The Office Providers: a flexible office search service at $14K a month

The Office Providers is a free online search service that matches businesses from one-person startups to multinational corporations with serviced, managed and coworking office space, and earns a fee from the provider, operator or landlord of the space a customer picks — revenue was about $14K a month as founder Mike Gardener reported in a Starter Story interview published in July 2023.

How it started

Gardener is a chartered commercial property surveyor who spent his earlier career on both sides of the office leasing market: letting space for landlord clients at small partnerships, national firms and multinational consultancies, and then helping occupiers find space to rent. At the last firm he worked for, the clients included international serviced office providers, and his team passed them enquiries from companies that did not want a traditional lease. Those companies wanted short-term contracts, the ability to expand or contract, and one monthly bill covering rent, insurance, utilities, cleaning, reception and furniture.

He watched the flexible workspace market grow — London went from tens of providers to hundreds in a decade, he said — and noticed that the specialists in it had a strong online presence. A friend in tech offered to build a basic website to test the idea. Gardener went solo and committed to the business full time for 18 months. The company launched in April 2018 and is based in Manchester, UK. It took nine months from launch to complete and invoice the first deal, and a second deal was invoiced in that same month. Those two deals validated the website and the outline business model, he said.

What it sells and how it charges

According to the official website, fetched on 2026-09-30, the service is a comparison point for serviced offices, managed offices and coworking spaces, and it is free to the occupier: "Our services are FREE, always." The fee is paid by the office provider, operator or landlord of the property the occupier chooses. That is the whole model — a commission-style marketplace rather than a subscription product.

The same site states that the company works with 99% of office and workspace providers around the world, covers more than 3,000 locations across 120 countries, and has a network of experts positioned in the local markets of over 900 towns and cities. It also states that it is a member of the Global Workspace Association (GWA) and regulated by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).

In the interview, Gardener described what the brokered products look like in practice: turnkey offices fitted out and serviced by the provider, managed full-floor suites, coworking desk memberships and part-time offices for hybrid working. All of them sit on short-term flexible contracts, and the rental fee is inclusive of overheads such as utilities, cleaning and building insurance that would normally be billed separately under a conventional lease. He also said the company was the first flexible-focused office space rental agency to be regulated by RICS.

How it got its first customers, and what kept growth going

Almost everything comes from search. "Over 90% of our customers come through organic search," Gardener said, and the acquisition cost was frontloaded in time and cash rather than paid for per customer.

The content that did the work was unusual for a brokerage: directories. During the pandemic, with provider clients ordered to close and the public advised to work from home, he built a directory profiling office and workspace providers in the UK, then repeated the exercise for New York City and a few European cities. In his words, "it was quite a task to compile (it took me over 12 months), however, because the directories were unique, they became some of the most popular web pages on the website."

Because the directories were popular, the content was reused rather than left to sit: two of them were self-published as free books, one on Amazon and one on Apple Books, and the material also fed a podcast on Anchor.fm that reached over 60 episodes.

Retention runs on email. Gardener said the transactional nature of office agency means long-term client relationships do not form automatically, so the company sends newsletters and check-ins through Constant Contact, whose analytics track click-throughs and responses to calls to action. Social media plays a supporting, harder-to-measure role in relationship building.

By the time of the interview, the picture was mixed but cheap to run: website traffic was about 10% above pre-pandemic levels at roughly 3k visitors a month, conversion rates were low because of economic inertia, average time on site was rising, the email list stood at around 2k subscribers, and combined social following was 11.5k, including 2k on LinkedIn and 4k on Instagram. He keeps the business extremely lean because of the cyclical nature of commercial property, and said it remained profitable.

The numbers

Figure	Value	Basis
Revenue	$14K a month	Founder-reported in the July 2023 interview
Started	April 2018	Founder-reported
Founders	1	At the time of the interview
Employees	3	At the time of the interview
Based in	Manchester, UK	Founder-reported
Website traffic	~3k visitors a month, ~10% above pre-pandemic	Founder-reported at the time of the interview
Email list	~2k subscribers	Founder-reported at the time of the interview
Combined social following	11.5k	Founder-reported at the time of the interview
Start-up cost	Not stated	The founder did not give a figure

The revenue figure is what the founder said at that date; it is not current revenue, and nothing here should be read as a forecast.

How it compares

In 1M.chat's analysis of 1,997 businesses with founder-reported revenue in Starter Story interviews (2015–2026) — a self-selected sample of founders who chose to be interviewed, not a random sample of all businesses — The Office Providers sits below its category median. The category is Marketplaces & platforms, which contains 89 businesses with founder-reported revenue:

Median monthly revenue: $51K
Share of the category at $1M a year or more: 44%
Median employees: 5
Share started by one founder: 38%

Among the 69 businesses in the category with channel information, the most common growth channels were organic social media (62%), SEO and organic search (56%), paid ads (44%), and email and newsletters (33%). A business that runs almost entirely on organic search is therefore using a channel that a majority of category peers with channel data also report, while the team size of three and the revenue level sit on the lower side of the category's reported figures. These are comparisons of founder-reported cases, not a ranking and not a recommendation.

What a founder can take from it

Test the model with the cheapest version you can build. A basic website built by a friend was enough to invoice two deals nine months after launch, and those two deals were the validation — not a business plan or a funding round.

Build one asset that compounds, then reuse it. The directories took over a year to compile and then became books and a run of podcast episodes. If you are going to spend 12 months on something, pick the something that can be republished in three formats.

Make the useful thing free. The directories were built to help providers who had lost all their business during lockdown, and they turned into the site's most visited pages.

Keep fixed costs low if your market moves in cycles. Commercial property does, and a lean cost base is what let this business stay profitable through a period its founder described as adverse.

Be careful whose numbers you believe. Gardener's own pre-launch advice was that the true earnings of others in a market are rarely visible without an insider track, so check the validity of what is presented and get trusted third-party counsel in areas where you are not expert.

Sources

Revenue, team and start-cost figures are what the founder reported at the interview date, not current figures and not a prediction of what you will earn. Product and pricing facts come from the business's own website as checked on 30 September 2026. Method & sources · Disclosure