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Originally Posted by Lakegeezer
I'm not sure of the need, but perhaps a "rent an office" business would do well. Lots of people seem to be working down south while their family spends the week at their summer home. There are also folks that want to move into the area, but need a professional office type environment. How about a business that offers a receptionist, office supplies and equipment, private space, phone, internet, technical support and meeting rooms with video conferencing capability? One could rent by the hour, day, week or longer.
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This is interesting because I've looked at doing this in the MA tech loop.
I worked at another company at the CIC (Cambridge Innovation Center) at One Broadway. That is setup where you pay $250/mo/employee and you get office space, desk, chair (Aeron!), Full access to a VERY well stocked kitchen, conference rooms, Internet, Phone and a few other amenities.
These businesses are difficult to run both properly and profitably (although you can do 1 of those 2 in most cases
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The idea of doing this in the Lakes Region has a lot of appeal, but you'd likely need to get some sort of guaranteed tenant to help cover the basic costs. The Angel Investor idea has a lot of appeal to me and I've had thoughts of doing 6-12mo Angel/Incubator things in the Lakes region. Basically get people who have mobility to come in for contract positions doing startup programming for incubator concepts to spin off to be taken over by an EIR at a VC firm. Couple this 4-10 person workforce with a building that could accommodate 30 workstations and you could start to carve out an interesting niche.
I know of a few people who do this sort of contracting work and just live in various parts of the country (or world) for variable amounts of time.