During my first couple of years as a solo consultant I worked from home, which was great in many ways but was never going to work as a long term option. This was partly due to my poor productivity, but more due to the lack of opportunity to meet and collaborate with interesting people, so I started thinking about what my ideal workspace would look like and how I could make it happen.
After quite some research I found that I was not alone in my vision, and the sort of place I wanted to work from was what has become known as a space.
To cut a potentially long story short, a couple of clients liked my vision and in late in 2010 I helped them purchase a great little commercial property in Richmond, Victoria. Together we have turned the place into a new coworking space named . The name is not overly surprising when you find we are located at Suite 6, 8 Bromham Place, Richmond!
It’s a great space of 235 square metres across two floors with room for about 20 full time members, a couple of large meeting rooms, plenty of open space for events, and an area that we have converted (with the help of a sledge hammer) from a cramped and boring office into an open entertainment area complete with couches, plasma TV and a pinball machine.
The goal for the space is simple – to bring interesting people together in the belief that interesting things will follow. We apply this thinking to both to our members (one- or two-person businesses that can benefit from being part of a collaborative community of small business people) and regular events that we plan to run for our wider group of “friends of Six8″. We often talk about our goal to create a small business hub, and also refer to ourselves as a “business club that just happen to own a really cool clubhouse”. That should give you a feel for what we’re building, and while it may sound a bit out of the ordinary, that’s no accident. As Seth Godin says in his book Purple Cow:
In almost every market, the boring slot is filled. The product designed to appeal to the largest possible audience already exists, and displacing it is awfully difficult. Difficult because the very innocuousness of the market-leading product is its greatest asset. How can you market yourself as “more bland than the leading brand”? The real growth comes with products that annoy, offend, don’t appeal, are too expensive, too cheap, too heavy, too complicated, too simple – too something. (Of course, they’re too too for some people, but just perfect for others.)
So we’ll be too loud, too casual, too collaborative, and too inclusive for many people (luckily serviced offices cater to those people perfectly!) but we are sure that some people won’t be able to imagine working anywhere else once they learn about us. Also, while we don’t want to lose money on the venture, we all believe that we will benefit more from the relationships we form within Six8 than we will from running the space.
We only have a few free desks so we’re not actively advertising to bring people in (we want the right people, not just anyone that needs a desk), but if you’re interested in learning more we’d love to hear from you. You can also become part of what we hope will be a wider community of small business people that benefit from what we have planned by following us on or .
