Colorado Springs: Enclave Coop

5376 Tomah Dr, Suite 204, 80918

Enclave doesn’t appear to have any preference on what industries may join. Current members are in technical and non-technical arenas.

Memberships range from $15/day-$100/month with your first day free.

Denver: Green Spaces

1368 26th Street; Denver, CO 80205

Green Spaces has a focus on attracting members who are environmental entrepreneurs but other businesses and freelancers are welcome.

Memberships range from $20/day- $325/mo with your first day free.

Denver: The Hive Cooperative

2401 15th Street Suite 30 Denver, CO 80202

The Hive Coop tends towards programmers but has members from all types of industries like marketing, nutrition and more.

Memberships are offered at $249/mo.

Denver: YesPleaseMore

Denver Pavilions, 500 16th Street Suite 252 Denver, CO

Come one and come all. YesPleaseMore is new on the coworking scene.

There isn’t really a membership here so much as “this is free.” So go enjoy yourselves!  Note that they are in a temporary location and YesPleaseMore changes locations ~3 months.

Denver: ID345

2936 Larimer Street, Denver, CO

I couldn’t find a focus on particular types of members.

Membership as of 2 months ago was $250/mo- $750/mo for companies with up to 4 employees and first day is free.

Boulder: The Candy Shop

1720 15th Street, Boulder

Boasts diverse members from fashion designers to architects and digital service providers.

Memberships are offered at $10/hour | $40/day – $485/mo with a full week free for first timers

Boulder: Carbon Space Co-op

3100 Carbon Place, Suite 102, Boulder CO, 80301

They identify their target members as “Cultural Creatives.”

Memberships range from $199/mo-$399/mo

Louisville: The Vault at DaVinci Institute

511 E South Boulder Road, Louisville, CO 80027

Attracts “Mobile Professionals” in a wide variety of industries from attorneys to professional speakers.

Memberships range from $25/day-$600/mo for a private office

Fort Collins: Cohere, LLC (yours truly)

215 Jefferson Street, Fort Collins, CO 80524

Likes a nice mix of “technically creative” types or those who primarily use the internet to get work done.

Memberships range from $19/day – $249/mo with the first day free

Fort Collins: The Hive

117 East Mountain Avenue Ste 222, Fort Collins, CO 80524

Attracts small business owners in tech fields such as development and SEO.

Membership goes from $19/day-$247/mo

Loveland: Cohere, LLC

556 North Lincoln Avenue, Loveland (Dazbog Coffee Shop)

Join this developing community of coworkers every Tuesday from 11am-5pm

Membership at Cohere-Loveland is FREE until a permanent location is established

Be sure and try out a few coworking locations in your area before deciding on membership. Each coworking space has a different flavor and it’s best to find the right fit for your social and working style so you can have the best possible coworking experience!

Did I miss any coworking spaces or facilities in Colorado?  If so, let me know in the comments!

Independents have control over their bodies.  You decide where you want your body to be at any given time during the day. If your face wants sun shining on it, you can take it to the park at 6am, 10:12am, 1:44pm or dusk.  You can also go to your kid’s soccer game at 3pm on a Wednesday or get them out of school to have an ice cream cone…whenever you want.

Employees get paid for “butt in seat” time.  I don’t care how progressive your new boss claims to be. S/he will want your ass in their ergonomically correct chair from 8am-5pm with a whopping 30 minutes of “free time” during the day. You get to ask your boss if you can be with your child during business hours and hope that they approve it. They’re going to pay you to have control over where your body is, what you do with it and for how long. This reminds me of something….

Independents pick their projects. Think that client is an ass hat? Walk the other way.

Employees get to work with whoever is on your team at any given moment. Have fun working with “I’m not going to do anything and take credit guy” or “I’m going to crunch ice in the cubicle next to yours for 6 out of the 9 hours we’re here every day guy” or “you’re new, we’re blaming you for everything that goes wrong for the next 6 months guy.”

Independents choose where to work. You can set up shop on your couch, in a hammock, at a coworking space, at a coffee shop or in your car while you cruise around Toronto.  You choose.

Employees get whatever used office space the last person vacated. My favorite was getting to clean out the accumulation of dead skin cells and lunch spills off of the keyboard tray. Maybe you’ll get a cubicle or a “workspace” which is just a cubicle with lower walls.

Independents take better care of themselves. An absence of cheap health care will prompt them to do more preventative maintenance and a flexible schedule allows for a mid-day run or yoga session.

Employees go to the doctor a lot and will have to use “sick time” to do it assuming they even have any hours left over after their kids get the chickenpox.

Independents are scrappy in the best sense. Constantly scouting for the next gig, their income streams are diverse and staggered, they are in control and they can’t be laid off.

Employees get a nice, fat direct deposit every two weeks and just when you’re lulled into complacency with a bigger mortgage and a new jet ski, the company will downsize and your one and only source of income will become an unemployment check which will barely cover the new mortgage. “Thanks for your years of loyal service.”

Just think about it. That’s all I’m asking. Imagine both worlds and plant both feet firmly where you want to be.

I woke up on the floor. My head hurt. Mom cleaned the sliding glass door to an invisible sheen again.

Unmet potential.

I could have done more. I could have made a bigger impact. I could have changed things/people/lives for the better. I feel this swelling inside my chest. It’s somewhere between the lump you get right before you cry and the kind of utter exploding happiness you feel when a puppy wriggles in your hand or you watch two baby bunnies squirm.

Possible but not yet actual.

What to do with the utter certainty that you didn’t get to go all the way with your plans, your passion, your inspiration, your life’s work? Were you cut off at the pass? Did someone beat you to it? Did you sabotage yourself?

I had this great job once. A perfect job, really. The kind that hundreds of people wanted and didn’t get. I got it. I planned on working there for 26 years. For 86 days I ran so fast I lapped myself. I ran at full speed while I looked so far in to the future at what *could* be that I didn’t see the obvious barriers right in front of me. Instead of running in to a door, it was shown to me.

Undeveloped excellence.

That’s what they call potential. Undeveloped excellence. I sure had a lot of potential in that job. Bursting with ideas, alive with passion and well regarded by most of my coworkers as “the best [insert job title] person I’ve ever had.” Too bad I didn’t have even a cursory idea how to implement my big ideas in a way that wouldn’t result in my swift termination.

Do it anyway.

So I started a company. My very own squirmy bunny that I could raise up right in the vision of my own potential. Now I’ve got the developed excellence and ALL . I . WANT is to go back to that dream company and set the record straight.

I’d step off their elevator in impossibly cute shoes and say in an impossibly articulate way, “I was great for your company. I had the vision, the passion to carry it out and a whole boatload of employees who STILL WANT what I have to offer. But I’m Cohere’s now so I can’t come back to you. Your sprinkler is on and I can’t run through it.”

And they’ll smile and weep and hug me and offer me some ridiculous compensation to just hear my thoughts.

It’s possible.

Today has been all about link sharing.  Enjoy this snapshot of our irc chat between @_achiang, @rockstar, @sgillies and @coherellc

Additionally, Cohere welcomed many of our old Coherants back into the folds of coworking on Wednesday night.  There’s something about having @reusmith, @shirjoycreative, @kevin_u and @coherellc (the person) in #inappropriate corner that lends itself naturally to science + graphs + relationships.

We got on the topic of “levels of nerdery” and naturally we had to use some XY graphs to represent each of us.  Fossil fuel, mucus production, chocolate intake and keyword density were all found on at least one graph.  Enjoy these pictures of the results.

Source: MIT Human Dynamics Lab via Forbes magazine

Thumbing through the August 30th issue of Forbes today was enlightening. Normally I’d be reading The Oatmeal on a Friday afternoon but inspiration struck as I leafed through what I refer to as the “millionaire’s guide to making me feel poor”.

MIT did a ‘reality mining’ study by placing sensors around subjects’ (employees of a call center) necks.  The sensors recorded who each person talked to and for how long. The results yielded some interesting patterns in human behavior and productivity.

The employees who “talked to MORE coworkers got through calls faster, felt less stressed and had the same approval rating as their peers.”

In an effort to capitalize on these results, the company made a simple shift. They allowed employees to take coffee breaks at the same time rather than staggering them throughout the day.

What happens between employees on a coffee break isn’t just office gossip. They talk about customers *gasp* and those customers’ problems, which creates a very large, very useful database of information that is not stored ANYWHERE else.

“Informally talking out problems and solutions…produced better results than following the employee handbook or obeying mangers’ e-mailed instructions.”

One simple change: allowing employees to talk to one another over the water cooler increased productivity to the tune of $15 million in one year.

You don’t need to fully understand a phenomena to implement it or benefit from it. And that’s why we cowork. Every member of the Cohere Coworking Community has come to realize that “coworking” together offers a set of benefits that are quite impossible to get at home or in the coffee shop. We increase our stores of readily available knowledge of technical tools, social networks and every day problem solving by talking, asking questions and sharing information. Together, we can solve problems more quickly and find answers more easily all day instead of waiting for a mandated coffee break.

The message from this story is simple.  Get more work done faster by leveraging social networks and talking to a wide variety of people every day.

What have you learned today?

Read full Forbe’s story.

Once you have landed on your new (much higher) rate. You can use these tips to break the news to your clients.

Existing Clients:

• Will appreciate a little lead time.  Don’t say, “Hi, I doubled my rate, effective 4 minutes ago.”  Start with your longest term and favorite clients.  Call them up and let them know that your rate will be increasing on X date (about 3 months in the future).
• You can go for broke and do the whole increase all at once on X date BUT
• Consider stepping up the rate over time.  Your long term clients will appreciate being put on an adjusted rate schedule.  This allows them to project their budgets more accurately which will cause any good project manager to hug you. For instance, you might increase your rate by $10/hour every month for the next 3 months or until you hit your target rate.

New Clients:

• You have the benefit of historical ignorance here.  New clients probably don’t know how much you were charging last week so you can implement your new rate ASAP with new clients.
• Consider giving a discount on your normal rate when the project will be very large or long term.  You can afford to cut them a bit of a deal for the sweet security of a long term contract!  A good rule of thumb is to discount your rate by about 10-20% for these situations.
• There’s no harm in trying to get new clients on a retainer deal.  Retainer=they get a special rate for committing to X number of hours per month.  In return, they get your special “retainer rate.”  Again, the security of a long term contract frees you up to work on your craft instead of being out scrounging up new clients.
• Remember that clients on aggressive deadlines get to pay you A LOT more for your expertise.  They need the product of your brain in a hurry so they’ll have to pay for it.  Consider doubling your rate when you get these types of calls.
• If you are writing proposals for clients on the east or west coasts, adjust your price UP by 25-50%.

Let us know how your rate setting/increasing conversations are going!

*language is not for the faint of heart! ;)

Greg helps the group understand rate setting

Greg taught us what a CFO’s role is, why we might want a CFO’s help, how to set and raise rates, adding employees and tips and tricks for securing venture capital!  Yep, all that in just one hour at #frankfriday today.

Today’s financial focus will be on RATES.  How much are you charging and is it enough?

• Never undersell yourself.
• Longer projects can be at a lower rate in return for the security of a long term contract.
• Urgent projects demand a premium rate, sometimes double what you normally charge.  If a company expects you to drop everything for them, it’s going to cost ‘em!
• Measure yourself against your peers.  Your peers are people in the same industry with similar experience.
• What seems like a lot of money to you may not phase a company with deep pockets.
• You should not be charging less than $50-60 per hour.  Yep, you read that right.
• Know what your minimum dollar amount to survive is and work backwards from that number factoring in how many billable hours/month or week you can tolerate as a creative.  (Angel’s note: I’ve noticed that many technically creative people can only produce high quality work for about 5 hours/day. This 5 hours/day is in addition to the more functional parts of freelance like billing, writing proposals and catching up on twitter).
• When setting your rate, factor in taxes, retirement, insurance and the cost of doing business in your field.  What software or equipment do you have to keep up to date?
• Get off on the right foot with a new client by telling them your normal rate and then discounting their project.  ”My normal rate is $120/hour but I can do $100/hour since this is a large project.”

In summary,  you probably aren’t charging enough.  What could you accomplish if you doubled your rates and worked half as many hours?  Marinate on that and tune in later this week for Greg’s advice on how to raise your rates.

Contact Greg (gregory@fuhrmanconsulting [dot] com) if your business needs an interim CFO, business planning or a long-term strategy.