Welcome

Coworking offers the choice to work in the company of other independent professionals and avoid the isloation of working alone at home.

OfficeXpats is your shared community office, a productivity place, a place to meet clients, and a place to hold an event. We are building a community of professionals, including remote workers, independent consultants, and entrepreneurs.

Full time and part time memberships offer different levels of service that include some of the features of a business membership club, an Internet café, the library, or the airport VIP/Red Carpet club, all encompassed in the international trend of coworking, with easy access to the Winslow business district services and ferry transportation.

OfficeXpats can support hundreds of Bainbridge Islanders needing flexible access to professional work spaces, conference rooms, and other business services.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND

In early 2010, Leslie learned about this trend called ‘coworking’ from a GreatCity.org 3-minute BIG IDEA presentation given by the founders of Office Nomads in Seattle. Leslie told Jason of her discovery, and he later went to a full presentation and got quite excited about matching the concept to his idea for a company that offered ‘virtual IT’.

Coworking is about making the personal choice to work alongside other people instead of in isolation. Coworkers show up with their laptop, grab a desk, and get to work. They have access to all the features of a professional office as well… they can print, copy, and fax, use conference rooms, get coffee/tea, and eventually get to know some of the other coworkers.

As you know, Bainbridge Island is a pretty high tech and creative community, with lots of commuters, remote workers, consultants, and entrepreneurs. Most of us probably don’t want to commute to jobs in Seattle, but working at home all the time can be distracting and isolating.

We realized that there is an opportunity to create a new way to work that skips the long commute but still lets you get work done in the company of other motivated professionals.

OUR TEAM

Jason Omens has IT management and network administration experience for small to midsized companies that spans two decades, with some operations management. He has a passion for building secure, highly reliable information technology infrastructures, and was recently interviewed by Gartner to give views on their Magic Quadrant for SMB multifunction firewalls, and also by Biztech Magazine and Information Security Magazine about unified threat management. He is a Microsoft Partner (Silver Enterprise Resource Planning and Small Business Specialist competencies) with several certifications including MCSE, MCDBA, and MCP.

Leslie Schneider is a marketing and communications specialist with a history of building community. Leslie has worked with both start-ups and software giants offering messaging, marketing collateral, and training development. She is also a founding member and ‘graduate’ of cohousing, having developed and then lived in Jackson Place Cohousing (near downtown Seattle) for eight years. She served on the cohousing development LLC managing board for five years and was the owner’s representative for the 27-unit condominium construction.