When people ask John Norcross where he’s from, he has difficulty answering the question.
Norcross, co-founder at BridgeOne, was born in Canada and educated there. He moved to the U.S., lived in the U.K. and worked in several places, including northern Europe, South America and the Caribbean. He commuted weekly from Chicago to Western Canada for three years and has two passports as well as a resident card.
“I find it easier to call myself ‘North American’ or ‘Transatlantic,’ but even that fails to do my background justice,” says Norcross, a WeWork member. “My co-founder colleagues are in a similar situation. Their accents are no cleaner than mine!”
The vision behind BridgeOne reflects “the urge to be at home everywhere,” Norcross says. The company is a strategy and implementation agency that works with clients to transform their organizational cultures through design thinking. Even though the company has been based in WeWork Labs in New York since its inception in late 2015, BridgeOne is in discussions with partners around the world.
Shaking up the consulting industry with a unique offering on an international scale means they need to “punch above their weight.” They made a decision early in the business design phase to leverage a platform-based model for collaboration and geographical scale.
“We quickly identified WeWork as a cornerstone for this platform,” Norcross says. “It offered us the flexibility and geographical reach that we required to feel confident that we could access clients anywhere and know that we had the infrastructure behind us. WeWork seemed to us to be best placed to fulfil all our needs in that regard.”
Robin Timothy, another co-founder, carries three passports, grew up mostly in the Caribbean (with an intensely memorable couple of years in Madison, Wisconsin) and has worked in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, Northwestern Canada, and the U.K. He uses an unlocked phone because he switches regularly among four Sim cards.
Timothy says that he’s found the story behind how BridgeOne leverages WeWork’s co-working environment to be a compelling one for prospective clients.
“They love the story about why we chose WeWork,” Timothy says. “The idea of keeping our company open and the connection to the ‘guild’ of companies and talented professionals on offer here makes us unique in their eyes. And they love—and sometimes envy—my description of the experience of walking into our Chelsea office and feeling that energy, that sense that people are busy creating something amazing.”
Timothy says the fact that WeWork has offices around the world makes it easy to be a global company.
“On a business trip to London recently, we rolled into the SoHo location, were ushered to the Commons area and within three minutes we had opened our laptops, connected seamlessly and were picking up documents, which we had developed on the plane, from the printer,” Timothy says. “That kind of fluid infrastructure is unprecedented. And invaluable. It fully reflects our ethos. Our prospective clients always seem to be inspired by our description of it. Several have expressed a desire to pay a visit to experience it for themselves.”
Co-founder Ian Joseph says he was pleasantly surprised by the power of WeWork when it comes to tapping into on-demand talent.
“We were stuck at the last hurdle while developing our website and reached out to the community and were blown away by the helpful responses,” he says. “We learned so much about the talent on offer and even received au gratis coaching on some of our technical challenges. We’ve discovered potential go-to-market partners for our service offerings, just by walking through the WeWork Lab space and being inquisitive about what folks are doing. You don’t get this when you set yourself up isolated from other creators.”