We sold a coworking space. Salt House, one of the original spaces in Brisbane, which we founded by kind of an accident five years ago in 2010.

My co-founder and girlfriend Lisa at the time (now my wife) started the coworking space in a first-floor maze of vacant offices above the bustling commercial precinct of New Farm. It was kind of an accident, because all we really wanted was to rent a single studio office for our print design studio Saltprint.

There were no “for lease” signs on the building, but we managed to track down the real estate agent who was only willing to lease the entire first floor as one lease.

“We can’t afford to rent the whole floor Wick” Lisa said. She had a point.

“What if it was free?” I replied, “imagine if we rented the other rooms to other businesses, and it covered our own rent”.

God bless Lisa and her patience listening to my amazing ideas, that I imagined up all the time. “All right”, she conceded apprehensively.

I now had the most important license available to entrepreneurs worldwide — permission from the other half to give it a go.

Once an idea gets planted and starts to grow, it’s very hard to kill it. I was hoping that this was one of those ideas, and so I tried a little crowd-funded, group-buying, co-working experiment to convince my cautious co-founder using the best platform I knew of — Gumtree, the free online classifieds website in Australia.

None of the buzz words such as “crowd funding” or “coworking” were actually mentioned at the time, it just happened that way.

“Come and share an office with me”, read the free Gumtree advert. A small handful of startups and businesses came forward, and we toured the dusty, abandoned rooms together picking our favourite studios like kids picking bedrooms in a new home. It was a real life sharing-economy moment, although none of us knew it. Lisa and I signed the lease, and we quickly signed sub-leases for our founding tenants to form Salt House. Boom!

In 2012 we read about the growing trend and the term “coworking”. Coworking made sense, and helped us explain what our space was exactly.

We promptly added the “coworking” keyword to our marketing, as if we knew what we were doing from the start.

The truth was that our coworking space was a beautiful accident, which was fulfilling a need for the right people and the right time.

We had tenants come and go over the next couple of years, and since we still had space to spare in the building we experimented with additional services like hot-desks, a photo studio for hire and creative networking events. Shuffling furniture into different rooms for different purposes and events was a what we did to make instant art galleries, photo studios and board rooms — as we came up with more genius ideas. We realised that owning a coworking space was not like owning a business, but it was a living and breathing thing.

Coworking spaces are alive,
an ecosystem of people and ideas.

Our new found event space spawned one of our most successful events — Sprinkl, a popular series of networking event for creatives. Salt House was filled with networking, collaborating creatives from all disciplines. We hosted live design-offs on projectors, and group art shows with local emerging artist group Incstamp. Our coworking space grew beyond a building, into a community.

We got ripped off a few times with unpaid rent, disappearing tenants and download limits exceeded. Our carefree and friendly, hippie approach to coworking made it approachable and fun for everyone, however we learnt that there is a price — with real money — attached to blind trust. “Always collect the bond” became our mantra, as we learned that even good people with the best intentions sometimes don’t pay their invoices out of their own integrity.

Through coworking we have met and befriended so many cool, creative people and businesses. Startups came to our coworking space to begin their journey. Freelancers came to us to escape the kitchen table office, and larger companies sent us their remote workers who needed a desk away from head office.

Every coworker said the same thing about Salt House, that they “got shit done” like never before.

We had the vibe for productivity and community, which is the perfect platform for business and human beings.

So why did we sell our coworking space? Our family and kids custody arrangements were changing, and we needed to relocate to another state — our other home in Western Australia. We had been living between two houses in two states for the last seven years, and it was time to consolidate. On top of our coworking space venture, our print design studio and five kids between us, we had been flying between east and west coasts once a month to manage it all. This is another story for another time, but as you could imagine it was a hectic (but well oiled) schedule to live by.

We decided to sell our coworking space, and luckily one of our long term coworking tenants were keen to take the space into the next phase of it’s life.

The business sold with perfect timing before we packed up and moved interstate with our kids finally under one roof. A real life step-family, again another story for another time.

Now we work from our home studio on our core business Saltprint, and we are currently enjoying the tranquility of suburbia and the beach in Western Australia. We do miss the good life of coworking in Brisbane, and all of the inspiring humans we became so close to.

When we pass by abandoned warehouses and empty offices now on the west coast, Lisa and I both glance at each other before cupping our eyes up against the front glass window to peer inside. Would we start a new coworking space? Watch this space.