Notes
Eric never thought he’d like coworking spaces. He always made sure he could work from the Airbnb, until a tiny apartment in Buenos Aires pushed him to try one. Three months and four coworking spaces later, the biggest benefit had nothing to do with the desk. The space closed at six, so for the first time in his life he went three months without working past 6 p.m. As a self-described workaholic who used to wander into his home office for a five minute task and look up two hours later, he found that a hard stop meant fewer hours, more time on what matters, and more time with his family in the evenings and on weekends.
Eric walks through his process. He sets a daily budget (a cafe is always the fallback), keeps Mondays clear of meetings so the first Monday in a new city is his go find an office day, and searches Google Maps the weekend before for spaces about a 30 minute walk away, listening to business content on the way in and something unrelated on the way home to leave work mode behind. He screens for regular office hours, reviews, a flex desk, and a call closet for Zoom. He no longer checks pricing online or messages ahead on WhatsApp; he walks in, takes the tour, and asks for the best price for his stay without tracking hours. Then he covers what to expect: bigger spaces can be loud, some have animals, wifi can be choppy (he packs a 12 foot Ethernet cable in his carry-on), and you’ll meet a lot of locals.
The leadership tip of the week is to give an off ramp. When the business changes direction and a role no longer fits the person in it, Eric brings them the new job description and gives them the right of first refusal instead of quietly hiring their replacement. That’s how his freelance UX/UI designer in Ukraine, who once turned down a team role, chose to join full time, and how a salesperson who wasn’t working out moved into project management as director of product.
Key Highlights
- A workspace that closes at six can do more for your schedule than any productivity tool.
- Keep one day clear of meetings so a move, a trip, or a new city doesn’t wreck your week.
- Don’t overthink the search: pick two or three, walk in, and decide.
- Hire slow, fire fast when you have to, but when a role changes, give the person an off ramp first.
- Don’t say no for them, because people may surprise you when the choice is actually theirs.
Key Takeaways
So in the last three months I’ve used four different coworking spaces in South America. And in this episode, I’m going to unpack how I find my perfect temporary office space and what you can expect in a coworking space if you’ve never used one before.
Welcome to the podcast, everyone. My name is Eric Dingler. I am a full time digital nomad entrepreneur traveling around the world with my wife and four kids, and it is good to be back in recording gear. I did take a little bit of a break for the last three months once we left Costa Rica. It just took me a little bit of time to get back into the groove. We hadn’t been fast traveling for a while, you know. We had been parked for quite a long time in Costa Rica for a year, which is a long time for us. And so it just took me a while to get acclimated to being back on the road and moving around so much. But I have things figured out now and ready to be back here on a regular basis with new content. And thanks to those of you that reached out and asked and were inquiring about new episodes. Really appreciate that.
So with that, let’s go ahead and jump into coworking spaces. Now, I never thought I’d be a fan of coworking spaces. In fact, I always thought I would hate them with a passion. So I used to always make sure that when we found an Airbnb, I could work from it. And so I always worked from our Airbnb. But when we were in Buenos Aires, I decided to give a coworking space a try because the apartment we were in was really small. It was really small. And so I thought, well, I’ll give this a try. We’re only here for a couple of weeks. It’s not going to kill me. And so we’ll try it, and oh my gosh, I’ve no plans of going back to not using a coworking space if I can help it. The benefits have been amazing.
And that’s what I got. I don’t have the benefits listed here to talk about. I want to share with you how I find the coworking spaces, what I look for, what I no longer do, and kind of what to expect if you’ve never been in a coworking space. But I have really just been blown away by them, the benefit, I guess, that I’ve really experienced. And so I’ll unpack some of those as I go through the list here. And that is one of the reasons why it’s taken me a couple of months to get into a rhythm where I could be recording, have time to record, and then I’ll get to that in just a few minutes.
All right. So how do I go about finding a coworking space? Well, the first thing is I have a daily budget, so I set a budget. I know what that budget is going to be for the day. And the reason I do that is because if I can’t find a coworking space, I can go to a cafe. And so I know my daily budget and that’s what I spend. I don’t go over that. So that’s the first thing, is you have to budget, you have to make wise choices here.
The second thing I do is I now keep, and this works for me on our travel schedule the way we travel, you may have to adjust this to yourself, but I no longer schedule any meetings on Mondays. Mondays are meeting Fridays. Wednesdays are meeting Fridays as well. But Monday I keep free for a very specific reason, and that is because we generally relocate on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday. It’s generally, not always, but most of the time that’s when we’re relocating as a family. And so I like to keep Monday open because the first Monday we’re in a city, I go find a coworking space. And so I use that first Monday as my time to go find a space, and then the other Mondays I just use to keep up on projects, to get work done. Or maybe we’ll have taken a long weekend or done some exploring or something like that. And if it turns out that when we go to transition, if Monday or Wednesday is the most inexpensive travel day, then we already have Monday and Wednesdays available for that. But normally we don’t have to. Sometimes we do, but we don’t always have to do that. So I keep Mondays clear, and then that is my go find an office day.
Now, when I get to a new city, I used to try to look ahead and do some research, and I found that that just doesn’t work. So what I do is when we’re in our Airbnb, sometime that first weekend that we’re there, I just, you know, early on in the morning, late one evening, getting ready to go to bed, just whatever, I’ll open up Google Maps and I just search for coworking and I just look through the listings. I sort it by distance and I jump down to places that are going to be about a 30 minute walk. I like having a 30 minute walk. Now, this means I walk past a lot of coworking spaces. I’m currently in Santiago, Chile, and I walk a half hour to the coworking space and I see signs for coworking spaces I pass by. Same thing happened in Mendoza, Argentina, in Cordoba, Argentina. And so I found, in Buenos Aires I was in a coworking space really close to the house, but I found that I prefer to be a half hour away. And the reason is, one, it gives me a chance to get steps in. So I’m moving more, and that’s always good. I’ve got a nice half hour walk to get to the office. I can put my earbuds in. I listen to a podcast or an e-book on my way, and I can do the same thing on the way home and recharge. I listen to a non-business thing on the way home, you know, one of the podcasts I enjoy that’s not business related. I listen to business related walking to work. I listen to non-business related walking home. So when I get home, I’ve really transitioned out of work mode. And so I look for something about a 30 minute walk from the Airbnb. Now obviously that can’t happen all the time, you know, but I look for something within that range.
The next thing I do is I look for a coworking space that has the right kind of regular office hours. I’ve been in one that, you know, you could add 24/7 access and things like that, or some are open late, but I have found that those tend to be a lot more expensive, or at least a little bit more expensive. But the real benefit to having a coworking space that closes at six is, for the first time in my life, for three months, I’ve not worked past 6 p.m. And that has been the biggest benefit to me. I am a bit of a workaholic, and when I, by the time I get home and all of my stuff is packed into my backpack, when I get to the house, if I think about something I want to do for work, well, now I just pull out my phone and I put it on my to do list and then I get to it the next day. In the past, my computer was there. My office would just sit up. I would just walk into my office, you know, to go check something. I’d think of something, go, oh, I’m going to go take care of this, it’s going to take me 5 minutes, and 2 hours later, an hour later, you know, I’m still there at my desk because I like working. I enjoy working, I like creating, and I like helping people, and I like creating content and resources for people. I think it brings me great joy. But because of that, I can slip into work mode and it has enabled my workaholism, if you will. Having a coworking space that closes at six, like the one I’m in right now, it’s five as I’m recording this. It’s 5:20 on Friday. I got to be done recording this and out the door because the place closes at six, and it’s amazing. And this is why it’s taken me a few months to get back into a routine where I can record this podcast, because I have significantly cut my work hours down. And it’s been great. It’s been absolutely fantastic. I’m finding that I’m spending more time on the things that matter, less or no time on the things that don’t matter. I’m more engaged with my family in the evening and on the weekends, and this has just been great. It’s been way beyond anything I thought would happen working in a coworking space. So absolutely love it.
All right. So back to the list. The things I look for: distance, hours, reviews. I read through several of the reviews. I love reading reviews. The next thing I look at is, I look to see if they have a flex desk or a shared space. That’s important. Some coworking spaces don’t have that, which I find really weird. Most do. So I just look real quick. And then I do try to look and see if they have a call closet, you know, a privacy space. I don’t like sitting in the shared space having a Zoom meeting. I prefer to have little call closets you can go into. I’m sitting inside one right now recording this. And so I do look for that if I can.
So those are the main things I look for. Now, what I’ve learned no longer to look for. There are two things I have found that I no longer need to look for. Now, before I share those and then what to expect, I want to take just a quick second to let you know that I’ve also, in the last three months, been working on preparing two training videos that very quickly unpack the two main frameworks I use to run my location independent business. One of the frameworks is called OP3, and that is my business model, and I explain in there, this is universal. This isn’t unique to me. This is true of every business out there. And then the business processes, the business systems, the business operating framework, is the core five. And I’ve talked about the core five many other times on this podcast. You know, leadership, lead generation, lead conversion, manage money, and project management. Those are the core five business systems you have to have in place. So I now have these two training videos that walk through these two frameworks. What I have done is I set them up as part of a really quick scorecard and assessment, if you will. If you go to DNEPodcast.com, you just scroll down to the bottom of any of the pages, you’re going to see there where you can quickly click a button to take a Business Freedom Scorecard. To get your Business Freedom Scorecard, it takes about 4 minutes, and the questions are there. They’re very simple and they’re on a scale of 0 to 10. And what it does is it really quickly gives you an overview of where are you in the structure of your business. It evaluates the three in your business model, and then it also evaluates the five business processes, the five pillars, systems, the core five. And so when you’re done with that, you’re going to get the assessment results there, and you’re then going to be able to watch the videos and know particularly which part of the video you want to pay attention to. Because you’re going to see on the scorecard where you are strong right now and what area of your business you really need to shore up. So again, to take the four minute assessment and then get access to those two videos, just go to DNEPodcast.com, scroll down. You’ll see it available at the bottom of all the pages.
All right. Now back to the list here on finding coworking spaces. What I no longer look for, what I no longer do. So, two things. One, I no longer look for the pricing online. I used to. And I have found that there’s oftentimes some discrepancy there. But I have found that if I have walked into the places, I have been getting much better pricing. And not only that, a lot of the websites are not in English, and I speak English. I don’t speak any other language. And Google Translate does okay, Safari Translate does okay, you know, translating the websites into English. But I have found that the websites haven’t been all that helpful because 99% of the time they’re set up for locals. So I don’t do that anymore. I don’t look for pricing. And two, I don’t message anymore. I used to message through WhatsApp and nobody was in a really big hurry. You know, I might message somebody on a Monday morning, and they may take hours to get back to me. And I don’t have that kind of time. So I no longer look for those things I used to. Now what I do is I just go. I generally have picked two or three from my search the night before, like Sunday night I’ll search, and then I just head out. I just leave and I go and show up. And I have found that they’re generally very welcoming. They give me a quick tour. A lot of them will say, hey, why don’t you just work here for the day and try it out. And so sometimes I’ll do that, and then I may go check out another one the next day and another one on Wednesday. You know, that’s kind of cool right there if you want to, because it’s three free days of office space, if you will. Now, you know, not going to do that to take advantage of it. And generally, I don’t have to. I have found that I just go in and I get a really good read, you know. And in Santiago here, I visited, whoo, the second one, I was like, this is it. I’m all in, you know. Don’t overthink it. Yeah, I’m here for three weeks. Now, if I was going to be here for longer, I would definitely want to go try out a couple of others, because there are some things that change in the coworking spaces throughout the week, you know, flow of people, number of people and things like that. So I found I don’t look anymore for pricing. I don’t worry about that. I don’t try to message anymore ahead of time. I just go, and then I just ask them, you know, hey, what’s the best price for three weeks? Now, some of them are like, you know, oh, this is our standard price, you get, you know, 25 hours or 30 hours a week. And I just, I don’t do that. You can if you want to. But I’m like, I just tell them, I don’t want to worry about tracking hours. You know, I’m going to get here between nine and 11 and I’m going to leave at six, you know, when you close. And if it’s more complicated than that, I’m just not going to deal with it. I just, I’m just too lazy, I guess, but I don’t want to deal with it. And so I like finding a place that, you know, like, you’re only open from like nine to six, why are you going to limit me to 25, 30 hours? I just don’t want to deal with that.
Okay. So what to expect if you’ve never worked in a coworking space before. What are some things you can expect?
One, it can be louder than you might be expecting, and it just depends. You know, in Buenos Aires, the coworking space I was in, I’m going to link to the last several coworking spaces I’ve been in, and so I encourage you to check them out. But the coworking space in Buenos Aires I was in, it was awesome. It was big. You know, they had several different, they had like three different buildings in this big garden courtyard. And they had like a cafe and a restaurant. I mean, they had a lot of people there, but because there were a lot of people there, it was kind of noisy. People had no problem sitting out at the desks with their noise canceling headphones on, having Zoom meetings. And so I found it could be a little bit distracting. So I have found that I prefer the smaller coworking spaces that aren’t part of a chain. Now, there are coworking brands, coworking space brands, that have offices in lots of cities around the world. There are a couple of really big ones, and you can sign up for plans where you have a monthly pass and you can use any of their coworking spaces anywhere. And those are always way more expensive than I want to pay. I’ve been working at coworking spaces for around 200, 250 US dollars per month. I mean, that’s pretty good value, in my opinion. And a lot of these places, it’s double that to have one of their passes. And so why would I pay double when I could go find a small little independent coworking space? And that’s what I have found I really prefer. So the bigger ones can be a little bit louder than you might be expecting.
Next, something some of them have: animals. That was surprising. The one in Buenos Aires had a lot of cats. There were cats everywhere. The one in Mendoza, there was a guy that brought his dog every day, and he just was in there walking around. Really well behaved dog. He’d come and he’d lay by your desk for a little bit, and I didn’t really mind that too much. I didn’t like the one with cats, but that’s because I’m allergic to cats. But you know, so some of them have animals. So that’s one thing to expect.
Another thing to expect is it can be a bit choppy, the wifi. And so I travel with a 12 foot Ethernet cable, and this thing has saved my bacon more than once. You know, I found myself using this Ethernet cable quite a few times, and generally the 12 foot, well, it’s never not been long enough. It’s been long enough every single time. Sometimes just long enough, but it’s always been long enough. And so I just, I travel with it. And if you’ve been listening for a while, you know that we travel very light, we travel with carry on luggage only. So if it’s going to make it in my bag, it’s super important to me, because I have no extra space. And my 12 foot Ethernet cable is one of those things that has been really, really important, because I spend a lot of time on Zoom, and without that Ethernet cable, sometimes the connection is just too choppy. So you can expect some choppy wifi, a lot of people on the network and things like that.
All right. The last thing here on what to expect is, too, you can expect to meet some really amazing people. I have been really enjoying meeting people. Lots of locals. I did not expect it to be locals. I thought it’d be a lot more digital nomads, but it’s mostly locals. And so that’s been great. Always getting insider information, recommendations for places to eat. So you have lunch with these people, these are going to be relationships. A lot of them are younger, and there’s been lots of people in every coworking space in South America that have been speaking English, and they want to speak English with you because they want to practice their English. So it’s been a great way to meet people and just have a lot of fun and connect with some really amazing locals.
All right. Now with that, those are some things I have on coworking spaces. I do want to get into this week’s leadership tip of the week. If you’re a new listener to the podcast, every week I wrap up the podcast with a tip, a leadership tip of the week, because leadership changes everything. Your business could not grow beyond the capacity of your ability to lead. And you don’t have to have a team to be a leader. If you’re a company of one, you are leading yourself, and you need to have leadership chops for that. And so, when I was gearing up to start the podcast, I really wanted to just do a leadership podcast. It’s my most favorite topic to talk about. But people aren’t reaching out to me for leadership. People are reaching out to me to run a location independent business, because that’s what they see I do. And so I was getting a lot of questions and I thought, I want to start a podcast for that, but I am going to talk leadership in every single episode, because leadership is the key. I mean, like I said, your business can’t grow beyond your capacity as a leader. But before I share this week’s leadership tip of the week, I want to invite you to please review the podcast, subscribe. And now, if you listen on Spotify, comment on the episode. You can comment on each individual episode on Spotify. And so I’d love to have you leave a comment there and engage with you in the comments.
All right. So this week’s leadership tip of the week is: give an off ramp. Give an off ramp. Now, here’s what I mean by give an off ramp. There are going to be times, especially if you’re building a team, there are going to be times that people on your team are no longer going to be a good fit. All right. Now, sometimes this isn’t people that need to be fired. If somebody is on the team and they got to be fired, then fire them. All right. Like, if suddenly there’s an issue with their character that didn’t come up when you were interviewing, or, you know, sometimes people just have to be fired. Hire slow, fire fast when you have to. But there are some times where the business has grown and somebody hasn’t grown with it, or you’re wanting to change directions in something, and the person that’s there, they weren’t hired, then you don’t think they have the skill set for that. Well, in that case, don’t be a jerk. Give an off ramp for somebody.
We recently did this. We’ve had a UX/UI designer for the last couple of years. Now, when I first hired him, I tried hiring him to be on the team and he didn’t want to do that. He just wanted to be a freelancer, had no desire to be on a team. And that was fine, you know. But we have recently decided that we need our UX/UI designer to be in meetings with clients. We want our UX/UI designer to be in the meetings, be asking questions, be interacting with clients during the design phase of their websites. And so immediately, you know, some people were like, okay, well, we’re going to have to let him go and hire somebody new. So should we post a job first, and when we hire somebody, let him go? And I said, well, no, you know, I want to give him an off ramp. This is one of those situations where we can go to him and say, here’s the new job description. We know when we first hired you, this isn’t what you said you wanted. This isn’t what we hired you for, but this is the direction we’re going. And so I want to give you the right of first refusal. If you want to accept, this is the new job description, and sign off on this and let this be your thing, then, you know, we’ve got some questions for you. And we wanted to talk to him about his availability, because he’s in Ukraine and we need somebody to be available during these USA business hours, because our clients are in the U.S. Will he have availability for that? What were his future goals? Was he still, you know, planning to just be a full time freelancer, and all these things?
So we gave him that as the off ramp. And I expected him, I was 100% ready for him to say, oh, no, this isn’t what I want, this isn’t what I signed up for. And so we were already starting to gear the job description up to post it. We hired all of our team in through Upwork, and so that was what we were going to do. And I was blown away when he came back to me and said, actually, I would love to do this. I would love to do this. I think we can create a better product. I would love to be on your team full time. And that was a complete reversal of where we were when he first started working with us. But he’s like, this is, I want to be a part of this. Your company does cool stuff. I want to be a part of this. And so if we had not given an off ramp, we would have lost somebody that we had spent a long time building a relationship with, somebody that had the skills that we wanted.
And so in leadership, you know, this kind of goes along with, don’t say no for them. That’s another one of my favorite leadership lessons, leadership axioms. But this one is a little bit more specifically for if you think you’re going to have to move somebody on because they’re no longer a fit. There have been times I’ve had team members in the past, and I’ve gone back and I’ve just said, listen, this role isn’t working for you. We did this recently. We had a salesperson, and after a couple months, we just agreed, like, this is not working out very well. We think you’re still a great person to be a part of the team. What would you like to do? And they were like, you know, I’d really like to manage projects. I’d like to work with the clients after they’ve already agreed to become a client. So this person has transitioned into a different role of the director of product, which is our fancy title for project manager, and she’s absolutely crushing it in that role, just crushing it. And so had we not given the off ramp, if we had not gone and said, here’s the direction we need to go, would you like to, or here’s a new job description, that’s two amazing team members I’d have lost out on.
So when it comes down to leadership, give people an off ramp. If you can, give them the chance to say they had the opportunity to say, yeah, now’s the time for me to leave. But also, you know, they may surprise you and say, no, I want to stay on the road, I don’t want to get off yet. And you may just need to help them change lanes a little bit. So that’s this week’s leadership tip of the week.
With that, thanks for listening to the podcast. I look forward to reading your reviews or comments as they’ll be on Spotify. Until next time, chase the big dream, lead with courage, and safe travels.
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