Flexible Workspaces That Actually Work

A city-centre workspace can be more than desks and Wi‑Fi. Mark Wallace joins us for a role reversal and puts the questions to us about how we’re building two connected brands at 45 King Street: Working Flexi Spaces and King Street Events, right in the heart of Stirling.

We get specific about what people actually want from flexible office space after Covid: private offices on a licensing model rather than long leases, coworking membership that works day-to-day, and an “all-in” approach that includes furniture, utilities, business-grade internet, 24/7 access, a business lounge, and even an on-site gym. If you’re searching for coworking in Stirling, serviced offices, or a hybrid working setup that doesn’t slow you down, you’ll hear the practical details that make the difference.

Then we talk about the pivot that sparked King Street Events. When larger office suites weren’t in demand, we repurposed the space into meeting rooms and an event venue for everything from client meetings and networking groups to exhibitions, culture-night talks, and comedy nights. We also share how collaboration extends beyond our own walls through partnerships with other King Street venues, giving us the ability to scale events up to larger capacities and build corporate packages aimed at the MICE market (meetings, incentives, conferences and events).

If you enjoy honest business building, local entrepreneurship, and smart use of space, subscribe, share the episode, and leave us a review so more people can find the show.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

So welcome back to the Sterling Business Podcast. This week we have Mark Wallace again talking to myself about my two businesses, working Flexi Spaces and King Street events. So lots of people are asking me specifically about what we do here in number 45 King Street. So what we thought we would do is we'd do a role reversal and have somebody else ask me the question. So, Mark, thank you for agreeing to come and do that. Thanks for inviting me.

What Flexible Office Membership Includes

SPEAKER_01 0:39

It's exciting to be back here again. Really nice. Let's go. What made you come up with King Street events and work in flexible? Where did the idea come from?

SPEAKER_00 0:54

So there was a chicken and egg thing, yeah, with regards to this one. King Street Events is a relatively new concept in a relatively new business. And I'll come to that. But uh yeah, life started out with regards to this building um with two concepts. One, an apart hotel, which we'll talk about on uh on another episode, and um working flexi spaces. So uh working flexi spaces uh is a has two parts to the business, if you like. The first part are private offices, so small to medium businesses can come and uh effectively rent uh office space uh from us. Uh we would um regard it as boutique high-end. Uh you know, we'd like we'd like to uh describe it as that. Um what you get within uh within uh within a package, if you like, if if you take a private office from us, is um you get the furniture uh within the office, you get 24 by seven access to the building, uh you get all of your utilities covered, you know, like electricity, um, heating, uh the Wi-Fi infrastructure, which is all business grid, uh you get access to the business lounge that we have on site, and also the use of our on-site gym. So all private offices are on uh bit based on a licensing model. So you'd sign up to a 12-month license to occupy, but with a relatively short um notice period should you want to move on. Now, customers like that because you know, particularly post-COVID, they don't want to be tied into kind of long uh leases uh that they can't get out of when you know they have to kind of pay rent when they couldn't actually use uh use the space. So so that's what uh half of our um working flexi spaces business is very much focused around private offices. The other side of it is that we have a co-working hub, so you can book a desk by the day, by the week, or by the month. So if you book a fixed desk on a monthly basis, that's your desk, lockable pedestal, you get access and use of all of those other facilities that I've just mentioned, and you pay a membership uh rate on a monthly basis for using the space. So that's working flexi spaces. Now I said the chicken and the egg thing earlier on. We have had everything from a two-desk office up to uh a 10 and 12-desk office space available. We were finding that there was um less demand for the large office space. Uh a lot of uh clients that were coming to us were were solopreneurs or entrepreneurs or small businesses looking for a private office. The bigger offices weren't really uh workers. So what we did was we decided to repurpose that space and create an events meetings and events business. And using those bigger spaces for that type of purpose uh as opposed to you know a private office.

Why A City Centre Community Hub

SPEAKER_01 4:03

Yeah, it's interesting because flexible offices was a a a big thing, you know, maybe 10-15 years ago. And it was, it was big, but it was mainly Edinburgh, Glasgow. You've come to a small city, and it is a small city, you're right in the middle of the city. Is is that why you chose this location? Are you because of its accessibility and then and where it was? It was twofold, really.

SPEAKER_00 4:25

Firstly, there are lots of officers of office uh officers available, there's lots of office space available, but um it's all predominantly on that traditional license, sorry, that pr pr predominantly on that lease-based model. So um it in terms of Sterling and the Fourth Valley, uh, there's not a lot of option out with that kind of leasing model. And we wanted to create a more flexible work working offering, um, you know, for the likes of hybrid workers, some some people that work from home uh so many days a week, some you know they might go to their corporate office a day or two a week, um, but they've got an option to effectively come to a local office. Um we also wanted to create this uh community. So we've uh you know, we we're very passionate about uh having small to medium-sized businesses collaborate and with like-minded people uh and work with each other and work with the community outside of the building within Sterling. So creating that kind of foundation in the city centre was the way to go because a lot of the uh you know other offices tend to be out on the external business parks uh surrounding the city surrounding the city. Um and the ones that were inside of the city centre were, in the main, pretty kind of run down and they weren't offering the same levels of flexibility that we do. So that's why we chose to be central.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

It's almost a USP, isn't it? Because you're right, most of the offices are on the peripheral of the city and you need to drive. Now, here you can literally, if you live in the area, jump on a bus, a train, straight in the middle of town centre, and your whole day is is worked out because you've got your office, you've got your cafes nearby, you've got your transport, you can eat, you've got you've got everything here. I'm gonna ask you a question, because obviously you're an entrepreneur. When you first looked at that building, had you taken all that into consideration because really you're in the heart of the town and you just want for nothing when you actually get an office here. You want for nothing.

SPEAKER_00 6:26

Was that Yeah, it was part of the plan. Um so a few of these types of um developments which we've seen in some of the other major cities uh tend to have on-site restaurants, coffee bars. You know, they're keeping the uh they're keeping all of the business in the house. Well, number one, we don't have the the space to be able to do that. Uh, but our philosophy, our ethos right out of the gates was um to create a community hub. So we wanted other businesses, and we have the same concept for our hotel as well. We wanted other businesses to grow and thrive and and and um build you know, b build their businesses uh you know up at the same time as us uh effectively uh developing our own. And what started to happen is inside of the uh the building, whether you've got a fixed desk or a or a hot desk with us on a membership model or um an office on a licensing-based model, we're starting to see lots of collaboration between the businesses. So we have a marketing um communications company here, for example. We have a website design uh and um build uh organization. We have our IT support and cybersecurity guys on site. They all work together. They're separate independent businesses that rent office space from me. Um but they all work together for the benefit of me, for my businesses, but they'll also work with each other and the other businesses within the building, like the tour operator, for example, that we have in the building, uh the re renewables energy company that we have uh who have their office here as well. So everybody seems to be working as a community, and they're now starting to work with some of the cli, you know, the the finding clients outside of the building as well, uh, within the Sterling community.

Launching King Street Events

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Yeah, so you've almost set up a location. You've planned it, but by default, by bringing all these different businesses in, you've now formed a hub, a location, and you've actually formed a networking group where people can network. And I am aware, because I've been into the offices, you've even got a marketing department, a marketing department, and you've got the podcast studio we spoke about in a previous episode. It's really work, so you must be very proud. So going forward, you've done all that work, you've got your you know, your uh offices, it's all going very well, you've got all these businesses in, and then we'll move on to the next business. You decide to set up an events business. Have you not had enough?

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Uh well it's very complimentary uh to what we do with regards to um our kind of work workspace community, uh in that you know those businesses can use the meetings in events space themselves to bring their clients in and into a professional environment and and effectively help them elevate their own businesses in a very professional-looking environment in the middle of in the middle of Sterling. Um but we also have uh it's an independent business in the sense of we have businesses and not just businesses actually, we have uh a whole bunch of different uses for the space. Um like you know, artists and photographers coming up coming in to do uh art exhibitions uh in this in the space. Um we've got an event coming up as part of the Still and Culture night, for example, where you know we're gonna be uh providing talks in collaboration with creative veterans, veterans around um the Og Island Southern Highlanders. Um we can do comedy nights, we can do a whole raft of stuff that's not necessarily business related here. Uh networking groups, networking events. So that is you know, coming that's starting to come thick and fast now. You know, we we've got the kind of foundation with uh the businesses that are based here in the building using the event space. But um we're going one step further now and we're now starting to kind of build uh further collaborations into the educational establishments like Stirling University and uh and Fourth Valley College. So we're looking to create or develop um more of an entrepreneur's hub so we can, you know, we can try and kind of use the platform that we've that we've started to build here as a vehicle to take to the next stage and and to build content and uh you know kind of val incremental value uh you know over and above just providing the space.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

Do you know the the businesses they both complement each other, don't they? It's great how that's naturally happened. I know you've had these ideas in your head, but it's actually starting to work and I see where you're coming with the events, the event side. Now, as the event side gets bigger, you just mentioned a few things that are going on. You're gonna probably have to because space was something you mentioned. Have you got plans to expand from from 45 anywhere else and push this events business out?

Partner Venues And Bigger Capacity

SPEAKER_00 11:11

Yeah, it's funny to say that because what we've got is so King Street Events, uh uh we started that business predominantly to monetize the space and to um you know provide a facility for people to come and you know run their meetings here and event their events. But now we're starting to collaborate with other event space providers in the city centre, in King Street specifically. So uh we're in the process of uh uh building a joint venture with one of our kind of uh business partners that we're very close with as part of that community I talked about, um, to provide a you know a bigger space which is uh not a million miles away from number 45. So if we need to provide, you know, that bigger space where we can't accommodate for anybody over, say, 30 to 40 people, they can accommodate up to 120 people, for example. Um and they've got uh bar facilities as well, which is always uh uh a nice touch. Uh and it gives you that kind of more kind of expansive opportunity to uh to grow the different types of things that we do. But King Street Events will be uh effectively organizing and driving uh a lot of that activity. Uh it's just using partner space as opposed to our own space.

SPEAKER_01 12:25

Which is interesting because you mentioned collaboration with local businesses. King Street Events, there's a lot of a lot of businesses on King Street, so there are an opportunity for other businesses to actually become part of the King Street, you know, your story really, isn't there? They can use their space. A lot of these buildings people don't realise have got a space behind the front shops that that are not being utilized. So there is an opportunity there for other businesses to other businesses to get involved, isn't there?

SPEAKER_00 12:49

Yeah, we're very keen to develop corporate deals uh with um you know with organizations. So, you know, whether that be you know businesses within the Thistle Centre, for example, um there's lots of very large retailers and smaller branded resellers in there, uh retailers in there. Um we've got lots of business parks with very large institutions and corporations on those as well. So, you know, putting um packages together where they can come and run their events here, they want an off-site, they want to get away from their they might not have the space themselves to have big meetings, but in a lot of cases they might want to host those somewhere else. So we're we're a good option for that. Um but when you look further afield, we've got organizations that are looking to come to Sterling to run their meetings because it's very central. So we can also provide overnight accommodation with our uh a port hotel, uh which is on site as well. And some people might also want to come along and maybe record a podcast or do a uh a um a business launch or a new product launch or have a host a sales meeting here. So they can come and their staff can use the co-working space. Um you know the executives can or the or the leadership team can use the meeting space to have their board meeting. They might want to throw a podcast in while they're here, and they can use our business lounge to effectively uh, you know, do an all-hands meeting or a sales kickoff or whatever it might be. So we're we're trying to touch all of those bases and provide a facility that um will allow that. Uh we call it the mice market meetings, incentives, uh meetings, incentives. I can't remember what the say is, conferences and events. It's a big market and we're looking to you know tap into that uh you know corporate market to provide that whole holistic offer for those that uh that might need it.

SPEAKER_01 14:43

You know, I can see it's it's definitely evolving. So looking a couple of years ahead, because you're running out of space here because it's been so successful, you're gonna uh involve another another business in the King Street area. Where do you see this this sort of joined thing, the flexi working spaces? Are you looking to evolve this business further afield?

SPEAKER_00 15:04

Uh very much so. Um we you know we'll we're focused predominantly in Stirling at this particular point in time. Uh, we still think there's growth opportunity here in here in Sterling in the city centre. Um, but we will probably start you know, kind of looking uh looking at other opportunities going forward. But we've I think we're we've got a good brand. It's developing, it's growing. And um yeah, you know, who knows? Uh just watch the space uh for for more that's coming again soon.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

There's no l there's no limits to your um entrepreneurship. I can't even say the word, but um I can see you coming up with something something else in the future. You know, it's been really it's been really interesting chatting to you about your your business ventures and flexit working spaces and King Street events. All I see is a very bright fruit future.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

Yeah, and if you want to get in touch or you want to find out a little bit more, you can visit any of the two websites that we have, uh working flexyspaces.com or kingstreetevents.com. Uh all of our kind of pricing for our co-working is on there. As I say, you can book a desk by the day, you can book a desk by the week or by the month. Uh if you're interested in private office space, then reach out to us directly, uh pick up the phone and speak to Laura, who's our house manager, and she'll uh organise a site visit and show you around and and and explain what we have available. Uh or equally, uh King Street Events, um, our pricing is uh advertised on the website for the uh the three event spaces that we have here in number 45. But if you want something a little bit more complex and you want to include catering and other kind of facilities like that, then again, just pick up the phone and uh give Laura a call.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

Thanks for inviting me along today to have a wee chat to you. It's been very interesting and a great bus a great business you've got here.

SPEAKER_00 16:49

Thank you very much. Yeah, and thank you for less letting me wax lyrical about uh my two businesses here, Clark. Thank you. Well, yeah, no problem.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

We've been very smooth. So no, thank you and be safe, and I'll see you soon.

SPEAKER_00 17:00

Thank you, Bob.