The Official Launch of Our New Business Lounge

On February 16th, we had the pleasure of hosting our official launch of the New Business Lounge here at StartUp Croydon, sponsored by IRS and with the presence of Croydon Mayor Jason Perry, who congratulated the team on creating such a warm space for the business community.

Around 7O people attended the evening to hear from Saffron Saunders, the CEO, and Sarah Ling of the Beddington Community Fund, who contributed £29K to the project. Their investment enabled us to breathe new life into a tired business centre that desperately needed an upgrade to improve security and compete in the new post-pandemic business world. Watch the short video explaining more about the Beddington Community Fund here (scroll to the bottom of the page).

StartUp Croydon supports and advises new business owners and is funded from profits raised from our commercial arm, renting office space and meeting rooms at Weatherill House. Today’s work-from-home culture really changed the viability of substandard office space, so this new lounge has created a space unlike anything else in the borough.

Our business lounge is for Croydon’s business community and provides a relaxed but professional space for people to drop in and meet others or to work quietly from our new coworking space.

Although small business owners may work from home, meeting others in a third place other than work or the office has been proven to offer organic growth opportunities. Our new space offers the vibrancy needed by those who work from home to connect with others as well as private pod rooms for privacy whilst on video calls or taking 1-2-1s.

The business lounge is a great asset to our 40 tenants at Weatherill House, who have all been delighted with the transformation calling it a place to be proud of and an inspirational place to do business.

The transformation was delivered by local contractors, IRS, who invested a significant amount of time and consideration into designing the lounge, ensuring a “bold, bright & on-trend design to represent the energy, strength and future of business in Croydon”. Click here to read the full story regarding the revamp, including before and after pictures.

LSBU also helped to fund the New Lounge through a partnership to generate economic growth in the region.

The speeches were closed by Paul Taylor, the Chairman of StartUp Croydon, who gave a brief overview of the business lounge project and the many new projects we have delivered in the previous months.

Paul explained, “We aim to be a more flexible working environment. We have developed a new media studio, revamped our website and launched a new podcast to boost our social media presence.”

“A startup’s journey is so much more than the initial six months, and we should be nurturing businesses for the first few years of trading. We plan to build on the successes of previous years by delivering more support to those that deliver real economic growth for our borough.”

“We will be taking a relook at what we do, how we deliver and who we deliver to”.

The evening was wrapped up with a blessing from Pastor Alison Johnson, who celebrated all that StartUp Croydon offers small businesses and how vital an organisation we were to her small business when she first got started. We then had the pleasure of listening to two young singers who won Croydon’s got talent.

To celebrate our new lounge, we are offering the first ten people to sign up for full Co-working access for only £150 +VAT read more here

If you would like to come down and use our fabulous business lounge for a free trial day, please get in touch.