“I solved it!” I shouted to my husband as ChatGPT and I had yet another discussion about how to structure our agile learning program in a new space. Having outgrown the space in our own home in our second year of running our microschool, we had been on a journey to find a new option for a few months. I described to my husband how we were going to redesign the program to make it mobile and use a shared space in a church’s community center.
My husband seemed less excited. “What will we do when we outgrow this space?” he asked. He had a point. It was going to be a lot of work (and a bit of capital) to set us up to be mobile, and it seemed silly, or at least tiresome, to put in all that work when what we really want is a permanent home where kids’ stations are always set up for low-friction exploration and creativity. A mobile version could be a stepping stone, but I discovered that where the potential of new spaces fuels my visionary energy, the constant re-inventing the wheel was draining my husband.
The shared space was a great deal. They were giving us lower rent than any commercial space we had found, no rent in the summers, sharing their Internet and two TVs, and including utilities. It even had a small woodshop! It checked so many of our boxes, but required us to set the space back to zero at the end of every day. No furnishings, all flex space. With my can-do spirit, my agile learning philosophy, and the help of ChatGPT, I had created a mobile learning center that could come in and out of a trailer every day.
Then we found a great commercial venue. It was a bit of a stretch for us financially, but the location was amazing, and it would be a 3-year lease with options to renew—a more “permanent” home. We started the process of getting a commercial lease. A few things I learned about commercial leases:
- Landlords tend to want 3–5 years.
- They almost always include a clause to increase rent 3% every year.
- The rent is almost never what is advertised because there are usually variable fees called triple net fees (NNN).
- All terms are technically negotiable, and a good agent will help you draft a letter of intent with your preferred terms to start the process.
- The landlord negotiates the terms back, and when you both agree, they draft the lease.
- Someone can swoop in and outbid you before you get the lease back.
Yep. That last one stung. After two weeks of building the program in our minds, creating new marketing materials in Canva, and really falling in love with our plans for the space, our agent called to tell us we were outbid. We weren’t even given a chance to bid back because the new tenant was something called a national tenant, another thing I learned about commercial leases. National tenants are companies with a widespread, often coast-to-coast, footprint with more than 50 locations. They give landlords high credit stability and reliable rent. In other words, we are small potatoes, a high-risk mom-and-pop shop. They simply told us, “No, thank you.”
It was crushing news. But at first, I bounced back with my can-do spirit. I actually got that familiar surge of energy when I started dreaming about the potential of other spaces we still had available. That lasted for half a day until a thought crossed my mind: your school is not the room it lives in.
I finally admitted, this process is going to exhaust me if I keep redesigning for every space. Whether it is because a lease falls through, or we outgrow a location, or, heaven forbid, a flood or fire pushes us out, we need to know what our school is no matter where it lives. Agility is helpful when needing to make a space work, but identity is essential to sustainable growth.
The search for a new campus has revealed for me my chameleon tendencies. In every potential space, I was trying to be an enrichment program for homeschoolers, a full-time school for unschoolers, a private school for ESA families, a mobile school for sharing a space, classes, clubs, camps, you name it—and sometimes all at the same time! I can be anything, but I can’t be everything.
So I flipped the question. Rather than asking, “Who do we need to be to fit in this space?” I am now asking, “What space do we need in order to continue being who we are?” And that was a pointed question because it unlocked for me the realization that scaling is about identity.
Once we decide the core of our program, it can move to a new space every time we decide to grow. In fact, it will be easier to grow because a clear core with clear systems is easier to transfer to new facilitators, new families, and even new directors. Our core program, given solid systems, can translate to a mobile program, an outdoor program, a shared space, a larger program, or even multiple campuses. And that is real agility.
