When Peter Shea bought a 62.5 percent stake in Entrepreneur magazine 12 years ago for $3.5 million, one of his first decisions was to move the company’s headquarters from L.A. to Irvine. Now, the 54-year-old CEO is preparing to relocate again.

But Shea and his 110 Orange County employees won’t have far to go. The privately held Entrepreneur Media Inc., is moving two buildings down on McCabe Way.

More importantly, however, the switch involves Shea’s biggest expansion yet spinning off his growing Internet arm into a separate business.

“We think the online business is going to explode next year,” he said. “That’s one of the major reasons why we’re moving.”

Already, the print and online publishing house is cramped. “We’re using every nook and cranny of the building we’re in right now,” said Wendy Elwell, office manager and operations assistant for Entrepreneur.

The 20,000-square-foot office complex that Shea’s company occupies will be vacated by February, when Entrepreneur Media is scheduled to move into its new headquarters with twice the space.

Shea is a part-owner of the building, which will continue to feature Entrepreneur’s signage fronting the San Diego (405) Freeway. But a new name will appear to the side Entrepreneur.com. That’s what Shea will call his new company, which he expects to generate $25 million in revenue next year.

“We’re starting out a lot differently than most other dot-com companies,” said Shea. “The magazine has been around since 1976, so we have a well-known brand name. And we’re already a global player with our magazines. So it just stands to reason that in our niche serving small businesses, we have a head start (at creating an Internet company).”

With little advertising, he pointed out, Entrepreneur’s various Web offerings are now being used by more than 700,000 individuals to the tune of 3 million page views a month.

“We started with the Internet in 1992 as a content provider for CompuServe when they were still around,” said Shea. “Then in 1996, we started our own site.”

Enterpreneurmag.com now has more than 25,000 pages of content relating to small-business issues.

Last year, the company created its own search engine. This summer, it opened a special Web site to complement Entrepreneur’s expo and convention promotions business. Also added within the past two months was an Internet offering targeting Latino business owners.

In all, the company has created six different Web sites. But starting this month, all of those are being folded into one, at entrepreneur.com, which will allow small-business owners to buy everything from stationery to legal services online.

Entrepreneur plans to make money off the site from advertising and sales through its e-commerce business. “It will take a couple of months to bring that all together under the Entrpreneur.com banner,” said Shea. “But our online business is growing so rapidly we need to separate the print side from our Internet (operations).”

He added that print publications, now up to five magazines with worldwide paid circulation of more than 1 million a month, account for about two-thirds of Entrepreneur Media’s revenues. The company also produces books aimed at the small-business market. It has more than 200 titles in publication. By the end of 1999, Shea expects both Internet and print operations to produce close to $50 million in annual revenue as a combined company.

Spinning off the online business, he believes, will allow his staff to expand in different directions and create combined revenue for both companies of more than $75 million by 2001.

“Everybody’s looking at the possibility of going public,” said Shea. “We’ll just have to see how it goes with two companies down the line.”

A more immediate concern is how to keep up with the growth, he added. Besides its Irvine headquarters, the company has sales offices in New York, Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta and San Francisco. About 40 employees are outside of Orange County. “By the middle of next year, with the new company, we’ll probably add about 60 (employees) in Orange County,” Shea said.

Entrepreneur will take three of four floors in its new headquarters building. “I would expect we’ll end up with the whole building by the end of next year,” said Shea.