Why Every Coffee Shop Should Have a Meeting Room

Coffee shops with meeting rooms are becoming increasingly popular, and not just with millennials. More often than not, freelancers, entrepreneurs, and startups as a whole prefer the comfortable and friendly atmosphere of a coffee shop when looking for a space to have meetings with colleagues or potential clients.

Coffee shops are also usually located in choice city spots – close to corporate headquarters, yet far from stifling ‘office vibes’. This also makes them a favourite meeting place for employees.

For coffee shop owners, a meeting room can become their second biggest revenue stream after coffee. 

Meeting attendees can gather at their cafe during dead hours and give them the chance to charge meeting customers £20 to £60 per hour (snacks and lunches excluded!), depending on the location. 

How can I get started?

The main obstacle to running a meeting in a coffee shop is that they are typically noisy places, and it’s easy to become distracted by all the activity going on around you while trying to conduct a meeting.

This is why it’s so important to have a private space or have the ability to ‘create’ a semi-private area with a dividing wall.

A private room must provide:

• a table and chairs to fit 4-6 people comfortably,
• Wi-fi,
• a large flat screen (min. 40”), and
• a flipchart or a whiteboard.

It’s also good to have a USB speaker with a microphone, in case customers need to hold a conference call, but it’s not mandatory.

How to advertise this new opportunity?

Flyers are old-style, social networks will hardly reach the right audience and word of mouth through actual customers is too slow. The fastest way to start monetising the investment is to be listed on the best venue hire websites, for free.

These platforms offer the convenience of attracting new customers for you, while you simply pay a small commission on every successful booking.

The room profile can be set up with just a few clicks and 4 photos of the space.  Then you are ready to receive enquiries from the thousands of people that search Google every month by typing ‘meeting rooms in London’.  Why not give them the chance to find your coffee shop when they click on top-ranked results – such as Tagvenue – to discover the most suitable room for their needs?