Cat Johnson Founder of Cat Johnson Co | Creating Connections and Success in Coworking

Frank Cottle [00:00:33] Welcome to the future of work. Podcast. Today. Our guest is Cat Johnson. Welcome, Kat. 

Cat Johnson [00:00:40] Thank you, Frank. I’m thrilled to be here. 

Frank Cottle [00:00:43] A very warm welcome to you today and I’m excited to chat a little bit about community, brand of community and how that works, co working in general, and a few other issues. So tell us a little bit about when you talk about brand community, exactly what does that mean and how does it impact the way people work and the future of work? 

Cat Johnson [00:01:09] Yeah, thanks for having me, Frank. And I love this topic. For a long time I’ve been talking about content, but always there’s been this deeper understanding of there’s something more happening as people put out content, that what they’re doing is drawing like minded people, drawing perfect, fit members to them. And then once people are in a space, in a community, like the best co working spaces I’ve been a part of are co working communities that exist almost separate from the space itself. They’re a living entity. So when we talk about brand community, it’s broadly people who are emotionally bought in to your brand. They want to not only come buy something from you in coworking space, a space to work, but they want to be part of that brand. They want to have some ownership and resonate so deeply with what you’re doing that they buy into your brand. So that’s what we’re talking about with brand community. And as coworking grows and grows and grows, it’s becoming increasingly important that people aren’t just thinking about creating fabulous spaces and location and things like that, because everyone’s coming. Like we’re going to have five times as many spaces by the end of the decade. So having a brand community, a group of people who are bought in around your space and what you’re doing is going to be essential. 

Frank Cottle [00:02:46] Well, I think it’s interesting. First, you mentioned that coworker industry is growing. And statistically the industry is growing right now at about 10% to 12% a year. And to make a comparison, that’s faster than the growth of the PC industry at its height in 2000 2002, or the mobile phones in 2004 to 2007. So as an industry, the growth is really taking off. And you mentioned community, too, and I’ve always thought when you mentioned brand, that a brand is a household word, that everybody knows it coca Cola is a brand. Ford is a brand. Ford is a much bigger brand than Tesla in that regard, even though Tesla is a brand too, that it’s a household word and that individual companies, before their brand, they had to establish a reputation. That a smaller company usually had a good reputation locally or regionally, but it didn’t have a brand overall. But you make one interesting differentiation. You say that the community members or the people that participate with that organization, it could be virtual or it could be physical, that they feel they have ownership of it. And to me, that bridges reputation and brand a little bit. And what’s your thought on how do people exercise that ownership? Is it through social capital or through activity or just for the love of being there? What’s your feeling on that? 

Cat Johnson [00:04:36] Yeah, that’s a big one. And I think reputation is part of brand, that it includes a lot of other things. So when we talk about people being emotionally bought in, they contribute to the space and the community. They talk about the community. They find ways to participate. They tell their friends it’s something instead of being like, oh, yeah, that’s the place. I have an office. It’s like I’m a member of XYZ coworking. And in that membership, what does that mean? What does that mean to the extended community? What does that mean for you as a professional, entrepreneur, remote worker, whatever that might be? People who buy into the mission and emotionally buy into the community? 

Frank Cottle [00:05:30] Well, it’s interesting because brands, there are many types of there are many examples of brands, but there are good brands and there are bad brands, brands that you don’t want by association. And I wonder if part of a brand’s success or failure is that ownership component overall. I’ll use a co working example. There are many good brands, many good brands, but I’m going to use a bad brand as an example, and I’m going to use a very well recognized brand. And that’s WeWork Right now, WeWork overall, I don’t know if you’ve checked today, but its stock is down to $0.17. That’s staggering to me, considering where it was. And I’m wondering if one of WeWorks issues as a failed brand might not be the fact that the members of the community they tried to create never felt they had ownership, never felt that they were really a part. Of WeWork and something they wanted to associate with as opposed to just being a place with great decor and great facilities, but that they never really achieved the community structure of Brand. And that’s one of the reasons for their failure. 

Cat Johnson [00:07:01] Yeah, there’s a thing I think about a lot that you can’t hotwire connection, you can’t force community. And your question reminds me of a conversation I had with a guy in Austin many years ago. He said he went to tour a Coworking space, and he felt like they hoisted community onto him like a sack of potatoes. That was his exact phrase. Like as soon as he walked in the door they were like, oh yeah, now you’re in the community. And yeah, the community, community. And without having a single point of connection, he was being thrust into this quote, community. And the thing that I’ve learned, and I’m really learning at being in a new town, that community and connection, it takes many touch points, right? So it’s not a one time thing. Like you don’t become good friends with someone the first meeting, you might have a nice connection, have lots of things to talk about. But that true, genuine connection and community, it comes over time, it comes with lots of touch points. It comes by supporting and helping each other with skill sharing, referrals, sharing space, having hard conversations, having hilarious conversations, like all these touch points kind of build a community. So I think when people try to hotwire it like Hector Colonos tells a funny story where he joined a space and they talked all about the community and he was literally the only person on an entire floor of this building. Like there was nothing. And I think that’s something we can’t gaslight people about community and coworking. We have to be able to do the real work of building connections. 1.1 conversation, one person at a you. 

Frank Cottle [00:08:54] Know, it’s interesting, you mentioned an individual, Hector Colonis, being isolated there and you mentioned co working a lot overall. It’s been said, and I’ve even said this, that co working is great for people that actually co work together. But those are usually individuals that once somebody achieves a company of a certain size, they need privacy, they need their own culture, and they can participate, be around community, but they really kind of withdraw from it and have formed their own click, if you will. Even if they’re in a nice center where they’ve been for a long time. And that’s part of some of the larger operators of the industry. And I know you work with indies, but that’s part of their thing is going after the big corporate clients. Well how do they work in that regard? How do you draw these larger players that are in a facility and they may have their own full floor? How do you draw them into community to support the broader structure of a community brand versus no, it’s those guys over there, they’re on their own. How do you mix that up? 

Cat Johnson [00:10:11] Yeah, that is a common topic of conversation. Number one, how big of teams should you have come into your space without risking that when they leave, then you’re going to be out? Some people are like, I wouldn’t do more than 20% or something like that. But the question to your point about bringing them into the community, I think sometimes it’s challenging with teams. I was in a co working space that there was a team from amazon, and we call them the Amazonbies because they would just go to and from their office to get coffee. Like they just didn’t really want a part of what was happening in the coworking community. And I think that’s this not everybody wants the level of connection and community that I do and that the people who gravitate toward me do. And that’s great. Some people just need office rental. And the more buy in you can get from people, the more they participate in the community, the more they’re going to get out of your space and the community. I think even people who think they only want office space, if you can bring them into the fold, they’ll find they’re making connections, they’re more fulfilled, they’re doing better work. I think that there’s just an innately human thing into sharing space. We’re community, collective minded species. 

Frank Cottle [00:11:40] Well, it’s funny because when you talk about community, community, you’re also intermingling that with coworking, coworking, coworking overall and community. It’s been around for a long time before coworking as a concept overall. Why do you think that co working and community are so closely aligned and so important? And is it a well being issue, which we can get into later, but is it a well being issue or is it a business success issue? What’s the importance of those elements as they come together?

Cat Johnson [00:12:23]  Yeah, I think that they’re inseparable. And going back to the very first co working spaces, it was kind of when laptops were a thing so people could suddenly work from everywhere and people realized they didn’t really particularly enjoy working alone. So like, flip up some folding tables and find some WiFi and cowork together. And then that grew from this very DIY grassroots kind of thing into this massive industry. Like the space I’m in now, my home space Kiln, is just stunning. I love coming in here. You can see it’s beautiful. It’s everything you would love from a modern coworking space. And I do feel like the community and coworking are inseparable in my perspective. And I’ve been a member of seven I’ve been a Fob carrying member of seven coworking spaces. And I’ve worked out of dozens and dozens. So I’ve experienced a lot of different coworking flavors and vibes. And the ones that are the very best have an energy running through them, a connectedness running through them that even if I don’t like today, I’ve been really busy. I haven’t chatted with anyone in the space too much. A couple of hellos. But I love being here. The energy of the space, everyone hustling and bustling that thing. I think there is a wellness component that the days I work from home, I don’t know, my energy, my something just kind of goes down, down. And then when I come in here, I’m lit up and inspired again. So yeah, I think that the two are inseparable. And in my mind, coworking is a whole different thing. From office rental. And I think the two are kind of intermingling and figuring out what they are. And there’s on the spectrum of flexible workspace, as you always are talking about that coworking is a piece of that. It’s like I think that’s true and I think there’s something for everyone. So the people who come in and just have an office, there are people in my home space who aren’t particularly engaged in the events and the things that we do, but they’re part of the community. And I know that introverts and lots of different people like to be around that just innately human thing, being around other people. 

Frank Cottle [00:15:00] Well, I think human beings are gregarious animals. So I think that’s right. And this is probably a terrible analogy, but it’s a guy analogy. 

Cat Johnson [00:15:11] Okay, I’m ready. 

Frank Cottle [00:15:13] Okay, get ready. I think I have friends and they have great big, massive big screen TVs, okay? They can get every channel in the world. They’ll go to a sports bar to watch a game because they want to be with that energy around them. The people around them make the game better, even if it’s a losing game. 

Cat Johnson [00:15:40] Right? 

Frank Cottle [00:15:41] It makes the game better. So we do associate a certain element with that as we’ve gone through the pandemic and we’ve gone through so many changes these last few years. It’s an exciting time. It’s like the Tale of Two Cities are the best of times and the worst of times. 

Cat Johnson [00:16:01] Wow. Isn’t that true? 

Frank Cottle [00:16:04] When we look at that, the loneliness epidemic, is it really an epidemic? Maybe not. It depends on who you talk to. But it’s absolutely there. It’s been created as a result of not just the pandemic but the outcome of remote work, the way remote work is handled still, especially by big companies, by those Amazonbies, if you will, who honestly never got to come back to the office or didn’t want to. Overall, they relocated, maybe bought a new house in a new city based on expectations and all the challenges there. But the loneliness epidemic, does coworking really a solution for that or is it part of a marketing plan? 

Cat Johnson [00:16:54] Okay, it’s definitely not a marketing thing like the loneliness epidemic. We are at like, fever pitch, huge problem right now. Like suicide rates skyrocketing, mental health issues are skyrocketing. There was some gallup data that came out a couple of months ago that an estimated 300 million people around the world do not have a single friend. And in that same data, there was something. So the peak COVID loneliness was 24% of the population in the US. And we’ve gone down to 17%. So we’re making strides. Good for us. But the question they asked around that data was, I’ll paraphrase, did you feel lonely most of the day yesterday? So 17% of us, almost a fifth of the country felt lonely most of the day yesterday. Like we’re just in this crazy situation where on the heels of COVID with this complete cultural shift around remote work. A lot of fear and isolation that I think we’re still in the draft of that from all the isolation during the pandemic. So I think about this a lot. Is Coworking responsible for fixing this? I think that’s too big an ask of space operators. I think a lot of them are like, I am just trying to make a profit and do something good in my community. And is it part of the solution that’s desperately needed 100%? Absolutely, yes. Coworking has an opportunity here to as we’ve seen this sea change toward remote work, coworking has an opportunity to jump in there and be like, we’ve got you, you don’t have to sit home alone. That feeling of working from home day after day after day, for a lot of people it Frankly does not work, but they don’t have other options. And it’s interesting because I talk about Coworking all the time. There are still people who have no idea what it is we’re doing here. There’s still so much room for education and growth. Like I said earlier, we’re looking at like five times the number of spaces as we have now in the next by the end of the decade. So within that, can we have Coworking spaces be more than somebody who’s like, yeah, that’s where I rent a desk or rent an office and have it be a place that brings together people socially, professionally? I’m going to not say emotionally and spiritually. And anyone who’s a member of a great co working space knows that the emotional component is very real. And people who are striving to create a great co working space are trying to get that emotional component in place because we’re not going to solve the loneliness epidemic sitting at home alone. 

Frank Cottle [00:20:11] It’s funny, we’re throwing these great numbers around, growth of the industry and all that sort of thing, but using your number five times, which I think is aggressive, but let’s go for it using that number. Commercial office space, percentage of all categories of flexible workspace today in the US. Is only about two and a half percent. So at five times we’ll call it ten or 12% of the space. What are the other 90% of the space? What can corporates who there will be as more people working remotely on behalf of large corporations than there most likely will be at five times the size of the Coworking industry today? How do you create a bridge of business practices that takes what we’re learning and what we’re beginning to understand and help those others that will maybe never be in a co working center or never experience this firsthand, but help those corporates to grow who are struggling right now with the concept of return to office work from home work remotely, do all the benefits. There’s benefits to all of them. I won’t argue which is best, but we know that a whole myriad of structures will be existing in the future. How does co working bridge that and help create a business model that defines how community can work on behalf of larger the US government the largest employer possibly probably in the world. I can’t figure out what the Chinese government is like, but the US government massive and they’re looking at transitioning right now into flexible workspace for a whole variety of reasons. Not community, but mostly cost and efficiency reasons. Are you going to touch that or are those Amazombies going to wake up and not be Amazombies anymore or are they always going to be and you write them off? What’s the bridge that you build? 

Cat Johnson [00:22:29] There’s a lot there so going backwards, I wouldn’t write anybody off. I would say that anybody, coworking can work for anyone and people who are drawn to it are going to find it and find a way to participate and join the community. Even people on large teams, small teams, individuals, whatever, in terms of what companies can do. I think about this more than you might think, Frank, and I’m not sure. I think what would be a great idea is to create some parameters and support people in finding their own space and their own community. I think that trying to force employees of a company to then have an additional layer of and now we’re going to connect in all these ways and I’m way out of my lane here because this is not my job. My job is coworking and community. But I don’t think that people necessarily are buying in on all the extra things people are trying to add. I think what they want, it’s so simple. Quality of life, wellness, connection, a sense of belonging, friendship, hobbies, a life that they’ve designed and FLEXWORK gives people a lot of that, right? Especially like the design your life in a way that works for you. We’re in a really cool cultural shift right now. I’m not sure forcing people into a community around their employer is necessarily the solution. I think that the smart businesses would be helping their people find community and belonging from wherever they’re working. And in my mind that’s going to the neighborhood co working space where the quality of life, the richness, the local engagement, everything’s going to go up. So there are a lot of cool things we’re seeing come out of this shift and companies are doing really innovative, interesting things and some of it feels absolutely panicked because they’re trying to figure out how to have that sense of engagement. So I would say do your employees want that sense of engagement or do they want really clear parameters and the freedom to do their job well and to be able to work on their own? Which means empowering them to find a co working community where there’s no hierarchy, no one’s watching over their shoulder. They’re free to do their best work in their own rhythm and design. 

Frank Cottle [00:25:17] Well, it’s funny, I think you said you’re a little out of your lane on that. I don’t know that we all aren’t a little out of our lane on that. The CEOs of the largest companies in the world. Good point, trying to figure this out. Everybody has an opinion, but nobody has any real experience yet. So one of the things that was interesting, I was reading a white paper the other day about artificial intelligence and the issue around artificial intelligence that I went, oh yeah, that makes sense. It says, well, artificial intelligence is great at creating content, but it’s terrible at listening. It can’t listen, it can’t create the empathetic dialogue that we’re having right now as an example. It can’t hear your voice and what you feel strongly about or don’t feel strongly about, at least not yet. So time will tell on all of this, but I think that takes me over to what is directly in your lane and that’s content marketing has changed radically over the last ten years. Explain a little bit of some of those changes to us, in your view, because you’ve been at this for a while and how you think it will continue to change in the future. And ultimately the impact of what artificial intelligence will have on the way we use content and create content meaningfully, not just for marketing, but for really whether it’s our reading, pleasure or education, for any variety of things, content is content, period. It’s used for different things. So what are your thoughts on where we’ve been, where we’re going, and the impact of artificial intelligence on that? 

Cat Johnson [00:27:17] So with content, we have seen a big change. And when I first started writing about it and introducing it to coworking space operators, the co working world, not a lot of people knew what I was talking about. So this is years ago, right? There was a lot of educating about what is content marketing? Why should you be doing it? And now we’re at this place where content is an expectation and people who aren’t thinking about it are getting left behind like they’re already getting left behind. So it’s been an interesting arc to go from what is this thing that you’re talking about as compared to traditional advertising and just buying some space versus where we are now, where Instagram Reels and LinkedIn thought leadership and the different so many platforms and new ones all the time. Like within Instagram, there are like five different ways you can create content. It’s just this it’s really challenging to keep up with it and it changes really quickly. So as soon as you have one thing dialed in, you’re on to the next thing. So the thing that kind of speaks to how it’s shifted and where we’re going, I think less and less people want to be advertised at. They want to be educated, they want to be informed, they want to be inspired they want to be entertained. And that’s the challenge of being a company right now, is that you’re not just a company doing whatever you do, whether it’s running a co working space or selling widgets. You’re also a media company, right, where you have to be on all the platforms and making your brand voice and attracting your brand community and things. So the point of AI this is the thing I love the most about the AI conversation, the thing I’ve been talking about for years, like, be human, be brave. Show up as yourself. Tell the stories of your space, tell your origin story. Share, share, share, share. Like hitting that humanness. That’s the piece that AI cannot do. So AI can now write a blog post, a press release. You can use it to do infinite things. I feel like I need to take a course or something to catch up on the last two months of just this insane influx of AI stuff. So AI can do all of that stuff really well. The thing it can’t do is tell the story, like my origin story, and why I do this, and why I’m passionate about coworking and what I saw this morning in my space and how that informs the next convo or something that I learned from the lab. Just like the very human pieces of it, AI is just taking information and data and serving it back in really easy to digest ways. Right. But the human piece is what everyone needs to now be thinking about, because it’s no longer impressive that you have a blog post, right? 

Frank Cottle [00:30:27] Well, it isn’t. What’s impressive is whether it’s worth reading or not, but you don’t know until you read it. So that is we’re flooded with content, just massive amounts of content of all types right now, overall. But I wonder, you’re a writer, you write extremely well and very interesting material. Isn’t AI a tool that you can use to accelerate your writing process in a way that maintains your voice, maintains your understanding, but gives you the capacity to either put out more volume of content or more importantly, than volume? Because we don’t need more volume of content in the world right now. What we do need is more thought going into it. So an hour saved on tasks related to content creation is an hour able to be spent on quality of the content itself? I think right now we’re at this point where people are going, oh, cool, I get this free ride. But ultimately it should be about, I can use this to put out a higher level of quality than anything else. I don’t know what your thoughts are on that or whether that’s something you even would want to embrace. You might say, no, I’m the anti AI person or something, because a lot of people drawing a line on this right now, and I think it’s like drawing a line on railroads and automobiles. And jet planes. You can draw the line as far as you want, but you’re going to be the one there with a buggy, and I’m going to be the one. 

Cat Johnson [00:32:18] You’re going to be the person who never learned to drive. I mean, concerns and all, here we are, right? This is not going away. The thing I’m most excited about personally is some of the formatting options. Like, I can drop a piece of content in there and say, format this as an ebook with chapters and things like that. And within 12 seconds it’s done that. And it’s like, that’s the kind of thing that previously I would have sat there in docs and format, okay, do this, do that, do the other. And it’s like, it’s just done. So this is the cool and crazy thing about AI is, like, if we’re not spending our time doing these kind of rote things, what are we being freed up to do? If we collectively don’t have to go through these really long processes, kind of tedious things to be able to share thoughts or that what are we freed up for? Who are we if we don’t have to do all the tedious tasks? It’s a really kind of interesting existential question. And so I think, best case, it makes us dig a bit deeper, right? Because the blog machine, the content machine, just like you said, people who are excited that they’re like, I don’t even have to write a blog post. It’s like, well, neither does anybody else in the entire world. And what we don’t need is more and more and more content that looks and sounds and feels the same. So it totally begs the question of, like, who are we? What do I want to say? What does Cat Johnson have to share with the world? What does Frank Cottle have to share with the world? What is your unique voice? What is your perspective? That’s where we push into really interesting territory, where it’s no longer just, here’s a roundup of resources. It’s like moving conversations forward by sharing our perspective and best case, we’re moving the whole human conversation forward, right, and moving further into our potential. 

Frank Cottle [00:34:38] Well, do you think that we’re going to see a big gap between those people that really can take what’s good and make it better and those people that just use it to bake something? And so this quality gap is going to arise, and then there’ll be a lot of people that refuse to do anything. The Luddites of artificial intelligence, if you will, which there’s something to be said for being a Luddite, by the way, but that’s a different conversation. But do you think that gap will be created in much the same way? I mean, when I started my career, gosh, we did things on typewriters and carpet paper. It worked great, okay? And then we got our first computer and then our second computers, and we embraced technology. We’ve always embraced technology as a company, and I always have as an individual. My first programming was done on punch cards and it was great. Mary had a little lamb. I did. Mary had a little lamb on punch cards. 

Cat Johnson [00:35:55] And I was. 

Frank Cottle [00:35:57] Know we can look at these so called revolutions and everything you just said is it’s going to free up time? Sounds like a computer to me. Yeah, free up time. That old automobile sure beat the horse. Freed up a lot of time. Oh, how about those trains back in the early 18 hundreds? It started evolving. It freed up a lot of time. Every progressive step we make isn’t really about technology. It’s about how we use the technology to gain the one element that’s common amongst all humans on Earth. And that’s time. That’s time. Anything that can help us gain time for some other purpose, hopefully a higher purpose, a better purpose, has to be something that we should embrace and learn how to capture and how to conquer. 

Cat Johnson [00:37:00] I love this, Frank. Yeah. Because the computer was supposed to free us all up, right? And what happens is we’re all working all the time. Like it didn’t have that thing. So how do we hit the collective? 

Frank Cottle [00:37:15] Well, but our productivity got greater and so we chose to trade our own time for increased productivity rather than productivity for more time. 

Cat Johnson [00:37:32] Yeah. So what are we working toward? Is there going to be some point where we do get freed up as beings and species? I’m not sure, but I think that there’s an obvious parallel between AI and websites. The Internet. That’s the word I like. Where when it first came out, it was academics and techies, and then it kind of trickled down. Trickled down, trickled down. And now we’re at the place where my mom will be like, oh, I just looked at train tickets and we’ll be sitting there chatting and she’s scrolling all over and doing all the things. So I think to your first point, it starts with people, but it will trickle down and inform everything we do. And there are concerns like as the web brought some really crazy stuff that could just objectively be considered harmful to humanity, and look how much it’s done for us, too. Look how connected we are. And I think AI will have a similar impact where there will be stuff that’s scary, and I think it’s just going to supercharge a lot of the things that we do. 

Frank Cottle [00:38:50] Well, I would agree with that. And sadly, we’re running a little long on our time here today, and I really appreciate your thoughtful comments. Kat and I want to share with our audience that from all works point of view, you will become one of our very valued future of work voices as we go forward. And we’ll look forward to hearing a lot of what you have to say. And we couldn’t be more pleased with that opportunity. 

Cat Johnson [00:39:21] Frank, I’m absolutely honored. I can’t wait to drop my first column and I have lots of ideas. I really appreciate the opportunity. 

Frank Cottle [00:39:30] Perfect. We’ll see you all later, then. Take care. 

Cat Johnson [00:39:34] Bye. Take care. Thanks, Frank.