WeWork Separates Buildings and Beer

Here’s a business model. You start a company. It’s an office real estate company. You buy office buildings. You try to buy good office buildings, fancy ones in attractive areas. Then you configure and remodel the buildings. You try to do a good job of this, making nice offices that people will enjoy working in. You also manage the buildings. Again, you try to do a good job of this, offering high-tech amenities and free beer and a cool vibe that make the buildings attractive to tenants. Then you rent out the offices to tenants. Once again, you try to do a good job of this, building a strong brand so you can charge high rents; also, you let people rent relatively small chunks of the building (and for relatively short periods) to maximize your appeal to tenants.

You try to do all the things well, because they are all things you have to do. Each thing is a potential advantage, something that you can use to try to close a deal with a tenant. “You can get a flexible number of desks in our architecturally distinguished building in a convenient location that you’ll share with other cool creative tenants with whom you can drink free beer at a building happy hour but also the elevators don’t work” is an okay pitch, but the office market is competitive and you’d be better off saying the stuff about the building and the location and the tenants and adding “also we have state-of-the-art technology and you can control the temperature in your office from our app.” The way you distinguish yourself from your competitors is all ways; your goal is to be distinctive in all aspects of your business.