Contributions at The Broad

Although it has only been three weeks at The Broad, I feel as if I have made many personal contributions to this start up business. Because the leadership team in quite small, I work on many projects that tend to impact the business first hand. The most recent project that I was assigned to work on was a way to expand the business in regards to increasing membership and retaining memberships when it comes time for renewal. The Broad has reached almost 200 memberships in the few months that it has been open, which is really good for a small city like Richmond. Most other co-working spaces for women are in large cities like D.C. or NYC. However, in the upcoming months, Ali wants to continue to increase memberships and asked me to do some research. I focused on altering the base memberships for graduate students in the area, young adults, small businesses who have multiple people using the space, and a supporter membership for founding members who no longer wish to stay a Broad but still support the cause. I researched what pricing options other co-working spaces had and gave my own insight on ways to change the pricing for these individuals. I referenced the benefits of sliding scale pricing which I learned in my microeconomic theory class this past semester. Basically, with sliding scale pricing, you change the fee of a product based on the customer’s ability to pay. For example, a graduate student does not earn as much as a full-time worker, so their membership is slightly cheaper. Additionally, I tailored the membership to fit their needs; rather than a normal 6 month commitment, their membership would only be a semester long commitment. We just finalized the details of each of the different forms of memberships, but hopefully we will see even more increased interest in the near future!

As this past Friday was the beginning of June, I also was able to sit down with Ali and learn from her all of the finances of the business from the past month. It was exciting to see how The Broad already was ahead of their estimated revenue for June on the very first day of the month because they gained a number of memberships that day. With this transparency, I understand the financial side of the business more, which will hopefully help me to discover ways to expand the business even more in the future.