Ryan James closed his company’s office when the team was seven or eight people. Two or three months later, his staff asked him to find them somewhere to work together again. Today Rocket SaaS has 70 employees, and he puts the fact that almost none of them leave down to the space they share.
Ryan is the founder of Rocket SaaS, a demand generation agency for B2B SaaS companies. He started the business in 2013, spent the first eight or nine years with little growth to show for it, then niched down and grew to roughly £7m ARR in five years.
He joined Paul Dutnall on the Leaders Circle podcast to talk about that growth, and the most useful part of the conversation for any leader weighing up their workspace was the section where he described taking his away.
By the time Ryan had 7 or 8 people on the team, Rocket SaaS had a physical space. Then his wife became pregnant, and he made a call that felt reasonable at the time. “I’m not going to be around for, I don’t know, 3 to 6 months,” he reasoned. “So I’m probably not going to come to the office… lots of businesses are going remote, it’ll be fine. So I shut the office down.”
Within two or three months, his own team came to him. Two of the team members who were close friends wanted to see each other in person a few times a week and asked if he could get them co-working passes. “It wasn’t even me that was driving that,” Ryan said. “It was my team that wanted to actually be with each other and be in a co-working space.”
That changed his perspective because the demand for space was coming from the team itself. What he’d assumed was a straightforward cost saving turned out to be a decision his own people weren’t prepared to accept.
It spread quickly once the first two had somewhere to go. A third team member heard about the arrangement and wanted the same. Ryan followed them not long after, because he was missing it too.
Inside a few months, the company had gone from a shared workspace to fully remote, to a co-working space the team had effectively chosen for itself.
Plenty of remote businesses would recognise the gap Ryan’s team were reacting to, and most have the same answer for it: the annual offsite or quarterly social event. One big cultural moment that everyone talks about for a fortnight afterwards. Ryan has watched that approach run out of road.
“You do the big event and you get this big cultural boom, but then it starts to decline and the culture starts to fade.”
He isn’t arguing against big events, and Rocket SaaS still runs quarterly parties. His argument is about what holds culture up in the months between them, and his answer is frequency.
“When people come into an office two or three times a week, you get these constant little spikes. The culture stays at a really decent level, and then the big parties come along every now and then to create another big spike.”
What makes those smaller spikes possible is that the workspace supplies the occasion without anyone having to create it.
The team recently ran a challenge where everyone tracked their steps against a leaderboard for a month, with prizes awarded. The tracking app itself works anywhere. What you don’t get remotely is someone talking you into a longer walk at lunchtime, or the banter that happens off the back of the competition because everyone is in the same room.
This is the practical case for a collaborative workspace, and it has very little to do with desks. A remote business has to schedule every cultural moment it wants, which means culture becomes a project with an owner and a budget. A shared space produces those moments as a by-product of the team being together, cheaply and without anyone managing them.
One is an event you wait a year for. The other is what happens on a regular day in the team’s workspace.
Ryan’s argument moves onto commercial ground when he talks about who stays with the business. He is careful about how he frames the evidence, and it’s worth repeating his caveat rather than dressing it up.
“It’s not an actual data point, but for employees working fully remotely in the UK, the turnover isn’t great. By comparison, our employee turnover for people who come into the office twice a week is virtually zero.”
That observation comes from inside one business over a handful of years, and Ryan says so himself. It has still been enough to change how Rocket SaaS hires.
He also believes it has held onto people who had every commercial reason to go. Members of his London team have been approached by headhunters offering around £10k more and turned it down. His read is that the same offer would have been far easier to accept from a kitchen table, where the job is a salary and a laptop with nothing else attached to it.
When retention does break, Ryan is specific about what it costs a business of his size.
“When your best employee hands in their notice, and then another employee hands in their notice, that disrupts the client work, operations go wrong, you have to retrain people, rehire people. That really impacts productivity and clients.”
“When people are remote, they’re just tied to a salary number and can leave quite easily. Whereas getting people bought into the vision and culture has such a positive impact on revenue and employee retention – and therefore on client work and profitability.”
For Ryan, that’s why culture isn’t a soft benefit sitting alongside the commercial side of the business. The relationships people build, the sense of belonging they develop and the reason they choose to stay all eventually show up in the work.
Ryan has been asked before what his favourite moment of building Rocket SaaS was. His answer had nothing to do with revenue or headcount.
“My answer was when we got to five people. I walked out of a meeting room and saw my team having lunch together, falling over laughing. I didn’t know what they were laughing about – I still don’t – but it was really special. I’d brought these people together, and they’d formed a friendship they wouldn’t have had on Zoom.”
At 70 people, Ryan sees the same thing happening at a much bigger scale. He talks about the different friendships that have formed across the company, and the sense of connection they create.
“Now you just see all these pockets of friendships, and that makes people really buy into a company. It massively reduces employee churn and turnover, and it just creates a really nice working environment, which has knock-on effects on the positivity of the clients and the results.”
The point isn’t that an office magically creates culture. It’s that bringing people together gives them the chance to build relationships that don’t form as easily through scheduled calls and Slack messages.
Those relationships can become part of what makes a company worth staying at. For Ryan, that’s the real value of having people in the same place: not simply that they work together, but that they become friends.
Junior employees may have the most to lose when teams go fully remote. A lot of early-career learning happens by watching people who are further ahead: how they handle a difficult conversation, make a decision, solve a problem or simply approach their work.
Ryan sees that as one of the less obvious benefits of having people together. His argument isn’t just that junior employees need formal mentorship. It’s that much of what they learn happens incidentally, by being around people who are better and more experienced than they are.
“There’s a massive maturity gap in terms of mentality, understanding and context. Just being physically around people who are really good operators ups your game.”
That’s the part of the remote-working debate that can be easy to miss. You can schedule a weekly check-in with a junior employee, but you can’t easily schedule all the small moments where they see how someone else works, ask a quick question, overhear a conversation or get pulled into something they wouldn’t otherwise have encountered.
The Global Workplace Happiness Report 2026, which surveyed 80,000 people across 115 countries and was co-sponsored by Work.Life, points to a similar pattern. Younger employees report challenges around mentorship, while mid-tenure employees face engagement issues and senior leaders report isolation.
For businesses hiring their first wave of junior talent, that makes the workspace about more than where people sit. It’s part of the environment in which those employees learn – often in ways neither they nor the business think to put in a calendar.
Asked outright whether he could draw a straight line from the workspace to the culture to how the business performs, Ryan didn’t hedge.
“Yeah, undoubtedly. I’m massive on culture. A lot of people aren’t, but I am… and I stumbled into it by mistake.”
The mistake he’s describing is that he never set out to build a cultural advantage. His original rule was simply that he wanted to work with people he liked. The commercial logic came later, once he could see what low turnover was doing for client work and margins. Summing up the role of the space itself, Ryan says, “It’s very hard to have a good culture without it.”
Asked at the end of the episode what he’d do differently if he started Rocket SaaS again tomorrow, workspace came up without being prompted.
“I would try to network, meet people and partner as fast as possible. Having a workspace, I wish I hadn’t worked from home for so long and got a bit miserable. You can rent a relatively low-cost co-working desk and just be around other people. That’s one thing I would have done differently.”
He spent years working alone before understanding what it was costing him. Then he removed his team’s shared space before understanding what that would cost them. In both cases, the lesson came from what happened when people had, or didn’t have, the opportunity to be around other people.
That’s the case for workspace that Ryan’s story makes clear: environment shapes the way people interact, those interactions shape culture, and culture eventually shows up in how a business performs.
If your team’s energy has dipped since co-working stopped being a habit, the most useful thing you can do is get them back in a room together and see what changes. Book a tour of a Work.Life space and we’ll talk through what two or three days a week could do for your culture.
Hear Ryan James and Paul Dutnall discuss culture, growth, workspace and what changed when Rocket SaaS went fully remote. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch the full conversation on YouTube.
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