Your Office Space

Collette McKenna Parker

May 28, 2008

A s you walk through the marble and granite lobby and into the class A office space, a striking, modern, circular reception desk marks the entrance. Clocks hanging behind the desk tell the time in Atlanta, as well as across the globe, in case your clients are international and you need to keep up with their schedules. To your right is a warm sitting area with leather couches, a wrought-iron coat rack and decorative mirror. To your left is a long corridor with an arched doorway; through that are doors to a conference room and the closed doors of private offices.

It could be any office – a small law firm in Buckhead, a software company in Alpharetta, a paper supply company in Scranton, Pa.

In fact, it’s all of these, sort of.  The concept is simple: More commonly known as executive suites, serviced office centers have been around for a while. Concepts like YourOffice provide a ready-made, furnished office and technology such as state-of-the-art audio-visual equipment like video conferencing and multimedia presentation tools. They have temps or part-time staffers on call if clients require extra help. The office also has concierge services and administrative help, including a receptionist to answer the telephones of each client and receive packages.

And, unlike traditional office space, serviced office suites offer flexible contracts. People can lease a private office for part of the week or month-to-month for as little as $175 per month, or they can lease a large corner office in the heart of Buckhead for $2,500 a month for years.

YourOffice started as a concept in Europe in the early 1990s and opened its first U.S. location in Denver in 1998. CEO Scott Rae Buono purchased the company in 2004 and opened office locations in Atlanta, Orlando, Charlotte, Philadelphia, Raleigh and Birmingham.

When Buono purchased YourOffice, he made several changes. He increased the average square footage of the office suites from 8,000 to 10,000-30,000 square feet. And he secured higher-quality office space in more sought-after areas like Buckhead and Roswell. “We improved both of those in a meaningful way so the economics of the business worked better,” he says.

Projections call for more than 100 new business centers to open during the next five years across the country.

And the need is there. Distributed workforce is a term that refers to employees who have no permanent office at their companies. This includes independent contractors working from home, sales and mobile work forces working across the country and employees of big companies working in independent offices. Business Week reports that 40 percent of IBM’s workforce and nearly 50 percent of employees at Sun Microsystems are distributed. And The Work Design Collaborative estimates that by 2012, 40 percent of the American workforce will be distributed. 

“The independent workforce is exploding,” Buono says. “The need is growing at a faster pace than the industry can provide.

“The growth of the distributed work force is a big, big trend. It’s a trend bigger than YourOffice,” he says. And what allows this workforce to really grow now – more so than 15 years ago when the trend slowly began – is broadband technology. “Broadband blew open the ability to work from remote locations,” he says.

“At no other point in history have small units or individuals been so powerful in productivity. Tools like laptops and PDAs are perfect for distributed work,” he says. The technology allows a growing population to work when they want to work and where they want to work.

Even corporations are buying into it. Years ago, if a Virginia company hired you, you moved to Virginia. Not anymore. “Companies realize they don’t have to move everyone in-house – they can let employees stay where they are. Corporations have adopted flatter management. With the labor pool being tight, it is a benefit to live and work where employees want. People have accepted the concept of outsourcing, and we are an outsourced solution to their office,” Buono says.

Another reason the distributed workforce is exploding is that the backbone of the U.S. economy is changing, increasingly, to service industries and knowledge-based industries. And, says Buono, “these people work with this technology that allows them to work remotely.”

And all of those workers need a place to call “the office.” 

Buono is branding the concept much like the hotel industry did in the past decade in order to get professionals to expect certain standards with YourOffice and gravitate to this brand when looking for an office.

After all, while the lure of working at home in your pajamas was an exciting, new prospect 15 years ago, it’s tough for even really nice pajamas to compete with a marble lobby, part-time co-workers and a color copier you never have to repair yourself.