Orlando Business Journal

Alex Soderstrom

In 2017, Jon Pirtle traveled from Tennessee to Florida for the groundbreaking of downtown Orlando’s newest tower, SunTrust Plaza at Church Street Station.

Three years and a pandemic later, the president of co-working provider E-Spaces Inc. finally is able to see his company open its first Florida location in the 13th floor of the complete tower. The Nashville-based company on Jan. 7 announced the opening of its 30,000-square-foot downtown Orlando co-working space.

Of course, the Covid-19 pandemic in the meantime descended on the U.S. Some operators of co-working spaces, often popular among small and growing businesses, were hit hard. In fact, some co-working providers were forced to close dozens of U.S. facilities in 2020. However, E-Spaces has seen demand “explode,” Pirtle told Orlando Business Journal.

“It’s hard to find good in any of [the pandemic],” Pirtle said. “One thing that might come out that people aren’t realizing is that certain companies are always going to need their big offices, and they’re going to need tons of space. But a lot of companies are realizing, why am I signing these five- to 10-year leases with personal guarantees with high rental rates when I don’t even know what my business is going to be doing?”

E-Spaces ranks No. 5 on the Business Journal’s List of Nashville-area co-working spaces. The company has five locations in Tennessee, including three in Middle Tennessee. This marks the company’s first out-of-state facility.

Here’s more from Pirtle on why E-Spaces picked Orlando for the company’s newest location and why the future is bright for the co-working operator.

In 2017, you said you saw Orlando following in the footsteps of Nashville in terms of growth. Do you still think that? Well, I see it even more. I see every aspect of business coming to Central Florida. Even living in Nashville, you hear about Central Florida. Everybody talks about this area down here, especially during Covid. We’re used to hearing a lot of the time, we hear from people in Nashville as well, “This has really made us think about if I can work and do my business from anywhere, why am I staying in some of these places I’m staying? Why not go be in Florida, where my family can be going to Disney some, and we can go fishing and play golf year round?”

How has the pandemic affected demand at E-Spaces? The demand, for us, has definitely exploded. I’ll tell you a couple reasons why. One, people want to work. People want to get outside of their houses for the most part, even if just for a couple of days a week. You want to be able to see other people, hear what’s going on in the business world, just be around that energy that gives you the energy to do your own work … I’ll also say we were socially distanced and all that stuff before socially distance was cool. I’m not saying that to be funny, but it’s the truth. A lot of people have the misconception of co-working spaces as just one big office where everybody goes to the table and has their air buds in and they work. That’s just not the truth. We’ve got 30,000 square feet here, and 80% of it is private offices.

Was there a drop-off in demand earlier in the pandemic? We never lost any of our private office people. Now the only thing that did dip a little bit during March through May or June-ish is we didn’t see quite as many meeting rooms. That all started picking back up. Now, at the beginning of the new year, we’ve really seen people wanting to do meeting space.

What is the long-term outlook for E-Spaces and co-working? A lot of companies, they’ve lost a lot of revenue during this pandemic. One of the big advantages of E-Spaces is if you go out and get an office space, you’ve got a lot of money in that. Then you’ve got to have customers come to you, or you’ve got to spend money on marketing. At E-Spaces, you get all of that. If you’re a freelancer, if you’re a small marketing company, why are you going and getting an office space, spend all this money and then want people come to you when you can have an office space in E-Spaces and be around 100 different companies that might end up using your marketing company? People who rent out of our space end up doing 30%-40% of their total business with other companies in the space.

This is E-Spaces’ first location outside Tennessee. How active of a role will you and corporate play in its operation? It’s important that Orlando and Florida realizes that we’re not a company out of Nashville just moving down here. We’re part of the community. I’m down here a lot, and I plan to be down here more. We don’t look at ourselves as a Nashville company. We’re a Nashville and Orlando company. We want to be part of the community. We’ve joined the Orlando Economic Partnership and the Downtown Orlando Partnership. We want to be involved in the community as a good steward.