New location more than triples the space for the co-working community

Richland’s growing co-working community will be moving into a three-story office that more than triples its space.

Fuse SPC, which started in 2014, is moving from its current location at 710 George Washington Way, Suite A, across the street to 723 The Parkway.

The new building should open Jan. 1, said Jess Stangeland, community manager for Fuse.

Stangeland said the group backing the move “is made up of Fuse members and some outside investors. There is a 10-year lease with an option to renew the lease. The move costs $500,000 for the renovation and furniture.”

Fuse’s current building is 3,000 square feet and the new facility is 10,000 square feet.

Stangeland, who started working at Fuse a year ago, said that space difference will be a big deal.

[blockquote quote="We’ve grown and grown, and we’ve helped launch 84 companies." source="Jess Stangeland, community manager for Fuse" align="right" max_width="300px"]

“This current building has nine small offices, two conference rooms and two sets of bathrooms, a podcast booth that gets a lot of use with regular podcasts and audio book recordings,” Stangeland said.

The new building, which has three floors, will be more open.

“I’m an interior designer,” Stangeland said. “I love the space there.”

The new Fuse space will have seven offices on the first floor, a total of 15 offices throughout the building, an expanded podcast studio and more space for the hot desk – a first-come, first-serve area for people using laptops for their business.

“The hot desk costs someone $95 a month,” Stangeland said. “That comes with 24/7 access, and eight hours in the podcast booth, and free events.”

Monthly memberships are tiered, based on space needs of the individual.

And while Stangeland said there are still offices available for rent, Christian Diamond – Fuse’s operations manager – doesn’t expect that to be the case not too far down the road.

“And yes, we expect to outgrow that eventually,” Diamond said.

That’s because Fuse is growing.

“We currently have 150 members of Fuse,” Stangeland said. “It was 95 a year ago at this time.”

As an added bonus, Diamond said Fuse is providing free WiFi for its Parkway neighbors.

What exactly is Fuse SPC?

Imagine wanting to start a business, but not having the money to rent or lease office space or afford the necessary internet bandwidth. Or the new equipment.

Fuse provides solutions to these barriers. The SPC in Fuse’s name stands for “social purpose corporation.”

Fuse “brings together ideas, abilities and resources in a co-working community environment that supports and champions enthusiasm. It’s the cumulative passion of over 30 contributors in the Tri-Cities, including lawyers, accountants, designers, developers, photographers, entrepreneurs, telecommuters, and big business refugees (people who benefit from getting out of their traditional office environment to find inspiration and connection in a community),” according to Fuse’s website.

Stangeland said the 30-plus contributors all met at a startup weekend event.

“They made their minds up to put this together,” she said. “They were full of energy and it was an intense 72 hours. They decided, ‘We want more of this collaboration.’ So we’ve grown and grown, and we’ve helped launch 84 companies.”

The co-working part is a collaborative form of working, where individuals work on their own businesses and projects in a shared environment. It’s a different way to look at the traditional work-place environment. People from different backgrounds working on different projects tend to bounce ideas off of each other.

Kim Kessler has seen that.

She and her husband used to work in the banking industry.

“My husband quit to be a standup comedian,” she said. “I got into writing and editing and do it from my house. Then I connected with Jess. I loved the idea of this community. I didn’t know it existed. It’s just great to come here and work around people.”

Justin Jones, a consulting architect in networking, security and open solutions for VMware Professional Services, loves the Fuse environment.

“As a remote employee for a Silicon Valley company, I either work from home or travel on site to customer locations,” Jones said. “The first year I worked from home, I really loved the extra time around the house and being home when my wife and daughter both left and returned home. By the second year, I really missed the camaraderie of being in the same space as co-workers. I also felt the need to get out, so I went to the library or coffee shops to work - anywhere with free WiFi.

“When I discovered Fuse, the community aspect of it really appealed to me,” he continued. “Some of my best friends in the Tri-Cities have come from Fuse, and I’ve had the opportunity to work on some amazing projects. Having a dedicated space which allows me to separate my work and home life has really helped me to maintain a reasonable work-life balance.”

Diamond, who used to have his own business, said when he worked from home, he’d go to Walmart at 1:30 a.m. “just to be around other people,” he said.

Diamond works with Middlerock Partners, a small consulting group that works top-down with CEOs and C-Suite management to fix the culture and process in their companies

John Roach, who runs Wholestory SPC, a software company developing a product that helps make hiring easier, said Fuse helped him get to where he is today.

“Fuse provided a community of other people who are really committed to entrepreneurship and all the great things it brings,” Roach said. “As well as the program itself, there has been an extremely meaningful amount of learning and personal development that made me so much more confident about my ability to lead and grow a business.”

People who have full-time jobs elsewhere also come to Fuse, perhaps to work on their dream business idea.

Besides Wholestory, Fuse has assisted in getting some other businesses off the ground.

That includes Solar Spirits, a distillery in Richland; Wildland Labs Inc., a software firm that started at Fuse and now has 20 employees; Red Level Games Inc, a video game company that created Cash Crop, a cannabis tycoon video game; Thrive Fitness Adventures, a guided hiking, camping and exploring company; Trutik, a trucking logistics software company; and Gravis Law.

The latter was started by Brett Spooner.

“My firm started in Fuse with just me and one staff,” Spooner said. “And we have grown to 18 employees. We recently moved to a nearby building on The Parkway.”

Fuse also has a social purpose, reminding people to keep that in mind when making business decisions.

That doesn’t always mean it’s only about making money, but making the world a better place.

Fuse does that by hosting a variety of events.

They include fireside chats, where a guest speaker talks with a group of people; Launch University, in which people attend class to learn what they need to do to get their business idea going; and Ted X Talks, organized by Stangeland, is in its third year.

A big highlight is Pitch Night for Launch University, where people with business ideas have two minutes to pitch their ideas to local entrepreneurs, who can either turn them down or invest in their businesses.

“We’ve gone through 480 business ideas, and launched 138 projects,” Diamond said.

And Fuse gets former standouts coming back all the time.

“We see a lot of companies that move on come back,” said Diamond, who started working at Fuse in April. “They’ll sponsor events, do panel discussions. We see a lot of people come back and say, ‘I want to be part of the events.’”

And it’s not age specific.

“We have people in Launch University from early college age to people in their 50s and 60s,” Diamond said.

Even the hot desk is diverse.

“There are people of all ages there,” Kessler said.

It’s not about the age. It’s about the thought process.

“It’s a young mentality,” Stangeland said.

Around Jan. 1, there will be more room for that in The Parkway.