Meet Tiger Lily Beck and Demi Smith, the founders of Flex and The City, which launched just over a year ago. Both in their mid-twenties and hailing from Hertfordshire, these young entrepreneurs have been lifelong friends who suddenly realised they could create a business together once they understood each other’s professions. Fiona Scott chatted with them about their ‘great idea’ and how it’s going.

What is Flex and The City?

Tiger Lily: It’s a new digital hub for professionals in the flex industry – so it’s all connected to the flexible workspace sector. We are also a press and media platform with that sector at our core.

Our goal is to equip landlords, brokers, agents, flexible operators with the kind of marketing tools they need to stay ahead, bring them together by offering the ‘go to’ platform for informative news, fun, media content and offline events as well.

Are we just talking about co-working spaces for smaller businesses?

Demi: The flexible office sector has been renowned for working primarily with the SME sector and catering for startups and offering co working, with dedicated desks, hot desking areas and private offices as well.  Yet, as the sector has evolved, you now have the classic service office and flexible workspace market, which caters to startups, and you also have the middle ground, which in our industry, we call ‘the managed’ side.

This is the midpoint between flex and the traditional leasing side of things, which tends to cater for more established companies. For example, this could be self-contained floor of a premises but it’s packaged up in a flex way. Our digital hub caters for this more nuanced sector.

Why did you do this?

Tiger Lily: We wanted to bring our kind of new, fresh, trendier energy to property media and flex reporting and news.  We felt it didn’t exist in the way that we brought it to the market so we feel we’ve found that sweet spot.

My background is in the editorial world, where I previously worked in retail media and was involved in the fashion and beauty sector in the UK, connecting brands and retailers.

Demi had been in the world of flexible office space for the last five years or more.  We’ve literally been best friends literally since birth! Yet as is very common, even though we were so close we didn’t really understand the details of what our respective jobs involved.

One day, a conversation literally happened over a kitchen table where she said to me ‘what do you actually do?’ and I explained.

She said: “this doesn’t exist in our industry”.

I said: “Why not because surely it’s a must in that world. Now surely it’s essential for any industry?”

That was it, we teamed up to make it happen. 

Demi: With Tiger being the editorial genius that she is, my background was as a broker within a company in this sector. In fact I worked with one of the first brokerages to be active in the UK.

Tiger and I are literally like sisters. And it genuinely was one of those situations where she said: “I’m actually going to explain to you what I do because it’s borderline embarrassing that neither of us understand what the other does.”

And we did have that detailed conversation. We taught each other about our professional lives.

I think what makes us special and what makes it so interesting for people to kind of leverage our platform is that they are able to not only have us create cool content for them that’s different and dynamic, but we’re able to put it on our platform and get it in front of the right target audience.

We also hold events and that’s a massive part of what we do.

How do you make money? 

Tiger Lily: Much that you see on the site, a lot of that media comes at a fee. We design and run digital ads, we have e-mail marketing, you get your own dedicated slot on that, which is a great avenue as it hits directly the inbox of our clients’ target audience so that’s booming.

Events is a strong revenue stream for us, so obviously with this online hub, but also offline. That’s massively important to us, especially since COVID and to really continue to bring the community back together.

In terms of events we have sponsors and a lot of those tend to be suppliers to the industry including big tech firms, design and fit out companies who all want to get in front of the operators.

We also have a ‘jobs’ area or a recruitment arm which is growing.

Does the site offer editorial opportunities ie. stories which you include without payment?

Tiger Lily: We offer advertorial and we choose editorial. It’s our job to be this relevant news platform. We run relevant sector stories and we also offer advertorial pieces which people will leverage because they want that story spotlight.

Demi: It’s a balance of both. We would report on a lot of, new building openings and stories like that as it’s of general interest to our sector.

On the operator side of things, if a company has a product that they want our audience to know about – it’s relevant, but it’s not something that we would consider to be a necessity that we must report on, that would be ‘paid’ content.

Do you see yourselves as ‘news editors’ for your sector?

Tiger Lily: Yeah, and with the ‘news’ stories, our video content is something that performs extremely well and loved and is one of our best features. For example we will, at our discretion, take a video tour of beautiful workspaces.

We do then have members of our audience coming to us saying “can you create this video for us?”

And we will say yes and that attracts a fee.  Videos shared on our social media feeds is a growing area for us.

Once you decided to work together – where did you start?

Tiger Lily: The first thing was the website and a lot of our investment went into that. Into the future we’ll also be looking at investment and although we can’t share details at the moment, that’s happening which will great for us as a business.

Demi: We didn’t really start out with anything. We had help from our family to give us a little jump start, but essentially, we didn’t have any help or outside investment. It was really challenging. I think Tiger Lily’s a lot more patient than I am and that’s one of her strengths and not one of mine.

Creating the platform and wanting to get the design 100% correct and putting our vision into actually building it was really challenging for both of us. It was difficult but I think we did a good job.

Tiger Lily: There was a lot research. I leveraged my creative skills to map out visually what we wanted the platform to look like but it’s never that simple.

I guess when you send it to tech wizards who do all the coding, sometimes they push back and rightly so.

We also spent several months actually on the road going around and visiting operators, and in my case, Demi showing me the ropes of the her industry.

One of the challenges, is that is that it’s a bit of an enigma. What is Flex and The City? People can’t always buy into something until you’ve launched, and they can visually see it.

It was really rewarding when we did launch and people in our world then understood it and the positive reception was incredible.

What does it feel like to look back over this first year?

Demi: To be honest we both have ‘pinch me’ moments often. It’s kind of crazy to think that we’ve only been going a year and I feel like we’ve accomplished so much.

Like even when we had our Awards night, our first ever kind of massive event last year and we literally like the next day were like ‘we just did that like what the hell!

I don’t know whether that’s like a novelty that will wear off!  I think it couldn’t have gone better.

Tiger Lily: There’s overwhelming pride as well and gratitude for the industry. It’s such a positive space. It’s fun, and I actually didn’t expect it to be as much fun as it’s.

What’s your advice for anyone else starting a business?

Demi: You know that phrase, ‘you make plans and God laughs’? I think you just have to mentally prepare yourself that things aren’t going to go the exact way that you want. And that is OK.

I think going into this, we may have been slightly naive on that subject. Mentally prepare for that and accept it.

Tiger Lily: To be able to be prepared to juggle a million things, wear a different hat or 1,000 different hats, sacrifice your time. Your business becomes your baby, and it’s not a nine-to-five job. I’ve realised I work well in the mornings, while Demi prefers night shifts.

I understand why it’s not for everyone, but we love it.  

How do you ‘do’ business with your best friend – and still be friends?

Demi: Tiger Lilly is not my friend, she’s my sister! I don’t have any sisters. I have two brothers. She is, quite literally, the sister I don’t have, and I think that’s why it works, because we have a genuine, sisterly bond, just like with family.

You can be completely upfront with each other, say exactly how it is, and walk away, saying, ‘OK, that wasn’t ideal,’ but then the next day you move on.

Tiger Lilly: Yeah, I think that’s true. We’re so sisterly and literally know each other inside out. We can really like to play to each other’s strengths as well.

Whereas I think sometimes when you go into business, even if you join a team and you’re working with someone new, it takes a while to get to know them. We are able to operate instinctively and I think that’s played to our advantage.

How long into your young business journey were you before you outsourced anything?  

Tiger Lilly: Only quite recently. Demi likes to say I’m a control freak!

Demi: When you run a business it is about wearing a bunch of different hats. One day you’re an accountant, the next day you’re a tech person. We were doing absolutely everything. And we’ve already got to a stage of let’s relinquish some control and help ourselves out a little bit.

It’s not easy to do this. Just this kind of help is allowing us to free up time for business development.

 What will be the next thing to outsource?

Tiger Lilly: I think the media side of things around videography and things like that. That would be a game changer. We’ve got to find the right fit, especially for the brand.

People love our content because they know it’s been edited and produced by Flex and the City.

We never want it to be a situation where you can see it’s not our brand.

What’s in the future?

Demi: Long term, I want us to have an empire. I want us to have a major recruitment firm. I want our marketing to go to the next level and to have our in-house marketing agency running itself. I want to have an in-house events company. Everyone can dream, right?

Short term to look medium term I’d just love to have a couple people in the Flex and the City team. I think Tiger Lilly and I would love to grow our baby and have a proper team in the near future.

Tiger Lilly: It’s also just about continuing to grow our community of subscribers, readers, viewers, and attendees of events and taking it to the next level. We’re in the US and in Europe, so we have the potential to take ‘Flex Reporting’ global. So that’s something that we’d like to do, and not limit ourselves to the UK.  

Demi: Commercial property in central London is huge, but we made a point at the very start to like not just be London centric. We want to be regional and representing Birmingham, Bristol, Nottingham, Manchester and other booming cities.

Find out more about Flex and The City