Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Danielle Lim. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Danielle thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

At Haven Collective, we don’t just talk about community, we built one. The WeWork and Regus models that get all the headlines often show beautiful spaces in high rises around the globe. They mention community but when you actually work from these spaces, community feels like an afterthought. The spaces look pretty in pictures but the members feel just as isolated working there as they did working from home. We wanted to start with the community first and then create spaces that support the way we work.

You won’t find cold, industrial workspaces at Haven. Our entire approach to coworking was to create relatable, approachable, welcoming workspaces. We wanted to be the work-from-home professional’s haven away from home. And with that decision, we found that we attracted people who were seeking connection, community, and growth opportunities.

With our community in mind, we started creating support services that went far beyond workspace. Our freelance and small business members were overwhelmed in their businesses and often felt stuck, so we created peer group masterminds to the community come come together to support each other. Then we took that a step further and partnered with experts in subjects where our community needed a higher level of support, which turned into our coaching program.

The Haven Collective coaching program is unique to the coworking industry standard. The experts we’ve partnered with will meet with our members one-on-one in the areas of business law, accounting and taxes, strategy and operations, digital marketing, social media, health and wellness, branding, leadership, and career advancement. This crew provides a level of growth opportunities often only seen in major corporations.

Our members tell us all the time that without the support of their peers and coaches, that they may not have been able to stay the course and continue their businesses. It’s tough to run a business on your own and isolating in its own way, so the Haven support services meet those members where they are and help them through rough patches or grow in meaningful ways.

Danielle, 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?

Haven Collective Co-Creators, Melissa Blackburn & Danielle Lim met in grad school at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business and hit it off with the first ‘hello’. Mel comes from an operations strategist background and Danielle is from VC and marketing. Over the years, ideas were tossed around for ways they could work together.

Timing is everything. Mel was looking to start her own business after successfully helping startups grow and find their own exits. Danielle had been working from home for over a decade and saw some glaring holes in the offerings for remote workers in Columbus. Over dinner one night, the discussion turned into Haven Collective, a solution to truly support those flying solo in a better way.

They created a vision to build THE space, community and support system for entrepreneurs, freelancers, and side-hustlers to get sh*t done, find balance, and conquer the world.

Since Haven Collective’s initial opening in 2018, the community has grown to two locations in Central Ohio and the offerings have continued to adjust to members’ needs. When it was founded, Haven included a drop-in kids club, which subsequently closed during the pandemic. Since that time, the space has adjusted to accommodate more hybrid employees who spend an exhausting amount of time on video calls. As our world continues to reshape how we work, Haven Collective will grow and change with it. It’s just one of the benefits of being an independent coworking space with owners who are passionate about the small business community.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Thinking back to when we first started trying to get the word out about Haven Collective, it was 2017. The Upper Arlington location was under construction in many parts of the building, but we were operating out of the second floor. So, we started sharing behind-the-scenes images of what we were creating. The photos weren’t glamorous or professional, but we just started sharing our story.

The more we shared the why behind Haven, the more people started feeling connected to what we were building. We focused our spotlight on our growing community, using whatever small following we had to highlight the incredible work that our members were doing.

We reached out to several small business owners in our greater community to invite them into our space for coffee and a hard hat tour so they could see firsthand what Haven was all about. A lot of these relationships started through Instagram DMs at all hours of the night (entrepreneurs don’t often share the same “office hours” as you might expect). So many of these IG connections were so supportive and came to visit us, shared our story in their feeds and many even joined our community. Instagram became our social platform of choice during that time. It felt like we were building an online community the same way we were community building in our space as well. Neither was built overnight, but they were built entirely organically over the years and thousands of conversations.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

So many businesses had to pivot during 2020, that it almost doesn’t feel like a pivot anymore. But, as a workspace operator that relies on people to work from the office, some pivoting was certainly necessary to survive the pandemic. On March 12, 2020, Governor DeWine announced that school would be closed for three weeks and our community felt that impact immediately.

Since a great deal of Haven’s members were parents, we tried to stay in contact with them and they all worked through making plans to work from home while taking care of their kids. We took stock of everything we did inside the space to support our members and from that list, we worked to provide as many of those services virtually as possible. We didn’t want our members feeling abandoned and we knew as the pandemic restrictions extended that isolation would take its toll.

We created a new level of membership that was entirely virtual and focused on growth and support. We worked together with experts to create workshops and online events that would engage our members and help them through this rough patch. And we virtually coworked from time to time just to spend time connecting. Connection was critical for our mental health and helped all of us get to the other side of the pandemic together.

Pivoting our memberships online was the first change. Close on the heels of that pivot was the decision to close the kids club. The Haven Kids Club was an in-person-only resource to support members who needed a few hours each week to meet with clients or get some focused work done while their kids were cared for onsite. During COVID-19, the members were forced to seek alternative solutions that they could rely on at home, and others were looking for private spaces to meet with their teams. So kids club turned into a new space for members to get together safely once they did return to the office. It was a bittersweet moment, but necessary for our survival.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://havencolumbus.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/haven.collective/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HavenCollective/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/24980419
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/haven-collective-columbus