EPISODE 74 OF THE MARKETING SOLUTIONS PODCAST: CREATING COMMUNITY AND PIVOTING LIKE A BOSS WITH SHEREE RUBINSTEIN

Sonia MacIntyre-Reid:
Welcome to the Boom Your Biz podcast, a podcast for the movers, the shakers, and even bigger action takers in business. I'm your host, Sonia MacIntyre-Reid, and each week I'll be exploring the question of what really makes businesses and organizations thrive. I'm on a mission to educate, empower, and inspire business owners and myself along the way.

Sonia MacIntyre-Reid:
Today, I am joined by Sheree Rubinstein, and Sheree is the founder of what used to be the most fantastic in-person coworking space and is now an online membership for female led businesses. Welcome Sheree.

Sheree One Roof:
Thank you, Sonia. Such a pleasure to be here.

Sonia MacIntyre-Reid:
Sheree has actually been responsible for basically most of my podcast guests in the last six months have been One Roof members, which has been incredible. I know for me, when I was first starting out in business to have the One Roof office space to go to and be surrounded by other incredible women, doing exciting things was a real help in my business. And to this day still we're fostering those connections and it's just been fantastic. So I just wanted to say thank you, Sheree. I appreciate everything that you've created.

Sheree One Roof:
[inaudible 00:01:25] everything I hope to hear. So thank you, you know you really need to hear it sometimes.

Sonia MacIntyre-Reid:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Sheree, I was just saying before we started recording that, I love your story around how you started One Roof. So why don't you take me back on a little bit of a journey? I'm not sure what year you started it, but how did it all come about? You were working in a completely different field at the time as well. So tell me all the things.

Sheree One Roof:
Sure, so I'd started my career in corporate law working in a top tier law firm. I don't think being a lawyer was really ever for me. So I think, kind of from day one of entering that world, I was just trying to navigate my way through and fumbling my way along and not really sure what I was doing. But at the same time, I started to become acutely aware of the gender gaps and the barriers in the business and corporate world and the challenges that women were facing to get into leadership positions. I became really passionate about wanting to make a difference in that space. And so it all started really small. I never thought I was going to be an entrepreneur or run my own business. I just started by running networking events with some friends of mine. We thought, well, we're kind of feeling unsure about ourselves and quite anxious and not knowing where to go in our career journey. And there must be lots of other women out there feeling the same way, so let's just put on events and bring women together and have interesting speakers and create that platform for conversation and connection.

Sheree One Roof:
Obviously there's now... That was seven or eight years ago. There's a lot going on for women today, which is great. But back then, there wasn't much. So this was fairly new and exciting. And we grew that from 15 women around a dining room table to 300 person events with really well-known speakers. And that was great, but I knew I wanted to do more. It wasn't just about running events. And so I with Jianna, who's my ex business partner. We met and came up with this idea that we were going to create a physical hub and provide everything women need to succeed in business all under One Roof, which is where the name One Roof came from. At the time coworking was on the rise and so... And we actually knew about a space in the U.S. That was designed for women. I think that was the only one we knew of at the time. We were like, okay, let's jump on that. This is a growing space. People...lots of people starting businesses wanting to work in a coworking environment and we're going to design something really unique and innovative and actually dedicated to women led businesses.

Sheree One Roof:
We didn't have funding at the time, so we couldn't just go and sign a lease and fit out a beautiful space. So we started really lean and small and actually rented an Airbnb mansion in St Kilda and turned this woman's beautiful home into a pop-up coworking space for a week. We actually had nearly 500 people walk through her doors in that week. Which she had no idea about, and I still to this day wonder if she's ever heard me, any of these podcast interviews or me talk on stages about that story. But yeah, her home was the catalyst for what became One Roof, which over the last six years, I grew it, as you mentioned, Sonia, as a coworking operation.

Sheree One Roof:
We were based in south bank, we became the leading co-working space in Australia, dedicated to women led businesses. We had founders and businesses like you Sonia working in the space. There were about 180 members and we had a 200 person event space, and so we were hosting epic events every day of the week. More than just being an office space, it was really about providing the business support, the community, the connections for women to grow their businesses and to succeed and thrive. Then COVID hit and I'm sure we'll get into that more, but that really changed everything. My whole life changed from the moment COVID hit and that really changed the business.

Sonia MacIntyre-Reid:
Going from this Airbnb to actually having a physical space, you mentioned that when you first started, you didn't have funding, was there a form of external funding that happened and how did you go about sourcing that?

Sheree One Roof:
Yes, I decided that I was going to... I went from the Airbnb space to then going, "okay, that works really well. I need to keep building this. I obviously don't have the funding to do it. So what is cheap, economical, easy ways of doing it?" My business partner at the time had moved back to the US. And so we thought, okay, let's do global domination. You take on the U.S. I'll take on Australia and it's all going to work easily and perfectly. It never works out that way. She found a retail space in LA, and then also found a surf lodge in New York and then a boutique shopping mall. And so we were setting up spaces in those locations and finding really cheap rent or sharing the rent between another tenant in the space.

Sheree One Roof:
Then I actually ran One Roof out of my auntie and uncle's home for six months just before they were going to renovate. So we did that, and again, I didn't have to pay rent for that. That worked really well and then I decided I just needed to find a landlord who loved the idea, and loved what I was doing and could give me a really good deal. I don't know, I was totally ignorant, but it actually worked. I don't even know how I manifested this, but I ended up being introduced to a landlord who were property developers and they had a space in South Bank and they were waiting for permits to demolish the building and turn it into an 80 story apartment building. Somebody introduced us, it was a very warm referral and I pitched the idea to them and said, I'm doing this great work, supporting women in business and I'm looking for a space. And they said, "Look, we're going to give you a really good deal a below market deal. You can take this space, sign a lease for 18 months, and then it'll be month to month after that. Then once we get our permits we'll kick you out."

Sheree One Roof:
I took my partner and I took my dad and we walked through the space and I was like, "What do I do?" And they're like, "This is the best, you won't find a better opportunity than this. This is your chance to build the business and see what you do with it, go for it." My dad's an electrician, so we DIY'd everything. As you would know, Sonia, it was a beautiful space, but also interesting. We knew we weren't going to be there for long, so we couldn't rip up the ugly carpets and we couldn't re-do the fit out. We basically just had to work with what we had and then paint things ourself and bring in some nicer furniture. I built the event stage with my dad and the bar table with my dad, and he came in and did the all the electrical work. Every time we did renovations he was there to help. It was a very scrappy DIY effort. And then once that was doing really well and I'd built up enough of a brand and a name and a community, and we had good revenue coming in, I then went on a capital raising journey to raise capital, to be able to fit out a permanent flagship.

Sonia MacIntyre-Reid:
Fantastic, then I guess that whole world of raising capital is something that you probably hadn't been exposed to previously, especially working as a lawyer. How did you go about navigating that? Where did you find your information? Where do you even start? I mean, when you hear the concept of capital raising, I just think about an American movie and they're raising some big tech invention or something.

Sheree One Roof:
It felt very scary and I felt out of my depth the entire time and didn't feel like I knew what I was doing at any point in that journey. But I guess I had the benefit of having built One Roof over the years and spent so much time with founders and investors and accelerator program and just constantly learning and absorbing and understanding the lingo and understanding who would be the right kind of investor for me. So I guess that, that was just a bonus that I'd had that insight.

Sheree One Roof:
I knew straight away that the typical VC route wasn't going to work for me. I was building a business that I wanted to make money, but also have an impact. It's not a tech business and it is supporting women. And so most VCs are men and most VCs have a mandate to 10 X their money. I just knew that I didn't want to grow One Roof to be the next we work. That wasn't the intention. And so I knew not to pitch to VCs, and I probably saved myself that pain and heartache of never standing in front of a single VC and pitching to them.

Sheree One Roof:
Then I knew that my investors needed to come from ideally women who had come from money or self-made and they're looking to invest, but also give back. And they would really resonate with the mission that I was on. I had a few people in mind and that's just kind of over the years of knowing and having these conversations. I had a friend [inaudible 00:11:02] introduced me to this woman whose name is Susie Carp, Susie and her husband run a fund and then also do a lot of philanthropic work. I was introduced to her and I said to her, "I'm looking to raise capital. And this is what I want to do with the money. This is where I want to go with it." And we just got on really well. She then said to me, "You know what Sheree, I'm going to put on a lunch and I'm going to invite a lot of people in my network who are looking for investment opportunities as well, a lot of women. Let's just see what happens. I can't promise anything, but you stand up, you share your story and let's see."

Sheree One Roof:
From that lunch, I got basically all of my investors, which was just amazing. The best thing about the lunch was it wasn't the kind of shark tank style of standing up and pitching and they're interrogating me and, tearing my pitch to shreds and analyzing my numbers and asking me really difficult questions. It was wanting to know my story and my vision. And what's the direction of why women and how are we going to solve this problem that all the women in the room related to. I felt really blessed and lucky that I could just really share my honest story. I got lucky in that sense, but I guess I also knew who were my... I was strategic about the people that I pitch to.

Sheree One Roof:
I also ended up engaging a coach in the U.S. who was very well-versed in raising capital. He helped me along the journey that was really helpful because there would be times where I'm like, "Oh my God, I've got a meeting tomorrow with a potential investor, what documents do I bring? What questions are they going to ask? What if I asked me about valuation? What if they... How do I answer any of those questions?" So he was there as my person to call and be like, "Okay, can we talk out all the possible questions they're going to ask me? What documents do I bring? How do I respond to this email?" That was really helpful.

Sheree One Roof:
I would say in hindsight, I think it would have been better to have someone on the ground in Australia who really understood my business, who understood the markets here a bit better. I know people now who I wish I'd had in my pocket at the time, but I was successful in raising the capital. So it was a difficult process and it took about eight months or nine months, I would say from starting to actually getting money in the bank. So it takes a long time.

Sonia MacIntyre-Reid:
That's incredible. I feel like I'm not going to phrase this question very well. So anyone listening to this do not come at me about being anti feminist because I am completely not. I think it's Sheryl Sandberg talks about it in her book Lean In, which I absolutely adore that book. She talks about how, say you've got 12 partners in a law firm, for example, and a woman is trying to make partner. She looks at the fact that there's only two other women who are currently partners. So she thinks, well, I'm not competing against all 12 people to get that position. I'm just competing against those two women. I think Sheryl raises a point in there around if we just continue to do business with women and creating these female groups and things, then we're excluding men. And we're not actually infiltrating and becoming being seen as equal. So women or people just competing against each other for space rather than competing against the other women. What are your thoughts around that?

Sheree One Roof:
Yeah, so few things, I think when I started One Roof firstly it was never about being a women only space. As you would know, there were plenty of... Obviously there were more women than men working in the space, but there were plenty of men. I would never expect women to only build businesses that hire men or don't have male clients or don't have... Who only hire women. Sorry. It was never about being a women only space and I'd watched the wing in the U.Ss and they were at a time women only and had a lot of backlash and a lot of issues around that. I think that never made sense to me and of course I have male mentors, male investors, and men on my board and so it was just never going to be women only.

Sheree One Roof:
That said, I think that there is still space and it's important to have both women only, and men only platforms to have these kinds of conversations. I know that a lot of the programming that we've run time and time again, women will say, I felt the space that you've created is a safe space where I can have these honest conversations that I wouldn't otherwise have, if it wasn't a female only space. So I think there's a time and a place for both genders. And then obviously we have a world now where some people don't identify as either agenda. And so we're kind navigating all of that, but I think that there's still a place for that. That said, I think that where the real change happens is when all genders converge and we're not really talking about gender, we're going, okay, let's just actually move forward and create equality.

Sheree One Roof:
A lot of the things that we do, like we're about to run a big conference called the Unspoken Conference, which is bringing to the virtual stage conversations affecting ambitious career-driven women, that we don't have often enough and publicly enough. We've got men in those conversations and I think it's crucial to have that because the reality is if we want to see change, we want to close the gender gaps, there is still majority of decision makers are men. So if we're not including men in the conversation, we're not actually going to see the change that we made to have happened. So I think it's really important for everyone to be in the conversation and for everyone to feel comfortable, to be able to engage and talk about their experiences and their understanding. I think the hard thing is when men don't feel comfortable to share, because they're like, "Well, I'm just going to get attacked for anything I say." We actually need to all be having open conversations about all this.

Sonia MacIntyre-Reid:
Absolutely completely agree. All right, so COVID hit, the lease on your space was up just before that. You were actually in the process of having meetings with people trying to find a new landlord. I remember you were coming and going on sort of secret squirrel business for months before the co-working space actually closed trying to sort out a solution and then COVID completely threw a spanner in the works And you had to pivot, what did that look like for you?

Sheree One Roof:
prior to COVID, as you mentioned, Sonia, I knew that the lease was going to be up on the space. I was just waiting for the day that the landlords would call and say, you need to be out. I'd raise the capital. So I'd raised a million dollars and then I had investors and a board and they were like, "Okay, we've got to make sure that we secure a space before you get kicked out. Otherwise the business is going to be in disarray."

Sheree One Roof:
The issue that I faced was when I raised the capital, I raised it on assumptions around rent and the cost of fit out, and all these expenses that actually over time just kept going up. Like rent went just through the roof in Melbourne. I'd raised this million dollars, but realized that in order to achieve the dream and the vision that I was talking about, I actually didn't raise enough money.

Sheree One Roof:
I was finding it really hard to find a good deal on a site that was going to match everything I said I was going to do in the right location and so on. So it was pretty frantic. I was feeling really stressed and I would have to say it was a very difficult time in my business and my life. I felt like I was pushing shit up a hill and every door that I tried to open was slammed in my face. It was really tough. Then of course I was pregnant. I actually was pregnant then lost the pregnancy then was pregnant again. You throw all the personal shit into this mix and it was just really hard with a lot of pressure from investors and advisors.

Sheree One Roof:
Then I got the call that we needed to be out of our space in South Bank. That was just like... I bawled, I thought that was the end of everything. I then had to face all of our members, face all of our event clients and say, "I've got three months and you need to find a new office space and a new venue." So I dealt with all of that. We packed up the space in South Bank after four years, and then I was still frantically trying to find a location for our new site. I actually secured it. So it was going to be a space in Cremorne and it was a beautiful new build. That was going to launch around May last year, two months after I was giving birth. I was just, again, frantically doing everything that I could to get prepared for that, knowing that I was about to have a baby, trying to support all our members who were now dispersed across different spaces and trying to appease my investments and say, it's okay. I know all of our members and dispersed, but it's fine. They're all going to come back. They're loyal, the businesses is okay.

Sheree One Roof:
I could sense a lot of fear in my investors, but I just kept going. And then when COVID hit, it just stopped everything. Obviously for all of us, the world just came to a halt. Two weeks into lockdown I had a baby and that also changed my life. Then I thought that the investors... I thought I was in this space where it was like, okay, there's a global pandemic, we're in a crisis. The investors would be like, "Cool let's just sit and wait and see what happens. Cause like, obviously the whole world is on hold." But what started happening was I was having calls with may saying, "We know we're in a pandemic, but you've got our money and you need to make a decision. What are you going to do? Are you setting up space in Cremorne? When are you doing it? If not, where's the money going? You have to start making some decisions."

Sheree One Roof:
Then I remember I jumped on a call with all of them and they said to me, "You've got to make a call. Make a decision on this." I spent the weekend thinking about it and I realized I've lost a lot of confidence in the business and the model. I actually don't feel comfortable investing their money in this climate. We have no idea what's going to happen. We have no idea if coworking is going to continue to rise or is going to die. We don't know what's going to happen, we're stuck in this lockdown. I made a very quick decision and it felt really hard, but also it felt like an immense sense of relief.

Sheree One Roof:
I called them all on the Monday. And I said, "I actually just want to return your capital. And I want to pivot the business. I'm going to turn it into a digital membership and continue running all of the events and the support and everything that I love doing, but just do it all online." That was an idea that one of my advisors said to me, she called me and she said, "Sheree, everyone's online, everyone's on zoom, just launch the business online." I always wanted to do a virtual membership. So it was like, just bring that forward. Let's do that and then work out what to do with the coworking when we have some more clarity and answers. That's what I did. I returned the capital to investors. They said to me, "Consider us as warm investors and let us know if you want to re pitch to us at some point, there's no timeframe, just see how you go.

Sheree One Roof:
I just got to work building the online membership and it was an absolute game changer. At the same time, my partner and I decided that we could leave Melbourne and spend some time in the Byron Shire. [inaudible 00:23:01] was four months old when we did that. We've been living and working remotely and I'm building [inaudible 00:23:08] membership and rather than looking at raising capital again to set up my own coworking spaces I'm partnering with other coworking spaces. I no longer have the overheads that I had. I'm no longer needing to be in a physical space every single day. That was full on and took up a lot of my time. It's actually been a really pleasant and exciting change of pace and change of business and change of life. And I'm loving it. I'm loving building an online business and just turning what could have been a complete failure into a new opportunity.

Sonia MacIntyre-Reid:
I think it's fantastic and I'm working out of co-working space in Aubrey at the moment. It was really funny a couple of months ago... Because we've got a One Roof Facebook group and you will do an intro every time there's a new member that's joined. So I think it was on a weekly basis, is it? There was a name that popped up and it's this woman in my coworking space in Aubrey that sits two seats down from me. I was like, "it's spreading." It's absolutely incredible. And I sort of went up to her and went, "Hey, how did you find out about One Roof?" And it sounds like a lot of it really has been word of mouth.

Sheree One Roof:
I think yes, definitely word of mouth, but also intentionally building the brand. I think over the years, I've put in a lot of effort to build the One Roof brand. Also my personal brand as somebody who is a thought leader in this space in terms of supporting women, women in business, women in entrepreneurship. I very quickly got over my fear of public speaking so that I could just keep saying yes to opportunities to talk at big events and sit on panels and do podcast interviews like this. There's been a lot of organic concerted effort in building the brand and the community and a big part of that is my belief that the more honest we are in terms of what's going on in building our businesses and how we're striving to be leaders in what we're doing, the more we support other women to do the same. So I just love to be very public about the challenges that I'm facing personally and what's going on for me and then supporting other women and giving them the permission to feel shit and feel the same and work through their challenges.

Sonia MacIntyre-Reid:
Sheree, can you tell me a little bit about what people get from the One Roof membership as it currently stands digitally? And if someone listening to this is interested in joining, what does that look like?

Sheree One Roof:
Yeah, sure. As a member, you start with a very personalized onboarding experience. We do a group onboarding call where we talk through the membership in more detail. We ask you to share more about your business or your career and your goals. Then we talk about how we can tailor the membership to your needs. We then send this beautiful welcome pack to your home or your office. We've got a partnership with metal, which is a social enterprise supporting women who have experienced domestic violence. They create these beautiful gift packs with really nice self-care products. We send that as like a welcome. From there you join our private Facebook group, you get access to our weekly networking events and master classes. We have different guest speakers talking to different topics that are to entrepreneurial women.

Sheree One Roof:
Sonia you've run a masterclass for our community on how to build an online business, how to pivot and build an online business. We run everything from mindset, staff, leadership, how to score government grants, and then very technical skills around SEO, or content creation, or legal and so on. We also have a lot of different experts and industry experts, and you can book in office hours with them. So whether that's talking to an expert in legal, accounting, finance, tax, marketing, branding, so on. You get access to a great network of advisors and industry experts.

Sheree One Roof:
We spend a lot of time really trying to boost your visibility, whether we do we do these workshop talks. We interview our members on Instagram Live. We have a weekly newsletter. We kind of share our member wins and podcasts. We put our members forward for different opportunities. We just run lots of networking and group sessions where we can troubleshoot business challenges that you have.

Sheree One Roof:
As a member you sign up to either a monthly subscription or an annual subscription, and you get a big discount if you sign up for the annual one and it's all through our website. Then we've got a member portal where you can access all the member benefits and the recordings from different masterclasses. There's heaps on there, and then as I said before, we also have a partnership with coworking spaces. We try to do in-person catch up and we're building partnerships with different spaces across the country so that members can catch up anywhere across the country. So there's lots going on, and we're really just all about understanding our members and connecting them to the right network and the right experts and advisors, and really helping you along your way to business and career success.

Sonia MacIntyre-Reid:
I think it's a really genuinely supportive community. So for me, if I need an expert in some area, the first place I'll go is the private Facebook group. Today, for example, you've got someone running a masterclass on influencer marketing, which I'm all signed up for and could not wait for. I think just connecting with these incredible women who are doing such exciting things, particularly in a time when there's so much uncertainty around COVID, I think it provides that really great support with people that are going through the same thing as well. I think, I've joined other coworking spaces in the past. I've been part of other networking groups, things like that. I can't put my finger on what it is or how you've actually fostered it, but the community around One Roof is genuinely something really special. So anyone listening to this that is looking for something a little bit different out there, it's not like every other membership that we see floating around. It really is special and incredibly affordable as well. So definitely jump on it. Sheree, where can we find you and One Roof on Instagram and also what is One Roofs website address?

Sheree One Roof:
So website is weareoneoof.com and Instagram handle is We are One Roof, and also on Facebook.

Sonia MacIntyre-Reid:
Awesome. Sheree, thank you so much for your time.

Sheree One Roof:
Thank you.