At my company, DEVUPP, we decided lifestyle was one of the most important factors we could offer our staff. Two years ago I lived in the Phoenix. It was busy, I spent a great deal of my day in the car communiting one place or another, and I hardly knew anyone on my street. For the most part, I couldn’t even tell you what they looked like. My kids hated the outside, it was 70+ degrees outside year round and 100+ for a good part of the year. For half the year playing outside was something like playing in an oven.
We moved largely because we wanted a different life, and we wanted our kids to have a different life. Moving from Arizona to Colorado was a bit of shock. The temperatures aren’t that different in the summer (100+), but they are DRASTICALLY different in the spring, fall, and winter. Here in Grand Junction we have snow, we have regular rain in the spring, and it actually cools down in the fall. My kids play outside and so do I.
This morning, I went for a hike on the Colorado National Monument with my Director of Business Development at DEVUPP. I had the opportunity to look over our small town (about 60k people) and look at the beauty this town has managed to preserve in terms of flora. It made me grateful of the choices my wife and I made that led us here.
It also reminded me why we are the way we are at our company. Our team is distributed. We have people in multiple states, and work closely together using the power of the Internet and tools that were built for collaboration. Most of our clients are spread across the country as well. Having a largely virtual team makes this easy.
Most importantly it reminded me that a great reason to work for our company is lifestyle. The point is that you get to choose it. So many people feel tied to their job and their place of work that moving somewhere out of the city is just not an option. Our team has the great opportunity to be located wherever they want. If they want to be in Grand Junction, great. If they want to be in Phoenix, great! If they want to be in the mountains in Colorado, as long as they have access to the Internet, GREAT!
I think more companies should work this way. Finding the kind of people that it takes to grow a company this way isn’t easy, but it is very rewarding. The entrepreneurial, self-starter, driven individual works great in this environment, and also contributes strongly to the early stages of growth in a company. If your company hasn’t considered virtual expansion programs, I highly recommend it.
It’s one of the things we explored deeply in terms of growth hacking. Running productivity experiments on our staff, seeing if more flexible schedules made differences, or if the opportunity to work from home, or be placed in an office made a difference. In the end, we found that a combination of flexible schedules and virtual work produced happier employees who were more committed to our company, produced more, and were more reliable.
If you’d like to connect and talk about putting together the right tools for virtualizing your office, connect with me. I can provide great advice, and help you avoid some pitfalls we discovered the hard way.
Recent Comments