About

My Story

Welcome, I’m thrilled that you’re here.

My journey spawned from the same place that most businesses find their dawn – my personal need to be with my tribe and a belief that our pursuit of well-being shouldn’t be limited to the hours before 9 am and after 5 pm.

I spent a lot of years loving life in start-ups and a few years in corporate America getting my soul sucked. In my last start-up, I was a part of a very passionate healthcare company whose mission is to help people live healthier lives…but we were spending a bunch of time in painful corporate environments trying to force health messages on  employees that were so crushed by lack of light, lunch at their desk, and cubicle walls that they had no ear for our message.

I saw a need for a major paradigm shift – to start from scratch to design spaces and work cultures to empower wellbeing. And I came across the model of coworking. And that made all the sense to me.

So I started Enerspace Coworking – a place where entrepreneurs go to do their best work. A place for tribes to congregate and be well through connection, inspiration and perspiration. Enerspace started in Chicago and is now in Palo Alto.

So what are we doing here?

I got into coworking in the relatively early years got really passionate really quickly about the industry and helping to shape its future.

I started two coworking spaces in two different markets.

I sold one.

I had investors in the other.

I made a lot of mistakes on the first one and got the model down.

I served as president of the League of Extraordinary Coworking Spaces for two years. I am now the Executive Director of the Global Workspace Association. I speak and write to help industry players understand where we’re going and how to build sustainable businesses.

I forgot to mention. I’m a bit of a nerd. I have an MBA from the University of Chicago in finance and entrepreneurship. I love spreadsheets, pro-formas, DCF’s. I also ran marketing for multi-million dollar brands at Kraft Foods after business school. I was the COO of a healthcare startup after that. I love business but I also love people. And like it was yesterday, I can feel the wild excitement, the energy of the journey to fulfill a dream…as well as the fear, the loneliness, the stress of not knowing what I didn’t know. I did this thing all by myself  back in 2011. And today, there’s no excuse for that. There’s industry data, knowledge, wisdom to be tapped and shared. So this is how I impact the world. I create content and experiences to make sure that no one has to do this thing alone.

If you want to get into the flexible office space and make decisions based on data and the most current industry knowledge, we should talk.