Sean Johnson - Intentionally - The Education of Sean Johnson

I wonder why more companies don’t take advantage of the implicit benefits of retail when considering office space.

I don’t doubt that the costs of retail space vs. a traditional office are large. But I wonder if the benefits would outweigh the costs. The decisions that an organization would subsequently make upon choosing a retail space would be numerous, and many would be (imho) very beneficial.

Retail environments operate from an entirely different set of assumptions. Unlike many cubicle farms with poor florescent lighting and fake plants, the focus isn’t all about utility. Unlike the boardrooms of many professional service firms, the focus isn’t on conveying power and respect.

Retail environments are about the customer. The lighting, the furnishings, the music…everything is designed to create a mood, to make customers “feel” comfortable or happy…and ideally to compel them to make a buying decision.

You might argue that your clients wouldn’t approve. You might be a law firm or an accountancy or something similar and feel such an environment just wouldn’t work.

And yet banks - for decades the epitome of conservative, buttoned-down culture - have embraced the retail environment wholeheartedly. My local bank has a television with financial news playing, a variety of business books and magazines, soft music in the background, bright colorful graphics touting various products, and friendly people at kiosks ready to help me out. If it works for banks, I would submit it could work for anyone.

Imagine you were a consulting firm focused on small business. And imagine that instead of renting an executive office space, you grabbed a storefront on one of the main streets of your local downtown. Imagine that you and your employees were seen by hundreds or thousands of businesspeople each day as they walked to and from work.

What would you do differently? What could you do differently?

What if the front 1/3 of your office had big, overstuffed couches and chairs, with the morning newspaper on the coffee table in front of them?

What if you served complementary coffee in the morning, and opened it up to give folks a comfortable place to hold morning meetings or relax before the day?

What if you had free wireless access and a printer in the front for folks to pop in and run off a few copies before their important meeting?

What if you made the front a flexible space, and once a week converted it to a place to hold seminars on the fundamentals of running a small business? What if it were timed an hour before work started so your guests would arrive to work on time and the everyone else who walked by saw the meeting in session?

What if you used the window space and hired a local artist each month to create a beautiful window display? What if their artwork was up on your walls on the inside for sale, cycling in and out each month?

What if you had a young, beautiful receptionist who greeted everyone who came in with a smile? What if guests who had an appointment were offered a drink and a copy of some piece of reading material written by you to enjoy while waiting for the meeting to begin?

What if once or twice a month, you held your own happy hour, serving folks in your community drinks, perhaps bringing in speakers, holding giveaways?

If you operated in a retail environment, what could you do? What kind of music would you play? What kind of smells would you fill the place with? What kinds of attractive furniture, lighting, graphic treatments would you display? What would you put on the flat screen televisions that would line the windows, projecting your message 24 hours a day to passersby? What kinds of evening events could you hold? What kinds of people would you need to hire? What kinds of risks would you be suddenly willing and able to take?

How would such an environment almost instantly make you more memorable to your community, to your potential customers? How much more energetic and enjoyable would such an environment be for your employees and clients? To what degree would such an environment improve your work and add variety to your life?

And what would you have to do with your plastic ficus?