Gina Goodwin, the founder and Chairman of Tavistock, was thrown in at the deep end of the Business Centre industry in the mid-eighties, when she took over the management of three Business Centres in London. While Gina had a good background in management, Business Centres themselves were quite new to her, but she took on the challenge and soon gained a wealth of knowledge, learning through her own experience and from a few mistakes! She soon realised that a lot could be gained from talking to others involved in the industry, and, through contact with other centres in the area, built up good relations with her Business Centre 'neighbours'. This led to the formation of a regular luncheon group of centre managers who met to share their views and experience.

Despite coming up against mistrust and apprehension on the part of some Business Centres, Gina felt that communication within the industry was vital for Business Centres to survive, evolve and improve their services, and so she sought to extend the initial luncheon group to include other managers and owners. This led her to found Tavistock Consultants, as a source of information and advice to Business Centres.

Tavistock Consultants organised the first ever conference for Business Centres at the Tower Thistle Hotel in 1989. Again, some Business Centre managers were wary about talking to others, nervous that they might be giving away trade secrets. However, when the conference was due to reconvene after the morning session, delegates were so busy talking to each other, they were reluctant to go back into the conference hall! It was like opening the floodgates - once the delegates began to communicate amongst themselves, they soon realised the value of sharing experience and the need to have a common identity as an industry.

Prompted by demands from the delegates themselves, Tavistock formed a professional association for the industry, the Business Centre Society. This was later renamed the Federation of British Business Centres, at which point Tavistock handed the association over to its members

The massive number of queries generated by press coverage of the conference led Tavistock to produce their first Directory of Business Centres and Managed Workspace. At the time, it listed just 300 centres; now the Directory includes over 5,000. More conferences were to follow, and Tavistock also continued to expand and increase its services to the industry.