A commercial space management company is helping burgeoning businesses in West Norfolk to get off the ground with the opening of a new co-working space.
Yours Business Networks has opened the area at its Tuesday Market Place business centre in King's Lynn, offering start-ups, entrepreneurs, home workers and small local companies the opportunity to rent a town centre location for a peppercorn rent.
Management at the firm – which lets office space and meeting rooms – made the decision to capitalise on the growing trend for co-working, which has seen successful spaces pop up in towns and cities around the UK.
Worldwide, there were 21,000 people who worked in a co-working space in 2010 – by 2017, this number had reached almost 1.2 million.
Norwich is home to several co-working spaces including Whitespace and St George's Works, which are popular with the city's tech community.
One co-worker taking advantage of the new facility in King's Lynn is Michelle Ring, sales director of Abtec Industries, a supplier of abrasion products.
She said: 'I am much more productive, can focus more and find that I can get more into my working day by co-working. It's such a bonus too, to be able to meet my clients in impressive meeting rooms and network with the other businesses in the building.'
Another co-worker, Charlotte Niemiec, editor of Speciality Chemicals Magazine, said she enjoys the ability to draw a line between work and home which the co-working space offers.
'It's great to have other people to talk to and bounce ideas off, plus the professional focus and the inspiring networks I have now mean I get more done and have a better quality of work life,' she said.
Matt Cooper, from Yours Business Networks, said the co-working space at its business centre enabled resident companies to collaborate with others working close by, and benefit from the meeting rooms and other facilities in the building.
'We're delighted to be able to offer affordable office space to growing businesses in West Norfolk,' he said.
'We have superb offices to let and first-class meeting rooms to hire in a terrific town centre location and it's exciting to be able to complement that by answering the demand for new trends in the workplace.'
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