ALX Community is a coworking and event space — well, spaces — with a focus on social impact. Launched in 2018 out of Old Town Alexandria’s 106 N. Lee St., ALX Community has since grown to 800 members and three locations, with a fourth on the way. “We said from the start we wanted to be more than a workspace,” Kelly Grant, ALX Community’s chief operating officer and one of its three co-founders, said.
How it started: The business was born out of a “what’s next” question. Scott Shaw co-founded Alexandria Restaurant Partners in 2016 and then, in January 2017, sold another business, restaurant data firm Fishbowl Inc. — where Grant served as head of talent — to a Northern California tech firm. In March 2017, a Shaw affiliate acquired 106 N. Lee St. for $4 million.
OK, what to do with it?
Shaw, Grant and co-founder Amanda Kate Galbraith landed on coworking. The Lee Street property was renamed Founders Hall and ALX Community was born. What started on North Lee later expanded to the Old Town waterfront at 201 N. Union St. and The Atrium Building at 277 S. Washington St. Between the three, ALX Community now manages about 60,000 square feet, including 9,000 square feet of meeting space and 14,000 square feet of event space.
The business, which employs eight people plus contractors, offers the typical coworking spaces — private offices, and dedicated and flexible desks — and much more. Think space for events, weddings, happy hours, networking, baby showers and “everything in between,” Grant said. There are TALX Talks geared toward growing members’ businesses, fundraisers and other efforts to support local charitable causes.
That social impact helped land ALX Community the 2023 Business of the Year award from the Alexandria Chamber of Commerce, and a spot on the Inc. 2023 Best in Business list in the small and mighty category.
“What we do is unique,” Grant said. “We’re really baked into our local community. We’re owned here. We live here. It makes a big difference.”
It is not a commercial real estate business, she emphasized, but rather hospitality. Administrative services like answering phones are available at ALX Community, but not its focus. Indeed, there are plenty of other coworking options out there with that bent, Grant said, and the competition has only helped to grow their business. They’ll send a prospective client to a competitor, she said, and vice versa.
And it’s working. Grant, who declined to disclose revenue, said ALX Community’s member spaces are 95% full. Its membership includes businesses from all over who may want a second or third office option close to D.C., but without the D.C. traffic, she said, though most live in or around Alexandria.
“Alexandria homes were not meant to be an office,” Grant said.
The pandemic effect: ALX Community opened its North Union space three months before the pandemic started, and never closed it. It couldn’t: “So many of our members were doing so much to support” pandemic-related efforts, Grant said. Plans to open yet another space at The Foundry on the Eisenhower Avenue corridor, combining a coworking space and Alexandria Restaurant Partners food hall, fell through during the pandemic, but the parties said the decision had been made earlier. They “couldn’t make the math work,” Shaw said at the time.
In 2021, ALX Community announced it had leased 15,000 square feet at 277 S. Washington St. — an optimal time, Shaw said in a statement, as the country looks to be “on the other side of the pandemic.”
The business did land some help from the federal government in the form of two Paycheck Protection Program loans, one for $29,500 in April 2020 and another for $60,040 in February 2021, according to ProPublica’s PPP database. Both have since been forgiven.
The challenge today: Keeping up with growth — not just its own, but of its members.
“We are finding that some of our companies are growing to a place that they need more space and want more dedicated space for themselves and their teams and right now we can’t facilitate that,” Grant said.
ALX Community’s private offices, which start at $800 a month, are limited in the number of employees they can host. So the business is looking to grow yet again, to another 20,000 square feet on the Alexandria waterfront, where Grant said it will host 15 suites for small- to mid-size companies of 10-30 employees. She declined to release the address, but said the deal should be locked in soon.
What’s next: The ALX Community model could probably work elsewhere, Grant said, but she’s content where she is, “small enough where our impact can be felt.”
“I’m happy in Alexandria and have been part of companies that are very large,” she said. “I don’t want to do that anymore. I think that takes what makes us unique away.”
ALX Community is not looking for any investors and “not looking for an exit right now either,” she said. “Some day in my life maybe, but I’ve got a lot more to do.”