Nick Clark of Common Desk in Dallas, Texas was interviewed by GCUC Radio host, Tony Bacigalupo.

About Nick Clark

Nick graduated college in 2005 with a real estate background and went straight into the leasing and management of office buildings.  He worked for a company in Dallas that owned, leased, and managed about four million square feet of traditional multi-tenant office buildings.  He worked in real estate for about seven years, all the way through the recession. His passion for the workspace developed within those years.

People spend most of their lives at work in environments that are pretty lousy.  Additionally, during this time, many creatives were losing their jobs and freelancers began to fill up local coffee shops.  It became obvious to Nick that the land that he was leasing was becoming less and less desirable. So, because of his entrepreneurial spirit, he turned to coworking.

Why Coworking

Coworking blended the two things that Nick enjoyed most, community and workspace design, together.  Through his journey, Nick learned the power of bringing the right people into the project.

If you understand what you want your community and brand to look like you are able to have a better focus on the final vision for your space.  It helps you to keep pushing forward and commit to opening it.

Common Desk, as a bootstrap space, made a lot of decisions based off of economics.  They knew they were not going to go into a class A office building and pay super high rates.  This kind of ushered them into more of a hipster-type neighborhood where they could get much lower rates.  The brand you are trying to build should align with who you are as a person or the journey will be much more difficult.

It important to balance your vision and beliefs with the more logistical side of building a space.