Offices a la carte.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: ON SMALL BIZ

RALPH GREGORY HAS OWNED RADIO STATIONS IN THREE upper-Midwest states, owned a paging company licensed in nine states, and developed a natural-gas-fired co-generation plant in Michigan that he still counts as an active investment. In a rare non-entrepreneurial venture, the 62-year-old Gregory also once hosted a TV talk-show in Michigan called "Controversy and Consensus," for which he played the "everyman" while two opponents of a statewide issue squared off.

That barely scratches the surface of Gregory's interests over the years, but you get the idea.

"You hear the term 'serial entrepreneur,'" says Gregory, who moved from Michigan to Boulder in 1993. "Well, you're talking to the only real serial entrepreneur I've ever known."

That brings us to Gregory's most recent venture, Intelligent Office, a concept he started in Boulder in 1995 for professionals who only need an office once in a while to meet with clients, or only need a receptionist or a business mailing address to give the impression that they have an office.

"Most people do it for the economics initially," Gregory says of Intelligent Office's clients. "They see that they can be very professional for a fraction of the cost."

There are other office-rental concepts out there, and Gregory takes a swipe at them even though he insists they aren't his competition.

"We're NOT a virtual office," he says. "There's a whiff of deception there, if you look up 'virtual' in the dictionary. We ARE your office. We're your business address, we're where you meet with clients, where your mail is picked up, where the receptionist answers your phone. We seamlessly connect you to your client, anywhere you are--on a yacht, skiing, laying on a beach in Hawaii.

Gregory is on a roll now, talking about how Intelligent Office, with the help of today's communications technology, is enabling humans to return to a more natural, liberated state.

"Three hundred years ago we were hunters and gatherers," he says, sitting in a room at one of his Intelligent Offices in the Denver Tech Center, one of three locations in the Denver area. "Then came the Industrial Revolution, and we had to go where the machines were. But in the last generation or so, technology has allowed our work life to become non-geographic. Intelligent Office gives you a brain that is a member of your staff for that one important phone call, relieving you from the tyranny of having to be in a specific place."

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Gregory's concept is...