Q&A with Matthew Kendall

With the entire country isolating, I’m at home, Newton’s is closed down temporarily. And so, I’ve brought in Jen to ask me some questions that you may or may not know about our coworking journey.

Where did the coworking idea come from?

The idea to start my own coworking space came from when I was running a business in 2015 and at the time, we (me and Jen) were living in Manchester, and coworking had just kind of come into Manchester. Ziferblat was the first experience I had at coworking, around the same time I used to cowork at Takk through an early morning networking group. I wasn’t in the coworking space all the time it was just once a week or once a month.

I’ll admit I didn’t kind of jump into the community, I kind of kept myself to myself. What I found beneficial was having somewhere, from the home or office, where I could go and break up the daily home routine and form a more productive routine of going into the space, work for couple hours from my laptop, have everything I needed easily, kind of reduce the distractions and go from there.

At the same time, I kind of accidentally renovated some empty space in a building and rented them out as offices. Originally, I wanted to make a coworking space here, but it was too early for the concept, it wasn’t in the town centre of Bury and I was only finding my entrepreneurial feet. Fast forward to 2017 the ground floor of Newtons really lent itself to the coworking layout I had experienced before; it also had a prominent town centre location so it was a really good space to kind of open up and have it as coworking space so I pitched the idea as a space alongside the offices and as a benefit to the entire building, which I am happy to say it is.

Why did you pick the building, Newtons of Bury?

We were looking for a couple of places for about probably three months and we saw Newtons of Bury on a property listing and I kind of immediately dismissed it. It just didn’t look like the right fit.

Unlike many people I Bury I didn’t know the furniture shop, people describe it as “full”, in that sense that you couldn’t move about without worrying you were going to knock something over. We just decided to go and have a look and that’s when we met Glenn, who is the businessman behind Newtons. As soon as you step through the building and move into the real depth of the building, you kind of get how old it is and how it’s been preserved. That’s the big thing about it – it’s kind of been like this weird time capsule with some of the features surviving since the 1700’s.

The building is also like a rabbit warren, you’re going down into the cellar and it’s an old Georgian cellar so it’s quite big and then also you’re going right through the building all the way through to the back where we have the old stables, The Old Coach House, it goes a lot further back than you would think.

What’s been the most difficult part?

I think obviously getting something started from the very beginning is difficult. I think probably the most difficult was changing the route and the direction of the business halfway through. The space was open, and everything was running, and we had found a good way we wanted to do things and what people can expect when they use the space.

Then in 2019, we made a change for the betterment of the business, to be more flexible in the future. So people were expecting one thing and we’d changed a little and that was difficult to kind of move through those changes. It was a long-term project to try and get those changes through, change what people expected, it’s a different space to what I first started in 2018

Changes are always going to happen in your business but if you can try and get things right or at least set up correctly in the first place, it’s a lot easier to do rather than trying to add things or kind of implement things halfway through.