Regus IWG's Mark Dixon explains how he fought off WeWork
Mark Dixon, founder of global workplace provider Regus – now known as IWG – has talked about how the launch of its Spaces co-working brand in 2015 helped keep rivals such as US giant We Work at bay. The service, aimed at creative workers who were put off by corporate Regus centres, is part of a broader plan for the firm, which is aiming for 20,000 outlets worldwide. "We have in London over 100 centres so we are more broadly spread, we are opening more outlets large and small. It’s a growing market," said Dixon.
C atching up with Mark Dixon is tricky. The founder of the serviced office empire Regus, who’s already clocked up more air miles than he cares to remember this year, is running half an hour late for our meeting after struggling over from Heathrow.

In a couple of hours he’s off again, hopping on a plane to San Francisco.

Travelling is one of life’s unavoidable chores when your company — now formally known as IWG — has 3000 centres across more 900 cities.

These days, at 57, he’s toned things down and he’s only on the road for two weeks a month.

He’s been running Regus for nearly 30 years and now he’s got a new challenge on his plate, fending off the likes of WeWork and The Office Group, sold this week to Blackstone for £500 million, trying to eat his lunch in London and elsewhere.

Dixon himself, who now owns 25% of the £3.3 billion business after selling £94 million in shares days ago, is probably the most unassuming multi-millionaire you’re likely to meet.

Sitting in Regus’s airy glass-walled Berkeley Square centre tieless in a suit and check shirt, the Essex man could easily pass for any one of the millions of businesspeople on the move he caters for year after year.

He’s softly spoken, stocky with a bit of a paunch and a gammy knee keeping him off the tennis court. There’s none of the big “I am” about him.

Still, anybody who left a Chelmsford comprehensive at 16 to set up half a dozen businesses over a lifetime can’t be underestimated.

His parents divorced when he was nine, and early on Dixon wanted money and independence — doing paper rounds and even digging up and selling peat from the forest near his council estate (“highly illegal, of course”). At school he was a star performer but found education “extremely slow and not challenging enough”.

His father — a Ford engineer who encouraged his son’s academic progress — was “mortified” by his decision to pack in formal education, Dixon recalls.

“I had superb results, and could have done whatever I wanted. But education had nothing for me. It would have been torturous.”

So while Dixon Sr was lamenting his son’s university snub, he was hard at work on his first venture, Dial-A-Snack: selling sandwiches and learning lessons that weren’t on the syllabus at Rainsford comp.

The fledgling venture soon foundered. “My customers were very happy customers — the reason I didn’t make any money is because I put too much filling in the sandwiches.”

Besides, Dixon himself was itching to get on the road. An avid newspaper reader, he saw a story about French sex siren Brigitte Bardot and Saint-Tropez, which from mid-Seventies Chelmsford looked impossibly glamorous. “On a cold winter’s morning you imagine these places where life is better. I caught a train to Paris from London and then I hitchhiked to the south of France.”

It took the teenager two days and he was completely exhausted. But he had a lucky break; the first person he met asking directions to the campsite was a relation of the wealthy Senequier family who owned most of the centre of Saint-Tropez, including the famous eponymous cafe.

The benefactor gave him a hut in his garden to sleep in, and managed to get him work.

Within a couple of months he was the assistant barman in Le Papagayo restaurant, and from reading about Bardot in the papers, Dixon found himself serving her drinks along with Barbarella director Roger Vadim and James Bond producer Cubby Broccoli.

“In life you’ve got to go for it, but you need some luck,” he says.

But he was soon moving on, travelling and reading, worried that his university-educated friends would end up being smarter than he was.

He went to Australia and travelled around, doing a host of jobs then moving on, from flogging encyclopaedias to working as a logger in Victoria.

Finally back in the UK with his business head on, Dixon spent £600 on a hotdog van and bought six more in the heyday before McDonald’s conquered the UK, “but you’re out every night if you want to make money — you smell like an onion and it’s bad for your love life”.

He sold on the vans and set up a bread roll firm, making 500,000 a month. But he was always on the lookout for new ideas so he sold up again and moved to the Continent in the late Eighties, where Regus was born.

Again, it was a newspaper story that sparked the idea: he read that in Washington recessions don’t hurt as much because there are so many government buildings.

So he headed to Europe’s government hub of Brussels, also encouraged by the fact that there was “less competition for good ideas” than in the UK.

By this time he had three children, and was married to his now-ex wife with whom he had two more before a high-profile £28.7 million divorce settlement in 2005. “Life is not always what you plan it to be. I have five wonderful children but it was not well planned,” he says.

Spotting businessmen having meetings around hotel coffee tables soon gave him the idea, and Regus flew as Dixon scaled up as quickly as McDonalds, the company he most admires.

“They’ve got 36,000 restaurants and they haven’t done the world yet. And work is more common than hamburger eaters.”

By the time the business floated in 2000 it was worth £1.5 billion, shooting him into the top 10 of the UK Rich List. But the dotcom crash forced the US arm into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for 10 months. Dixon also sold a majority stake in the UK business to Jon Moulton’s Alchemy Partners to raise cash, eventually buying it back in 2006 as the group’s recovery gathered pace.

Dixon lives in Monaco for tax reasons but Regus itself moved its head office from Luxembourg to Switzerland last year to take advantage of a non-EU base. Aside from the London listing, the new IWG holding company is based in Jersey.

The staunch Remainer is defensive over its financial affairs: “If you look at our accounts our tax rate is a normal tax rate [20%]. It’s not as if we’re not paying tax. You have to run your business efficiently. We started off in Benelux in the beginning and moved many times. But the management team now is in Zurich so that is where we plant it.”

He also has a job on his hands fighting off new rivals. Regus launched its Spaces “co-working” brand in 2015, targeting creative workers put off by the more corporate Regus centres. Private equity houses Blackstone and Carlyle are pumping money into the sector and the US giant WeWork has just snapped up a mammoth 280,000 sq ft site on the South Bank — the biggest co-working site in the world. One industry insider says: “WeWork has completely outmanoeuvred Regus. They are planning to double in size in London by the end of 2018 and Regus simply can’t keep up.”

If Dixon is worried about the competition, he is not letting on. He has bold plans for 20,000 outlets worldwide. “We have in London over 100 centres so we are more broadly spread, we are opening more outlets large and small. It’s a growing market, so it’s not just them and us.”

In the City the shares have jumped almost 50% this year and rumours of a private equity bid occasionally surface but Dixon isn’t quite ready to let go yet, despite nearing 60. “Stepping back is a relative thing. When you don’t spring out of bed, you’ve got to bring younger people in, and that is what we’ve done.”

That said, the billionaire has a growing sideline in wine, buying the Château de Berne vineyard in Provence nearly a decade ago after falling in love with it. He’s also snapped up an English vineyard at Kingscote in Sussex, and hopes to forge a “new frontier” in English wine. It sounds very much like his retirement business, and he admits to “an early dream where I wanted to live in the countryside on a farm. It suits me, it’s global, and I like to create things.” But that will have to wait for now. With a shake of my hand, he’s off again: the cab is waiting and there’s another flight to be caught.