Karratha Enterprise Hub begins operation

Start-ups and micro-businesses in Karratha have a new home after the main office area of Business Centre Pilbara’s Karratha Enterprise Hub reached completion and began operating this month.

The upstairs level of the $2.8 million business incubator, at 18 Hedland Place, was fitted out last week and is already operational, with a number of businesspeople taking advantage of its facilities including co-working space, hot desks, rentable offices and a meeting room.

The ground floor, which will include a retail business, cafe and more office space, and the exterior of the building will be completed in coming months.

Business Centre Pilbara chief executive Paul Jagger said the hub had been custom-designed to meet the needs of fledgling and micro-businesses.

“The hot-desking, the co-working and the office space are all three solutions that reflect the progression of a business starting up,” he said.

“So the incubator won’t just be a place that provides space, it will be a facility that fosters usage by a range of different users, and when it’s done well, what you’ll find is that it develops its own community.”

Among the hub’s stand-out features are a multi-purpose meeting room with teleconferencing capabilities, a photography and videography studio and high-speed fibre-to-the-premises internet.

It hosted its first business event, a scale-up accelerator program from KPMG, last week and more programs are planned for coming months.

The business centre will also be based at the hub and continue to operate its services from the building.

Mr Jagger said there had been good interest in the facility so far, with its offices fully occupied and bookings coming in for the meeting room.

He said he hoped the hub would foster business growth and alleviate isolation among small businesspeople, many of whom were currently working from home, in the City of Karratha area.

“There are some (people) that believe business incubators have had their day, but I think when you look at a region like this, we really haven’t had business incubators here before because we haven’t had the right space to do that well,” he said.

“So I think this is something that's going to be very relevant for us in the Pilbara region.”

The Karratha Enterprise Hub was funded by $2 million from the WA Department of Regional Development and $800,000 from the Business Centre Pilbara.

The building will be opened to the community at a soft launch in late February, and is expected to officially open at an event in April.