I think this is a fantastic idea. I think it would likely result in the kind of foot traffic and interest that Lodges could genuinely benefit from, fiscally and fraternally.
As a small business owner I would love the opportunity for something like this to host client meetings, collaborative networking events, or even just a place to just clack at the keys in good company.
I think Freemasonry could benefit from a space for Brothers to plan, meet, and lay the cornerstones that reinforce and secure the future of our foundation and our interests as a fraternal organization. Much as our Masonic predecessors did before us.
I believe it could result in additional opportunities that Lodges might benefit from if properly postured. I have some early concepts I’d be happy to collaborate and workshop with any Brothers that are so inclined to discuss making it a reality.
Count me in for any discussions to this end as permitted!
I too have struggled, in the past, to find a good place to meet with my own clients. I try to meet at their location, but sometimes they really want to travel to me. (Gives them a day out of the office I suppose.) When that happens, I then need to find a place, given that I work out of my home. I can't be the only person in a situation like that.
If I had my druthers we would give up our Pool Room and our Board Room for this. No one ever actually plays pool, and the Board Room hasn't been used as such for a dozen years.
We would also give up our Lodge Office. But, I don't think we would be giving up much there, because the co-working space could then become the place where the Secretary, Treasurer, and Building Manager do their work. Just like all the other co-workers. We'd simply need to move our physical records up one floor to storage, but I don't think that would be much of a problem.
My NY Masonic Grand Lodge has a Masonic Temple that is in close walking distance to the NY Capital Building. I was there once to see a daughter receive a Masonic Scholarship to help pay her Tuition & Fees to attend a one year Opera Certificate Program at the Royal College of Music in London. Locality is a great plus.
You are right, I think, location is key to something like this.
The space we've taken over for this in Olympia is in the rattiest old building you can imagine. But, it's really close to the Legislative Building. A fancy building a little further away wouldn't work.
Our lodge here in Bremerton, while downtown, suffers from the same issues a lot of lodges are dealing with. Namely, downtown core rot. Boarded up buildings, crime, and drug use make developing something like this unfeasible. The revitalized parts of town are down towards the waterfront, we're too far away to be usable for office use.
I agree. I don't think that it would work for your building in Bremerton. In addition to the issue you mention, I think that the lack of adequate easy parking would keep people from wanting to work in the building.
We are lucky in Centralia that while we own no parking, there is ample public parking available, without cost.
It has been very slow, but in the years I've lived here, our downtown core has gone from fairly dilapidated to quite vibrant. In the blocks that make up the heart of it anyway. Slowly the old buildings have been remodeled, and new businesses have moved into them. An example of that is the place I mentioned in my recent post about boots. That building was vacant for decades, but now it has the store I mentioned, the watering hole I mentioned, a really high end boutique, newly remodeled apartments above, and they are talking about putting a private club on the floor between the retail and the apartments.
The blocks to the North and the South of the core are still fairly dilapidated, but slowly the good stuff seems to be moving in those directions, so the trend is excellent.
I think that a number of things helped make this happen:
1. A downtown association, seperate from the more broad Chamber of Commerce was formed, and it is super active at promoting the downtown. Our Lodge has been involved with that since the start. I think that is important. When they can show the City that all the businesses, and groups like ours, and the other property owners are all united, it helps to direct needed resources and attention.
2. Three park like public spaces were created in the downtown core. I say park like instead of parks because each of them are controlled by a business. They are private property which ensures that people who cause problems in them can be trespassed from them.
3. Throughout the year regular large events are held in the downtown, such as the annual Ghost Tours and Dark Market that our Lodge has a big role in.
All these things bring people into the downtown, where they spend money in restaurants and shops, making it a vibrant place.
That said. We still have severe problems with homeless people and drug use in the downtown core. And there is no sign of those problems going away. It will take much more political will than we currently have on our City Council to adequately address those problems.
I think this is a great idea. The income would enable many lodges to maintain their buildings better. My only concern is that while your lodge is in a position to take advantage of the spaces. Many lodges have buildings that need far more work to be able to support this idea. I think this idea is worth pursuing, if not a shared workspace, then something similar.
Agreed. My Lodge does have a couple major advantages that not all would have.
Primarily its excellent location right in the center of a thriving downtown, and of course the available space.
It would take the courage to part with the junk that has built up in those two rooms over the last 100 years, but other than shedding a few tears I think we could do that.
1) The available market for shared space is large enough to recover the start up costs (paint, carpet, furniture, etc.). And there will be start up costs. Nobody will be eager to rent if they're not renting a nice place. Be mindful that a lot of short term office needs are fulfilled in coffee shops, hotel lobbies, and even cars, all of which subtract from the available market.
2) Professional and accountable management is a must. Take care of #1 above and you make a good first impression, which gets clients through the door. However, without strong second, third, and nth impressions they'll walk right out. If that were to happen it'll be very hard to remove the stink of unfavorable impressions.
3) Focus. Run it as a business with a single purpose. Don't lose focus by imagining that it might also be a recruiting tool for the Lodge. Maybe it will be, but prospects are supposed to ask first, and then we're supposed to guard the West Gate.
Specific to Centralia Lodge, we would be looking at start-up costs for:
-Paint
-Decor
-Office furniture
-Electrical upgrades (We don't have nearly enough outlets in the space under consideration.)
We are lucky in that the rooms themselves are quite beautiful, and other than the ungodly paint color put on the walls some years ago, in good shape. We are also lucky that the building is already operating as an office building, so we would face no additional red tape, we would just be adding a couple more office spaces to a building that is already 75% offices.
I believe that our largest expense would actually be for desk chairs. In reading about things most important to people who rent in co-working spaces, the three most frequently mentioned things seem to be:
-Super fast and reliable internet. We already have commercial grade.
-Free coffee. Lord knows that we've got plenty of fancy coffee pods at all times.
-Good quality, ergonomic desk chairs. (These we would need, and good ones are expensive.)
The advantages over a coffee shop that I see are a greater degree of quiet, and again, those nice ergonomic chairs. I also think that the cost we might charge would be offset by the cost of purchases that must be made if one wants to hang out working in a cafe for hours on end, and of course the co-working space can be listed as a business expense.
We also would be competing of course against those who simply work at home. But some folks don't like doing that due to loneliness, or don't have a conducive environment for work at home.
Management and administration will certainly be an issue as you point out. Some things, we can take care of ourselves. Other things we would have to hire assistance. Billing, entry, building emergencies, and the like we can handle ourselves. Janitorial for example is something that would be really important, that we would have to hire someone else to handle. But a lot of these things, again just using Janitorial as an example, we wouldn't be starting from scratch, we'd simply be adding another space for the company that does that work for us in the other office areas.
Back in the early days of the co-working boomlet (like 2015ish when WeWork was the unicorn darling of startups) I proposed a similar idea for a big chunk of unused space in our Lodge Building. Based on the response from the older gentlemen you’d have thought I was proposing turning the building into some sort of illicit Japanese Internet cafe.
A building down the street did it and made a huge amount of money over the next three years taking advantage of a lack of space, then several major developers finished build outs of some very nice office space and the demand dropped way off (but still made them money but not much).
In the right market conditions it’s a fantastic idea, but as pointed out below the area conditions have to be right and you have to make it more attractive than the alternatives.
I remember the time when we were all going to end up spending our days in WeWork facilities!
We had a pretty detailed discussion about this at our Temple Board meeting last night. I think that everyone was pretty positive. Three concerns were expressed, one legitimate two nonsense:
The legitimate concern had to do with electrical. We don't have enough outlets, and the electrical in that space hasn't been upgraded since the building was constructed. To do it right, we'll need to pull new Romex from the building's incoming power infrastructure one floor down, and then put in all the new outlets. That won't be cheap, but it won't be a near impossibility either. There is a crawlspace between each floor of the building, so wire won't have to be snaked through walls, it can just come up from that crawlspace.
The nonsense concerns were really nonsense:
-When the women's organizations meet, if we had a lot of people co-working at the same time, there might not be enough restroom capacity. This was said with a straight face despite the fact that there are six easily accessible restrooms!
-When the women's organizations meet, they might encounter a co-working person in the hallway. This also was said with a straight face, as if said co-working people might all be serial killers, and as if the same thing couldn't happen with someone from either the accounting or law firms that already rent office space from us!
I don't think that we are at much risk of new office spaces opening in our downtown core. It's a protected historic district so developers would have a hard time smashing an old building to build a newer and larger one. But, it could of course happen.
Worst case scenario, in my view:
We build it out as a co-working space, and it doesn't work. Not enough people join to make it profitable. If that happens, we simply move the furniture out and are left with two or three offices that we can then rent out at traditional offices. For our little town, we are a prestige location, indeed our largest tenant (a law firm) has been with us for almost 100 years now.
Wonderful idea, of course. Some Lodges have commercial space as part of the building and it really makes long-term ownership tenable in a low-membership era.
Another option are community libraries where there are no public ones. That would be consistent with our old culture of establishing public education in the 1800s.
The commercial spaces in our building do give us a chance to continue ownership of it long term. But, only if we can figure out how to increase our income from it. Our income is good, but it is not adequate. A great deal of that can be laid at the feet of long term mismanagement, but it isn't an impossible thing to overcome. With enough will, and enough smarts.
I'd love to talk about the community library idea further. Do you mean a library where a fee for membership is paid?
The degradation of our own public library is one of the reasons I believe this co-working space could work for my Lodge. We do have a wonderful library building that would be perfect for people to work in, it even includes use of commercial grade office equipment, but it has been completely overrun by homeless people. As it is just a couple blocks from my house, I do use the office equipment there fairly frequently, but there is never a desk or a table not taken up by someone sleeping, passed out, or mumbling to himself. Other than in the Children's area that they do keep clear, but that is not suitable for co-working adults. It's a really sad deal.
I think so. Currently it is just wasted space. And based on my travels through the years, I think that large numbers of our Temples have a fair amount of wasted space.
In our part of the world, commercial kitchens for decentralized food production are at a premium. One of my visions is to get our lodge kitchen certified so we can rent it out to people who have a need for such things
I think that is a really solid idea as well. At least one of the Lodges here has done it, and seems to be successful at it. That particular Lodge is in an extremely rural location, I'd guess that maybe 300 people live in the town itself, and the next nearest city of maybe 10K is about 40 minutes away.
So that just proves in my mind that the particular idea can work in locations one wouldn't think that it could.
We have talked about it in my Lodge here in Centralia, but our kitchen was built in 1923, and other than the addition of new appliances as old ones broke, it's still pretty much 1923. I shudder to think what it would cost to bring it up to commercial standards.
It doesn't help either that our kitchen is massive. That would just add to the costs, and I imagine for a commercial enterprise, serve to make it inefficient.
Not a bad idea...
If we decide to do it, I'll let everyone know how it works out. The pitfalls we discover along the way.
Most Worshipful Brother,
I think this is a fantastic idea. I think it would likely result in the kind of foot traffic and interest that Lodges could genuinely benefit from, fiscally and fraternally.
As a small business owner I would love the opportunity for something like this to host client meetings, collaborative networking events, or even just a place to just clack at the keys in good company.
I think Freemasonry could benefit from a space for Brothers to plan, meet, and lay the cornerstones that reinforce and secure the future of our foundation and our interests as a fraternal organization. Much as our Masonic predecessors did before us.
I believe it could result in additional opportunities that Lodges might benefit from if properly postured. I have some early concepts I’d be happy to collaborate and workshop with any Brothers that are so inclined to discuss making it a reality.
Count me in for any discussions to this end as permitted!
I too have struggled, in the past, to find a good place to meet with my own clients. I try to meet at their location, but sometimes they really want to travel to me. (Gives them a day out of the office I suppose.) When that happens, I then need to find a place, given that I work out of my home. I can't be the only person in a situation like that.
If I had my druthers we would give up our Pool Room and our Board Room for this. No one ever actually plays pool, and the Board Room hasn't been used as such for a dozen years.
We would also give up our Lodge Office. But, I don't think we would be giving up much there, because the co-working space could then become the place where the Secretary, Treasurer, and Building Manager do their work. Just like all the other co-workers. We'd simply need to move our physical records up one floor to storage, but I don't think that would be much of a problem.
That could be a really fun project! It’s also a great opportunity to digitize records for future generations.
Let me know if you need an extra set of hands if that is the Will of the Lodge.
Thank you Brother! That is a very kind offer.
I'll let you know if the Temple Board decides to move forward with it. But, of course, we do move with the speed of Masonry! 😁🐿🤠
I’m happy to. The offer stands as long as I can. Some days that’s a little longer than others… 😂
I look forward to the consensus of the board, regardless of when it is provided.
Good luck and godspeed Brother!
My NY Masonic Grand Lodge has a Masonic Temple that is in close walking distance to the NY Capital Building. I was there once to see a daughter receive a Masonic Scholarship to help pay her Tuition & Fees to attend a one year Opera Certificate Program at the Royal College of Music in London. Locality is a great plus.
You are right, I think, location is key to something like this.
The space we've taken over for this in Olympia is in the rattiest old building you can imagine. But, it's really close to the Legislative Building. A fancy building a little further away wouldn't work.
Our lodge here in Bremerton, while downtown, suffers from the same issues a lot of lodges are dealing with. Namely, downtown core rot. Boarded up buildings, crime, and drug use make developing something like this unfeasible. The revitalized parts of town are down towards the waterfront, we're too far away to be usable for office use.
I agree. I don't think that it would work for your building in Bremerton. In addition to the issue you mention, I think that the lack of adequate easy parking would keep people from wanting to work in the building.
We are lucky in Centralia that while we own no parking, there is ample public parking available, without cost.
It has been very slow, but in the years I've lived here, our downtown core has gone from fairly dilapidated to quite vibrant. In the blocks that make up the heart of it anyway. Slowly the old buildings have been remodeled, and new businesses have moved into them. An example of that is the place I mentioned in my recent post about boots. That building was vacant for decades, but now it has the store I mentioned, the watering hole I mentioned, a really high end boutique, newly remodeled apartments above, and they are talking about putting a private club on the floor between the retail and the apartments.
The blocks to the North and the South of the core are still fairly dilapidated, but slowly the good stuff seems to be moving in those directions, so the trend is excellent.
I think that a number of things helped make this happen:
1. A downtown association, seperate from the more broad Chamber of Commerce was formed, and it is super active at promoting the downtown. Our Lodge has been involved with that since the start. I think that is important. When they can show the City that all the businesses, and groups like ours, and the other property owners are all united, it helps to direct needed resources and attention.
2. Three park like public spaces were created in the downtown core. I say park like instead of parks because each of them are controlled by a business. They are private property which ensures that people who cause problems in them can be trespassed from them.
3. Throughout the year regular large events are held in the downtown, such as the annual Ghost Tours and Dark Market that our Lodge has a big role in.
All these things bring people into the downtown, where they spend money in restaurants and shops, making it a vibrant place.
That said. We still have severe problems with homeless people and drug use in the downtown core. And there is no sign of those problems going away. It will take much more political will than we currently have on our City Council to adequately address those problems.
I think this is a great idea. The income would enable many lodges to maintain their buildings better. My only concern is that while your lodge is in a position to take advantage of the spaces. Many lodges have buildings that need far more work to be able to support this idea. I think this idea is worth pursuing, if not a shared workspace, then something similar.
Agreed. My Lodge does have a couple major advantages that not all would have.
Primarily its excellent location right in the center of a thriving downtown, and of course the available space.
It would take the courage to part with the junk that has built up in those two rooms over the last 100 years, but other than shedding a few tears I think we could do that.
This is a great idea if:
1) The available market for shared space is large enough to recover the start up costs (paint, carpet, furniture, etc.). And there will be start up costs. Nobody will be eager to rent if they're not renting a nice place. Be mindful that a lot of short term office needs are fulfilled in coffee shops, hotel lobbies, and even cars, all of which subtract from the available market.
2) Professional and accountable management is a must. Take care of #1 above and you make a good first impression, which gets clients through the door. However, without strong second, third, and nth impressions they'll walk right out. If that were to happen it'll be very hard to remove the stink of unfavorable impressions.
3) Focus. Run it as a business with a single purpose. Don't lose focus by imagining that it might also be a recruiting tool for the Lodge. Maybe it will be, but prospects are supposed to ask first, and then we're supposed to guard the West Gate.
My two cents ...
Thank you for this practical advice VW.
Specific to Centralia Lodge, we would be looking at start-up costs for:
-Paint
-Decor
-Office furniture
-Electrical upgrades (We don't have nearly enough outlets in the space under consideration.)
We are lucky in that the rooms themselves are quite beautiful, and other than the ungodly paint color put on the walls some years ago, in good shape. We are also lucky that the building is already operating as an office building, so we would face no additional red tape, we would just be adding a couple more office spaces to a building that is already 75% offices.
I believe that our largest expense would actually be for desk chairs. In reading about things most important to people who rent in co-working spaces, the three most frequently mentioned things seem to be:
-Super fast and reliable internet. We already have commercial grade.
-Free coffee. Lord knows that we've got plenty of fancy coffee pods at all times.
-Good quality, ergonomic desk chairs. (These we would need, and good ones are expensive.)
The advantages over a coffee shop that I see are a greater degree of quiet, and again, those nice ergonomic chairs. I also think that the cost we might charge would be offset by the cost of purchases that must be made if one wants to hang out working in a cafe for hours on end, and of course the co-working space can be listed as a business expense.
We also would be competing of course against those who simply work at home. But some folks don't like doing that due to loneliness, or don't have a conducive environment for work at home.
Management and administration will certainly be an issue as you point out. Some things, we can take care of ourselves. Other things we would have to hire assistance. Billing, entry, building emergencies, and the like we can handle ourselves. Janitorial for example is something that would be really important, that we would have to hire someone else to handle. But a lot of these things, again just using Janitorial as an example, we wouldn't be starting from scratch, we'd simply be adding another space for the company that does that work for us in the other office areas.
Back in the early days of the co-working boomlet (like 2015ish when WeWork was the unicorn darling of startups) I proposed a similar idea for a big chunk of unused space in our Lodge Building. Based on the response from the older gentlemen you’d have thought I was proposing turning the building into some sort of illicit Japanese Internet cafe.
A building down the street did it and made a huge amount of money over the next three years taking advantage of a lack of space, then several major developers finished build outs of some very nice office space and the demand dropped way off (but still made them money but not much).
In the right market conditions it’s a fantastic idea, but as pointed out below the area conditions have to be right and you have to make it more attractive than the alternatives.
I remember the time when we were all going to end up spending our days in WeWork facilities!
We had a pretty detailed discussion about this at our Temple Board meeting last night. I think that everyone was pretty positive. Three concerns were expressed, one legitimate two nonsense:
The legitimate concern had to do with electrical. We don't have enough outlets, and the electrical in that space hasn't been upgraded since the building was constructed. To do it right, we'll need to pull new Romex from the building's incoming power infrastructure one floor down, and then put in all the new outlets. That won't be cheap, but it won't be a near impossibility either. There is a crawlspace between each floor of the building, so wire won't have to be snaked through walls, it can just come up from that crawlspace.
The nonsense concerns were really nonsense:
-When the women's organizations meet, if we had a lot of people co-working at the same time, there might not be enough restroom capacity. This was said with a straight face despite the fact that there are six easily accessible restrooms!
-When the women's organizations meet, they might encounter a co-working person in the hallway. This also was said with a straight face, as if said co-working people might all be serial killers, and as if the same thing couldn't happen with someone from either the accounting or law firms that already rent office space from us!
I don't think that we are at much risk of new office spaces opening in our downtown core. It's a protected historic district so developers would have a hard time smashing an old building to build a newer and larger one. But, it could of course happen.
Worst case scenario, in my view:
We build it out as a co-working space, and it doesn't work. Not enough people join to make it profitable. If that happens, we simply move the furniture out and are left with two or three offices that we can then rent out at traditional offices. For our little town, we are a prestige location, indeed our largest tenant (a law firm) has been with us for almost 100 years now.
Wonderful idea, of course. Some Lodges have commercial space as part of the building and it really makes long-term ownership tenable in a low-membership era.
Another option are community libraries where there are no public ones. That would be consistent with our old culture of establishing public education in the 1800s.
The commercial spaces in our building do give us a chance to continue ownership of it long term. But, only if we can figure out how to increase our income from it. Our income is good, but it is not adequate. A great deal of that can be laid at the feet of long term mismanagement, but it isn't an impossible thing to overcome. With enough will, and enough smarts.
I'd love to talk about the community library idea further. Do you mean a library where a fee for membership is paid?
The degradation of our own public library is one of the reasons I believe this co-working space could work for my Lodge. We do have a wonderful library building that would be perfect for people to work in, it even includes use of commercial grade office equipment, but it has been completely overrun by homeless people. As it is just a couple blocks from my house, I do use the office equipment there fairly frequently, but there is never a desk or a table not taken up by someone sleeping, passed out, or mumbling to himself. Other than in the Children's area that they do keep clear, but that is not suitable for co-working adults. It's a really sad deal.
The numbers definitely make sense to have the space utilization
I think so. Currently it is just wasted space. And based on my travels through the years, I think that large numbers of our Temples have a fair amount of wasted space.
I like the way you think!
In our part of the world, commercial kitchens for decentralized food production are at a premium. One of my visions is to get our lodge kitchen certified so we can rent it out to people who have a need for such things
I think that is a really solid idea as well. At least one of the Lodges here has done it, and seems to be successful at it. That particular Lodge is in an extremely rural location, I'd guess that maybe 300 people live in the town itself, and the next nearest city of maybe 10K is about 40 minutes away.
So that just proves in my mind that the particular idea can work in locations one wouldn't think that it could.
We have talked about it in my Lodge here in Centralia, but our kitchen was built in 1923, and other than the addition of new appliances as old ones broke, it's still pretty much 1923. I shudder to think what it would cost to bring it up to commercial standards.
It doesn't help either that our kitchen is massive. That would just add to the costs, and I imagine for a commercial enterprise, serve to make it inefficient.