How To Choose a Coworking Space as a Digital Nomad

So in the last three months I’ve used four different co-working spaces in South America. And in this episode, I’m going to unpack how I find my perfect temporary office space and what you can expect in a co-working space if you’ve never used one before. Welcome to the podcast, everyone. My name is Eric Dingler. I am a full time digital nomad entrepreneur traveling around the world with my wife and four kids, and it is good to be back in recording gear. I did take a little bit of a break for the last three months once we left Costa Rica. It just took me a little bit of time to get back into the groove. We hadn’t been fast traveling for a while, you know. We had been parked for quite a long time in Costa Rica for a year, which is a long time for us. And so it just taken me a while to get acclimated to being back on the road and moving around so much. But I have things figured out now and ready to be back here on a regular basis with new content. And thanks to those of you that reached out and asked and was inquiring about new episodes. Really appreciate that. So with that, let’s go ahead and jump into co-working spaces now. I never thought I’d be a fan of co-working spaces. In fact, I always thought I would hate them with a passion. So I used to always make sure that when we found an Airbnb that I could work from it. And so I always worked from our Airbnb and be B But when we were in Buenos Aires, I decided to give a co-working space a try because the apartment we were in was really small. It was really small. And so I thought, Well, I’ll give this a try. We’re only here for a couple of weeks. It’s not going to kill me. And so we’ll try it and oh my gosh, I’ve no plans to going back to not using a co-working space if I can help it. The benefits have been amazing. And that’s what I got. I don’t have the benefits listed here to talk about. I want to talk and I want to share with you how I find the co-working spaces, but what I look for, what I no longer do, and kind of what to expect if you’ve never been in a corporate space. But I have really just been blown away by the them, the benefit, I guess, that I’ve really experienced. And so I’ll unpack some of those as I go through the list here. And that is one of the reasons why it’s taken me a couple of months to get into a rhythm where I could be recording have time to record, and then I’ll get to that in just a few minutes. All right. So how do I go about finding a co-working space? Well, the first thing is I have a daily budget, so I set a budget. I know what that budget is going to be for the day. And the reason I do that is because if I can’t find a co-working space, I can go to a café. And so I know my daily budget and that’s what I spend. I don’t I don’t go over that. So that’s the first thing is, is you have to budget, you have to have a you have to make wise choices here. The second thing I do is I now keep that this works for me on our travel schedule the way we travel. You may have to adjust this to yourself, but I no longer schedule any money, any meetings on Mondays. Mondays are meeting Fridays. Wednesdays are meeting Fridays as well. But Monday I keep free for a very specific reason and that is because we generally move relocate on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday is again Jen or not always. But but most of the time that’s when we’re relocating as a family. And so I like to keep Monday open because the first Monday we’re in a city, I go find a co-working space. And so I use that first Monday as my time to go find a space and then the other Mondays I just use it to keep up on projects to get work done. Or maybe we’ll tap. We may have taken a long weekend or done some exploring or something like that. And if it turns out that when we go to transition, if Monday or Wednesday is it is the most inexpensive travel day, then we already have Monday and Wednesdays available for that But normally we don’t have to. Sometimes we do, but we don’t always have to do that. So I keep Mondays clear and then that is my go find an office day. Now when I get to a new city, I used to try to look ahead and do some research, and I found that that just doesn’t work. So what I do is when we’re in our Airbnb, sometime that first weekend that we’re there, I just, you know, early on, you know, the morning, late one evening, you know, getting ready, go to bed, just whatever. I’ll open up Google Maps and I just search for co-working and I just look through the listings. I sort it by distance and I jump down to places that are going to be about a 30 minute walk. I like having a 30 minute walk. Now, this means I walk past a lot of co-working spaces. I’m currently in Santiago, Chile, and I walk a half hour to the co-working space and I see signs for co-working spaces I pass by. Same thing happened in Mendoza, Argentina, in Cordoba, Argentina. And so I found I in Buenos Aires. I was in a co-working space really close to the house. But I, I found that I prefer to be a half hour away. And the reason is, one, it gives me a chance to get steps in. So I’m moving more. And that’s always good. I’ve got a nice half hour walk too, to get to the office. I can put my earbuds in. I listen to a podcast or an e-book on my way, and I could do the same thing on the way home and recharge. I listen to a non-business thing on the way home, you know? One of the podcasts I enjoy that’s not business related. I listen to business related walking to work. I listen to non-business related walking home. So when I get home, I’ve really transitioned out of work mode. And so I look for something about a 30 minute walk from the ah, Airbnb. Now obviously I can’t that, that can’t happen all the time, you know, but I look for something within that range. The next thing I do is I look for a co-working space that has right kind of regular office hours. I’ve been in one that, you know, you could you could add 24 seven access and things like that or was you know, some are open relate, but I have found that those tend to be a lot more expensive or at least a little bit more expensive. But the real benefit to having a co-working space that closes at six is for the first time in my life, for three months, I’ve not worked past 6 p.m. and that is been the biggest benefit to me. I am a bit of a workaholic and but when I, by the time I get home and all of my stuff is packed into my backpack, when I get to the the house, if I think about something I want to do for work, well, now I just pull out my phone and I put it on my to do list and then I get to it the next day. In the past, my computer was there. My office would just sit up. I would just walk into my office, you know, to go check something, you know? You know, I’d think something go, Oh, I’m going to go take care of this or looking. It’s going to take me 5 minutes and 2 hours later, an hour later, you know, I’m still there at my desk because I like working. I enjoy working, I like creating and I like helping people and I like creating content resources for people I think brings me great, great joy. But because of that, I can slip into work mode and I it it is enabled my workaholism, if you will, having a co-working space that closes at six like the one I’m in right now, it’s five, I’m recording this. It’s 520 on Friday. I got to be done recording this and out the door because the place closes at six and it’s amazing. And this is why it’s taken me a few months to get back into a routine where I can record this podcast because I have significantly cut my work hours down. And it’s been great. It’s been absolutely fantastic. I’m finding that I’m spending more time on the things that matter less time and less or no time on the things that don’t matter. I’m more engaged with my family in the evening and on the weekends, and this has just been great. It’s been way beyond anything I thought would happen working in a co-working space. So absolutely love it. All right. So back to the list. The things I look for, distance, it’s hours, it’s reviews. I read through several of the reviews. I love listening to reviews. The next thing I look at is I’m look. I look to see if they have a flex desk or a shared space. That’s important. Some co-working spaces don’t have that, which I find really weird. Most do. So I just look real quick. And then I do try to look and see if they have a call closet, you know, private privacy space. I don’t like like I don’t like sitting in the shared space having a zoom meeting. I prefer to have little call clauses you can go into. I’m sitting inside one. Right now recording this. And so I do look for that if I can. So those are the main things I look for now what I’ve learned no longer to look for. There are two things I have found that I no longer need to look for. Now, before I share those and then what to expect, I want to take just a quick sec a second to let you know that I’ve also in the last three months is I’ve been working on preparing to training videos that very quickly unpack the two main frameworks I use to run my location independent business. One of the frameworks is called OPI three, and that is my business model and it’s I explain in there, this is universal. This isn’t unique to me. This is true of every business out there. And then the business processes are business systems. Business operating framework is the core five. And I talked about the core five of many of other times on this podcast. You know, leadership, lead generation, lead conversion, collective manage money and project management. Those are the core five business systems you have to have in place. So I now have these two training videos that walk through these two frameworks and target them. What I have done is I set them up as part of a really quick scorecard and assessment, if you will. If you go to Disney podcast dot com, you just scroll down to the bottom of any of the pages you’re going to see there where you can quickly click a button to take a Business Freedom Scorecard to get your Business Freedom Scorecard. It takes about 4 minutes, and the questions are there. They’re very simple and they’re on a scale of 0 to 10. And what it does is it really quick, quickly gives you a overview of where are you in the structure of your business. It evaluates the three and your business model, and then it also evaluates the five business processes, the five pillars assistance, the core five. And so when you’re done with that, you’re going to get the assessment results there and you’re then going to be able to watch the videos and know particularly which part of the video you want to pay attention to. Because you’re going to see on the scorecard where you are strong right now and what area of your business you really need to shore up. So again, to take the four minute assessment and then get access to those two videos, just go to D and E podcasts dot com, scroll down. You’ll see it available at the bottom of all the pages. All right. Now back to the list here on finding co-working spaces. What I no longer look for when I no longer do so, two things. One, I no longer look for the pricing online. I used to. And I have found that there’s oftentimes some discrepancy there. But I have found that if I have walked into the places, I have been getting much better pricing. And and not only that, a lot of the websites are in English and I speak English. I don’t speak any other language. And Google Translate does okay, Safari Translate does okay. You know, translating the websites into English. But I have found that the websites haven’t been all that helpful because 99% of the time they’re set up for locals. So I don’t I don’t do that anymore. I don’t look for pricing and I don’t message I used to message through WhatsApp and nobody was in a really big hurry. You know, I might message somebody on a monday night or Monday, I’m sorry, Monday morning. And they may you know, they may take hours to get back to me. And I don’t have that kind of time, so I no longer look for those things I used to. Now what I do is I just go I generally have pick two or three from my search the night before, like Sunday night I’ll search and then I just I just head out, I just leave and I go and show up. And I have found that they’re generally very welcoming. They give me a quick tour. A lot of them will say, hey, you can just why don’t you work here for the day and try it out? And so sometimes I’ll do that and then I may go check out another one the next day and another one on Wednesday. You know, that’s kind of cool right there if you want to, because it’s it’s it’s three free days of office space, if you will. Now, you know, not going to do that to take advantage of it. And generally, I don’t have to I’ve I have found that I just go in the I get a really good read, you know, and Santiago here I visited. Whoo! And the second one, I was like, This is it. I’m all you know. And don’t overthink it. Yeah, I’m here for three weeks now. If I was going to be here for longer, I would definitely want to go try out a couple of others because there are some things that change in the co-working spaces throughout the week and you know, flow of people, number of people and things like that. So I found I don’t look anymore for pricing. I don’t worry about that. I don’t try to message you anymore ahead of time. I just go and then I just ask them, you know, hey, what’s the best price for three weeks now? Some of them are like, you know, oh, this our standard price. You know, you get, you know, 25 hours or 30 hours a week. And I just I don’t do that. You can if you want to. But I’m like, I just tell them, like, I don’t want to worry about tracking hours. You know, I’m going to get here between nine and 11 and I’m going to leave at six, you know, when you close. And if it if it’s more complicated than that, I’m just not going to deal with it. I just have I’m just too lazy, I guess, but I don’t want to deal with it. And so I like finding a place that they’re, you know, like you’re only open from like nine. The six. Why are you going to limit me to 25, 30 hours? I just don’t want to deal with that. Okay. So what to expect if you’ve never worked in a coworking space before, what are some things you can expect? One, it can be louder than you might be expecting, and it just depends. You know, in Buenos Aries, the co-working space I was in, I’m going to link to the last several co-working spaces I’ve been in, and so I encourage you to check them out. But the Korean space in Buenos Aires I was in, it was it was awesome. It was big. You know, there were they had several different they had like like three different buildings in this big garden courtyard. And they had like a cafe and a restaurant. I mean, they had a lot of people there, but because there were a lot of people there, it was kind of noisy. People had no problem sitting out at the desks with their noise, canceling headphones on, having Zoom meetings. And so I found it could be a little bit distracting. I’m on those. So I have found that I prefer the smaller co-working spaces that aren’t part of. Now there you can sign up for service and you there there are co-working brands, co-working spaces, brands that have offices in in lots of cities around the world. There are a couple of really big ones and you can sign up for plans where you have a monthly pass and you can use any of their co-working spaces anywhere And those are always way more expensive than I want to pay. I’ve been working at co-working spaces for around 200 250 U.S. dollars per month. I mean, that’s pretty sick and yes, producing a good, in my opinion ask me. And so a lot of these places it’s double that to have one of their passes. And so why would why would I pay double when I could go find a small little independent coworking space? And that’s what I have found. I really prefer. So the the bigger ones can be a little bit louder than you might be expecting. Next, something some of them have animals. That was surprising. The one in Buenos Aires had a lot of cats. There are cats everywhere. The one in Mendoza, there was a guy that brought his dog every day and so she thought he just was in there. Walking around was really well behaved dog. He come and he lay by your desk for a little bit and I didn’t really mind that too much. I didn’t like the one with cats, but that’s because I’m allergic to cats. But you know, it is was so so some of them have animals. So it’s one thing to expect. Another thing to expect is it can be a bit a choppy wi fi. And so I travel with a 12 foot Ethernet cable and this thing has saved my bacon more than once. You know, I found myself using this Ethernet cable quite a few times and generally 12 foot. Well, it’s never not been long enough. It’s been long enough every single time, sometimes just long enough, but it’s always been long enough. And so I just I travel with and if you’ve been listening for a while, you know that we travel very late, we travel with carry on luggage only. So if it’s going to make it in my bag, like it’s super important to me because I have no extra space. And my 12 foot Ethernet cable is one of those things that has been really, really important because I spend a lot of time on Zoom and without that Ethernet cable, sometimes the connection is just too choppy So you can expect some choppy Wi-Fi and those a lot of people on the the network and things like that. All right. The last thing here is on what to expect. Is too. You can expect to meet some really amazing people. I have been really enjoying meeting people. Lots of locals. It’s. It’s. I did not expect it to be locals. I thought it’d be a lot more digital nomads, but it’s mostly locals. And so that’s been great. Always getting insider information, recommendations for places to eat. So if you know someone, you have lunch with these people, these are going to relationships. A lot of them are younger and so a lot of them, there’s been lots of people in every co-working space in South America that have been speaking English and they want to speak English with you because they want to practice their English So it’s been great, great way to meet people and just have a lot of fun and connect with some really amazing locals. All right. Now with that, those are some things I have on coaches spaces. I do want to get into this week’s leadership tip of the week if you’re a new listener to the podcast. Every week I wrap up the podcast with a tip, a leadership tip of the week, because leadership changes everything. You’re you’re your business could not grow beyond the capacity of your ability to lead, be in. And you don’t have to have a team to be a leader. If you’re a company of one, you are leading yourself and you need to have leadership chops for that. And so I really when I was when I was gearing up to start the podcast, I really wanted to just do a leadership podcast. It’s it’s my favorite, most favorite topic to talk about, but people aren’t reaching out to me for leadership. People are reaching out to me to run a location, independent business, because that’s what they see I do. And so I was getting a lot of questions and I thought, I want to start a podcast for that, but I am going to talk leadership in every single episode because leadership is the key. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s like I said, your business can’t grow beyond your capacity as a leader. But before I share this week’s leadership tip of the week, I want to invite you to please review the podcast, subscribe. And now if you listen on Spotify, comment on the episode, you can comment on each individual episode on Spotify. And so I’d love to have you leave a comment there and engage with you in the comments. All right. So this week’s leadership tip of the week is given an off ramp. Given off ramp. Now, here’s what I mean by give and off ramp. There are going to be times, especially if you’re building a team. There are going to be times that people on your team are no longer going to be a good fit. All right. Now, sometimes this isn’t this is it. People that need to be fired, if somebody is on the team and they got to be fired, then fire them. All right. Like, if they’re if they’re, you know, suddenly there’s an issue with their character that didn’t come up when you were interviewing or, you know, there’s just, you know, sometimes people just have to be fired, hire slow, fired fast when you have to. But there are some times where the business is grown and somebody hasn’t grown with it or you’re wanting to change directions and something. And the person that’s there, they weren’t they weren’t hired. Then you don’t think they have the skill set for that? Well, in that case, don’t be a jerk. Give it given. Give an off ramp for somebody. We’ve recently did this. We’ve had a UX UI designer for the last couple of years. The last couple of years. Now. When I first hired in, I tried hiring to be on the team and he didn’t want to do that. He just wanted to be a freelancer, did had no desire to be on a team. And that was fine, you know. But we have recently decided that we need our UX UI designer to be in meetings with clients. We want our UX UI designer to be in the meetings, be asking questions, be interacting with clients during the design phase of their websites. And so immediately, you know, some some people were like, okay, well, you know, we’re going to have to let him go and hire somebody new. So, you know, should we post a job first? And when we hire somebody, let it go? And I said, Well, no, you know, I want to give him an offer. Yeah, I will. I can. This is one of those situations where we can go to him and say, here’s the new job description. We know when we first hired you. This isn’t what you said you wanted. This isn’t what we hired you for, but this is the direction we’re going. And so but I want to give you the right of first refusal. If you want to accept this is the new job description and sign off on this and let this be your thing, then, you know, we want we we’ve got some questions for you, you know, and we wanted to talk to him about his availability because he’s in the Ukraine and we need somebody to be available during this USA business hours because our clients are in the U.S. and will he have availability for that? You know, what was his future goals? Was he still, you know, planning to just be a full time freelancer and all these things? So we gave him that as the off ramp. And I expected him. I was I was a 100% ready for him to say, oh, no, this isn’t what I want. This isn’t what I signed up for. And so we were already starting to gear the the job description up to post it and allow for it. We hired all of our team in through Upwork, and so that was what we were going to do. And I was blown away when he came back to me and said, Actually, I would love to do this. I would love to do this. I, you know, I, I think we can create better we can create a better product. I would love to be on your team full time, and that was a complete reversal of where we were when he first started working with us. But he’s enjoyed where he’s like, this is I want to be a part of this. Like, you know, your company does cool. Like I want to be a part of this. And so if we had not given an off ramp, we would have lost somebody that we had spent a long time building a relationship with, somebody that had the skills that we wanted. And so in leadership, you know, this kind of goes along with don’t get don’t say somebody is. No for them. That’s another one of my favorite leadership lessons, leadership axioms. But this one is, you know, a little bit more specifically for if you think you’re going to have to move somebody on because they’re no longer a fit There have been times I’ve add in team members in the past and I’ve gone back and I’ve just said, listen, you’re this isn’t this this role isn’t working for you. We we did this recently. We had a salesperson. And, you know, after a couple months, we said and he’s like, we just agreed like this. This is not working out very, very well. We think you’re you know, though still a great person to be a part of the team. What would you like to do? And they were like, you know, I’d really like to, you know, manage projects. I’d like to work with the clients after they’ve already agreed to become a client. So this person has transitioned into a different role of the director of product, which is our fancy title for project manager, and she’s absolutely crushing it in that role, just crushing it. And so had we not given the off ramp, you know, if we had not gone and said, here’s the direction we need to go, you’re not like, would you like to go off? Or, you know, here, here’s a new drop script and that’s two amazing team members I’d lost out on. So. When it comes down to leadership, give people an off ramp. If you can’t give them the chance to say they had the opportunity to say, yeah, now’s the time for me to leave. But also, you know, they may surprise you and say, no, I want to stay on the road. I don’t want to get off yet. And you may just need to help them change lanes a little bit. So that’s this week’s leadership tip of the week with that. Thanks for listening to the podcast. I look forward to reading your reviews or comments as they will be on Spotify. Until next time, chase the big dream lead with courage and safe travels.