The Art of Trend Breaking with IWG
Wayne Berger, CEO of IWG North America and Latin America, discusses how the company rode the waves of the coworking boom and bust to emerge ahead of the pack.
As far as trends go, a few years ago you were probably hearing all about the rise of co-working and how some big brands were making inroads in major cities to give workers looking for more options exactly that. But there was one company that was already there, holding steady through it all and emerging from the co-working bubble still standing strong.
Wayne Berger is the the CEO of IWG North America and Latin America. IWG, short for International Workforce Group, boasts thousands of coworking spaces internationally, and has been on the co-working bandwagon before it was cool. And it’s maintained its position because it didn’t listen when the so-called experts told Berger and the IWG team that it might be time to shift gears.
“As all this growth was taking place around us, and frankly, as the kind of the sexiness of the sector was growing, it would have been really easy to try to do what other people were doing,” Berger said. “As a matter of fact, we would occasionally hear from, let’s call it experts or journalists that, you know, our company at the time known as Regus may have been yesterday’s coworking business center type of phenomenon.”
When the market exploded from 2018 to 2021, with spaces increasing by 30% and the new players that were cropping up to double down on the popular markets, IWG focused elsewhere. And it used a backlog of data to point them in the right direction.
“We were fortunate to have 25 and now 30 years of demand data and customer data that frankly, we utilize to help us understand where do people want to go next,” Berger said. “And that was really powerful for us. And it was a big differentiator because also we have a brand diversified strategy where we are the only player in the industry that actually manages and operates more than one brand. And that’s a critical element because brand also is inclusive of size.”
Berger and his team used cold hard data and facts to stay three steps ahead of the supposed up-and-comers who have since come and gone.
“Workspace is becoming more ubiquitous where people are going to start using space in a more fluid fashion, similar to how they’re utilizing, for example, Airbnb or other platforms,” Berger said. “This whole shift is starting to really move. So, we utilize our user data to understand how often they select certain brands. And then also, what type of space are they utilizing within the actual workspace within the actual coworking facility? Do people like to use the club space more often than they’re using meeting rooms?”
By mixing data and design, IWG has opened up new opportunities for growth.
“We’ve recently launched our first Spaces retail concept in Napa,” Berger said. “[It’s] something that incorporates more ambient track lighting, lots of greenery, lots of club space, but some quiet space facilitates a really nice environment in a space that physically doesn’t normally have a lot of natural light… It’s been a roaring success.”
IWG has stayed strong, invested in new ideas and identified where the wave of work was going instead of focusing on what was exciting right now.
“What we’re recognizing is the future,” Berger said. “The future worker, they’re hybrid workers, they’re going to work from home part of the time. They’re going to go to a corporate headquarters part of the time, and then they’re going to need to work from somewhere else part of the time. And by the way, their commute could look like work time as well.”
To find out how Berger and IWG are riding the co-working wave, how IWG is using data to find new business models, and where Berger thinks the industry and work is heading next, tune in to Business X factors.
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