Decisions That Made Me: Mark Dixon (IWG)
The Bottom Line
BBC
4.6 • 615 Ratings
🗓️ 4 September 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mark Dixon left school at 16 and began selling hot dogs before building a bread roll business. In 1989 he founded Regus, spotting the need for flexible offices after watching people hold meetings in coffee shops. From a single site in Brussels, he grew the business into IWG — now the world’s largest provider of flexible workspace, with thousands of locations in more than 120 countries. Along the way he faced fierce competition and survived the dotcom crash. Mark speaks to Evan Davis about his journey from hot dog stands to global boardrooms, the setbacks that nearly ended it all, and how he built a company now worth billions.
Producer: Osman Iqbal Series Producer: Simon Tulett Editor: Matt Willis Sound: Gareth Jones Production co-ordinator: Katie Morrison
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism. |
| 0:09.0 | In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero? |
| 0:16.0 | Simply doing your job, being a decent human being. |
| 0:20.0 | A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by |
| 0:23.1 | their own light and that light is to be recognized by others. The long history of heroism with me, |
| 0:28.7 | Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. Okay, Mark, I think we should start right at the beginning of your career, |
| 0:40.6 | because you had sort of entrepreneurship in your blood, didn't you? |
| 0:45.9 | What was it you did as soon as you left school? |
| 0:48.0 | What happened? |
| 0:49.5 | Well, look, I did it before I left school, and I was selling peat. |
| 0:53.5 | That was to dig up from the local forest at 13. |
| 0:57.0 | I had numerous paper rounds. I was sort of inspired to do stuff from an early age. |
| 1:03.0 | Leaving school, much of my, you know, my father wanted me to stay on and do further education, |
| 1:09.0 | go to a very good university, but that was not for me. |
| 1:13.2 | I wanted to go out, see the world, become an immediate entrepreneur. And so at 16, I left home. |
| 1:21.0 | I actually started working first in a bakery, started a business soon after. So, you know, |
| 1:27.1 | I had that thirst. I wanted to do stuff, |
| 1:29.4 | wanted to build. I've always wanted to do that. And the bakery, that was never going to be a |
| 1:35.4 | career. The bakery was just a job. But it gave you your first post-school, let's say, |
| 1:42.7 | business idea. Talk us through that. Yeah, well, it sort of gave me |
| 1:46.0 | a little bit of cash in capital's the most important thing in business. I started a sandwich |
| 1:50.7 | business. This was an early version of deliver. This was, I have to say, before mobile phones |
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