Office of the Future

What's a Prime Location?

One longtime rule about property hasn't changed: the importance of location. What has changed, however, is the definition of a "prime location." Downtown ain't what it used to be. To one company, "prime location" means having satellite offices that are convenient to employees' homes. To another, it means having additional space near a key customer or partner. A third company might need an overseas office to accommodate expansion into new markets. Then there's the startup that's eager to trade its garage for the credibility that comes with a prestigious address. In other words, having a great location is now more relevant than ever.

With more than 250 business centers in 45 countries, totaling about 5 million square feet of office space, Regus provides plenty of locations. Pick a city anywhere in the world -- from Singapore to Sao Paulo, from Warsaw to Washington, from Melbourne to Moscow -- and chances are, Regus is in business there. The centers are usually in landmark buildings or in high-rent districts with picture-postcard views. To underscore that point, Regus publishes a book of postcards featuring those very views.

What's more, any Regus customer automatically becomes a global company, because every customer has access to this global-office network. Immediate access. One of Regus's slogans is "Walk in, sit down, start work." In reality, the process is only slightly more involved than that. You make a reservation by phone or over the Internet, walk in, fill out a rental agreement, sit down, and plug in your laptop. As Dixon likes to say, renting office space should be just as easy as renting a hotel room.

Along with multiple locations, Regus offers several "office platforms." Netspace, for instance, allows companies to rent a lot of space for a very short time. Regus will outfit an entire floor or building to a company's specifications and will provide a dedicated support staff. The vast majority of customers, though, rent one or more offices for an average of six months. They have the option to expand or diminish the space as necessary. Regus can usually make the alterations overnight, repositioning the metal walls as if they were Legos.

The Touchdown service is designed for business travelers who need to "touch down" for a day in a Regus office that's fully equipped and staffed. Or they can rent one of the spacious meeting rooms or videoconference facilities for a few hours. Regus never knows how its customers will use the tools that it provides. Even entertainers like Phil Collins and the Backstreet Boys have used its facilities to hold worldwide videoconferences with the media.

Regus's Link service lets startups like Arq International Ltd. use a prestigious address, such as 68 Lombard Street, even though its employees work elsewhere. For Julian Smith, 28, who's the managing director of Arq, that place was his North London flat. The Lombard Street staff would answer the phone, "Hello, and thank you for calling Arq International," and then would forward calls across town. For all the callers knew, Smith worked just across the hall. "We were based there without actually being there," says Smith. The address, support staff, and access to meeting rooms gave Arq's three-person executive-search firm instant credibility. Within six weeks, Arq had moved into an actual office at 68 Lombard Street. Soon after, its staff doubled. "I can't imagine accomplishing that if we hadn't used Regus," says Smith. "It makes you think about how you define the literal office. Obviously, for a business like ours, it's more amorphous."

Regus opened its first business center in Brussels in 1989. After selling a business that he'd grown from a hot-dog stand into one of the UK's largest bun bakeries, Dixon moved to Belgium, eager to start a business that would cater to the European Union. Dixon, who had dropped out of school at 16 to start a lunch-delivery service called Dial-A-Snack, soon came up with an idea: Working out of his hotel room, he grew frustrated with the difficulty of opening an office. He wanted to bridge the gap between property owners and tenants by offering instant professional offices with flexible leases. Dixon thought that the idea would catch on in the new European economy, but he never expected globalization to become the force that it has. The list of Regus's current and former customers reads like a who's who of international business: American Express, Boeing, Coca-Cola, Dell Computer, Disney, Kodak, Microsoft, Mobil, Nortel, Siemens, Sony, Ticketmaster, and Time Warner.

The privately held company (with 1999 revenues of more than $300 million) has doubled the number of centers every year since 1991, and it's been opening new centers at a rate of about two per week. Regus claims to be the fastest-growing provider of such business centers and the market leader in 42 out of the 45 countries in which it now operates. The United States has had similar business centers for years. For Regus, the U.S. market is relatively new, but it has the potential of becoming its biggest. Since opening two U.S. centers at the end of 1998, Regus has opened more than two dozen others. "Our goal is to have a total of 700 U.S. centers within the next five years," says Gaudreau.