Charlotte Kirby left a career in health care recruitment to open Markham's first coworking space, and ten years later, she runs three Village Hive locations across the GTA, spanning suburban Markham, industrial-adjacent North York, and midtown Toronto at Yonge and Eglinton.

Along the way, she has landed a landlord partnership from a cold Google search, survived opening two locations during COVID, and stumbled into a thriving wellness niche with 40 psychotherapists booking on-demand offices, on top of the members she serves across her portfolio of spaces.

In Episode 29, Charlotte shares how she built a profitable multi-location business by staying scrappy, saying yes to the right opportunities, and doubling down on what she has before chasing what's next.

We discuss how:

• Charlotte went from burnt-out hospital administrator and reluctant work-from-homer to coworking operator after a sold-out TEDx event pushed her into a livestream at the Center for Social Innovation, one of Toronto's first coworking spaces, and a for-lease sign on a historic Markham schoolhouse did the rest
• Her North York location started with a cold email from a landlord whose sister had simply Googled coworking operators, and Charlotte won the deal partly by being one of the only people who bothered to reply
• When that North York building sold, the new landlord toured the space, kept her on, and converted her management agreement to a lease, and Charlotte says the business makes more money now without the revenue share
• She tested demand in Aurora with pop-up coworking days at an art gallery and a media company, filling every seat and measuring success on two simple signals: attendance and whether attendees said they would consider a membership
• Her therapist niche found her, growing from two on-demand offices to 40 psychotherapists and a dedicated wellness floor at Yonge and Eglinton, with a WhatsApp group where practitioners refer clients to each other instead of competing
• Her marketing team is mostly herself plus a part-time contractor, her HubSpot sequences have sat dormant for months, and business is still strong, which raises the question of what happens if she ever turns everything on
• AI just might be driving her virtual office boom, including one lead who arrived via Gemini convinced the Hive supplied easels and drop cloths for a paint and sip, which is exactly why operators need to feed AI complete, accurate information
• Three locations serve three completely different demographics, from condo dwellers escaping small spaces to private school parents killing the day, all under one brand with one marketing approach, and her current focus is revenue maximization over expansion

If you want to hear how an independent operator builds a decade-long business one smart yes at a time, this one's for you.

Want to connect with Charlotte Kirby? Find her on LinkedIn and check out The Village Hive.

By the way, you can also:

• Check us out on YouTube
• Download all free tools, templates, and resources from 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast 🛠️

About 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast

Hosted by Kevin Whelan of Everspaces and Taylor Mason of Talemaker, 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast dives deep into marketing tips, tools, insights, and strategies you can actually use to grow your coworking business.

🔔 Hit subscribe to make sure you don't miss an episode.

About Lucid Private Offices

The Village Hive is a network of coworking and community spaces across the Greater Toronto Area, with locations in Markham, North York, and Midtown Toronto at Yonge and Eglinton, offering private offices, coworking memberships, meeting rooms, virtual office services, and on-demand offices.

Lucid Private Offices CEO Flip Howard has been in the flexible office business since 2001. In that time, he has been through a recession, a pandemic, and two full rebrands, and has come out the other side running one of the most premium brands in the industry.

Today, he has 29 locations open with (at least) two more on the way, and Flip has done the branding, positioning, and marketing math.

In Episode 28, Flip dives into the evolution of his business, where his priorities are, and what he sees for the future.

We discuss how:

• Lucid started in 2001 as Meridian Business Centers, a Regus copycat that competed mostly on price, before two rebrands carried it through Work Suites and upmarket into the modern, premium Lucid Private Offices brand it is today
• Flip built Lucid in the gap between Regus and WeWork on purpose, and his test for that in-between position is whether you land on the best of both or the worst of both, because nobody wants to buy a convertible minivan
• Lucid's motto is "work is good, where you do it matters," and Flip makes the case with a simple comparison: people happily pay thousands to drink a cold beer by a pool in Fiji and would not pay thirty bucks to drink the same beer at a roadside motel, because the surroundings are the product
• He treats marketing as pure ROI and calls the phrase "marketing budget" a stupid sentence, since you would never stop buying customers who cost two dollars and bring in a hundred
• He recently cut his Google ad spend roughly in half with almost no drop in lead flow, and he is reinvesting the savings into SEO, AI visibility, referrals, and broker outreach to wean the business off its dependence on Google
• After a year and a half of pouring money into sales training that barely moved his close rate, Flip realized the bigger lever was getting more people in the door, since lifting the conversion rate had done so little
• His new locations run 25,000 square feet and up by design, because small spaces fill faster, but large ones are where the profit lives, and he thinks the industry confuses occupancy with profitability
• He breaks every coworking location into four legs of a stool, real estate, build-out, sales and marketing, and customer service, and the first two are the ones you can never fix once you have signed the lease

If you want to hear from one of the coworking industry's pioneers, this one's for you.

Want to connect with Flip Howard? Find him on LinkedIn and check out Lucid Private Offices.

By the way, you can also:

• Check us out on YouTube
• Download all free tools, templates, and resources from 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast 🛠️

About 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast

Hosted by Kevin Whelan of Everspaces and Taylor Mason of Talemaker, 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast dives deep into marketing tips, tools, insights, and strategies you can actually use to grow your coworking business.

🔔 Hit subscribe to make sure you don't miss an episode.

About Lucid Private Offices

Lucid Private Offices provides flexible workspace for teams and individuals, along with meeting rooms and virtual offices. They operate locations across Austin, Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, and Nashville.

Justin Moran is the founder of WorkspaceMA, a five-location coworking operation just outside Boston with around 200 private offices. He's 51, has a sales background, and has never written a line of code. In the last four months, Claude tells him he's written close to 200,000 lines of it.

Justin joins this episode to share a recap and follow-up of our AI panel at GWA Immersive in Toronto. We get practical about how we're putting AI to work across marketing and operations, and where any operator should start.

In this episode, we cover what's possible and what we're seeing making an impact, including:

• How Justin built custom internal tools, including a proposal builder, an attorney-approved license agreement generator, and an infrastructure issue logger, without writing any code
• The "tell Claude to write the prompt" approach that lets non-technical operators build real tools by voice
• How Justin rebuilt his five-year-old website in a single rainy weekend in Claude Design
• How Kevin designed and coded a fully branded newsletter for Shift Workspaces in Claude Design, then dropped it straight into Mailchimp
• Taylor's repeatable system for turning one idea into blog, email, LinkedIn, and Instagram content while keeping brand voice consistent and avoiding AI slop

If you run a coworking or flexible office business and you've wondered how to put AI to work in a meaningful way, this conversation is worth your time.

Want to connect with Justin Moran? Find him on LinkedIn and check out WorkspaceMA.

By the way, you can also:

• Check us out on YouTube
• Download all free tools, templates, and resources from 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast 🛠️

About 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast

Hosted by Kevin Whelan of Everspaces and Taylor Mason of Talemaker, 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast dives deep into marketing tips, tools, insights, and strategies you can actually use to grow your coworking business.

🔔 Hit subscribe to make sure you don't miss an episode.