Three years of Pink Coral Community

Three years of this community 🪸

The idea first came up in December 2022 during a coaching call with Tiff @tiffanyjohnsoncoaching. At the time, I was still running my VA business and working from home on my own, and I remember saying how lonely I was. I didn’t need more clients or more work, I needed people to talk to about businessy stuff, people who understood the ups and downs, and I basically just wanted to force people to be my friend 😉

I told Tiff I was thinking about starting a small virtual coworking and accountability club. Nothing fancy schmancy. Just somewhere low key where we could show up online, get some work done, and not feel like we were doing it all on our own. I also remember saying I didn’t want to overthink it, because I didn’t have a big following or a huge network, so I assumed hardly anyone would be interested anyway.

In early January 2023, I put a post out on social media and decided to just see what happened. I genuinely didn’t expect much. Then someone replied saying they were interested, then another person, and then a couple more. I still remember how shocked I was that anyone wanted to join at all.

Those first few months were weekly Zoom coworking sessions with a small group of women who showed up with their to-do lists and kept each other company while trying to get things done. We stayed connected via our WhatsApp group and slowly became a community of women who supported each other and could ask for advice. That’s when I knew it needed a name of its own, and that’s when Pink Coral Community was born.

Thank you to Becky Coote, Rachel Clayton @fruitionforbusiness, Suzy Rennison, Louise Fowen @yourcopycompanion, Cass Dartnell @unwindthemindwellness and Jane Connell @theglassduck for being part of those early days, and especially to the three of you (Louise, Cass and Jane) who are still members of Pink Coral today 😊

Taking Pink Coral offline

By the summer of 2023, I was fed up with working from home all the time and started wondering whether there were other women like me locally who wanted smaller, quieter meetups than traditional networking. So I decided to try hosting some in-person coworking sessions alongside the virtual club. The very first one had four of us there, and one of them was my sister, but it felt like a start.

From there, Pink Coral grew slowly through a lot of trial and error. Some things worked, some things didn’t, and the founding members really did bear with me while I figured out what on earth I was doing. Running a community and a growing business like this takes a lot of energy and time, and it soon became clear that I couldn’t do it properly alongside my VA business. So I made the decision to focus fully on Pink Coral.

When everything paused

Then in 2024, my health forced everything to stop. I was really unwell and spent a large part of the year bed-bound and house-bound. What I will always be grateful for is that the community didn’t disappear. The WhatsApp group stayed, connections continued, and events even went ahead without me for a while. That support meant more than I can really explain.

As I started to recover, I slowly reopened Pink Coral and focused fully on in-person connection, as we were all seeing deeper relationships and more opportunities from being together in real life. The virtual coworking club came to a close, and in 2025 I finally felt well enough to push the business forward again. That’s when Pink Coral grew from one hub in Fleet to opening new hubs in Guildford and Farnham, with more planned for the future.

The reality of building this

I’m not gonna pretend this has been easy. Building Pink Coral has been bloody hard at times. Making decisions, having hard conversations, creating business plans and a business model, and carrying the pressure to make things work and keep them going all by myself.

But it’s also been so much fun.

I’ve loved being able to try new things, learn as I go, problem-solve, and build something at my own pace, around my kids and my life. I’ve loved doing something different instead of just following what everyone else does. I’ve found my own business besties - people I can confide in and I get to watch that happen for other women in Pink Coral too. New clients, real connections, and friendships that go beyond business.

Some weeks I’m absolutely loving life. Other weeks I’m wondering what the heck I’m doing and who I think I am trying to grow something like this. But deep down I love it. I love the challenge. I find it exciting. I love seeing Pink Coral work for our members and how much they genuinely love being part of it.

Three years in

Over the past couple of years, more than 150 women have attended Pink Coral events, and we now have members across three hubs. It still blows my mind when I think back to how this all started, especially as I didn’t even know many people locally at the beginning. I just knew I loved connecting people and building relationships, and I decided to trust that. 

We’re not a huge business community, and some people might not see us as a success, but I started this business almost by accident, from scratch, as a passion project. Our size is intentional. I’m growing Pink Coral slowly and steadily, much like our members and their businesses, many of which are being built around kids and real life.

So this month, as the community officially turns three, I want to say thank you to every member. Please know how grateful I am for your support, for showing up, for believing in this community, and for trusting me to create a space that genuinely supports you and your business. This wouldn’t exist without you, our founding members, Tiff, and everyone who’s given me the courage to just go for it. I’m so excited about what comes next.

Nikki 🪸