA yearly, but for budgeting purposes this is what it costs per month.
Credit card processing fees ran around $200 in January. This is a variable cost, of course, as our membership grows this will go up. All members are billed monthly through our credit card processor, Stripe. Stripe is extremely easy to work with. Their recurring or subscription processing is set up really well, it is easy to integrate it with your own billing system, their reporting is excellent, and their charges reasonable and completely transparent. We used Authorize.net in the past and will never go back.
For card-present charges, such as day passes or trial memberships, we use Square. Square is easy to set up and use.
We run a lean operation. We have no receptionist, instead the members take turns answering the door and giving tours. The members also clean the place, taking out the trash, cleaning the sink and toilet, and tidying up when necessary. Every second Sunday we have a general clean-up day where members come in, vacuum and mop the floors, wash windows, tables and chairs, scrub the bathroom, and clean out the fridge.
Trek Glowacki, Dave Nelson, Bill Tozier and I split management and administrative duties, which saves on office manager expenses. The fact that members are billed monthly automatically eliminates that administrative hassle.
I can’t speak to the cost of starting a coworking space, since we acquired Workantile from its previous owner.
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