Lucid Private Offices CEO Flip Howard has been in the flexible office business since 2001. In that time, he has been through a recession, a pandemic, and two full rebrands, and has come out the other side running one of the most premium brands in the industry.

Today, he has 29 locations open with (at least) two more on the way, and Flip has done the branding, positioning, and marketing math.

In Episode 28, Flip dives into the evolution of his business, where his priorities are, and what he sees for the future.

We discuss how:

• Lucid started in 2001 as Meridian Business Centers, a Regis copycat that competed mostly on price, before two rebrands carried it through Work Suites and upmarket into the modern, premium Lucid Private Offices brand it is today
• Flip built Lucid in the gap between Regis and WeWork on purpose, and his test for that in-between position is whether you land on the best of both or the worst of both, because nobody wants to buy a convertible minivan
• Lucid's motto is "work is good, where you do it matters," and Flip makes the case with a simple comparison: people happily pay thousands to drink a cold beer by a pool in Fiji and would not pay thirty bucks to drink the same beer at a roadside motel, because the surroundings are the product
• He treats marketing as pure ROI and calls the phrase "marketing budget" a stupid sentence, since you would never stop buying customers who cost two dollars and bring in a hundred
• He recently cut his Google ad spend roughly in half with almost no drop in lead flow, and he is reinvesting the savings into SEO, AI visibility, referrals, and broker outreach to wean the business off its dependence on Google
• After a year and a half of pouring money into sales training that barely moved his close rate, Flip realized the bigger lever was getting more people in the door, since lifting the conversion rate had done so little
• His new locations run 25,000 square feet and up by design, because small spaces fill faster, but large ones are where the profit lives, and he thinks the industry confuses occupancy with profitability
• He breaks every coworking location into four legs of a stool, real estate, build-out, sales and marketing, and customer service, and the first two are the ones you can never fix once you have signed the lease

If you want to hear from one of the coworking industry's pioneers, this one's for you.

Want to connect with Flip Howard? Find him on LinkedIn and check out Lucid Private Offices.

By the way, you can also:

• Check us out on YouTube
• Download all free tools, templates, and resources from 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast 🛠️

About 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast

Hosted by Kevin Whelan of Everspaces and Taylor Mason of Talemaker, 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast dives deep into marketing tips, tools, insights, and strategies you can actually use to grow your coworking business.

🔔 Hit subscribe to make sure you don't miss an episode.

About Lucid Private Offices

Lucid Private Offices provides flexible workspace for teams and individuals, along with meeting rooms and virtual offices. They operate locations across Austin, Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, and Nashville.

Justin Moran is the founder of WorkspaceMA, a five-location coworking operation just outside Boston with around 200 private offices. He's 51, has a sales background, and has never written a line of code. In the last four months, Claude tells him he's written close to 200,000 lines of it.

Justin joins this episode to share a recap and follow-up of our AI panel at GWA Immersive in Toronto. We get practical about how we're putting AI to work across marketing and operations, and where any operator should start.

In this episode, we cover what's possible and what we're seeing making an impact, including:

• How Justin built custom internal tools, including a proposal builder, an attorney-approved license agreement generator, and an infrastructure issue logger, without writing any code
• The "tell Claude to write the prompt" approach that lets non-technical operators build real tools by voice
• How Justin rebuilt his five-year-old website in a single rainy weekend in Claude Design
• How Kevin designed and coded a fully branded newsletter for Shift Workspaces in Claude Design, then dropped it straight into Mailchimp
• Taylor's repeatable system for turning one idea into blog, email, LinkedIn, and Instagram content while keeping brand voice consistent and avoiding AI slop

If you run a coworking or flexible office business and you've wondered how to put AI to work in a meaningful way, this conversation is worth your time.

Want to connect with Justin Moran? Find him on LinkedIn and check out WorkspaceMA.

By the way, you can also:

• Check us out on YouTube
• Download all free tools, templates, and resources from 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast 🛠️

About 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast

Hosted by Kevin Whelan of Everspaces and Taylor Mason of Talemaker, 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast dives deep into marketing tips, tools, insights, and strategies you can actually use to grow your coworking business.

🔔 Hit subscribe to make sure you don't miss an episode.

Alex Hughes is the founder of CENTRL Office, an 11-location flexible office brand built across Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles over the last decade.

He started as a real estate broker who got dared into coworking by a landlord, and grew CENTRL from a single Pearl District location into one of the most respected operators on the West Coast.

This is a conversation about what it actually takes to grow a flexible office brand across multiple states without losing the feel of the original neighborhood location.

In Episode 26, Alex gets into how he built CENTRL from one Pearl District location into a multi-state operator, including:

• The origin story behind CENTRL, and the landlord who "dared" Alex to put his money where his mouth was
• Why CENTRL evolved from leases to management agreements, and the reframe at the heart of how Alex structures every deal
• The Montessori approach Alex uses to build mixed-stage communities of startups, enterprise tenants, and established companies in the same space
• Why CENTRL invested in serious branding from day one with just a single location, and how that decision compounded over the next decade
• Where flex is heading next, and why enterprise tenants are driving most of the growth most operators have been waiting for

If you're running, scaling, or partnering with landlords on a flexible office operation, this conversation is worth your time.

Want to connect with Alex Hughes? Find him on LinkedIn and check out CENTRL Office

By the way, you can also:

• Check us out on YouTube
• Download all free tools, templates, and resources from 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast 🛠️

About 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast

Hosted by Kevin Whelan of Everspaces and Taylor Mason of Talemaker, 2 Marketers and a Coworking Podcast dives deep into marketing tips, tools, insights, and strategies you can actually use to grow your coworking business.

🔔 Hit subscribe to make sure you don't miss an episode.