We recently connected with Christopher Hoyt and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Christopher thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. The first dollar your firm earns is always special. We’d love to hear about how you got your first client that wasn’t a friend or family.

Our first client literally walked through our front door as we were in the final stages of construction of our first coworking space. His name was Manny and he’d recently moved from Florida to Seattle to sell airplanes. He saw our space while out for a walk and asked if he could rent a desk immediately. We scrambled to make it happen even though we weren’t scheduled to open for another two weeks.

We gave him an early adopter discount since we hadn’t even plumbed our coffee machine or finished setting up furniture. After Manny moved in, we were no longer suffering from empty-restaurant syndrome and our next few customers signed up that month. Getting those first few paying customers is always the hardest. If Manny hadn’t happened to walk by, we may never have gotten off the ground, so we owe him a debt of gratitude.

Christopher, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We founded The Pioneer Collective in 2014 as a side project. Audrey and I had just returned from extended travel in Europe and were inspired by the way they activated the street level of historic buildings. I was consulting at Microsoft at the time and was in the first wave of “work-from-anywhere” employees. I worked from coffee shops, home, and the corporate campus at the time. They all had positives and flaws. We set out to take the best elements of all of those settings and merge them into an accessible workspace option for workers like me.

We started by offering coworking memberships and eventually expanded to renting event and meetings space, and eventually private team offices. We were quite fortunate with our timing. Coworking was defining itself as a category and a viable supplement to the traditional office in 2015-2019 while we were growing our brand. We were able to ride those tailwinds as we established our brand and because we were bootstrapped, we avoided the gold rush mentality that plagued many of our competitors. Because we’d grown sustainably, we were in a strong financial position to ride out the pandemic. Now our customer base has grown from freelancers and remote workers, to include anyone who works on a laptop. Our mission remains the same though: to create spaces that foster creativity, productivity, and human interaction in an increasingly isolating world.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Our focus on clear positioning has bolstered our strong reputation. We’re obsessed with balancing intentional design and an independent, hand crafted aesthetic, while also offering enterprise-grade amenities, tech and human centered hospitality. There are a lot of workspace providers that do one or two of these things well, but very few that can appeal to both design-minded freelancers and Fortune 500 enterprise teams. The Pioneer Collective does.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

I met her in a bar in college. I approached her and asked her out. We eventually married and started the business much later!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thepioneercollective.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_pioneercollective/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thepioneercollective/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/6407145/admin/dashboard/

Image Credits

Carina Skrobecki Photo