According to a story at Mashable.com, being the owner of a small business often means spending your time working on projects outside of your talent.
While an owner should seek to understand all aspects of his business early in its development, spending too much time on the aspects he doesn’t excel at can be a massive inefficiency and stunt the business’ growth.
By leveraging a community of business owners with similar issues, these inefficiencies can be minimized through collaboration. Making this collaboration efficient and easy will be the future of co-working.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, co-working is about bringing businesses together into a shared work environment.
It ranges from people working together in someone’s living room, to dedicated co-working spaces with dozens or even hundreds of businesses all under one roof.
Having a dedicated space is often an unjustifiable expense for small businesses; co-working spaces allow these businesses to benefit from the advantages of an office space without having to shoulder the cost themselves.
As co-working spaces grow larger, the value they’re able to deliver to members of their community will grow as well.
Pharmaceutical giant Merck doesn’t purchase office supplies at the same price as the pizza shop down the street – they leverage the size of their business to receive discounted products.
Co-working spaces will begin to negotiate more and more relevant discounts and perks for their members using the size of their communities as a bargaining chip, and delivering prices to small businesses previously only enjoyed by larger corporations.
Photo by Mashable.com.