Member In The Spotlight Pacific Business Centers - Laurent Dhollande, President Print Version (18 kb) 05/24/2005 Member In The Spotlight Pacific Business Centers, Inc. Have you ever wondered what other OBCAI members are up to? Well… OBCAI is pleased to introduce you to Pacific Business Centers, Inc. in California. Laurent Dhollande, President. Tell us about the economy in your area. The economy in Northern California is improving slowly but surely. This is a dramatic and, in some ways, welcomed change of pace since the burst and bust years of the dot com era. In the last few months, Pacific Business Centers, Inc. has pursued a strategy of prudent growth in the San Francisco Bay Area, mostly via small scale expansion of some of our existing centers. We plan to continue with the same in the short term. We are considering opening new centers in markets outside of the San Francisco Bay Area where rates and occupancy levels may enable a more aggressive growth strategy. Have your occupancy rates changed? Rates have inched up slightly in the last 18 months. After the dramatic free fall that followed the dot com bust of 2001-2002, the priority has been to restore occupancy rates to satisfactory levels. (...) What are your clients like? The start-ups that fueled the growth of the late 90s seem to be coming back somewhat, although in a much more reduced fashion. They seem more mature and armed with more reasonable business plans than in the 90s. We also see an increasing number of large corporate users. This is interesting because we do not particularly market to Fortune 500 companies. The fact that they find us is a powerful proof that our industry is well positioned to handle a huge corporate demand. Could you explain the services your centers provide. We provide a similar range of services and amenities that most in our industry offer: furnished offices, conference rooms, copying rooms, answering services, T-1 lines and administrative & IT support. Our centers are probably less team-space intensive than, say, Regus - but more IT services rich than most. In the last year, we started to provide extensive IT desktop and networking support including server hosting services. To do this we invested in a full-fledged data center 18 months ago and secured 3 full time IT professionals on-site. The ramp-up period for this new array of services has been slower than we would have liked, but our marketing efforts are finally catching up. Please, describe your centers. We have nine centers in Class A and Class B buildings in Northern California. We have only one downtown center. All others are located in suburban areas, solidly inside the outer belt of the San Francisco Bay Area. They range in size from 9,000 to 15,000 SF. Although some centers offer team space and 'plug & play' space, most of our rentable space consists of private offices in the 80 to 250 SF range, some of which are clustered in mini-suites. Do you offer virtual identity programs? Yes. we do offer Virtual Office plans and we are seeing an increase in the clients we serve that way. Please share any marketing ideas that you or your staff use to increase occupancy. First, we found extreme value in the power of a regional portfolio, particularly from a marketing standpoint. This is one key reason why four independently run centers joined the Pacific Business Centers family in the last year: an opportunity to pool marketing budgets together to get significantly more mileage per dollar spent. This enabled us to drive very successful marketing campaigns we would have never been able to engage in otherwise. Second, we see value in evangelizing the industry as a whole. Our main competition is traditional space. We found we benefit greatly from encouraging prospects to visit other OBC operators (...) In so doing, prospective clients become more knowledgeable about our industry and more comfortable with its value proposition (...) It helps our own credibility to show we are not a new and obscure industry, but a growing way for business users to solve their workplace requirements. Our industry's value proposition of shared office infrastructure and support services, wrapped up in flexibility to solve workplace requirements, is very powerful… but it also requires customer education, particularly on the concept of "total cost of occupancy" (i.e. not just the cost per square foot, but also the cost/value of the support infrastructure, the cost/value of real-time expansion and contraction flexibility, and the value of a-la-carte services). When exposed to a new concept for the first time, it pays to hear it several times from various angles before it truly registers. We found that by "selling" our other OBC friends in the area, Regus and independent operators alike, we not only help them but we also help ourselves. < Return to Press Coverage | Return to Top ^