Sisters Jodie Hastings and Shelly Slater decided they needed a fresh start when they hit a wall in 2016. Slater, a prominent WFAA anchor at the time, struggled to balance her family life with the intense demands at the news station. So, she left to found communications firm Shelly Slater Strategies.
Hastings, a 15-year commercial litigation attorney, was confronted with her lack of balance when she bumped into her husband—also a lawyer—at the San Antonio airport after they were both traveling apart for five days, covering various depositions and hearings. It was a wake-up call to Hastings, a mother of two children, that she needed more control over her professional life.
The sisters’ crises led them down new paths—together. Shelly Slater Strategies has landed contracts with Nike, Crow Holdings, and Toyota, but at the time, Slater couldn’t find a headquarters. “There was nothing on the market with a full production, TV, video, photo, or podcast studio,” Hastings says. So, the sisters built it. They invested “enough money that the business can’t fail,” Slater says, and in 2018 bought the building that is now The Slate.
They worked with GFF and Talley Riggins Construction to reconfigure the space that was a jewelry photography studio, working through Thanksgiving and the holiday season that year to get it off the ground. The Slate opened its doors on March 1, 2019.
The coworking space was tailored to women-owned startups at its launch, but the space accommodates men, too. A year after opening its doors, the pandemic struck, and the sisters worried they would face another career crisis. “We thought everything was going to go down; instead, we grew by 83 percent in 2020,” Slater says.
Members range from one-person ventures to Southwest Airlines. In 2022, The Slate partnered with Texas Woman’s University to provide space and coaching to women via the Women Owned Business Incubator.
Along with the full production setup, The Slate’s 11,488-square-foot space has 10 offices, 28 desks, and two large conference rooms—one that can host 20 people and the largest of which has a 75-person capacity.
2022 was The Slate’s highest-performing year. In 2023, the sisters expect revenue to grow by 25 percent. Going forward, they have discussed adding another location, but instead, are focusing on expanding in place. “With a killer downtown skyline view from our lot, we’re throwing around the idea of adding another story,” Slater says.
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