Scaling a new flexible workspace proposition from £0.5m to £32m annualised revenue

The situation

Fora is a premium flexible workspace provider. Brockton Capital had committed more than £300m to developing a pipeline of London locations. WeWork was dominating the category, but we believed there was white space for something more premium, more hospitality-led and ultimately more conducive to productive work.

I joined as the first marketing hire, with one half-full location and the next due to open within months. Sales had been founder-led up to that point, and there was no established go-to-market strategy.

My job was to build the strategy to launch and fill three to four new locations a year, while creating a premium brand that could cut through in a fast-growing, increasingly competitive market.

What I did

I developed the initial go-to-market strategy and presented it to the board at the end of my first quarter, alongside the budget and headcount required to deliver it.

The remit was broad. I led PR, events and content, demand generation, sales enablement and member retention, and built the team and partner network around those areas. One of the early insights was that the proposition became much easier to understand once people experienced the spaces for themselves. That meant bringing the experience to life much more effectively through our digital and sales materials, while also creating more reasons for prospects and local communities to come into the buildings.

As the market became more competitive, lead generation became harder and more expensive. We needed to make what was distinctive about Fora much easier to understand and more tangible before someone ever walked through the door, while ensuring the experience itself consistently reinforced the same proposition.

I saw that we needed to sharpen the proposition and brand, so I initiated the work and ran the agency selection, bringing in an external brand consultant who oversaw the research and brand development. From that, we developed a clearer organising idea for Fora and defined the signature elements of the experience that brought it to life. Those elements then had to be present consistently across the portfolio: in the design and operation of each building, in the way sales teams talked about the spaces on tours, in our marketing and social content, in the events we created and in additional products and experiences for existing members, including around areas such as wellness.

The aim was to make the proposition something customers could immediately understand, see and experience, rather than something that existed only in brand language.

£0.5m to £32m in three and a half years

The result

Revenue grew from £0.5m to £32m in three and a half years. We launched twelve buildings, most reaching 90% occupancy within twelve months, while sustaining headline rates around 15% above the wider market.

We also attracted some exceptional businesses to Fora, including Netflix, Dropbox, Sony and Nike, alongside many high-growth companies that stayed with us as they grew and took more space. We weren’t a temporary solution for them: many set up UK or European HQs and created permanent homes at Fora. That helped create busy, vibrant buildings with a real sense of community, rather than somewhere people simply rented a desk or an office for a few months before moving on.

Events became an important part of that experience. Thousands of people came into Fora buildings for talks, launches, wellness activities and other events, whether or not they were members. Over time, Fora became well known in London as a premium workspace brand with a distinctive experience around it.

When Fora later merged with The Office Group, which had been the much larger and more established business, the Fora brand was retained and ultimately rolled out across the combined portfolio of more than 70 buildings.

What it took

The opportunity was bigger than simply selling better offices. We had to understand what our core customers wanted from the place where they worked beyond a desk and a chair, and where there was an opportunity to give them something they weren’t getting elsewhere, or perhaps didn’t even realise they needed.

For each business, we effectively had two customers to understand: the person signing the contract and paying the bill, and the team they were responsible for, who ultimately experienced the space.

That meant understanding those needs properly and then building a coherent experience around them. The same proposition had to come through in the design of the buildings, the service people received, the events and additional products we created, the way sales teams talked about the spaces on tours, and what customers saw through our marketing and communications.

Doing that while opening three or four new locations a year meant being very clear about what the brand stood for. Each building could have its own character, but the things customers valued about the experience needed to be present consistently across the portfolio and understood by the teams delivering it.

We were part of the growth of flexible workspace, but we were also trying to do something quite different within it: combining workspace, hospitality, design, service, events and wellbeing around the needs of a particular type of customer. The challenge was to keep innovating around those needs while maintaining the quality of the experience as the business scaled.