Jonathan Herps: Welcome back to Stories of Scale — my interview series with scaling CEOs. Today I'm really looking forward to a conversation with Brad Krauskopf, Founder and CEO of Hub Australia. Brad, welcome.
Brad Krauskopf: Thanks for having me on — great to see you and looking forward to the chat.
Jonathan: Let's start with your origin story. How did you get to where you are, and tell us about the business.
Brad: I've always been self-employed. My family was in hospitality, and I distinctly remember saying in my 20s that I'd never go into hospitality — too much capex, fixed costs, and 24/7 demands. Fast forward 20 years and I've ended up in a hospitality business. It's workspace hospitality, so I've managed to avoid the weekends — but I still have the high fixed costs and capex. Ultimately, we're focused on creating a customer experience every day that keeps people coming back.
Hub sits squarely in what's now known as the flex office or co-working market — the premium end of it. Think hotel-style amenity at every location, food and beverage at every site, and a genuine focus on the member experience. The customers who come to us are predominantly scaling businesses — 10, 20 people, growing fast — and the primary problem we solve is helping them attract and retain the best talent. It's not about a cheap desk. It's about outsourcing their workspace requirements to an operator who can help them compete with the Googles and large corporates of the world for top people.
We're currently across Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Canberra — and by April this year we'll be in Perth as well, making Hub the only premium national flex office operator in Australia.
Jonathan: What are you currently working on and what goals are you most focused on?
Brad: Three things. First — finally opening in Perth. We started the business in 2011 with the ambition of being national, and I would have expected to be in Perth years ago, but the pandemic fundamentally changed that timeline. Getting there now is a significant milestone.
Second — we're finally at a point post-pandemic where we know enough about where the workspace market is heading that we can stop pivoting and actually focus on getting really good at our core service. The last five years involved constant product refresh and market repositioning. Now we want to differentiate clearly and execute with discipline.
Third — there's significant consolidation coming in this space. The relationship between flex operators and landlords is evolving rapidly, and there's a genuinely exciting opportunity to partner with both landlords and enterprise clients to manage their flexible workspace requirements. Long-term commercial leases of five or ten years simply don't make sense for most businesses anymore — and that structural shift is creating real opportunity for operators like Hub.
Jonathan: What do your daily habits and routines look like?
Brad: Up at 5:30 AM — though I'll admit this morning was a struggle. That 5:30 to 7:00 AM window is the most important part of my day. It's my time: gym or exercise, ten pages of a book, a short meditation, breakfast, and reviewing what's ahead. If I can protect that block consistently, I'm set up for success.
During the day I try to build in short walks around the block and brief breathing exercises. I eat five times a day — breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner — at relatively consistent times. I've found that a consistent daily schedule paradoxically creates more freedom, not less.
One I'm actively working on: batching email. I removed email from my phone at the start of this year and I'm staying with it. If someone genuinely needs me urgently, they're not going to email. Another one: preparing tomorrow's to-do list the night before, written in a physical diary. It clears my head and means I start the day with clarity rather than spending the first hour deciding what to do. And across the organisation we've tried to establish clear norms around which communication channels are used for what — because knowing what you don't need to pay attention to is just as valuable as knowing what you do.
Jonathan: How do you balance personal life with the demands of running a national business?
Brad: My single biggest challenge point is the transition from work to home. I've not mastered it. I've arrived home many times not ready to be present with my daughter Suki — still mentally in work mode. What I've found helps is building a 15 to 30 minute gap between leaving work and arriving home. Leaving the phone and all screens out of the room when I'm with her has been significant. And protecting weekend time — even when the week is difficult, weekends with Suki are a genuine anchor.
One habit I try to maintain: never finish a holiday without the next one already booked. Having something on the calendar gives you something to move toward and forces the discipline of actually taking the time.
Jonathan: Tell us about a major failure or challenge — and how you navigated it.
Brad: A few stand out. The earliest was scaling Hub geographically before we'd truly figured out our single-location model. We went into multiple states before we understood what we were doing well at one site. We scrambled for years to catch up from that, and I'd love to have that decision back.
The second is holding on too long — to cultures, ways of operating, leadership team members — out of loyalty or stubbornness when the business had moved on and the context had changed. Whenever I've held on when I should have let go, it's backfired. The market doesn't care about your loyalty or your sentiment. If you can't fight the change — and as a smaller business you often can't — your job is to navigate it, not resist it.
The pandemic itself was a defining stress test. Most people assumed the co-working model was finished when offices closed in 2020. Our model proved far more resilient than anyone predicted. But the harder challenge was actually the two years after — the speed of adaptation required on the other side. In many ways, 2021 to 2023 was more difficult than 2020, because the uncertainty about how the market would evolve was so prolonged and so deep.
Jonathan: What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?
Brad: You're always going to need more time and money than you think you do. It's not an original insight — I can't even remember who said it to me — but it has proven true in every phase of this business. The corollary in today's environment is that you can't afford to think in three-year timescales to reach cash flow positive or hit key milestones. The rules of the game change too quickly. You need to be hitting meaningful milestones in one month, six months, eighteen months — because by the time three years arrives, you're solving a different problem entirely.
Jonathan: What's been your biggest learning as a business owner?
Brad: Right people, right seat, right time. That's it. It's not the most original answer but it's the truest one I have. As a founder CEO — not a trained professional CEO — the most important and most liberating thing you can do is build a professional management team as quickly as you possibly can. It's better for the business, better for the team, and considerably better for your own sanity.
Jonathan: What's the most important characteristic of a great leadership team?
Brad: Trust — and the ability to divide and conquer that flows from it. For years I built a culture at Hub where everyone was involved in everything. It worked for a while, and then it very much didn't. It took years to move from that model to one where every leader owns their domain fully, comes together for cross-functional decisions, and can be trusted to operate independently the rest of the time. That shift was almost like rewiring the organisation's DNA. But once it took hold, it changed everything.
Jonathan: Any books, podcasts, or resources you'd recommend?
Brad: A few non-typical ones that speak to the whole person, not just the business operator. Breath by James Nestor — extraordinary insights into something we all do but never think about. The 5 AM Club by Robin Sharma — aligns well with how I try to structure my mornings. Stolen Focus by Johann Hari — a genuinely important book for anyone trying to manage their attention in an environment designed to fragment it. On podcasts, The Imperfects — two Australians, deeply human conversations, very much outside the typical business framing, and genuinely worth your time.
Jonathan: Any final advice for entrepreneurs looking to scale?
Brad: Two things. First — make sure the business you're building matches where you are in your life right now. The version of yourself running a business at 30 is not the version running it at 45, and pretending otherwise leads to misalignment that usually doesn't end well. Second — your job as a founder and CEO is to get enough things aligned at the right time: the market opportunity, the funding, and the right team. You're not in control of most things. The ones who win are the ones who figure out how to have enough of the right pieces in alignment at the same moment. That's the game.
Jonathan: Brad, thank you so much — a genuinely great conversation.
Brad: Thank you for the opportunity. I look forward to catching up next time you're in the city.
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