In 1989, before the word “coworking” existed in any pitch deck, an Englishman named Mark Dixon sat in Brussels and noticed something ordinary: businesspeople were holding meetings around the small tables of local coffee shops. They had clients, they had deals, they had laptops-in-waiting - but nowhere professional to sit. Dixon, a school dropout who had once delivered sandwiches by bicycle, saw a product where everyone else saw a caffeine habit. He opened a business center where you could rent a furnished, staffed office for as long or as short as you needed. He called it Regus.
More than three decades later, that idea has hardened into infrastructure. Regus - now the flagship brand of the publicly listed International Workplace Group (IWG) - operates a network of thousands of business centers across more than 120 countries. You have very likely sat in one. You may just not have looked at the sign on the door.
01The coffee-shop question
The premise Dixon started with is still the whole business: a commercial lease is a bad fit for most of the people who sign one. Landlords think in years - five, ten, sometimes fifteen. Businesses, especially small and fast-moving ones, think in months, weeks, sometimes a single afternoon. That gap is where Regus lives. It takes the space, fits it out, wires it, staffs the reception, and rents it back in slices sized to the customer rather than the building.
What made it durable was that Dixon never treated it as a real-estate play alone. A single serviced office is a nice amenity. Thousands of them, bookable from one membership and one app, is a network - and networks are hard to copy. That distinction is why the company survived the moments that should have ended it: a US bankruptcy filing after the dot-com crash, a restructuring during the pandemic, and a parade of better-funded imitators.
Dixon himself is part of the explanation. He left school at 16, worked as a logger and an encyclopedia salesman, ran a sandwich round on a bicycle, and built a soft-drinks business before Regus. That biography reads as trivia until you notice how it shows up in the company: a preference for cash over story, for owning the customer relationship, and for expanding only where the numbers work. He took Regus public on the London Stock Exchange in 2000, held on through the crash three years later, oversaw the acquisition of the coworking brand Spaces, and in 2016 folded everything into a multi-brand parent, International Workplace Group. He is still the CEO. Founder tenure measured in decades is rare in any industry; in this one it is almost unheard of.
02What you actually rent
Regus is best understood as a ladder. At the bottom rung is the virtual office - a professional business address with optional mail handling and telephone answering, often the cheapest way to use a location. From there it climbs through coworking access plans and hot desks, day offices and meeting rooms you book by the hour, dedicated desks, and finally full private serviced offices for teams. Each rung buys you a little more space and a little more permanence, and you can move up or down without breaking a lease.
Wrapped around the ladder are the things that make an office an office and not just a room: fast Wi-Fi, reception and admin support, cleaning, utilities, printing, catering for meetings, and business lounges you can drop into between appointments. There is also a quieter product with a serious job - workspace recovery, the standby seats a company can switch to if its main premises go dark. It rarely makes the marketing, but it is exactly the kind of unglamorous service that keeps large customers loyal.
03The business behind the desks
The model is space-as-a-service, and the economics are a kind of flexibility arbitrage. Regus signs for space on one set of terms and sells it on another - shorter, richer per square foot, bundled with services. In its earlier decades that meant carrying the lease risk directly. More recently, IWG has leaned hard into a capital-light approach: franchising and management agreements that let property owners convert their buildings into Regus-branded centers while IWG supplies the brand, the booking platform and the customer. It is the same shift a hotel chain makes when it stops owning buildings and starts running them.
The revenue lines follow the ladder: office and coworking rentals, virtual-office subscriptions, meeting-room bookings, memberships, and a long tail of add-ons - printing, call handling, catering, mail. Some of those add-ons are small in isolation and meaningful in aggregate, which is why a headline desk price and the real monthly cost can differ. At the group level, IWG reported its highest-ever system-wide revenue - roughly £3.3 billion - for 2023, with profitability rising as hybrid-work demand returned. It is not a hyper-growth story. It is a compounding one.
The expertise that is easy to overlook is operational. Running one office is a facilities job; running four thousand across 120 countries, each with local leases, staff, connectivity, security and health-and-safety rules, is a logistics and technology problem. Regus has spent 35 years learning how to open a center quickly, standardize the fit-out, and plug it into a single booking system so a customer in one city can reserve a room in another from the same app. That accumulated know-how is not visible on a balance sheet, but it is the reason a landlord signs a management deal with IWG instead of trying to run flexible space alone.
04Who is in the room
The customer base is broader than the stereotype of a freelancer with headphones. It runs from solo founders and small firms that need a credible address, through mid-sized companies that want offices in three cities without three sets of paperwork, up to large multinationals and government teams using Regus as an outsourced office network. IWG says roughly 83% of the Fortune 500 use its space. For those enterprise accounts, the appeal is not the coffee - it is the ability to add or shed locations without a real-estate department negotiating each one.
The two ends of that customer range explain why Regus keeps the whole ladder rather than picking a lane. A one-person consultancy might spend a few dollars a day on a virtual address and a lounge pass; a bank might take a floor for a project team for eighteen months. Both are buying the same underlying thing - certified, ready-to-use space without a lease - and both can grow into the next rung without leaving. That is a retention machine most single-product coworking brands never built, and it is part of why Regus reads less like a trendy operator and more like plumbing for how modern companies occupy space.
05The rivalry everyone remembers wrong
Ask most people about flexible offices and they will say WeWork. Ask which one is bigger and older, and the answer surprises them. Regus had been renting furnished offices by the hour for about a quarter-century before WeWork existed. The two companies chased the same idea with opposite temperaments: WeWork built a design-forward, startup-flavored brand and burned enormous capital; Regus stayed more corporate, more geographically spread, and more disciplined, expanding through franchising rather than spectacle. When the market turned, temperament mattered.
Regus does not have the field to itself - it competes with its own sister brand Spaces, plus Industrious, Servcorp, and thousands of independent operators, while virtual-office challengers nibble at the bottom rung. But on raw footprint, no rival matches the spread.
06Where it fits now
For most of its life Regus was slightly ahead of the market - selling flexibility to a business world that still believed in the ten-year lease and the five-day commute. The pandemic collapsed that belief almost overnight. When “the office” stopped meaning a single building you drove to every morning, companies suddenly needed exactly what Regus had been quietly selling since 1989: space they could switch on and off, close to where people actually live. The tailwind Dixon had waited three decades for finally arrived.
That is the through-line of the whole story. Regus is not the loudest name in its category, and it has never tried to be. It is the patient one - a founder who has run the same company for more than thirty years, a product that reads as obvious in hindsight, and a network that got large by being useful rather than fashionable. In a market full of reinventions, the original is still standing.