Oct 22, 2026
4 mins read
Future of Work
When flexible workspace operators think about growth, the conversation tends to start in a familiar place.
A new location. More square footage. More desks. More meeting rooms.
And this logic makes sense, because if you want to grow a flex space business, you need more… space
But what if your next million dollars in revenue doesn’t require another lease?
In a recent dinner with an operator who has 10 locations, they shared that over the years we’ve worked together, their on-demand online revenue has grown to represent 10% of their total revenue.
That might sound like just another sales channel doing its job. But the way the operator described the impact is notable.
And here’s why:
If each of their 10 locations generates $1 million in annual revenue, that’s a $10 million business. Online revenue now accounts for another $1 million across the portfolio.
In the operator’s eyes, it was as if they’d opened an eleventh location. Except they hadn’t taken on another lease, built out another space, or hired a new team to run it.
They had created the revenue equivalent of another location by making the inventory they already had available to customers online.
That’s a very different way to think about growth.
For an industry accustomed to measuring expansion in physical terms, it raises an important question: How much growth could operators unlock by getting more out of the locations they already have?
Physical expansion will always be an important part of the flexible workspace business. New locations bring new markets, new customers, and new opportunities.
But opening a location also brings costs and complexity. There’s the lease, the buildout, the staffing, and the time it takes to get a new space operating at the level you need.
There’s another opportunity to consider: generating more revenue from the locations you already have, by making them easier to discover, evaluate, and book.
When customers can find available space online, understand what it costs, and complete a booking without a lengthy back-and-forth, operators can reach demand that might otherwise never convert.
And when that happens across multiple locations, the impact can add up.
Online revenue isn’t necessarily incremental in the way operators have traditionally imagined it, or how it’s been treated in the past.
It can become a meaningful new layer of revenue across an existing portfolio.
The flexible workspace industry has become very good at measuring growth in physical terms: number of locations, square footage, occupancy, and capacity.
And those metrics matter. But they don’t tell the whole story.
They don’t show how much demand operators are capturing online or how much additional revenue they could generate from the inventory they already have. That’s not speculation; that’s real data we’re seeing with our Flexspace AI partners.
Before operators open up another location, they need to consider how much more revenue they could be generating from the locations they already have.
Now, that doesn’t mean physical expansion is the wrong decision. It just means it shouldn’t be the only growth strategy on the table.
Scaling your flexible workspace may come not just from opening new locations, but from building a stronger online revenue engine across the spaces that already exist.
Because your next million dollars of revenue might not require another building.