4
3
1164
Idea Overview:
A platform to enable businesses to manage and monetise excess office space. This, in turn, creates opportunities for individuals, small companies and large businesses to access immediately available office space, hot desks, and meeting rooms on an ad hoc basis.
Who might use it/where it might be used?:
The idea offers utility to both businesses and individuals. In particular, in and around city hubs, and it can traverse geographic boundaries and be used anywhere in the world. If you own or run an office and have a spare desk, you can monetise that. Empty meeting rooms can turn into revenue streams. Small businesses would benefit by maximising yield on their floor rents, and large businesses who are moving to more flexible working models and are still tied in to long leases, can also benefit greatly.
From a consumer perspective, at present if you have a day of meetings in town, and a gap between 2 meetings, you are forced to check countless different platforms to find somewhere to reside, and even then you would have had to book in advance. Finding a desk to work on, on the day, last minute, by the hour is of tremendous convenience and has never been available, until now.
The Market (B2B, B2C or Both):
Both
Sector the idea belongs to:
Business services
Why you think there is a demand for your idea?:
The global pandemic has had a tremendous impact on the office working landscape. The ONS confirmed that home working has significantly grown in 2020, reaching 46.6% of all people in employment, against 5.1% in 2019. This shift in remote working is likely to become an ongoing trend with Deloitte reporting that a full 61% of desk based workers would prefer to work from home more often.
Coupled with the demand for more work from home is an appetite from businesses to cut costs on surplus office rents. A survey of 278 executives by McKinsey in August 2020 found that on average, they planned to reduce office space by 30 percent. This leaves many businesses with longer leases faced with redundant office space for a number of years, and this is the problem we are trying to solve.
Who would be the ideal customers?:
Our ideal customers are twofold. Firstly, it's the businesses in city centres. Those who have spare space, or spare meeting rooms. Any business would fit the business, as would hotels who have conference and meeting rooms that they wish to monetise. Large businesses may be able to offer sections of their offices or entire floors, for short/long term hire, whereas smaller business may be able to offer a single desk or bank of desks.
From a B2C perspective, our customers will be primarily office workers who are on the go, in between meetings and not near their own offices.
We can see subscription to our platform becoming a part of a company HR perk for their staff.
What ideas do you have to reach these customers?:
Our customers are twofold - B2B in the shape of businesses who own office space, and B2C as professionals looking for hot desks, office space and meeting rooms. These two audiences effectively represent supply and demand, with B2B being supply and B2C being demand. As a marketing professional, I would lean on a number of channels for marketing to niche and specific audiences. As the platform builds however, we may focus on a specific smaller area to build personal relationships with venues in order to initiate momentum.
How far have you developed this idea?:
We have yet to speak to any potential partners or mentors. We have built a pitch deck and conducted some desk based research, and have also built some user flow diagrams to bring to life the functionality of the app.
What – if any – feedback have you had for this idea so far?:
Positive feedback from peers
What supporting material – if any - would you like to add to your proposal?:
We have a pitch deck that can be shared (no option to upload on ideasnest)
3 comments to “Remote Office”
You can leave a reply or Trackback this post.
Simon Krystman - April 22, 2021 at 6:11 am
Are there any platforms in the US doing something similar? From what I can see there are a lot of organisations offering office space, analogous to estate agents but no rightmove type of platform that these orgs can list on. You uploaded your pitch deck to supporting files.
Mark Cardwell - April 27, 2021 at 5:03 pm
Interesting idea. If there’s spare space in offices because people prefer to work from home, do you think that might also reduce the demand for workspace rental? If you were an established provider of shared space (Regus, Spaces, WeWork, etc) how would you respond?
Jasvir Zonobi - February 1, 2022 at 8:32 pm
would be even more interesting when packaged as blockchain technology. I’d love to explore it with the ideator!