Co-working space enterpreneur details the chance encounters and automation strategies propelling growth
Sometimes you don’t need a large marketing team to accelerate growth – especially if you have a household name to give you a nudge in the right direction.
This has certainly been the case for co-working business, CreativeCubes.Co, and its founder, Tobi Skovron, who thanks to a chance encounter with US basketball legend, Shaquille O’Neal, is now poised to expand his business internationally.
Skovron first encountered the benefits of co-working while running a pet sector business in Los Angeles, where he was managing a sales team spread across the US. His desire to separate his work and home life saw him take space at a facility in Santa Monica, which coincidentally was also used by Uber founder, Travis Kalanick, and Snapchat founder, Evan Spiegel.
“I came alive as an entrepreneur,” Skovron tells CMO. “I was propelled into an environment of like-minded people, and it was super addictive being there. A lot of the success I had in that business was from being motivated and stimulated by like-minded people, doing completely different things, but working from the same space.”
After selling the pet business and returning to Australia, Skovron wanted to provide the same inspiration for other entrepreneurs and began building CreativeCubes.Co. He started with one location in Melbourne and expanded to five locations across the city. Its first Sydney location is coming soon. Today, CreativeCubes.Co has somewhere in the vicinity of 5000 members representing more than 1300 businesses, who call on it for both physical workspaces and community services.
While Skovron always had plans to see the business grow, one fateful coincidence may make international expansion happen much faster than he ever imagined. One of Skovron’s US-based friends ran a business that counted among its investors the retired O’Neal, who has a diverse involvement in a range of technology and other businesses.
When Skovron’s friend sold that business, he passed along O’Neal’s contact details. Skovron grabbed a videographer and quicky captured footage that showed the energy and enthusiasm within the CreativeCubes.Co sites. He posted this to YouTube, then sent an invitation to O’Neal to watch it.
“I wasn't after Shaq’s money, but I wanted him to come and inspire my community,” Skovron says.
Thirty-five minutes later he saw the video had been viewed in Atlanta, Georgia – where O’Neal lived – and soon after in Las Vegas, Nevada – the home of O’Neal’s agent – who called Skovron 24 hours later.
While Skovron couldn’t initially afford the cost of bringing O’Neal to Australia, one of the members of CreativeCubes.Co specialised in facilitating events with big-name stars and had previously brought fellow NBA legend, Kobe Bryant, to local shores.
“I made the introduction [to O’Neal], they got a deal done, and as a thank you, Shaq said he would come in for an hour,” Skovron says.
That led to an on-stage interview at one of CreativeCubes.Co’s facilities, towards the end of which Skovron expressed his sorrow their time together was coming to an end.
“Shaq said to me, don’t be sad, because we’re going to be partners,” Skovron says. “I really wanted to be his partner, but I wasn't going to come and sell to him – I wanted him to understand who were first. I don’t need his money, but his money and his status take us to a whole new level, and we are in those discussions at the moment.
“If he can blaze a trail to help CreativeCubes.Co to have bigger impacts in other communities all over the world, I’m all in.”
Should a deal come to fruition, it would propel CreativeCubes.Co’s growth at a rate that even Skovron hadn’t conceived.
One important factor that may help the business fully capture this opportunity is a very deliberate strategy Skovron has adopted of using automation to keep costs down – especially in marketing – using the CRM suite and related tools from Salesforce.
“We’ve built an amazing business, we serve incredible companies, and we have done all of that without a full-time marketing department,” Skovron says. “I have exclusively leveraged the Salesforce marketing tools in conjunction with CRM and Service Cloud and Slack, to be able to get really close to my customer, to understand what their needs are.
“It is about servicing my customer, and it is about doing more with less.”
Much of this investment is in support of automating CreativeCubes.Co’s member acquisition strategy, although automation continues through onboarding and member management and servicing.
“It’s all about the best, or nothing,” Skovron says. “When it came to servicing my community, I really needed to understand who they were, what their needs were, and how I could then be programmatic about how we curate space, curate community, and deliver product.
“So we have built a multi-eight-figure business with no marketing department. That makes us really light as an organisation, which then enables us to keep our membership pricing down.”
The result is a business which boasts a 97 per cent five-star rating on Google, with a net promoter score of 96. While Skovron is now building a marketing team, his investment in Salesforce means he can do so at a reduced rate in comparison to the growth of the business.
“That infrastructure is built to scale, so as we open new buildings it comes down in cost,” he says. “I like to think of us as a 6-star hotel at a 3-star price point, and we are able to do that from a high service perspective because we have a lot of automation put in.
“And if the conversations continue with Shaquille, we’ll be coming over to the US.”
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