Employees in 20+ States, One Workspace Plan: How Timely Gives Every Hire an Office Without a Lease

Here is the version of the office question that most growing remote companies eventually hit. You are hiring fast. Some of your people cluster in one city, but most are scattered everywhere else. They want somewhere to work that is not their kitchen table, and they want to see each other in person sometimes. A lease solves that for one city, at one headcount, for one multi-year term. Nothing about that matches how you are actually growing.

Timely, an AI-powered K-12 scheduling company, hit exactly that wall. About 20% of their US employees live in Boston. The rest are spread across more than 20 states, plus 10 contractors overseas. And the company tripled in a year, from roughly 20 employees to 50.

"We knew that we didn't want to lock ourselves in to a set lease with a set amount of capacity," Courtenay says. The lease question was really a scaling question: what do you commit to fixed capacity, and what do you keep flexible?

The bank-of-hours model

Timely's answer was to stop thinking about square footage as a place and start thinking about it as a budget. The company runs on a single shared bank of Croissant hours that any employee can draw on to work from coworking spaces across the country.

Courtenay's framing is the best one-line summary of the model we have heard:

That one line does a lot of work. The Boston cluster gets a place to collaborate and build relationships in person. The employee who lives nowhere near a colleague still gets a change of scenery and a professional space to escape to. And when headcount grows, the workspace budget grows with it. No new lease negotiation, no capacity guessing.

One vendor instead of fifty reimbursements

There is a quieter operational win in Timely's story that will resonate with anyone who has managed a workspace stipend. The usual alternative to a lease is individual coworking memberships, which means dozens of separate subscriptions, receipts, and reimbursement requests flowing through finance every month.

Timely skipped all of that. "As a business, we're able to work with a single vendor B2B, which makes it much easier for us," Courtenay says. "We don't need to track and reimburse people's individual memberships."

The single-vendor setup also solved a fairness problem that stipends quietly create: coworking prices vary wildly between markets, so a flat stipend buys an employee in a small metro far more workspace than it buys their colleague in New York. Croissant standardizes what the company pays across metro areas and smaller regional markets, so what employees get is the same wherever they live. Asked to describe the model in three words, Courtenay picked "flexible, easy, and fair," and the fairness point was specifically about pricing.

The presence layer

The part of the story that surprised us most is not about cost at all. On Croissant, employees can see who else on the team has checked into a workspace, anywhere in the network.

"I can look on my app and see that somebody in Houston is checked in and I'm in New York," Courtenay says. "Even though we're not in the same office, it just gives me a sense of team to be able to see that she's working from an office, too."

Remote-first companies spend a lot of energy engineering connection through offsites and Slack rituals. Timely found some of it in a simpler place: the ambient awareness that your colleagues are out working from real workspaces, same as you. It is a small thing, but it is the kind of small thing that makes a distributed company feel like one company.

What to take from this

If you are scaling a distributed team and staring down the office question, Timely's playbook is worth stealing: treat workspace as a variable spend rather than a fixed asset, buy it through one vendor instead of reimbursing many, and let the budget scale with headcount. The office stops being a place you lease and becomes part of how the company operates: something every hire gets on day one, in whichever of the 20+ states they happen to live.

Want to see what a bank of hours would look like for your team? Learn more at getcroissant.com.

Watch the full conversation: We Have Employees in 20+ States. Here's How We Give Them All an Office.