A Place to Wear Pants
The YPGroup leadership team sprinted into 2018 with several goals. One was to find a consistent space to work, give presentations, host meetings and client events. This place needed to not be a coffee shop, as we’ve so often used, or a apartment community space.
We’re not yet a big enough team to demand our own private space in a Downtown office tower but also, until the grey hairs fill all the way in, we’re not moving into a suburban office park. We needed a centrally located spot that had the energy of a cafe but that we’d also proudly show off to our moms (Hi mom!).
Let’s get to the point… We’d been shopping coworking spaces for the last 4 months. But in a city full of viable coworking options, we needed to set criteria to help us narrow the pool.
So we did:
- Is the place Tech Forward? Can we live stream events, access the latest digital presentation technologies but also escape to take a private phone call? We didn’t know how many of these kind of things could exist under one roof but found out, they definitely do.
- Are they Flexible? I still have an affinity for random cafe tables, and occasional mornings (that turn into afternoons) spent in my basketball shorts. I’d also prefer to not pay for the hours spent exercising my antisocial habits. The team also decided fairly quickly that we preferred not being confined to working out of expensive closet space.
- Do they have a Community Focus? This was easily the most important qualifier for us. Which coworking spaces are really empowering our community, or at least has a genuine desire to do so?
YPGroup finds a home…
Several of the spaces we visited checked off the qualifications we we’re looking for. One of them checked all of the boxes (with added je ne sais quoi) and seemed extremely intentional in its mission for community building. That place was ATLAS Workbase.
During our search, serendipitously, I read an article posted on the YPOSeattle blog by Kim Burmester, VP of Sales and Marketing at ATLAS Workbase — admittedly, I didn’t read it until weeks later when our marketing team told me it was their most read article of the month. The part of the article that caught my attention was her suggestion to “Evaluate the type of companies and the community that the space is building…”
One of the advantages of coworking is the organic networking opportunities provided or, as I like to say, the exposure to collisionable hours: chance encounters and unplanned interactions between knowledgeable people. It was time to put our pants on and add some collisionable hours to our day. We are, after all, products of our respective environments; ATLAS is full of VCs and angel investors, accountants and attorneys managing their own practices — people you likely won’t collide with in your home kitchen when you go back for your second bowl of cereal.
Back to the important stuff…
We chose ATLAS Workbase not simply for all the cool technology, swanky furniture or its A-list membership base, but it was really because, through a chance collision, we identified a shared objective: solving the challenge of uniting, and then empowering, the community that serves us.
There isn’t an easy fix to this — easy fixes don’t really exist — but as partners, YPGroup and ATLAS believe that empowering a community starts with getting the right mix of people in the (theoretical) room.
The beginning…
To start, on February 7th, we’re inviting the community to ATLAS Workbase for a day of free resource and collisions (an educational round table discussion, open office hours with angel investors and other business service experts, a happy hour and a fireside chat on leadership and mentorship).
Yes our new partnership is young and imperfect, but dedicated to our shared responsibility to you all. Expect more from us in 2018. Seattle deserves it.
