Gui Cavalcanti June 4, 2013, 7:00 am PDT
Creating a Makerspace Business Model
Today, we’ll be discussing common types of expenses and income that makerspaces around the world experience on a regular basis in order to help you create a business model for a space of your own. In the process of identifying these expenses and income, we’ll review examples from several well-established spaces across the U.S. for reference. Please don’t consider this an exhaustive list of either income or expenses; expenses vary wildly based on location and circumstances, and spaces have found a huge number of ways to make money.
A couple of quick notes before we get started. First of all, you probably want to keep a spreadsheet open as you read through this primer so that you can take notes and write down example figures. Secondly, this is intended to help you create a steady-state model of income versus expenses to help you make sure your plan will be sustainable; this doesn’t cover startup costs, which will be explained in a post that’s soon to come. Lastly, please regard all your projected numbers from this exercise with a big grain of salt; you need to confirm your actual expenses before starting down the path of creating a sustainable business.
Mitch: As I was considering business models the idea of the shared tools and space of makerspaces interested me. Many smaller departments do not have the same budgets as the larger ones. It would be an interesting business model to create a “firefighterspace” where various departments would have access to all kinds of new tools which they could test and evaluate without taking a risk with a portion of the already tight budget to try a new tool. This would encourage further refinement of tool offerings as departments would be able to afford to compare new designs to determine if they’d be worth in investing in and not simply stick with outdated ones due to budgets.
