Laurent, CloudVO and Pacific Workplaces CEO, recently shared Pacific Workplaces’ experience with the recent acquisition of NextSpace Coworking locations in a presentation to Coworking Europe in Dublin, Ireland. That presentation led to much discussion, interest, and requests for slides by coworking operators that did not have a chance to make it to the Dublin conference.
Laurent accepted to record the presentation after the event, and make it available for viewing through our blog, thinking that the slides alone fell a bit short to understand his responses to the questions he had been asked to address:
- What drove the acquisition?
- Why Pacific Workplaces refer to it as a merger?
- What were the motivations behind the acquisitions?
- What were the challenges
- Lessons learned
What attracted much attention to this merger/acquisition was that the companies came from very different directions in the shared office industry.
NextSpace is a legendary name in the open coworking industry, with charismatic co-founders that attracted the spotlights as leaders of the coworking movement in the last decade. To this day, people come from all over the world to see how coworking is being done at NextSpace Santa Cruz and NextSpace Berkeley. In the last few weeks alone co-founder Ryan Coonerty hosted delegations from China and Japan of folks wanting to learn about how the best of coworking was being done.
Our partner (and CloudVO’s sister company) Pacific Workplaces, which at its inception came from a serviced office concept, has attracted its own spotlights from the industry, thanks to its methodical building of a highly performant portfolio of flexible office spaces, it’s success with virtual offices, and its own leaders highly respected profile in the coworking and flexible office space industry.
About Pacific Workplaces
(Pac) manages 19 shared office space locations, mostly in California, that offer a wide range of part-time and full-time office space, including virtual offices, private offices, open coworking, and mini-suites, with curated communities of professionals who help each other be successful in their respective enterprises. Members have access to furnished offices, hot desks, meeting rooms, VoIP telephony, unified messaging, phone answering services, IT support, admin support, online legal library, and to our CloudTouchdown network of day offices and meeting spaces with over 650 locations worldwide, under a subscription or a pay-per-use hosted model Pac refers to as Workplace-as-a-Service.™ Pac partners with landlords to develop and operate coworking and other types of shared office spaces. The Pac model responds to trends toward a more distributed workforce, increased flexibility, sustainability, the desire to join professional communities, with a growing demand from professionals associated with small and large firms alike. All Pac centers are operated by PBC Management LLC under the Pacific Workplaces, Enerspace Coworking, and Nextspace Coworking brands.
