Mark Dixon Steps Down as IWG Chief Executive After Nearly 40 Years

Mark Dixon, one of Britain’s most enduring entrepreneurs, is to step aside as chief executive of International Workplace Group nearly four decades after he founded the company.

Christian Schmitz, a former McKinsey partner and onetime director at the private equity firm KKR, will succeed Dixon in the top job, IWG confirmed in a statement to the stock market. Schmitz joined the group last year as chief transformation officer before being promoted to global head of all regions.

Dixon, 66, will move up to executive chairman, a role in which he will “continue to provide strategic guidance to the board and act as an advisor to the CEO”, the company said. He still owns just over a quarter of the shares in IWG, and the board framed his new position as a way to “maintain Mark Dixon’s unrivalled industry knowledge, experience and long-term strategic perspective through an orderly CEO transition process”.

IWG is the world’s largest provider of flexible workspace and sits behind a stable of brands including Regus, Spaces and Signature. The group operates more than 4,000 locations across some 120 countries, a footprint that has expanded sharply as employers have embraced hybrid working. The shift has been good for business: demand for flexible space recently drove IWG’s revenues to a record £3.3 billion.

Dixon founded the business in Brussels in 1989, at the age of 29. The idea came to him after watching businesspeople hold meetings in coffee shops and concluding that the traditional office was overdue for a rethink. That hunch has since reshaped how millions of people work, and the rise of serviced offices built for hybrid working has kept the model firmly in fashion.

He is one of the few people in Britain to have built a business worth more than £1 billion, and one of the longest-serving chief executives across the FTSE 100 and FTSE 250, of which IWG is a constituent. The company is valued at about £1.8 billion on the stock market. Dixon’s stake leaves him with a personal fortune of £931 million, according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List.

His route to the top was anything but conventional. Dixon left school at 16 to start a business, and by the time he launched IWG, then called Regus, he had already tried his hand at selling sandwiches and running a bakery.

The company he created has weathered more than one storm. After rapid growth through the 1990s, it was badly hit by the dotcom crash in the early 2000s, when many of the start-ups renting its desks went bust. Its US arm entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy and Dixon was forced to sell a stake in the UK business, though he later regained control and bought the operations back. More recently he has trimmed his holding, selling £68.5 million of shares to repay a bank loan.

Dixon cast the leadership change as a long-term bet on the company’s future rather than a retreat. “This is an investment in the future. I am a very significant investor in the business and I want to get the right management to take it forward to the next stage,” he said. “It’s about succession planning, doing the right thing for the company and for the company’s future. We are doing very well. There is lots of opportunity, but you need the right management team and the right leadership to take it to the next level.”

He praised Schmitz for his “superb leadership skills and lots of experience”.

Asked what had been the key to building IWG, Dixon returned to a single word: perseverance. “You’ve got to persevere. If you look at the history of the company, it’s the management of capital and perseverance from the beginning,” he said. “It’s also about hiring the right people. That’s what we’re doing here with the investment in Christian. It’s not a one-man activity, it’s always about people.”

Amy Ingham

Amy is a newly qualified journalist specialising in business journalism at Business Matters with responsibility for news content for what is now the UK’s largest print and online source of current business news.