What is it like to manage a co-working hub?

Work IQ’s Eoghan Powell discusses his role in leading the co-working hub, his ‘jack of all trades’ approach and the difficulties entrepreneurs face early on.

Remote working and co-working are concepts that have gained a lot of traction over the years, providing flexible work options for workers.

Through a mix of private investment and Government funding, co-working hubs have popped up all across Ireland in recent years. We’ve previously taken a hands-on look at the benefits of working at one of these hubs, from the services they provide to the simple perk of getting a change of scenery.

But what is it like to be leading one of these co-working hubs, which can be full of entrepreneurs and teams from various sectors? To answer that, we spoke to Eoghan Powell, the centre director at Work IQ in Tallaght.

Work IQ features flexible office and co-working spaces for up to 60 businesses, along with meeting rooms and conference facilities for customers and the wider community. It opened earlier this year and is expected to support the creation of more than 700 jobs worth €80m to the economy.

This site is also the first Irish centre run by Oxford Innovation Space, an organisation that manages 31 other innovation centres in the UK. Powell works with a team of four at the centre and liaises with these other centres too.

“We run programmes to support new and established entrepreneurs, but one of the big things I try to do is help with the weird and wonderful problems that come up which don’t have straight forward answers,” Powell said. “Who should I talk to about building a cleanroom? Does anyone know someone who makes millions of socks? Is this something I should weld or can it be attached some other way?

“I rarely know the answers, but I’m a really curious person, so I’ve made it my business to meet a really diverse group of people and get to know a bit about their business, so I can connect people.”

The jack of all trades

Powell has had an interesting career, being a manager for various locations and a founder of his own AI-focused business in 2020. He describes himself as a “jack of all trades”, having developed skills in marketing, accountancy, sales, operations, legal, customer service and leadership.

Besides his key achievement of having two children, Powell said his greatest achievement was when he renovated a dilapidated 14-bedroom Georgian mansion on a “shoestring” budget.

“I didn’t really know anything about listed buildings, construction, creating a financing package or project management – but it’s amazing what you can do when you are motivated,” he said. “I can now lime plaster, debate the appropriate fall for a plumbing run, tell you about the pros and cons of mezzanine loans, and I fear the sight of a Gantt chart.

“The biggest thing I took from that project is that I am capable of becoming 80pc fluent in lots of different domains really quickly, which I think is a critical skill for anyone starting a business. It’s not anywhere near as hard as it might seem if you put it all down in a list. The most important thing to doing anything is to get started, you can only eat an elephant one bite at a time.”

Powell said he struggled to figure out where to apply his diverse skillset. He originally considered consultancy work but felt that would mean working “in one giant corporation on behalf of another giant corporation”.

“I also wanted to do something meaningful, and a big part of what we do in Work IQ is focusing on economic development in areas undergoing regeneration,” Powell said. “Tallaght is an area undergoing a massive transformation and I’m very grateful to have an opportunity to play a small part in that. Every start-up is a scrappy underdog and there are a lot of parallels between those two things.”

The Work IQ building was funded by South Dublin County Council and built on council land as part of the newly developed Innovation Quarter in Tallaght.

Supporting entrepreneurs

Powell said the co-working hub provides various benefits for the businesses utilising it, but that the biggest support it offers is “the people” who understand the journey of a start-up. Powell said he knows “what that feeling of working without a safety net feels like for an entrepreneur”.

“It’s easy to understand intellectually, but hard to truly empathise with until you’ve been there,” Powell said. “For a lot of entrepreneurs, it can be really lonely, it can be difficult to find people to talk to when things get tough – sometimes you don’t want to scare your family or your team if things aren’t progressing as you hoped.

“Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. So, we look to build trust with leaders so that they know they can have an outlet.”

Powell said the facility is “sector agnostic”, with businesses of various backgrounds all sharing space in Work IQ. One key area that he wants to support in the future is hardware.

“There are lots of really cool hardware start-ups popping up in Ireland, from Manna Drones to Xocean, Danu Sport and GoEve,” he said. “But the narrative out of places like Silicon Valley has always been to move bits and bytes not atoms.

“In the same way Amazon disrupted the high street, as things progress, AI is going to mean the marginal cost of creating software is likely to go near zero, and that is going to disrupt a lot of tech companies. I think that the next wave of really exciting companies are going to be born from a more old school crazy inventor type, rather than the coder type, and I’ve started recently putting a lot of time into figuring out what I can do to help them.”

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