A Place To Work

Work is what I do, not where I go.

I don’t ‘go’ to work, in the traditional sense.

I operate from a number of workspaces. As a friend pointed out the other day when he got my ‘out of office’ autoresponse on email,
“What do you mean you are out of the office?” he came back. “You ARE your office!”

And he was right.

I use The Hospital as my London place to ‘work’, meeting clients, catching up on emails, doing stuff. The Hospital is a media centre and club for the creative industries and is full of similar micro-entrepreneurs like me.

One Alfred Place is a new London club for on-the-go-entrepreneurs and seeks to capitalise the one-person business niche, providing workspace, business services and meeting rooms at a Central London location. And certainly there is a market for that, somewhere in between the uber cool of The Hospital where bars are more important than workspaces and say, the Institute Of Directors which is primarily full of suits.

The Hospital works well for me, but One Alfred Place’s philosophy is to not base the offering on wining and dining like most other London clubs, but instead be focused on actually somewhere to do business. Their mojitos may not be great, but you might find it a more effective place to work. And they even have a club ‘cabin’ where you can take a power nap.

As business becomes more global and more virtual, the importance of bricks and mortar offices is reduced. Why make a big investment in office overheads in a single location if you need to be conducting business all over the place?