Carole Dupré describes herself as a “recovering corporate marketer.”
She started her brand and digital marketing consultancy last summer while still working for Cox Media. Cox was kind enough not to mind her “side hustle,” but meeting her new clients in coffee shops wasn’t working out for her. So she contacted John Jackson, who founded the Creative Bloc co-working space in downtown Baton Rouge.
“I went and visited the property, and I’m just like, ‘This would be perfect for this transition time,’” she recalls in a feature from the current issue of Business Report.
She signed up for a membership, which gave her access to amenities like a “beautiful conference room” for meeting clients. She did well enough with her business to leave the corporate gig in March. But instead of moving into a traditional office, she signed a lease for her own space at Creative Bloc.
“One of the best things about it is that you feel like you’re part of a family,” she says.
While it hasn’t really caught on in the Baton Rouge area, co-working spaces are a surging trend in real estate. By one estimate, close to 260,000 people worldwide work in such locations, compared to fewer than 10,000 five years ago. Regus, perhaps the best-known name in co-working, claims 3,000 locations worldwide, including one in Baton Rouge.
At least three locally owned co-working spaces have opened in Baton Rouge in recent years, although Creative Bloc, which opened last November, is the only one of the three planning to keep operating as such.
“Baton Rouge is a smaller market,” says commercial real estate broker Branon Pesnell. “I think there’s definitely a place for those, and I think that there’s interest, but it’s kind of a numbers game. … I think there’s only room for a small number of those in town.”
Entrepreneur Headquarters, or EHQ, was the first of the three co-working spaces to announce itself in Baton Rouge. It opened at Perkins Rowe in 2011 before moving out near Siegen Lane last year.
Jared Loftus, an entrepreneur and one of the EHQ co-founders, says the project “was pretty much full.” But Loftus and restaurateur Louis DeAngelo, who Loftus says was the main person responsible for the project, both have other ventures to worry about. When one of the tenants expressed interest in taking over the entire space, it seemed like a good idea.
So EHQ is no more. Meanwhile, the Springboard Baton Rouge co-working space that had been housed in the historic Kress Building downtown closed this summer. Developer John Schneider says the offices mostly were full, but he was closing the co-working aspect to concentrate on a new venture: NX, an entrepreneurship and technology conference planned for New Orleans in September.
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