Welcome to Transforming Work with Sophie Wade. Exploring the future of work. Find out what's going on in our multi-generational distributed organizations with a new tech and talent focus. Discover what you need to know to stay upskilled and relevant and ensure your business keeps its competitive edge.
Hi, this episode puts offices in their place, so to speak, as functional and flexible features of our working lives, enabling people and enhancing performance. Offices play their part, cultivating environments and relevant hospitality-driven encounters that can adapt for teams, tasks, and projects, and also the dynamism of people's situations and business needs. I'm delighted to be speaking with Mark Dixon, founder and CEO of IWG, the International Workplace Group, which Mark founded in 1989 as Regus, and has now expanded to 18 brands, including Regus, Spaces, HQ, Stop and Work, and Open Office. More than 8 million people now use their 4,000 plus workspace locations in over 120 countries worldwide. Hi Mark, how are you?
I'm good this morning, thank you.
Wonderful. We have a lot to talk about. Starting off at the beginning though, as I always do, what did you study at school and what then?
I didn't study at school.
No, I well I did I did I was a brilliant student up until the age of 16.
When I decided that school was too slow for me, so I decided to go into business instead. So my studies have all been about businesses, how they work, how you grow them, and I've done many of them and still continue to do many of them today.
So you leave school, you're like, 'This is not for me. I want to move faster than that.' I get that. And where do what business do you start first?
Sandwiches. Okay. What kind of sandwiches?
These in the days of analog telephones, you know, those old bakelite phones and people phoned in their orders and I made sandwiches and delivered them to offices. It's a primitive version of Deliveroo or Just Eat. There's nothing new in this world. I always wanted to. Absolutely. So anyway, like I built that up. I sold it. Didn't make a whole lot of money on it, I have to say. Decided I need more experience. I traveled around the world. I went all over the world. Did loads of different things and then came back and did business properly.
Okay. And then what was your next business?
Hot dog from hamburger vans.
Okay. Food, right? Easy start place, low cap.
I didn't have any capital. So, right, small capital, high returns. All you've got to be is better than everyone else. It's not about food quality. It's about persistent.
Oh, okay. Being persistent.
So, be open when everyone and these were the wild west days pre-McDonald's. Yeah. And so, that was quite a successful business. Build it up, sold it, then made hamburger buns, built it up, sold it, then did sort of a version of co-living. Again, all of this pre-technology, pre really advanced technology.
What does co-living mean and why was that?
Co-living means well that this is furnished apartments in Belgium in Brussels. Okay. For secretaries. So, or assistants, lower level people who couldn't afford to have, you know, didn't have the capital to buy everything, didn't have the wherewithal because they didn't know the market, so they could come in. It was a furnished apartment. Easy terms. You know, that was a type of co-living.
And why Belgium? You don't have a Belgium accent. Sounds like a London accent.
I know. I did everything in England, but I decided '88 that I wanted to go and do Europe. I spoke French. Basically, pretty good French, I suppose. Yeah. And I wanted to do Europe. It's a bigger place, isn't it? I mean, there's more opportunities. And I always got the feeling that, you know, UK is a super competitive place. You know, you got a lot of entrepreneurs all crammed into that small island where Europe I thought the fields would be more open. Okay. And I was right, you know, there was loads of opportunity in Europe for entrepreneurial people. Yeah, and I got on with it in Belgium, did that. From that sort of it developed what we now know as IWG but you know started off as early iterations were Regus.
I'm just curious as to how co-living then spawned the idea of the flexible working space. What was it about that?
I needed an office, okay. And I'd always, you know, previous that I always had factories. I had factories. I didn't really have an office. So, I need an office. That went quite well that business. So, I need an office. I realized how difficult it was to, you know, just get an office. It's not an easy thing. Yep. It should have been easy. It wasn't easy, right? Then I saw other people had the same issue. You know, Brussels at the time, this was at the beginning of the wider European Union. There were lots of people there. People didn't have the right support. Yeah. So that's where it came from and it was a hunch that, you know, basically I opened the first center, I researched it, opened it, one center, September 1989.
Wow. And everything's sort of built up from there. What were some of the learnings as you were growing Regus? Obviously very very early in the market, but there was still huge need for this type of smaller and not flexible on a monthly basis to the same degree, but still very much more flexible. Yeah. Much more flexibility in terms of what you offering to businesses.
