Offices By The Hour

Missed package deliveries and phone calls. The occasional barking dog. This wasn't exactly what Tom Galloway had in mind when he launched a digital printing business from his home a few years ago. He was going to roll out of bed each morning, fire up the coffee and PC and make a fortune without ever getting out of his pajamas. Yeah, right. Within a few weeks, he was buried under paperwork and lonely. After six months, he hung up his bathrobe for good. "It was such a pain," Galloway recalls.

Even though he no longer works at home, Galloway still deals with that kind of frustration--every day if he's lucky. His new venture, a franchised chain of upscale, small business-service centers called Your Office USA, happens to target carbon copies of his former discombobulated self. Your Office is just the latest entry in the growing business of serving folks who work from home. That encompasses nearly 40 million people, from small-business owners to corporate telecommuters, according to International Data Corp., and many are searching for a home away from their chaotic and/or lonely home offices. Cut off from the professional services and social interaction that come with cubicle life, they're crying out for support, not to mention a little chitchat.

Along with executive-suite operators such as HQ and Regus, Your Office has a notion of being a more elegant version of Kinko's, the document dynamo that's gone from a haphazard copy shop to a retail multitask force. Even superstores like Office Depot and Staples are looking to duplicate Kinko's by adding more in-house, digital offerings. The industry's growth is such that Kinko's and Your Office both hope to go public in the next year or two.

A subsidiary of IB Your Office, a $50 million-a-year company with more than 100 franchises in Europe and Asia, Your Office, based in Charlotte, N.C., recently opened its first U.S. outposts in cities such as New York, Charlotte, San Diego and Denver. Founder Uwe Brettman, a former executive at The Body Shop, calls Your Office "a superstore for the home-based entrepreneur," and plans to open 25 more locations this year. Sure, the 6,000-sq.-ft. interiors have the familiar, drab trappings of officedom: a receptionist area, long hallways with mediocre art on the walls leading to individual offices. But few corporate sites house such varied activity. One customer trains security guards in a meeting room, for instance; nearby, a techie taps away.

Randolph Blatt, 41, of Raleigh, N.C., is one of those techies. After working from home for four years, Blatt, who recruits computer professionals, tired of the distractions. "I would get phone calls, and I had screaming babies in the background. I would duck into my laundry room to hide. It never worked," Blatt says. "[Here] I regularly run into people, and I feel like I'm part of the world." Your Office also hopes to serve the millions of sales reps who have lost their desks to downsizing and become corporate nomads, as well as on-the-go entrepreneurs who want satellite offices in several cities. By the hour, the day or the month they can rent office space, hire a secretary, check their mailboxes or e-mail, or conduct a videoconference. Whenever New York City bankruptcy attorney Garret Rubin has to meet clients near the Brooklyn courts, he uses a nearby Your Office. "I wish my office were this nice," he says.

The advent of new competitors has already sharpened the focus of Kinko's, which provides a widening array of services for its customers, who make 16 billion copies a year. Like the college kids it used to serve, this once ragtag collection of copy shops has graduated to more serious pursuits, its hit-or-miss menu of services now replaced by corporate conformity. In the past two years, Kinko's has been rolled up from a loose partnership into a $1 billion-a-year juggernaut led by a new CEO, Joseph Hardin Jr., a former high-ranking Wal-Mart executive who doesn't think small. He just launched a $40 million ad campaign with the slogan "Express Yourself," and plans to add 100 branches to the more than 900 Kinko's has worldwide.

In any of these outlets, day or night, graphic artists and bank presidents alike can access a uniform set of PCs, fax machines, color copiers and printers to update resumes, create flyers, trade ideas and confer with clients. "We're the intellectual meeting place in any community," claims Paul Orfalea, who started Kinko's in an old Santa Barbara, Calif., hamburger stand in 1970 (the name came from his kinky red hair). That may be a stretch. But there's no denying that Orfalea, who owns a third of the company (probably worth a few hundred million) and wanders the world as a Kinko's goodwill ambassador, has created his own brand of low-end consulting.

A key part of that success, it turns out, is replicating the sense of community that employees used to find hanging around the water cooler and the cafeteria. "It's a social, professional network," argues Franklin Becker, director of Cornell University's International Workplace Studies Program. "The real value at Kinko's is sharing ideas and leads with a broad range of people." Says Terri Biloff, a Milwaukee, Wis., Web consultant who often chats with the Kinko's "co-workers," as the staff is known: "I've really kind of built up a rapport with them and received referrals from them." And Susan Cumins, a Miami p.r. agent, calls Kinko's "the only office social experience I connect with. It's like the office, but without the politics." To make things cozier, Kinko's has opened up a few FedEx and Citibank minibranches in its stores, and it's talking with Starbucks about adjoining coffee bars. At Your Office, franchisees hold pizza parties and holiday bashes to bring their disparate customers together.