A year after being named the region's fastest-growing company, COhatch has no plan to slow down.
In a LinkedIn post, COhatch CEO Matt said he wants to connect every Central Ohio neighborhood and suburb — Hilliard, Marysville, Plain City, Franklinton, Powell, New Albany, Grandview, Clintonville, Bexley, Granville, Pataskala, Reynoldsburg, Whitehall, Olde Towne East, German Village, Grove City, Canal Winchester, Pickerington and more — via his company's shared workspaces.
“The ones in Central Ohio, we have on our development plan currently, we’re working with several of those cities now to find locations and buildings. Our goal is to build a couple per year for the next five years to finish them out,” Davis told Columbus Business First.
The company currently has locations in Delaware, Upper Arlington, the OSU Gateway area, Worthington, Easton and Polaris, with construction underway in Dublin and Westerville, according to its website.
Davis said one of the obstacles the Worthington-based company has run into is real estate, but working with the cities has allowed it to grow organically.
For example, Davis said COhatch’s Westerville site came to fruition after the company learned the city wanted to redo its armory.
“It’s never been a matter of if we were going to some of those cities, it was when,” Davis said.
In addition to the Central Ohio expansion, Davis wants to expand to small towns across the state.
In his LinkedIn post, he said the goal is to have a COhatch in “every small town in Ohio.”
He told Business First he is targeting towns with populations around 10,000 people.
"The vision is we could be the future town hall 2.0 and a center of the town," Davis said.
He said the challenge is trying to scale the company to fit the town, but is working on coming up with another type of model.
Davis told Business First he is considering finding local partners to create a COhatch without franchising it.
He said he is also considering giving a small town a license for a free COhatch while teaching them how to use it; however, if this is the route the company takes, he said the profits would have to be kept by the city and used to help the surrounding community.
"I’m not open to the idea of gifting it to someone who’s going to try to make money themselves and be selfish about it," Davis said. "We’re trying to push the envelope of how to maximize the impact of COhatch."
