For Epicenter, which had outgrown its Cooper Young space, the ground floor of the Peabody Place building seemed like the perfect new headquarters.
Previously, it had been the Innovation Center for Terminix — and innovation is something Epicenter seeks to foster.
“We kept the name Innovation Center; now it’s Epicenter’s Innovation Center,” said Taylor Sherbine, the nonprofit’s community manager. “It felt like it was basically built for us to be there.”
In March, Epicenter announced it would sublease the 20,000-square-foot facility from Terminix — doubling the amount of space it had in Cooper Young — and in April, it started moving in.
Preparing the space wasn’t difficult. The company did spend time ensuring that leftover belongings of Terminix employees were returned to their rightful owners; but otherwise, Sherbine said it was “smooth sailing.”
The new headquarters has a mixture of offices and coworking spaces with open desks, along with a spacious lounge area, a cafeteria, a kitchen, six meeting rooms, six phone rooms — where you can take private calls — a wall of lockers, and a training and event space that can be split into two different rooms. It also has a shuffleboard table that’s been a resident of the building since the days of the former Peabody Place mall.
Right now, 50 to 60 people are working in the facility, according to Sherbine. About 25 of those are staffers and contractors of Epicenter, which shifted back to a remote work environment when the Delta variant of COVID-19 surged, and just returned to a hybrid work format this week.
The other occupants of the space come from a variety of groups associated with Epicenter.
Economic development agency Pathway Lending works out of the headquarters. So does Innova Memphis, the venture capital firm that moved in after its previous host, the Memphis Bioworks Foundation, closed its doors. Local startups Connect Music Group and MedHaul are housed at Peabody Place, while participants of the Patents2Products program and the ZeroTo510 medical device accelerator have access to the space too.
In 2022, Epicenter also plans to begin offering membership options that will give people the chance to use either their incubator area — one of the coworking spaces — or offices.
Unlike the membership offerings it had at Cooper Young, however — which could be used by just about anybody — these are specifically for entrepreneurs and organizations that support them.
“In the last space, all you had to do was sign up and pay for the first month of membership,” Sherbine said. “This time, you have to fill out an application, and name your business and business goals. We make sure it aligns with what we’re doing. It also helps us … better pair [entrepreneurs] up with Epicenter programs, or another member of the space.”
Epicenter will have three different membership options. One of these, at $150 a month, is for a “flexible desk” in the incubator. You can come in and work as you need, but you don’t have an assigned desk that’s yours; you choose one that’s open when you come in.
For $350 a month, you can get a dedicated desk, one assigned specifically to you. This comes with the added benefits of having your own permanent space, like a filing cabinet.
Then, for prices that range from $750 a month to $1,800 a month, depending on the size, you can rent out private offices, though currently all are full. All three membership options will provide access to the facility's various features and amenities, and Epicenter's membership platform.
Once the memberships really take off, Sherbine estimates up to 200 people could use them.
“We're looking forward to when we can open up to the pubic in the new year,” she said. “We deeply miss our space in Cooper Young, because that’s essentially where we started, but the opportunity to expand our work at the new location just feels infinite right now."
