Nettl of Bury – Coworking Full Time

I’m with Jason Groves from Nettl of Bury and we’re going to discuss running a graphic design business in a coworking space. It’s Friday, it’s 3:00pm so at Newton’s we have beers and so what we do is to get together a couple of beers in the space. It’s just a good way to end the week. And for me it’s good way to kind of go around the space and see everybody.

So Jason , Nettl of Bury what do you do with your days?

“So brief introduction into Nettl. We’re a creative agency setup right here in Newtons as well, using the coworking space and we produce graphic design, printing, user friendly websites and we’re here to help you engage with your customers, so help you engage with your clients. So basically we can do anything from branding, logo design, business cards through to exhibition work, promotional material and websites as well.”

You were the first company to kind of go in there and grasp exactly what Newtons is

We’ve always used Jason for some of the prints and one of the things we were really happy with was the website you produced. We always say you were the first company to kind of go in there and grasp exactly what Newtons is. Newtons got a lot going on. We’ve got the meeting spaces, the event space, the coworking space, the coffee shop, and soon to be potentially a gym in the back and how you put that on a website and explain to everybody what is going on here is really difficult and you were able to do that. I mean just run me through where all that started.

“So it was really an exciting brief to be fair because it’s almost like starting from scratch. We had in a way to create a personality for Newtons. You had it already in the coffee shop in the coworking space but never really anywhere else. And we really want to communicate that in a kind of quirky fun way, yeah.”

What’s the benefit of being in the coworking space?

If people were thinking of a coworking, somewhere they want to go there every day and kind of have meetings and use it like an office, which you can do at Newtons. What are the pros and cons? So starting like the pros, what’s the benefit of being in the coworking space?

 “I can’t recommend coworking enough really. First it became vital and it was really part of our, I suppose, business model. We originally had a private office space. We had stuff, but it wasn’t seeing a great return from it. So we moved downstairs. My designers now work remotely or they even use coworking space, so that builds relationships. But now I’m able to collaborate with people using the space. We’ve picked up a lot of work from people just walking in, people finding out what we do and also now we can collaborate with all the businesses in the space. We work well together. There’s a lot of synergy between the businesses that use the coworking space. And I think it’s that part that makes it vital really. It’s one of the things we look at is focus on the things you do really well. So we would then say, you know, if someone wanted a social media plan going with some graphic design, then we’d get involved with the Phenomenal Group who uses the coworking space as well. Similarly, there’s graphic designers, copywriters, there’s marketers, there’s basically a design agency’s dream working in the coworking space.”

So that’s Nettl of Bury and Jason Groves and I suppose you’ve coworked for a year and survived. Just about but not your mugs. That’s gone.