This is a blogpost about Mindpark itself – about how we want to build the best co-working community for single-, small-businesses and startups. By sharing what we do and have done we hope to reach even further, inspire other and also get feedback that will help us learn and do better.
One of the principles we value a lot is transparency. We therefore thought it could be interesting to tell some numbers from the past 12 month, as well as some insight and lessons learned from running the professional business community that is Mindpark. The figures are not entirely accurate since we do not yet have data for July and August, but it gives an idea of the financial situation. The numbers are from sept 2013 – june 2014.
The coworking space:
- We currently host 80 different companies and 130 people
- We had SEK 3 000 000 in rental income
- Most common type of office is a small office for 1-2 people
Of our total area of almost 3 000 sqm, roughly 2/3 is dedicated to the co-working space. All offices except one is currently leased. You can see available office spaces here (marked in green).
During the year we have set four key areas that are important for our co-working space:
- Ask for help when you have a question or problem
- Help others in the community
- Encourage transparency and proliferation of information
- Gather the coworkers around food and other cozy occasions
We will work around these four areas even more next year to hopefully get an even stronger and more coherent community.
Our conference business:
Besides the co-working community we have 9 conference rooms here at Mindpark. These are used for both internal as well as external meeting: mostly from companies in the region who are looking for a good place to have a meeting, or conferences that want to use our facilities for special occasions.
- Total revenue on conferences SEK 1 800 000
- Of those are food and beverages SEK 550 000
- Occupancy rate was 40%
- Most common external conference guest was: IKEA
- Biggest externa conference: Procordia / Orkla Foods innovation day
We have optimised and improved the conference section quite a lot the las year – both for the users of the conference rooms, but mainly behind the scenes, saving workload and time for the employees. We changed where we serve coffee and refreshments, now it’s easier to serve for the staff and that saves a lot of time and gives guests a better experience. We expanded and improved the wifi – setup, which enables swifter login and less troubleshooting by the staff. The digital display networks in the building was changed to be updated automatically with booking system instead of manually by staff. And our website now shows our prices better, to give an easier overview for our customers.
Events:
On the event side a lot has happened under 2013/2014. The CreativeLab Hackerspace community was formed and hosted over 100 events! And all that, on a budget of less then SEK 70 000. The events includes a wide mixture within areas such as tech, management and art/design. The THINK incubator hosted multiple events as well, focusing on either external inspiration events, or dedicated workshops for the Startups that are members of the incubator. We also hosted the “It’s all about location” – conference together with Media Evolution and Urban Inspiration on Helsingborgs Arena and we hosted After Warhol together with Boost Hbg, Helsingborg Stad and THINK.
Apart from that we have also expanded how we list events on the web, and just recently finished a thorough communication canvas, in order to better and more coherently spread awareness about our events.
The café:
- Total revenue – SEK 850 000
- Coffee sold: approximately 20 000 cups
- Lunches sold: approximately 4 000 soups served
On the ground floor in the café the last year actually did not bring too much change, compared to the rest of Mindpark. This is simply a focus question – the café has not needed the focus, we have chosen to develop the conference and co-working sections instead during this time-period. But some things have happened, the selection of food we serve has changed and the number of lunch-guests have increased during the year. We also introduced sushi and salads, which have been a good complement to the soups, sandwiches and bagels. We will now in august also change our charging solution to iZettle only and stop taking cash. This will help us save a lot of time for the staff, no more counting the daily cash! And most of our guests already pay with credit card so we hope this will not affect the costumer service to much. We think it is time to move out of a cash relying society, and we like to do things a little ahead of time. We will see how it works out!
Insights into running a co-working, event and café space
We hope this provides some insights into how we work and what we do. We have the community to thank for a lot, as well as the City of Helsingborg, which is very supportive to what we aim to do here.
We are ourselves quite amazed by all we have managed to do and what has happened here during the last year. Oh, and of course, we also changed name to Mindpark from SHIP during this time. We still have 2 months to go (on our financial year, which ends the last of august) but it has been an eventful year and now it’s time for us to sit down and plan the year 2014/2015!
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