Well before the arrival of ‘Working from Home’ or even WeWork, Regus was the go-to place for small startup companies seeking somewhere in city centres to rent while or if they grew their business. The company that owns Regus as well as the HQ, Spaces and Signature office brands posted its highest ever Group revenue last week at $2.2bn. But how healthy is the long term model of office space letting -given the rise of working from home and AI wiping out many white collar jobs in future?
Mark Dixon, is the founder and boss of the International Workplace Group - formerly known as Regus - and he had some very interesting thoughts on why the UK economy is in such a malaise - including on Brexit
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https://www.newstalk.com/podcasts/breakfast-business/mark-dixon-founder-and-boss-of-international-workplace-group
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Joe Lynam : Mark, We'll talk about the future in a moment, but how did you first spot the need for smaller hybrid office space back in 1989? Well before the internet took off?
MARK DIXON.
Well, I had great difficulty getting an office for my small business at that time, and I saw the opportunity of doing something which made getting an office easy, using it easy, making it a painless activity, and that's how the idea was born.
Joe Lynam
And you were sitting at a coffee shop or something and you saw all these people wanting to have meetings surrounded by noise and all that stuff, and you said, you know what? I might be able to help there, but how did you get your hands on the first bit of real estate because you have to buy it and lease it yourself?
MARK DIXON.
Well, great expense basically, I beg, I stole it and I borrowed to get there and I got there and it was great success from the first centre opened in Brussels, Belgium, 1989, September, where now just signed up our 5300th building. So it is been a success. I mean, it's been a long road, but we built this business over all of those years and we're growing it very, very quickly as we come into 26 and during 25, huge growth.
Joe Lynam
And you've got 35 sites here in Ireland and intend adding 10 new sites here soon, most of which interestingly enough, are outside the capitol. That suggests you see plenty of growth in more remote parts of Ireland.
MARK DIXON.
Well, we see growth all over Ireland, so yes, of course Dublin and Cork, the bigger cities, but we're opening up in clones, Monaghan, two in Kilkenny, another one in Limerick, one in Wexford, and all the suburbs around Dublin because really work has become something you can do from anywhere. The internet liberates work, and there's lots of people across Ireland that would like to work in an office, but they want it near to where they live.
Joe Lynam
Your business is doing very well, but would you accept that working from home is going to erode the business model going forward?
MARK DIXON.
Well, not for us because we have a huge division just doing people working from home, so we have more than a million customers today that are work from home. So it's a growing segment for us. And if you imagine someone working from home in Limerick or Dublin, they don't want to work from home every single day of the week. They will drop into a building to have a meeting quite hard to have a meeting in your attic office or your front room of your house. It's not convenient. So the people use the network on a day by day basis, extremely popular. So that is a growth area for us. So we're both opening lots of buildings, but also growing our customer base of home workers, large corporations and smaller and startup companies.
Joe Lynam
When WeWork arrived, they were the in thing for a few years, and it looked as if they were going to damage your business, and yet they were the ones who filed for bankruptcy recently.
MARK DIXON.
Well, they did damage their business in terms of from a reputational point of view, business has been going for a long, long time, but definitely far for bankruptcy, but they're much, much smaller and really limited to a few major cities. We are covering more than 1200 cities now globally in 122 countries. So it's just a totally different scale to anything else that's out there.
Joe Lynam
In terms of the properties or the commercial properties that you buy, is there something that is the absolute day minimus for you guys? What must you have in terms of either energy values or parking spaces or shower facilities or fun on the rooftop, whatever it is?
MARK DIXON.
Well, we'd like all of those things, but look, just to be clear, we don't buy the properties. We always do it in joint venture with property owners, and that's what we're doing all over Ireland. We've got multiple partners all over the country who have a building and say, look, I'd like to turn that into a flexible office space, and we operate it for 'em. So we do all the work to convert them, provide all the revenue to make that into a successful operation, but we clearly look for as many amen as we can get for our customers or we put them in, and we can do this in quite small spaces in Ireland. We'll, I think our smallest centres about 300 metres in size in a small town, but they will go up to as much as 20,000 metres in bigger cities or big crossover points.
Joe Lynam
You've been a barman mark, a miner, a sandwich maker, and now a billionaire. Which did you enjoy the most?
MARK DIXON.
Well, mining was very hard. That was in Australia in 50 degree heat sandwich making, didn't make any profit. Hot dogs made a lot of profit, but couldn't get a girlfriend always smoked with onions. Look, I don't have time to be a billionaire, unfortunately, because I'm busy with the business. All people in business, I, you're very busy with what you're doing. You don't really stop and say, well, I'm a billionaire or whatever. Sometimes you don't spend enough time smelling the roses, and that would definitely be my case and enjoy the business and that really, that's my drug if you like, don't need to have much else. Apart from that,
Joe Lynam
You're originally from Essex and living in Monte Carlo now and paying some taxes in the uk, we hear all sorts of talk about the UK economy and possibly even needing an IMF bailout. What's going on over there?
MARK DIXON.
Well, that's a very good question, and of course it would merit a very long answer. Look, obviously the UK has suffered from leaving the European Union. The UK is a country that's full of entrepreneurial people, but it's being more highly taxed and more and more regulation that sometimes gets in the way of job creation. So I think the UK in the coming years, we'll have to reset to be much more conducive to job creation and to allow entrepreneurs to get on with what they do best. So that was the idea, I think 10, 15 years ago. It's seeing that, but the economy more difficult, costs a lot of inflation and costs are going up. We are growing a lot in the uk in contrast to that, just because the entrepreneurs have less cash, so they want to use our facilities because you are in, it doesn't require any cash. It's very flexible because they also are not sure about the future. So it's a difficult situation in common with some other European countries. It's not just the uk and that's really, there has to be a reset of how some of the European economies work in terms of taxation, investment, infrastructure and so on in the coming five to 10 years, and I think it's underway.
Joe Lynam
Well, thank you very much for joining us and getting up early, mark to join us, and you've got five new centres opening up next week in City West, Kilkenny, Wexford, and Rathmines here in Dublin. That is Mark Dixon, the founder and boss of the International Workplace Group, formerly known as Regus.
Back in a moment, talking TV shows such as Dragon's Den and Dancing With the Stars.
