Leslie Bailey leased 15,000 square feet in downtown Indianapolis for Maven Space, and none of it had a private office. When she told me, my first reaction was: she’s in trouble. About 10,000 square feet ran like a normal coworking floor, desks and memberships. The other 5,000 became a full event venue, projectors and a podium included, plus a commercial kitchen.
On top of that she built a sponsorship program she ran like an old-school magazine ad department, and a membership community that started years before the lease was signed and kept going after the space closed.
Leslie joined me on this episode of the Everything Coworking podcast to walk through how she built that mix of revenue streams. This article is the written companion to that conversation, and Leslie is one of the clearest examples I’ve found of a pattern that shows up across this series: the most resilient coworking businesses do not run on workspace revenue alone.
If you missed the earlier articles in this series, catch up here: where that 30 to 40% actually comes from, part-time private offices, virtual mail revenue, meeting room revenue, and turning event space into a second revenue engine.
A media company that backed into a coworking space
Leslie’s background wasn’t real estate or hospitality. Coworking operators come from all kinds of backgrounds, and hers was journalism. She was a columnist at the Indianapolis Star and a lifestyle editor at Indianapolis Monthly, and in 2019 she launched Indy Maven as a media company, a newsletter for women in Central Indiana, with no membership and no plan for one. Then people kept asking to join, so she added a cheap membership, around $50 for the year, and a community formed around the content.
The physical space came in 2022: 15,000 square feet downtown, subleased from Salesforce on favorable terms that included the furniture and equipment already in place — right down to leftover iPads — on a lease short enough, two and a half years, that she felt she could test the model rather than commit to it.
It never had private offices. That was the one thing missing from day one. What it did have was Leslie’s existing Indy Maven audience and a building full of assets nobody was charging for yet: a fully built event space, a gym, and a café buildout. She started monetizing what she already had instead of waiting to build the office space she didn’t.
Events were a business of their own
That 5,000 square foot event space, fully equipped with projectors and a podium, became one of the biggest revenue drivers in the building. Events are a different business than coworking, with their own model and their own staffing, and I say that as a caution on most episodes.
Leslie had two things that made it work: a room that was purpose-built for it, and an events director who came out of hospitality and knew how to run it.
She also landed a catering liquor license, so alcohol sales became their own line of revenue on top of the room rental itself, and Leslie says having it made Maven Space a more desirable venue for people booking events.
Events also fed the rest of the business: someone would come in for an event and leave a member, and members got a discount to host their own events in the space.
Food and beverage turned the space into a destination
Leslie didn’t stop at a coffee station; she built an actual kitchen. There was a full café with a breakfast and lunch menu, run in-house after the original caterers moved on, and the events director was doing hundred-person seated dinners out of it. When Gary Vaynerchuk brought VeeCon to town, Maven Space hosted the press breakfast.
The café did not just serve coworking members either. It served every floor of the four-story building. The same kitchen that supported the event business also became its own daytime revenue line, feeding tenants who never rented a desk.
Food and beverage is a heavy lift, and it is not for everyone, but done well it turns a workspace into a place people actually want to spend the day.
Sponsorships: selling the eyeballs she already had
Her definition of a sponsorship is blunt: you put a logo somewhere, you tell the sponsor how many people will see it, you say what that’s worth, and you agree on a price. She learned how to sell advertising for the media company, and to her there is no real difference between a logo on a newsletter and a logo on the wall of a café.
What made it work was packaging. A sponsor could get the newsletter, the physical space, and a presence at events in one deal, digital audience plus physical room. My favorite example is the one that sounds like a joke until you see the invoice: a local plumber, Hope Plumbing, sponsored the bathroom stalls.
That same inventory exists in almost every coworking space: the newsletter, the events, the walls, the screens, even the stalls. Price it, package it, and it turns into real revenue.
The community was its own revenue line, and it outlasted the building
Underneath all of it was the membership community, and it is the reason the rest worked. The Indy Maven membership was separate from any coworking membership. Some members paid for the community and the newsletter and never wanted a desk at all. That audience is what made the sponsorships worth buying and what filled the events.
Downtown Indianapolis did not bounce back after the pandemic the way Leslie needed it to, and parking was a constant friction in a market where people expect it to be free. A planned move to a suburban building fell through. When the real estate went away, the business did not. Leslie still runs Indy Maven as a paid membership with a weekly newsletter, monthly in-person meetups, and virtual lunch and learns.
Match the revenue to who you actually are
There is a reason each of these streams worked for Leslie specifically. Sponsorships worked because she came from media and knew how to sell them. Food and beverage worked because the events director came from hospitality. The streams that stuck matched the backgrounds in the room.
It is tempting to look at another space, see what is working, and run the same play, but their magic sauce is built on their people and their market, not yours. Indianapolis turned out to be a bigger coworking market than Leslie expected, with real supply in the city and the suburbs, and in a market like that, sameness is expensive.
You differentiate by leaning into what you already have that nobody down the street can replicate.
Where to start
Leslie’s path points to a place to start: list the non-workspace assets and audiences you already have, the events calendar, the newsletter, the walls, the kitchen you could build, the community you could charge for, and pick the one or two that match your team’s actual strengths.
Then build them as real products, not afterthoughts. Price the events for what they cost to run. Sell the sponsorship inventory instead of giving it away. Treat the community as something worth paying for. Workspace revenue is the floor of this business, not the ceiling, and the operators who understand that are the ones still standing when their market gets crowded.
For the full conversation with Leslie Bailey, including how she structured the Salesforce sublease and why she ultimately chose the community over the real estate, listen to the full episode of the Everything Coworking podcast.
