The Emergence of Co Work Offices

Co-Work Business Plan

The author of this report is offering several parts of a business plan that centers on a co-work location where people can work and network within the greater Reston, Virginia area. The parts of the business plan that will be addressed in this brief report are the competitive environment, the customer demographics, the product positioning map and the ongoing market research plan and budget. A number of competitors that exist for this market will be selected and explained as well. While a co-work business plan may seem a little silly and out of place in the greater business market, there is actually a place for virtual offices and other places scattered around the country where people can work and be productive without committing a lot of money and resources for a full-on office.

Analysis

A competitor for the business being proposed will be suggested first. The name of the business is Croissant and it hails itself as the "newest way to co-work." They are not actually operating in Reston, Virginia itself as they only operate in New York, Boston and the District of Columbia. The author of this report is seizing on the fact that while Washington DC might be a hotbed for this new sort of product, the product availability of co-working offices is not in place in the Virginia area of the greater DC area and thus the author of this report will be able to establish a presence and reputation there before other competitors try to fill the void that will later be identified and plainly obvious to others that identify co-work as a viable business model. Even with the product being fairly new from an acceptance and proliferation standpoint, there are other companies that operate in the Reston area including Make Offices and Intelligent Office (Croissant, 2016) (Make Offices) (Intelligent Office)

In short, the competitive environment analysis is that there are competitors but they are thankfully not man. The bad news is that the author of this report noticed that the companies just searched (the latter two in particular) apparently bought up advertising with Google because they were listed as ads and were at the very top when the search string "cowork Reston" was used. As such, the author of this report will need to move quickly and purposefully as there are already players in the market and they are advertising in a very targeted and specific way. Rather than just creating a website and hoping for the best, they are making fairly slick websites and making sure the people that look for their product on Google see their websites fairly easily. Obviously, the author of this report will have to resort to the same tactics and still find a way to set the author's company part in terms of the presentation of the website and the lucrativeness of the product offering as explained either on the website or in person.

As for customer demographics, there will obviously be no children involved when it comes to this market. There will be men and women and the overall age demographic will probably be twenty-five years and older given that adults younger than that are in college and they generally do not own businesses if they are working in the white collar sector. With that in mind, the target type of business will generally be white collar although the administrative offices and functions of any business could theoretically be the target of this business model. Indeed, people in the manufacturing and other sectors that may not lend themselves to being white collar may need temporary office space in different parts of the country and this could obviously include the Reston, Virginia area. As for gender, there will obviously be men and women. As for education, the education will probably trend higher with people typically having at least an associate's degree, if not more. As for location, the target will obviously be any company, either in Reston permanently or not, that could or would need temporary co-work office space in the Reston area. This would be for people that are at maximum capacity in Reston or that, for whatever reason, need office space in the Reston area but do not currently have the amount or kind of space that they need.