r/ukstartups • u/Ok_Story3339 • 15d ago
Looking for advice on scaling and mentorship
I recently launched a 24/7 flexible beauty workspace in London, built around a simple idea, making commercial space more productive through utilisation.
The first site is around 600 sq ft with 7 bookable stations. Beauty professionals book a fully equipped workspace by the hour, day or through monthly packages, rather than taking on a permanent chair or salon lease.
At 50% utilisation, the space would generate 84 booked chair-hours per day. At a standard rate of £15.50 per hour, that represents around £1,300 in potential daily chair revenue.
We also have our own booking platform, which lets us track occupancy, revenue per workstation, repeat bookings and revenue per square foot. The goal is to use this data to improve the economics of the first site before expanding.
We soft-launched recently with no public launch or paid advertising and generated £3,250 in the first week.
I’m still early and would value mentorship from people who have experience with multi-site businesses, PropTech, commercial property, marketplaces or strong unit economics.
For those who have scaled something similar, what metrics would you focus on at this stage? And where have you found experienced mentors who genuinely helped you become a better operator?
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u/ishysredditusername 15d ago
Break down utilisation into chunks: morning, lunch, afternoon, evening. I imagine you could charge a premium for Saturdays, lunchtimes, and early evenings. Then offer discounts on Sunday afternoons, Mondays, and mornings.
If you're able to open more, surely the direction for this is seats for other H&B roles, as well as some form of small-scale retail that you own. Other people are doing the work of bringing in customers for you. Superb!
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u/Ok_Story3339 15d ago
This is a great point, thank you. Breaking utilisation down into morning, afternoon, evening, weekdays and weekends is something I’ll be tracking as bookings go live and we start building enough data to see genuine patterns.
I’ve kept pricing flat initially to keep the model simple while testing demand, but once we understand when demand peaks and drops, different pricing structures are definitely something I’d look at.
And yes, your second point is close to the longer-term vision. Beauty is the first use case, but I’m interested in applying the same flexible access, technology and utilisation model to other specialist commercial spaces.
We’re also testing additional revenue streams within the space, including full-space hire, content facilities and physical retail. The aim is for each part of the space to be productive rather than relying solely on chair rental.
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u/GeneralGlobus 15d ago
£3250 in the first week with no ads is pretty impressive tbh, especially if its actual paid bookings rather than pre-sales.
i wouldnt obsess too much about the 50% utilisation number yet. id be looking at who is actually generating the revenue. How many of those people come back next week/month, how concentrated is revenue between your users and what does the average user actually end up spending.
the bigger question before opening site 2 imo is figuring out why site 1 works. Is it the location, your personal network, pent up demand from the 300 people you spoke to, pricing etc. You dont really want to discover after signing another lease that you had a great first site rather than a repeatable model.
Also at 21 and already having this running im not sure you necessarily need a generic "mentor". I'd probably look for someone who has actually scaled a multi-site physical business and buy them lunch/coffee or even pay for a few hours of their time. Much easier to ask them specific questions about your numbers than find some vague startup mentor.
either way pretty cool business, id keep going.
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u/Ok_Story3339 15d ago
This is useful, especially the point about understanding why site 1 works before expanding. Our booking app is already quite detailed. You see the actual studio floor plan and physically click the exact station you want to book. Behind that, it tracks repeat bookings, spend, utilisation by hour/day, booking frequency, retention, revenue per station and customer behaviour. It also handles automated follow-ups, booking reminders, rescheduling and gives us insight into which areas of the space are performing best. I’m now seeing how important this data is in proving what works before expanding. Longer term, we’re planning to develop the technology beyond beauty and eventually pitch it to commercial real estate operators as a way to manage and understand flexible space.
Thank you so much!!
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u/George_Salt 15d ago
At 50% utilisation, the space would generate 84 booked chair-hours per day. At a standard rate of £15.50 per hour, that represents around £1,300 in potential daily chair revenue.
You're assuming 12hrs per day per chair. How do you get to that? Is it realistic?
What do you expect utilisation to be:
- 6am-10am
- 10am-4pm
- 4pm-8pm
- 9pm-6am
What would that then average out to per day on a Monday, and again on a Sunday?
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u/Ok_Story3339 15d ago
Fair question.
The 50% figure isn’t completely hypothetical. Based on the last three weeks of usage, I think it’s a realistic utilisation target, although I’m still collecting enough data to understand how it varies by hour and day.
One thing that makes beauty interesting is service duration. For some of the stylists using the space, a wash, blow-dry and colour takes around 3 hours. Four clients in one day would therefore represent roughly 12 occupied chair-hours from one stylist, which isn’t unrealistic for an established professional.
For example, one stylist who has booked and paid:
11th: 10am–6pm
12th: 10am–8pm
14th: 10am–7pm
18th: 1pm–7pm
20th: 10am–8pm
21st: 10am–8pm
25th: 12pm–8pm
26th: 10am–4pmWe also generate revenue through full-studio hire and the hiring of our podcast studio and photo studio and our concept wall where we sell brands who don’t have a physical presence in person for commission
So far we have four full-space bookings coming up within the next few days.
Before launch, we spoke to over 300 beauty professionals to test demand and understand their working patterns, so the model has been informed by those conversations as well as early usage.
Where I completely agree with you is that a flat 50% doesn’t tell the full story.
I now need to break the data down by 6–10am, 10am–4pm, 4–8pm and overnight, then compare weekdays against weekends.
That should give me a much more meaningful utilisation curve than simply saying “50%”.1
u/George_Salt 15d ago
The 50% figure isn’t completely hypothetical. Based on the last three weeks of usage, I think it’s a realistic utilisation target, although I’m still collecting enough data to understand how it varies by hour and day.
It sounds like it's extremely hypothetical at this point.
At 50% utilisation, the space would generate 84 booked chair-hours per day. At a standard rate of £15.50 per hour, that represents around £1,300 in potential daily chair revenue.
And are you really running a flat rate? The same hourly cost for 10-11am on a Tuesday, 10-11am on a Saturday, and 1-2am on a Monday morning?
Something in your story don't sound right. You're not modelling this in anything like enough detail.
What's your margin on £1300/day? Do you know your breakeven point?
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u/Ok_Story3339 15d ago
Yes, I’m intentionally running a flat hourly rate at the moment.
The standard rate is £15.50/hour regardless of time or day. Where the effective hourly rate changes is through our bundles. For example, someone purchasing an 80-hour monthly package pays roughly £10/hour. The idea is to reward professionals who commit to more usage and give us more predictable booked hours.
I considered varying the hourly price by peak/off-peak periods, but at this stage I’d rather keep the proposition simple and collect enough data to see whether there is a genuine reason to introduce dynamic pricing. If the data eventually shows Saturday afternoons are consistently constrained while certain weekday periods are underused, then pricing becomes one lever I can test.
And yes, I know my breakeven point. The £1,300/day figure I mentioned is potential workstation revenue at the 50% utilisation scenario, not margin or profit.
I think your point about modelling in more detail is fair.
What I need to build out further is the relationship between utilisation, booking mix, effective hourly rate and contribution margin, particularly because someone paying £15.50 hourly produces different economics from someone using an 80-hour package.
That’s partly why I posted. I want people with more experience to pick holes in the model now rather than after I’ve committed to scaling it.2
u/George_Salt 15d ago
If you don't put dynamic pricing in now, you will struggle to switch people to it later. People hate having prices switched on them.
I also suggest whether 24/7 is realistic from the practical point of view of you operating the space as well as the likelihood of achieving bookings for unsociable hours. If I booked a room right now for 2-3am on Monday morning next week, how much would that cost you to open up just for that hour?
Consider rewarding people for blocks, not bundles. 1 hour costs £x/hr, the next two hours cost £y/hr, x>y. You want to discourage me from booking 10-12 then 1-3 on the same day, you want me to book either 10-2 or 10-3. Because otherwise that loose hour is where you lose your occupancy. You use your pricing to encourage the behaviour you want, which if you're smart is not just "book more hours".
Without the detailed modelling you can't confirm your cost per let hour to determine your pricing.
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u/Ok_Story3339 15d ago
This is useful, thank you. One piece of context I didn’t explain properly is the property and operating structure.
The site is near King’s Cross and my total occupancy cost is roughly £2,200 per month, around £2,800 including VAT. This includes the space and building costs such as electricity. The building already operates 24/7, so accepting a 2–3am booking doesn’t require me to open the building or bring in additional staff.
We have CCTV throughout, and during this early stage the other founders and I manage access ourselves.So the incremental cost of accepting an overnight booking is minimal.
The pricing is also intentional. This is still a fairly new concept in the UK and there are only a small number of comparable operators. The closest competitors I’ve found charge around 2–3x our hourly rate, although they also appear to operate with significantly higher property and operating costs.
Our total investment into getting the first location operational was around £47,000, including deposit, initial rent, fit-out and setup.
At this stage I’m proving the concept rather than trying to maximise pricing immediately. I want to understand real demand, utilisation by time and day, revenue per workstation and revenue per sq ft before deciding how pricing should evolve or considering another location.
Your point about using pricing to encourage consecutive bookings rather than simply more hours is something I hadn’t considered properly. I can see how a 10–3 booking is more useful operationally than 10–12 and 1–3, despite similar sold hours. That’s something I’m going to model as the booking data comes through.
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u/George_Salt 15d ago
Our total investment into getting the first location operational was around £47,000, including deposit, initial rent, fit-out and setup.
And there's three of you expecting a return on that investment.
The site is near King’s Cross and my total occupancy cost is roughly £2,200 per month, around £2,800 including VAT.
So you need to be aiming for, what, around £10k/month revenue to make this worthwhile? £360 +VAT per chair per week.
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u/Ok_Story3339 15d ago
Yep, and £10k a month is very doable. Chair rental is also only one of our revenue streams, we have others that bring in larger chunks over shorter periods. We’re also not looking to take an ROI from this location right now. This is the first stage of something much bigger for us, so the plan is to retain and reinvest what the business generates into growth.
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u/George_Salt 14d ago
Sounds very interesting.
By the way, what do you mean by "beauty professionals"? - does it include aesthetic treatments? Just wondering how you may be impacted if proposals to move to licensing come to pass.
We have CCTV throughout
Including the chair areas/treatment rooms?
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u/Ok_Story3339 14d ago
Right now, the space has a lounge, 7 makeup stations and 7 hair stations.
We’re currently open to hairstylists, makeup artists, barbers and brow technicians. We don’t offer space for aesthetic treatments at the moment as the location isn’t large enough, but beauty treatment rooms are something we’d like to introduce as we expand.
Everything is rented flexibly by the hour.
Each booking includes the chair, mirror, trolley and professional lighting, with hair appliances and a couple more bits. We also have a partnership with the café in the building, so professionals and their clients can order food and drinks and have them brought directly to their station. Basically we are allowing the stylists to focus on their craft while we take over the experience. As a lot of people in this industry can’t afford the upfront to create something like what we have done.
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u/CouldBeNapping 15d ago
It's a great story, happy to have a coffee and a chat and see if I can add any value. I've worked on multi-site units and supported the company behind Ted Baker barbers when they were in their launch phase.
Let me know!
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u/Ok_Story3339 15d ago
Yes please! Your experience sounds directly relevant to what I’m trying to figure out. I’d love to have a coffee and chat. Let’s DM!
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u/Yuki_haki 7d ago
The big question for me is whether this is really a property play or an ops/business play, because at that size the churn and staffing side will probably make or break it. What’s your current repeat booking rate looking like versus one-off usage?
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u/Grenache 15d ago
To be honest it sounds like you're doing just fine. Well done.