A Juicy Story – Josh Fine, Captain of the Enterprise

We are real estate developers in central Denver. In February 2014 we saw a diamond in the rough and seized the opportunity – a 66,000 square foot, three level, beautifully constructed concrete building that had seen much better days. We signed a contract to purchase the building and began working on our redevelopment plan. Over the next few months we looked into moving our corporate offices into the building, and creating additional office space for other tenants. We thought it could be cool if some of the space was a shared office space with communal amenities. I was researching this model and discovered coworking – and I came across the website for GCUC. I thought, “there is a whole conference on coworking and it’s in a couple weeks – I should go check it out!” So I went and met a lot of great people. We toured coworking spaces in Kansas City, discussed how to furnish, staff and finance these spaces, and afterward a bunch of us went out to cheer on the Royals. Our idea for Enterprise, which is what we called the new space in Denver, continued to evolve. I attended the Coworking Europe conference in Lisbon, and made a trip to the Bay Area with my architect to check out some leading coworking spaces in that city. And of course I signed up to go to GCUC 2015 in Berkeley.  This time around, even though our space had not yet opened, I wasn’t quite the “newbie” I was back in 2014. My questions were more specific, the takeaways I got from the conference were more concrete, and we grew our team, bringing on an experienced coworking operator whom I met at GCUC. Fast forward to GCUC 2016 in Los Angeles. We are now a month away from opening our doors. The space looks phenomenal and the interest in Enterprise is buzzing around the city. Enterprise has been a labor of love for over two years and we are just weeks from launching. This time around, the GCUC confab was about reconnecting with friends, getting nitty gritty questions answered, and – for the first time – sharing with others what we did to acquire, develop and (soon!) open our space. I can’t wait to sign up for GCUC 2017 where we will hopefully have even more to share with the amazing community that comes together around these conferences. Our investment in attending GCUC has been – in terms of bang for the buck – the best money we spent in launching Enterprise.