Republic of Work is uncorking workers’ potential
His Republic of Work facility finally opened officially this month, years after he first had a vision of what the future of workspace should be.
Along with Dave Ronayne, in partnership with Bank of Ireland, Mr Cahalane opened the 15,500 sq ft facility on Cork’s South Mall, which consists of an airport lounge-style business centre for casual meetings and networking, a state-of-the-art meetings and events space, as well as a co-working space with 160 desks available on a 30 days no-contract basis.
People pay a monthly fee for membership and all the overheads — like electricity, connectivity, and photocopying — are taken care of.
There are boardrooms, seminar rooms, teamwork and brainstorming rooms — all designed for small, medium and large business to get work done. From the entrepreneurs to the self-employed contractor to the team from the multinational, DC Cahalane wants everyone in on his vision for the future of work.
“My family background is in architecture and I always had the feeling that physical space can drive business. I asked myself what kind of environment would be most productive for the most people at one time.
"You’ve seen it in Google and the like — if you give people nice environments, they work harder. I’m not talking about just pool tables and that kind of thing, it’s more about staff getting the sense that owners care about them. It’s the environment,” said Mr Cahalane.
“I thought of creating an office space where you get big and small companies in here, folks working for themselves. People from different businesses all working alongside each other with facilities that suited everyone. Tradespeople, the beauty industry, banking, insurance, IT, retail, you name it. That’s the giant experiment.”
Cork is on the cusp of something very special, Mr Cahalane insists. The fusion of IT, business, retail and social life is on the brink of coming together in the next decade if done with thought and precision from all stakeholders in the city, from business and political leaders to the general public.
He cites old friend and work colleague Pat Phelan, the Cork founder of Trustev who sold the business to American giant TransUnion for tens of millions of dollars, as evidence.
“People like Pat Phelan will come and want to help Cork succeed. That man has lived in the greatest city in the world, New York, yet he wants to come home to Cork. That tells you something,” he said.
Mr Cahalane has worked with countless companies and start-ups for more than a decade, a highly coveted gun-for-hire that helped transform the fortunes of those he has joined. Trustev and the much heralded Teamwork.com in Blackpool, Cork, are two of the entities he helped take to the next level. It was time he focused on his own vision of the modern workspace, he said.
“I had worked for myself as a consultant in various industries and it’s lonely, it’s very hard to get offices, and involves a lot of working from your kitchen table. I contacted Pat Phelan years ago because I had googled co-working spaces in Cork. That’s how we became friends.
"I was feeling the effects of working on my own. There was no camaraderie, no Christmas parties, as soon as the contract was over you were out of there. So that’s what the Republic of Work is — a physical space to help businesses get better, as well as a feelgood place to work. The connections, the networking, assisting others.
"It can be a carpenter who wants to utilise IT, it can be a multinational who wants a sales team in the city centre. It can be anyone. Yes, we are a commercial entity who wants to make it financially successful but it is bigger than that. It’s about putting Cork at the forefront of the changes we are seeing.”
Republic of Work will run start-your-own-business courses, host media training seminars, host the Built In Cork monthly events where speakers like Dan and Linda Kiely of Voxpro and Colm Lyons of Realex will share what they have learned as they built their businesses.
He is looking forward to sharing the vision at it@cork’s Tech Summit in City Hall on Thursday, May 4.
“I’ll be chairing a panel on the future of work and there will be some formidable visionaries speaking. it@cork has come on leaps and bounds since its inception and it is remarkable that it is run by volunteers who all share the same passion for Cork and what it can be.
"The Tech Summit is the best put-on event in Cork, in my opinion. I still don’t think the people of Cork fully grasp just how big we can be in IT. The world’s biggest companies are here to stay. If we get the next five to 10 years right, the possibilities are endless,” he said.
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