About 25 years ago, in another publication, I wrote an article about renting out surplus office space at pulp and paper mills. I also talked about making land at pulp and paper mills available for cell towers.

At the time, the industry was flat on its back, mills were being shut down or pared back and revenue was scarce.

Georgia-Pacific has a prominent office tower here in downtown Atlanta that was built in the 1980's, if I remember correctly. They have recently announced they are going to repurpose this building.

They are going to take a number of the top floors and remodel them into 400 apartments. The ground level floors will be repurposed for shops and retail space. The floors in between will become the new Georgia Pacific headquarters.

You may have similar space you can repurpose. Or perhaps you have space that can be converted to warehousing or cloud computing space.

The point is to think differently than you did in the past. Think about maximizing revenue, not preserving museums.

Jim Thompson is CEO of Paperitalo Publications.