If you’re a one- or two-person business, work remotely or have a handful of employees and are not quite sure how to project office space requirements a year out, what are your options? Tim Guthrie and Randall Stevens have an answer in their company, Base110.
Housed on three floors of the six-floor building at 110 West Vine St., Base110 is a combination of co-working desks and shared spaces with private team rooms and suites for one to 10 people, with no long-term commitment required. “Flexibility is what people value today over traditional leases,” Stevens said. “Especially small businesses.”
Base110 owners Tim Guthrie (left) and Randall Stevens at Creative Offsite, the company’s 1,800-square-feet event space on the fourth floor of their West Vine Street location.
Fortune 500 companies don’t mind it either. California-based Oracle Corporation has a team in Lexington that works out of Base110. “Lexington is an outpost location for about a third of the companies we have here,” Guthrie said.
This is the second such venture for Stevens, who opened Base163 in 2010 to provide a co-located office environment for 13 individual technology and creative companies on the third floor of 163 East Main. Stevens is one of four owners of that building. Following six years of nearly 100 percent occupancy at Base163, he looked to expand the concept. At the same time Guthrie, an acquaintance of his, was looking at potential real estate investments downtown. Guthrie had previously called Stevens a couple of times inquiring about office space for himself at Base163, only to be told, “we’re full.”
Together, they launched Base110 in April of 2017. “The goal is to create an environment that brings together technical and creative professionals who benefit from one another,” Guthrie said. “We call it ‘organized serendipity,’ the notion that exciting things happen when you put creative professionals around one another.”
By the end of that first year, all available office space had been rented out at Base110. This July, Guthrie and Stevens added offices on the fourth floor, including 1,800 square feet designed as a venue for corporate events, complete with a caterer’s kitchen. “We call that space Creative Offsite,” Guthrie said. Base110 then took over the second floor in August. Now they handle the tenant rental of 22 co-working desks and 52 team rooms and suites; just the two of them, without employees. “We try to make it as self-serve as possible,” Guthrie said. “Everybody has their own devices. There are not a whole lot of traditional assets that have to be managed.”
"We call it ‘organized serendipity,’ the notion that exciting things happen when you put creative professionals around one another.” — Tim Guthrie
Internet access, utilities and a cleaning service are included in the month-to-month rent, along with furnished offices, a café and amenities such as pingpong and foosball tables. With the addition of the event space, though, the owners do see the need for help managing it. “We are beginning to shop for a community manager,” Stevens said.
Stevens grew up in Pikeville, Kentucky, and moved to Lexington in 1985 to go to the University of Kentucky. He graduated with a degree in architecture and founded a company called ArchVision that develops software for use in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC). In 2016 he spun off another business, AVAIL, to develop and sell software used to manage content and information for AEC companies.
Guthrie earned an MBA at Murray State University in 1985 and founded CFO Services five years later, a Lexington-based consulting firm providing interim chief financial officer services to small and mid-sized businesses. In 2014, he added another arm, Entrée HR, offering human resource support for clients.
An influx of independent professionals, small tech and creative teams, as well as other workforce factors, are driving the demand for work environments like Base110. “Creative professionals thrive on interacting with others, which is difficult to accomplish working from home offices,” Stevens said. “The space is just a backdrop. You want to be around other people who are net positive in your business interest without having to be that large yourself. Every time you add the right people to the network, everybody gains from that knowledge and conversations.”