Pacific Workplaces, one of the most established names in flexible workspace, has said publicly that virtual office services — mail handling, phone answering, meeting room and day office access among them, make up roughly 30% of their overall revenue. Not office revenue. Not coworking memberships. Virtual office services.
A comprehensive virtual office program can include all of that. Most operators only ever build out mail. That’s what I want to go deep on today, because it’s the one nearly every operator already has, and the one most of you have never looked at twice.
That number is the reason for this episode of the Everything Coworking podcast, “Why Your Virtual Mail Program Makes 3%, and Theirs Makes 30%,” the latest in my summer series on adding revenue to your coworking business. This article is the written companion to that episode.
I’m not walking through pricing sheets or setup steps here. We’ve got other training for that. This is about the mindset gap. Some operators treat mail as a real, growing line of the business. Most treat it as a line item nobody revisits. Same basic product, wildly different outcomes. You hand someone a business address, and you handle their mail. What’s different is whether anyone decided to treat it like a real line of business.
Do you know what percentage of your revenue comes from virtual mail right now? Not a guess. An actual number.
Most operators I talk to don’t know it off the top of their head. And when they do know it, it’s nowhere close to 30%.
Your address doesn’t have a ceiling
Your desks run out. Your private offices run out. Once you’re full, the only way to grow that revenue is to raise your price or get more square footage. That’s the ceiling every operator lives under with workspace.
Your address doesn’t have that ceiling. A virtual mail member doesn’t take up a desk. One address can support ten members or a few hundred, and the constraint that caps everything else you sell simply doesn’t apply here. An address doesn’t need parking. It doesn’t need a window. It never emails you about the printer or the thermostat.
That’s the case for giving this its own goal instead of letting it run in the background while you focus on filling offices. If there’s a piece of your business that can grow without the ceiling that caps literally everything else, and you don’t have a number attached to it, you’re leaving the one truly scalable part of your revenue on autopilot.
Set an actual target for mail this year, a dollar number or a revenue-per-square-foot number, not a vague sense that it should grow. A percentage of total revenue can hold steady or drift for reasons that have nothing to do with mail, since your total revenue is moving, too.
Track the dollar contribution itself. Everything else, pricing, bundling, marketing, doesn’t matter if there’s no goal pulling it forward.
Ten percent is the floor, not the ceiling
Ten percent of revenue is a reasonable starting benchmark if your program is young. Operators who’ve built this out over years land well above that. Pacific Workplaces sits around 30%. Other multi-site operators who treat this like a business line hit 20%.
Those numbers aren’t accidents. They’re the result of someone treating mail as a focus for years, not months. But those numbers tell you the ceiling is much higher than most operators think. If you’re sitting at two or three percent, that’s not a coincidence either. That’s what happens when a product exists on your price sheet but nobody’s actually running it like a product.
Percentage of revenue is useful context. It’s also a moving target, because your total revenue is moving right along with it. Grow your workspace revenue at the same clip as your mail revenue and the percentage barely shifts, even though the dollars from mail went up. What actually tells you something is the dollar number itself, and what it’s doing to your margin, since mail carries almost none of the space and labor cost your workspace revenue does.
Stop Pricing Everyone the Same
Most operators price virtual mail as one flat product, the same number applied the same way to every buyer who calls. Here’s how you grow that revenue: you don’t have to price it as one low flat fee across the board. Different segments of buyers want very different things from this product, and a flat price treats them as if they don’t. Your pricing doesn’t have to match what a referral partner charges, either. That’s their number, not yours.
The fix isn’t a higher number. It’s building tiers, a good, better, best structure, built around the segments actually buying this product. A solo consultant who just needs an address and someone to scan a check is a different buyer than a growing team that wants a business address and somewhere to meet clients twice a month. Sell them both the same flat mail package and you’ve priced for whoever needs the least, instead of what each segment would actually pay for.
Build that out with real inclusions, not just a bigger invoice. Meeting room hours at one tier. Private office hours at the next. If a package includes private office hours, that’s also the tier where access to your Google Business Profile listing can live, since it’s tied to a deeper relationship with the space than a basic mailbox is. Each tier should mean something different is included, not the same product with more zeros on it.
This is a real opportunity. Your own packages don’t have to mirror what a lead gen or referral partner sends your way. Referral partners matter. They bring in volume you would not generate on your own. But your own packages are where you get to be creative and serve your customer in a way that’s actually meaningful to them, built around the specific buyer segments in your own market.
Hold onto the principle rather than any one package: if you’re only ever selling the bare minimum version of this product, you’re leaving value on the table that a real tier structure could capture.
If they can’t find you, none of this matters
Your SEO and your Google Business Profile are doing double duty on virtual mail. It’s not just visibility. As I just mentioned, it can be part of the product itself. But even setting that aside, most operators built their website and their listing years ago and never look at either one again as a living asset tied to a specific revenue stream.
When’s the last time you looked at your Google Business Profile specifically with virtual mail in mind? Not the general listing. The version meant to catch someone actively searching for a business address in your city right now.
Sell it like an e-commerce product, not a tour
Someone searching for a virtual mailbox is often ready to decide fast. If the only way to buy it is buried as a line item on your general pricing page, or the details only come out over a phone call, you’re adding friction to a decision that should be simple. A dedicated page that explains exactly what’s included and lets someone sign up does the selling for you when you’re not in the room.
This is the real mindset shift. A private office needs a tour and a conversation. Virtual mail doesn’t. Treat it like the e-commerce decision it actually is.
“It’s too much work”
This is probably the real reason most operators haven’t built this out, even if they’d never say it out loud. When someone tells you a revenue line is basically effortless, you don’t believe them, and you shouldn’t.
Here’s a real number. Operators running this well report getting most of their mail sorting and handling done in under 30 minutes per hundred members, once there’s a system in place. That’s not nothing, but it’s nowhere close to the overwhelming daily task most people picture.
What determines whether this feels manageable isn’t volume. It’s routine. Doing it the same way, at the same time, with the same person, every single day, is the difference between something that stays under control at real scale and something that feels chaotic even at a small one.
That person doesn’t have to be your community manager or someone pulled off your sales team. It can be a dedicated, mail-focused resource who comes in for an hour or two a day and does nothing else. One long-running center grew from 90 virtual mail clients to almost 600 in under three years, not because of a lucky stretch, but because of a process they never deviated from.
Compare that to the operator who treats mail as something to squeeze in whenever there’s a free minute at the front desk. That’s the version that actually feels overwhelming, and it’s not the volume causing it. It’s the absence of a system.
At high enough volume, processing mail does take real time, and you may reach a point where it’s no longer something your community manager should be squeezing into their day. You might need to bring someone on just to handle it. That isn’t the mindset failing. That’s what it looks like when a revenue line has grown enough to fund its own labor. It’s a good problem to have, and I’d rather you hear that now than be surprised by it later.
Where to go from here
Pacific Workplaces built virtual office services into 30% of their revenue. Most operators never get past mail, and most don’t track it as its own number at all.
The gap between that and where most operators sit isn’t about the product. The product works. The gap is whether anyone in the business has actually decided virtual mail deserves a real goal, a real pricing strategy, a way to be found, and a way to be bought, the same way you’d treat any product you took seriously.
For the full breakdown, listen to the full episode of the Everything Coworking podcast.
