Gina Schreck opened the Village Workspace 11 days before the pandemic hit. She had 10,000 square feet, 34 offices pre-sold, and four small conference rooms. Five years later she had expanded to 50,000 square feet, 80 offices, a 200-person ballroom, two 50-person training rooms, five boardroom-style meeting rooms, and a wait list for office space. Gina joined me on the Everything Coworking podcast to talk about how she got there.
This is the fourth article in this summer’s series on adding revenue to your coworking business. If you missed the first three articles in the series, catch up here: where that 30 to 40% actually comes from, part-time private offices, and virtual mail revenue. This one covers the channel that makes most operators nervous, and for good reason: events really are a different business.
Gina built events into a standalone business anyway, one that at one point generated as much revenue as her entire original workspace.
Her event space started because she said yes to more square footage than she had a plan for, and then had to figure out fast what to charge for it, how to market it, and who was actually going to book it.
The expansion that almost didn’t happen
Gina’s first space did not fill up until she converted her training rooms and meeting rooms into private offices. By 2021, post-pandemic demand had made that clear: nobody wanted a hot desk or a dedicated desk. Everybody wanted a door that closed. Once she was full, she started looking for a second location, one level, plenty of free parking, something that would work in the suburbs south of Denver. She just couldn’t find the space that fit her criteria.
Then the tenant in the other half of her building, a 40,000-square-foot call center, left during the pandemic and offered her the whole space. Her first reaction was to say no. That is a lot of square footage to fill, and most operators I know would have said the same thing. But she went home that night and thought about all the calls coming in for 50-person event rooms, and about how many event spaces near her had closed for good during COVID. She said yes, and two years later she had busted through the wall into 40,000 more square feet, with a big chunk of it built out for events.
Do your homework before you build any event space
You have probably never once asked your mayor what she pays to rent someone else’s ballroom. Gina did.
Gina did not rely on entrepreneurial optimism and intuition to size her ballroom. She had already committed to the expansion. What she had not yet decided was how big to build the event space, and that is where she did the work. She met with the mayor and the city manager first. It turned out the city was paying a neighboring town to rent event space for its own 150-person meetings, because nowhere nearby had the room. That conversation, plus the requests she was already fielding for weddings, quinceañeras, bar mitzvahs, graduation parties, and anniversary parties, told her exactly what size room to build.
Hope is not a strategy here. Use data and indicators. What demand are you already turning away because you don’t have the space required? Do your homework: talk to your chamber of commerce, figure out what demand gaps nobody nearby is filling, and build toward that. Then shape it to fit the space you have and the business you want to run.
The $8 tablecloth problem
Gina will tell you flatly that she underpriced the ballroom in year one. She started at $1,500 to rent the 200-person space for an event. She quickly learned that tablecloths cost $8 apiece to dry clean, that after 10 p.m. bookings need a security guard, and that none of that was built into her number. The rate is now closer to $3,000, with a $500 charge added on for events running past 10 p.m.
Events carry costs that workspace revenue simply does not: linens, security, cleanup, staffing for setup and breakdown. If you are building an event product and pricing it like an hourly meeting room, you will find out the hard way what Gina found out in year one. Price for the full cost of running the event, not just the hours the room is occupied.
The $40,000-a-month payoff
Get the pricing and the room sizing right, and the number gets big fast: the event space alone was bringing in $40,000 a month in revenue at one point, roughly the same as her entire original workspace.
That is the number this whole series keeps circling back to. Workspace revenue is the majority of a healthy operator’s business, but the 30 to 40% that comes from somewhere else is often what separates a space that survives from one that thrives.
Ask every booking what they Googled to find you
Pricing was not the only assumption Gina had to rethink. Marketing the event space required the same reset, starting with a habit she built into her booking process: every time someone books, she asks what they searched for online to find her. Not whether they found her through search, but the actual words they typed.
The answer surprised her. She expected people to search terms like “event space” or “meeting space,” the language she had built her marketing around. Instead, a large share of her event bookings came from people searching “banquet hall,” a term she had never used anywhere in her marketing until the data told her to. She has since worked that language into her Google Business Profile and her event marketing, right alongside the terms she already used for coworking and meeting rooms.
If you are marketing multiple product lines out of one space — meeting rooms, coworking memberships, event rentals — ask every single lead what they searched. You will learn your real keywords faster than any SEO tool will tell you, and you may find, like Gina did, that your best customers are searching for a word that has never appeared on your website.
Your biggest competitor might be a cheaper room down the road
Gina is not trying to win on price. A few event and meeting space competitors near her run a leaner, do-it-yourself model: no staff on site, book the room, let yourself in, run your own event. Great, if what you want from your daughter’s quinceañera is a lockbox code and a folding table. That model works for some renters, and it undercuts her on cost every time.
Gina went the opposite direction on purpose: full-service hospitality, a team that helps with setup, and a space people choose specifically because someone else is handling the details on the day of a wedding or a graduation party, not just a cheaper room with a door.
Neither approach is wrong. But know which one you are actually building, because trying to do both usually means doing neither well. If your real competition is a lockbox code and a folding table, your event product needs to offer something that room cannot. For Gina, that is a staffed, full-service experience wrapped around a community people keep coming back for.
Where events might fit into your revenue mix
The through line across this series holds here, too. Workspace revenue is the core of what most operators sell, but it is rarely the whole story for the most profitable ones. Events, done well, can become their own business within yours. They come with their own pricing model, their own staffing needs, their own marketing language, and in Gina’s case, their own line on the P&L, one that at one point brought in more revenue than the coworking business it grew out of.
Most operators are not sitting on 5,000 empty square feet waiting to become a ballroom. That’s fine. The idea holds at any size. Look at the flexible space you already have and ask what it could hold on nights and weekends. Talk to your landlord about a revenue-sharing arrangement on space that is not carrying its own rent right now. Or, if you are modeling a new location, build the event math into the plan from day one instead of bolting it on later.
However you get there, do the homework Gina did: talk to your city, find out what demand your market is already paying somebody else to serve, and price the real cost of running an event, not just the hours the room is booked.
For the full conversation with Gina Schreck, including more on how she built her community around the space and what changed when her daughter stepped away from the business, listen to the full episode of the Everything Coworking podcast.
