Amanda Lewan spent nearly a decade running Bamboo before she walked into her first coworking industry conference.
"I've been operating for almost 10 years before I went to one, which is mind-blowing," she said, smiling.
She does not recommend other operators wait that long.
For most of those years, she was building Bamboo in Detroit. First as a 2,000-square-foot experiment, eventually as a five-location network across Michigan. And she was doing it on what she calls an island. An operator who hadn't met other operators. A founder who didn't know the industry's benchmarks. A community builder running spaces full of community while having very little of her own.
That's part of why she offered to host the third Coworking Operators Weekend at her newest Bamboo location in Grand Rapids. The other part traces back to 2013.
Bamboo started when four friends in downtown Detroit kept getting turned away from the only incubator program in town. They applied three times. Got rejected three times.
So like many coworking entrepreneurs, they built their own space.
“We started off as the space for those being rejected,” Amanda laughed. “We were like, okay, we don’t fit in. So everybody who can’t get into this only program in town, you’re all welcome here.”
The first version of Bamboo was 2,000 square feet, $99 a month to join, and held together by borrowed IKEA paint and a friend's dad who agreed to let them test the model in his building. None of the four founders had been an entrepreneur before.
Amanda had a hospitality background and an instinct for bringing people together. Twelve years later, that instinct is still the engine.
Bamboo now runs larger spaces, ranging from about 20,000 to 40,000 sq ft per location, and serves roughly 500 members at each. The company built its identity around entrepreneurs and creatives. The kind of members who often arrive as a solo founder and grow to a team of ten within a year or two.
The newest space, in Grand Rapids, started as an art gallery and reopened as a coworking and events venue with capacity for up to 400 people for a large scale event. There's a movie theater. A gallery wall. A patio. Real popcorn.
“At this latest location, we took everything we’ve learned over a dozen years and put it into the operation and design,” Amanda says.
It's also where the team will host the Coworking Operators Weekend on August 28, 2026.
Amanda wasn’t a conference expert, at first. But the reason she finally went was practical. She was seeking ways to measure the business’ performance, but had no way to verify it. She didn't know how other operators were pricing, staffing, or planning their growth.
“I was on an island,” she shared, “and I just don’t know what I don’t know.”
She went to GCUC first. Then she came to the Coworking Operators Weekend in Raleigh.
“Every time I’ve gone to an industry conference, I’ve come away with more confidence, more clarity, and more community,” she said.
The Coworking Operators Weekend, though, hit differently. The room was about fifty operators, two days together, every conversation closer to a working session than a hallway swap.
“I honestly felt like I was in class for two days,” she described.
She likens it to an accelerator or a boot camp. Bigger industry conferences offer global perspective and broad trend signals. A small operator-only room offers something different. Depth. Repetition. The kind of conversation you only have when the room is small enough to remember everyone's name.
When she got home, she had something concrete. A venue that could hold the event. A clear sense of what would make next year's agenda even sharper. So she offered to host.
The agenda that Amanda and the event planning team of Jerome Change of People of Coworking and BLANKSPACES, Lauren Walker and DeShawn Brown of Coworks, and Jackie LaTragna of Pacific Workspaces are planning leans into two things at once.
The first is the unglamorous business stuff that doesn't always make it onto conference panels. Funding models. Growth decisions. Hands-on AI workshops where operators actually sit down and improve their operations rather than nodding at a slide deck.
The second is the thing she keeps coming back to. Community care.
“I think about it from our team's perspective,” she says. “They’re the frontline workers of a community. They’re constantly interacting with people. They’re in very busy spaces. They’re creating culture.
“Our industry talks about burnout and that managers don’t stay long,” she described. “I think they can stay a long time, and it can be a career. But only if we make it a supportive, nurturing environment and don’t foster an environment where you have constant burnout.”
She's also pushing the conversation past the four walls of any single space. Coworking operators are also block neighbors, chamber partners, conference center collaborators, and small-business owners who help shape the culture of a neighborhood.
“It’s not just the inside of your space that you’re building community in,” she says. “Most coworking spaces also participate outside their space. Small businesses really create that culture in a neighborhood and in a city.”
Amanda's pitch to anyone on the fence is short: just come. You'll meet someone. You'll learn something. There's a sliding scale of ticket options if affordability is the question.
The longer answer is the one she lived. Indie operators run mostly on instinct, grit, and whatever they can find in their inbox. The fastest way to know whether what you're doing is working is to put yourself in a room with people who are trying to figure out the same thing in a different city.
“I think you should attend at least once a year,” she says. “Maybe twice a year if you can. I know it feels like a big lift to leave your day-to-day, but you just get so much value from it.”
Amanda will spend the summer doing what she's done for the past twelve years. Running busy spaces. Caring for a team that cares for hundreds of members. Asking herself how Bamboo grows sustainably from here, and what the next decade looks like for a network that began as a place for the rest of the city's rejections.
When the event opens this fall, she'll welcome forty or fifty fellow operators who, like her younger self, are doing this work mostly on their own.
If they're lucky, they won't wait ten years to find each other.