Blair Jinks was sitting in her regular spot at Studio Cowork in Baton Rouge when she got the news. It was April. Her consulting firm had just laid her off.
A few hours later, her phone lit up. Matt Adler, the founder of the coworking space where she'd been working as a member, was texting about an upcoming event.
She mentioned she'd just lost her job and was looking for work. Three weeks later, she was running the front desk at Studio Cowork.
That's not a story about luck, though luck was clearly involved. It's a story about what happens when a coworking space actually does what it's supposed to do. When it creates the kind of community where people know each other, trust each other, and eventually hire each other.
But in 2018 and 2019, he signed a lease on office space in downtown Baton Rouge. Then his employees went hybrid, or remote, or moved out of state. He was left alone in a space he still had to pay for.
"I was like, either I'm going to not sign this lease or I'm going to figure something out," he says. "I think Baton Rouge can handle a coworking space, and I really enjoy it. I want people to come work in here and I don't want to be in this office by myself."
So he built Studio Cowork.
Studio Cowork sits in a mixed-use building in downtown Baton Rouge — grocery store on the ground floor, six floors of residential apartments above, three floors of commercial space. Some members live in the building, work in the coworking space, and grab lunch from the grocery store downstairs.
It's the kind of setup that makes urban planners very happy.
The space runs just under 3,000 square feet. On purpose, it doesn't try to be bigger than it is.
"I wanted it to feel very cozy, comfortable, that kind of gave you a hug," Matt says. Warm tones, wood accents, plants, big windows. Soft couches alongside traditional desks. One private office. And a studio — photography, videography, podcasting — built out years before Studio Cowork existed, from Matt's own company.
That studio is a differentiator. Their members skew creative: social media managers, marketing consultants, people who need to shoot content for campaigns and want a space that's already set up for it. It's also why the space feels different from the moment you walk in. This wasn't designed by a real estate developer. It was designed by someone who wanted to actually work there.
It didn't go well.
"I felt like a number," she says. "I didn't feel like I had a connection to the managers, to the people that set me up with my account. When I had questions, I had to go through hoops to speak to someone. It was quite expensive."
She almost gave up on coworking altogether. Then she found Studio Cowork. "I found this little boutique place and I was like, oh my gosh, this is my vibe. I feel so at home here."
That feeling is now her job to create for everyone else.
Studio Cowork's growth has been organic. They got on social media early in 2026. Before that, it was word of mouth — the way the best coworking communities tend to grow.
Today the mix includes an accountant, a lawyer, healthcare consultants, and a handful of marketers. People who are, as Blair puts it, "like-minded professionals who don't have a big team." People who are, in many cases, working entirely alone.
"Some of our members are quite isolated," she says. "We have an attorney here who's working by herself. She's her own receptionist, she's everything for her business. But everyone kind of comes together. I've heard conversations I didn't get to be privy to as a member — sharing ideas, collaborating, saying, 'Oh, this person is familiar with this.' It's so exciting to me that it's truly a coworking space where people are bouncing ideas off each other."
Matt calls those moments the whole point. "You might be sitting next to somebody in a totally different industry, but you overhear a conversation and then you start talking about problems you've been talking to yourself," he says. "That's really where the community is shining."
He's quick to acknowledge that Baton Rouge is still warming up to coworking as a concept. So the pitch is simple: you're already working from home, you've got a great setup, but if you need a couple of days a week around real humans, come find us.
Matt managed everything at Studio Cowork himself until the member count and virtual office memberships demanded more time than he had. Running multiple companies and an active nonprofit, he was stretched.
Blair, still a member, watched him from across the room.
"I knew he had a lot going on, but I didn't realize how much and how much he needed help," she says.
"I knew we couldn't grow with just me," Matt says. "I wanted to give the coworking experience what it needed, which was a dedicated person."
What he got was something better than a good resume. Blair had been working from his space for nearly six months before she ever became a candidate. He'd already seen how she handled problems, how she talked to people, what presence she brought.
"You always wish you had the ability to test out a relationship before you hire someone," Matt says. "We got to know each other for almost six months working in the same space — understanding each other's personalities, how we like to talk, how we solve problems — before I even had the opportunity to hire her. That has made this such a great transition."
For Blair, the shift from member to community manager took about three weeks to feel real. "No Sunday scaries," she says, laughing. "You get up and you're like, yes, I get to see everyone in the office space."
She's now planning Studio Cowork's first real programming push. There's an end-of-summer rooftop event in the works — taco bar, members mingling, Blair's official introduction to the community she's already part of. She's built out a newsletter calendar through the fall, starting with the question she hears constantly: what even is coworking? She's also planning a monthly member spotlight she's calling the "monthly mosaic" — a way to help people understand who else is in the space and what they're working on. So the attorney knows there's a graphic designer two desks over. So the marketing consultant knows someone who does bookkeeping.
The connections, it turns out, don't happen automatically. But they happen faster when someone's job is to help them along.
Matt chose Coworks after comparing a few platforms. The deciding factor was simplicity. "What I liked about Coworks is that it was simple," he says. "Being a single-owner, single-managed facility, I needed everything available to me in one system — payment processing, management, reporting, booking and scheduling. And it also wasn't trying to push me into being bigger than I was."
Blair came to Coworks already knowing it from the member side. Now she's using the admin side, running Zapier automations that flow bookings from Coworks into Monday.com. Her take is direct: "You don't really need a ton of programs when you have Coworks."
Matt describes coworking as something that "felt right" for the same reason his nonprofit work does. "Non-profit work, social good is a part of my being," he says. "Providing people space to support their own business aspirations and dreams — doing that comfortably — has allowed me to do that."
The rooftop event is this summer. The newsletters launch in August. And Blair, hired because she happened to mention she'd just been laid off to the right person at the right time, is building exactly the kind of community she fell in love with as a member.
The best community managers, it turns out, were members first.