Then there’s BrightLane’s George Horhota, also a speaker at Bisnow's Creative Office Summit, who these days says his golf game remains a work in progress (join the club). “It does give me a chance to smoke a cigar,” he tells us (George is snapped during a golf trip to the Bahamas). There will soon be time to smoke cigars to celebrate—his company will soon hang their sign at 545 King St W (image), also the future home of Mercatus Technologies software developers and programmers, and over 300 entrepreneurs—a living, breathing case study of what our panel will be focusing on next week at Bisnow's Creative Office Summit. “We are at the cross-section of rising self-employment and the desire of entrepreneurs to work in collaboration with others, learning from each other and shortening their path to success,” he says.

Before the 2008 recession, George was the co-founder of SuiteWorks, which provided workspaces in Barrie to employers of Toronto-bound Hwy 400 commuters so they could work close to home with colleagues some of the time. That complemented working in isolation at home as well as the arduous commute to the GTA corporate offices a few days per week. “Employers saved on corporate real estate costs... reducing their overall real estate footprint,” he says. (The desk tchotchke industry tumbled though.) IBM was their lead client and a pioneer in “distributed work” when talking about employees and unassigned space.