Looks like our friends at Silicon Prairie News are making some headway of a coworking space of their own.

Around 2004/2005, Ryan Sorensen (art director at Bozell) called me up and started talking to me about a shared space concept for Omaha.
It sounded interesting, and I knew I had to get out of the house and be around people. I was going crazy not interacting with people outside of the internet during the working day.

I ran the idea by Adam Nielsen (owner of Good Twin) and John Henry Muller (owner of What Cheer), and they both seemed very interested.
John Henry was currently working as Art Director at Sacco, and was planning on doing his own thing. He wanted to use the shared space as a legitimate place to work and bring clients, and felt it was essential to have to start his business.

Ryan Sorensen, Adam Nielsen and John Henry Muller.

We started meeting every Thursday for almost 6 months. We kept it just the four of us to make it easy. We wanted to do this on our own without going into debt and owing any loans.

We covered every topic in planning… finances, ethics, times, cleaning, etc.
Ethics was a huge topic… we were essentially competitors working in the same space. We had a lot of things to hash out.

We got everything worked out, and finally found a space that seemed perfect. Cheap rent, great location, open area for everyone to work, a meeting room and space to expand, however it needed A LOT of work.

John Henry scraping the tile off the wood floors. (I think this was Adam’s idea. I remember being annoyed that he wanted to scrape all of this, but in the end the wood floors were beautiful. Thanks Adam!)

Divvy Collective all cleaned up!

Check out more photos of Divvy on Flickr.

John Henry came up with the name Divvy.
And we all worked on logos and taglines for it, as well as the website, divvycollective.com

We summed it up as,

“We are not an advertising agency or a design firm. We are a group of creatives that have come together to share space.”

Overall, it was a huge success. We started out with 4 people sharing space, and ended with 8 people all coworking together (Shannon Wall, Matt Linder, Chris Kollars and Cody Peterson). It was a great time.

We all learned a ton from each other. Tips on how to run your business, different brainstorming methods, working in a team environment where everyone has different goals, and so much more.

At the end, everyone’s business had at least doubled, and we walked away with Divvy making a profit.

I’m excited to see the guys at Silicon Prairie News revisit this idea and create another coworking space in Omaha. Keep it up guys!