The new chief executive of office operator Workspace Group is preparing to bring years of experience in the retail real estate space to bear on the workplace.
Lawrence Hutchings joined Workspace last week after seven and a half years at shopping centre owner Capital & Regional. Announcing half-year results, the new chief executive said the company is positioned to “capture demand and, over the medium term, look to increase our share of London’s growing SME market”.
In an interview with EG, Hutchings reflected on what he has learnt from the retail real estate sector that he can now use to give him a different perspective on offices.
“I’ve spent 27 years in operational real estate. I love it, and this is a deeply operational business,” Hutchings said. “When I first started looking at the opportunity, the sheer operational velocity was something I found very appealing. Twenty-five years ago I was working at Westfield Australia, we were doing 900 leases a year then. When you’ve got that sort of operational velocity, there is lots of inherent opportunity in those businesses.”
In his first trading meeting with team members last week, Hutchings said, he was filled in on “the 140 viewings we had last week and the 25 leasing transactions we’d done”.
“These short leases, things that might strike fear in other’s hearts, I find huge opportunity in,” he added.
Workspace focuses on London small and medium-sized enterprises, a segment of the business community that Hutchings knows well from his Capital & Regional years and the company’s ownership of community shopping centres.
“We were working with a lot of independent traders who came to us with an idea,” he said. “That’s Workspace’s heritage [too]. People come into Workspace with an idea that outgrew the lounge or kitchen table. They need space, help and support. I was at a breakfast only yesterday morning with a panel of successful SMEs in our ecosystem, presenting to and fielding questions from newer SMEs on how do you do things like fund [growth], how do you approach capital raising, how do you assemble a deck to go out and speak to investors, how do you deal with HR issues when you haven’t got HR departments?”
Hutchings continued: “They are all things I’m very familiar with in supporting SMEs, so I’m interested in meeting more of them, understanding their issues and understanding how we can better tailor our proposition to support them and make us more compelling as a choice for a location.”
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