Having said that, I wouldn’t discourage anyone from giving it a good shot and getting help with the administration as you scale the initiative. Best of luck to Andy and anyone else trying to get CoWorking Belfast going. I thoroughly recommend you pester Paul Campbell (http://www.pabcas.com/) for ideas and feedback on anything you do with it; he knows CoWorking better than anyone else on the island and has worked in a few of the original spots like Citizen Space and set up CoWorking Dublin.

Regis is still moving towards a more open facility with their ‘card’ based service and expanding hot desking – in effect making their office more virtual – the costs are pretty in extremis (as you’d expect).

I think a co-working facility can be run as a non-profit, but there need to be salaried staff.

I was just trying to show that places like Regis make money using a bunch of techniques, many of which would still be applicable to the co-working place.

Where Serviced Offices provide privacy, Co-Working provides company.

I’ll add a picture to the main text.

There is mileage in offering the Virtual office, of managing the phones, fax, storage (virtual as well as physical) but again this makes it into a business that needs a manager.

1) Overheads will be kept to a minimum for all parties
2) The raisons d’etre are very different

However, in looking at the similarities between the models it brings to mind a secondary source of income with pure virtual offices: mailboxes, phone numbers, fax-to-email, etc. that have no or negligible square footage overhead. Working with someone like The Company Shop could then feed leads back and forth.