Mark Dixon and the business of making life less awkward

Before Mark Dixon sold anyone an office, he had a problem with the bread. His hot-dog business depended on buns, and he moved into making them himself. It is a pleasantly unglamorous place to begin a career in international business. No grand theory of the future was required. Something needed to arrive, taste right and be there when a customer wanted it. Eventually, Dixon would apply a similar impatience to a much more expensive purchase: somewhere to work.

Look at his career through that small transaction and the distances become less bewildering. Food vans, factories, business centres and vineyards all involve turning a collection of practical arrangements into something a person can actually use. The interesting question is how far you can take that habit. Dixon took it from Britain to Brussels, and from a single Regus centre in 1989 to a workspace network spanning more than 120 countries.

In June 2026, he moved from chief executive to Executive Chair of International Workplace Group, the parent of Regus, Spaces, HQ and Signature. Christian Schmitz took over the daily leadership. The change gives this long entrepreneurial story a fresh chapter: the founder still has a seat at the table, while someone else gets the chief executive’s inbox.

A bicycle was an adequate business school

Dixon was born in Essex in 1959, the son of a car mechanic, and attended Rainsford High School. He left at 16. His early sandwich-delivery venture, Dial-a-Snack, involved a bicycle and a rented kitchen. The name was a reasonably complete business plan. You called; he brought something to eat. A teenager could learn quite a lot about demand without having to put the word on a slide.

Travel followed. In France he worked at Papagayo, the bar and restaurant in Saint-Tropez. In Australia his jobs included selling encyclopaedias, working in an iron mine and cutting timber. The route hardly resembles a graduate recruitment programme. It did place him in different kinds of work, with different customers and different reasons for getting out of bed.

There is an appealing temptation to polish these years into a fairy tale about escaping school. Dixon’s own account is more practical. He wanted to learn quickly and do things. Later, he would acknowledge that formal education suits some people very well. His preference was to learn from people, reading and the activity around him. Leaving the classroom did not mean declaring his education complete.

“Plan, plan and plan again.”

Mark Dixon, writing about entrepreneurship, 2014

The hot-dog operation grew from one van to six. The bun business was eventually sold for £800,000. By early 1989, Dixon was looking for his next venture in Brussels. These are modestly tangible stepping stones: a vehicle, a production line, a sale. They also complicate the usual founder story, in which a great idea arrives before anybody has learned how to keep the promises a business makes.

The office that was too difficult to buy

In Brussels, Dixon struggled to obtain suitable office space and saw people conducting business around café tables. A café already had chairs, tables and coffee. It lacked the support and privacy of a properly equipped workplace. The opportunity lay in the gap between those two experiences. Renting an office ought to be easier than assembling a small property department.

Regus opened its first centre in September 1989. Dixon also saw that business centres could serve medium-sized and large companies, rather than concentrating only on small firms. That matters to the story. Flexibility was useful to people inside substantial organisations too. A company’s size did not make every team’s requirements permanent, predictable or conveniently located.

His early geographical ambition was a business centre in each of the European Community’s 12 member-state capitals. After opening the first, he discarded that plan because he thought the opportunity extended further. By 1994, Regus had reached São Paulo and Beijing. The idea travelled because the inconvenience travelled: people doing business away from their usual base still needed somewhere to get on with it.

The resemblance to hospitality is useful. A traveller can book a hotel room without purchasing furniture or negotiating for an entire building. Dixon wanted a comparable ease around work. Taken seriously, that changes what the customer is buying. The desk is part of the purchase; so are the arrangements that let someone sit down and start.

A good idea still has to survive the rent

Regus floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2000. The following years supplied a rather less agreeable education. The dotcom downturn damaged demand, and the American operation sought Chapter 11 protection in 2003. A business built around flexibility for customers had to confront the consequences of a sharp change in those customers’ circumstances.

In 2004, Regus bought HQ Global Holdings, then a major American rival. The sequence is worth sitting with: expansion, financial distress, recovery and acquisition. It makes a much more credible business story than a straight arrow pointing upwards. Being early to an opportunity does not protect an operator from the cost of being wrong about its immediate size.

By 2019, Dixon’s lesson from that episode was to prepare for the worst outcome. In his account, recessions had become familiar conditions across a network operating in many countries. Familiarity is useful, but it is hardly a guarantee. An empty office still needs to be dealt with; a forecast does not fill it.

That experience also gives his later approach to growth some context. IWG increasingly expands through management and franchise arrangements with property owners and partners. Those models bring other people’s buildings and capital into the network. They also make the service promise a shared responsibility. A brand can cross a border quickly; consistency takes work after it arrives.

His argument with the morning commute

Long before today’s arguments over office attendance, Dixon was talking about workplaces nearer to where people lived. In 2012, he described the attraction of getting on a bicycle and working down the road instead of making an expensive, awkward trip into central London. The bicycle had returned to his story, now carrying a customer rather than sandwiches.

His underlying observation is simple: much of what once tethered a worker to a particular building can travel. Computers, communications and documents became easier to use elsewhere. The remaining questions are about the job, the team and the arrangements that help them work. A desk’s postcode does not settle those questions by itself.

Dixon has a commercial interest in that argument. An employer using a network of local workplaces is a prospective customer. That makes the idea worth examining closely rather than accepting as a prophecy. It also makes his continuity interesting: he was selling access to offices when the fashionable argument was about the permanence of offices, and he kept selling access as that argument changed.

In his 2025 conversation with Frank Cottle, Dixon returned to convenience, management and network coverage. Coverage makes a particular office more useful because it comes with alternatives. It is an ordinary consumer idea applied to a substantial corporate expense. The attraction is being able to use a service where it is needed, without having to reproduce the whole service yourself.

The weekend place that acquired a balance sheet

Then there are the vineyards. Dixon owns wine estates in Provence and southern England. Château de Berne became the setting for his thoughts about stewardship: land has a history before its present owner and a future afterwards. He has written about passing it on in better condition, and about the difference between seeking immediate profit and building lasting value.

His farming advice includes planning, adapting to conditions and controlling what can be controlled. Weather, inconveniently, does not attend management meetings. You can decide where to plant and when to harvest; you cannot issue a revised forecast to the sky and expect compliance. A vineyard gives entrepreneurial confidence a useful audience with other ideas.

Dixon has called the wine operation his Saturday job. He described its origin as a weekend place that grew into something more involved once he became interested. There is humour in the admission. Many people acquire a hobby to put work aside. An entrepreneur may accidentally acquire another management team.

It also offers a different clock. Planting vines means waiting years for a product. That patience sits alongside the impatience in his business advice. He wants people to begin, experiment and learn, yet some of the things worth doing take a long time to show a return. Offices and vineyards make that tension unusually visible.

A different chair, the same unfinished question

IWG’s first-half 2026 results show the scale of the next chapter. It opened 425 centres and ended June with 4,974 open locations. The roughly 6,000 locations cited at the leadership handover included the pipeline. Keeping that distinction matters: an agreement for a future workspace and a functioning workspace are different stages of the same ambition.

Revenue growth was accompanied by pressure elsewhere. Operating profit fell to $38 million from $68 million a year earlier, while net debt reached $880 million. The numbers keep the story grounded. A larger network brings more reach and more work to do. The founder’s next chapter begins with an operating business, complete with costs, obligations and a successor responsible for execution.

As Executive Chair, Dixon provides strategic guidance and advises Schmitz. His career has supplied plenty to advise on: customers, expansion, reversals and the curious tendency of a weekend interest to become a business. What connects those experiences is a repeated question about what people need and why getting it has become so awkward. The answer once involved a better bun. It still involves a better place to sit.