From the beginning, MAC6 has been all about supporting good businesses, but even the most growth-oriented businesses hit a ceiling at some point in their journey.
Through our experience as a company, we’ve noticed that one of those ceilings is a less-than-ideal workspace. We consistently hear, “Yeah, I’m looking to move out of my home office/garage/local Starbucks, but a private office space just isn’t possible right now.”
We recognize the need for a space where companies can share knowledge and resources (like kitchen space, meeting rooms, or even drafting tables), and working from Starbucks can be difficult. Also, it’s really hard to scale your business when you’re feeling the constraints of a space that’s either too big and expensive, or too small and limiting.
How We Got Here
When we initially functioned as an incubator, we saw an opportunity to provide real value to our portfolio companies by building collaborative spaces for them to work out of.
After a lot of remodeling, we opened two spaces (in addition to our commercial office spaces): coworking and co-manufacturing.
Originally, these were spaces for our investment companies to grow, thrive, and build community. Over time, however, we realized we had more space than we had start-ups or time – especially as we began introducing more leadership development programs and bringing them outside of our spaces.
So, we opened our spaces up to cool companies who were doing cool things and creating value for their stakeholders.
We have three spaces:
- Coworking
- Co-manufacturing
- Commercial
We’re industry-agnostic, community-minded, and non-transactional.
What does “non-transactional” mean?
1. We don’t abide by the “the typical real estate (or consulting) model”, which is to make yourself indispensable. Our mission is to help business owners break through ceilings, even if that means eventually growing to a point where leaving our space is necessary. So, even when someday your business gets to a point where you need a much bigger office, we celebrate with you. We’ve already seen several companies outgrow us, like Uber, Lyft, and RevolutionParts. Our goal is to help you outgrow us (if that’s what you’re looking for). Here is Andreas Ronneseth from RevolutionParts talking about his experience working out of our coworking space as they grew.
2. We are not stereotypical landlords (that you only see when something breaks or the rent is overdue). We want relationships with all of our tenants, and we create a space for them to build relationships with each other. We’ll do what it takes to help you get what you want from your business, offering continued training and education to the companies inside our spaces, from lunch-and-learns to multi-week team performance programs.
Beyond that, we encourage a camaraderie in our spaces that reaches beyond individual companies.
Building Better Communities
Honestly, we can’t take credit for starting the community aspect of our workspaces – it began as a grassroots effort from businesses looking to connect with each other. We did catch on quickly, though, as tenants began to form groups and random events (like our Food Truck Tuesdays) showed up. In fact, their initiatives shifted our perspective on real estate as a whole and how we manage spaces to a more holistic approach.
Over the years, we’ve added a community gym and seasonal events to bring businesses together and meet the needs of the Tempe area.
A House of Learning and Respect
On a deeper level, we’re interested in building spaces that serve as a place for people to come together and elevate humanity. At this point in history, we see a decline in public meeting spaces: places where people can engage in respectful conversation with a goal of solving problems and gaining different perspectives. These places (like town halls, churches, soap boxes, and town squares) are being replaced with digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This has benefits and challenges, but one challenge is that it’s easier to respect another person’s point of view when you’re face-to-face with them. In some respect, we’ve lost the ability to have in-person conversations when we don’t necessarily agree.
Fostering these conversations in an environment of respect means so much to our MAC6 team, and we’re starting to see that goal become reality. We’ve even jokingly (or not so much joking) discussed building a “soapbox” for our conference room (for anyone who’s really looking to make a statement).
Mainly, we love having people in the space. So even if you aren’t a tenant of MAC6, we gladly rent out our many conference spaces for seminars or all-hands meetings. Our buildings are meant to be “collecting places” for local communities.
Whether you’re hosting an event, we’re hosting an event, you’d like to try coworking for a day, or you’re just curious, we’d love to meet you and show you around.
Let me know if you’d like a tour!
Kyle McIntosh | kyle.mcintosh@mac6.com