Headquarters is Where the Heart Is
There’s an old saying in life that home is where the heart is, and after a year of working remotely again, I’ve decided headquarters is where the heart is too. You see, after 20+ years, Outsell is leaving its HQ address in Burlingame, California, determining there are better uses for our hard-earned dollars than a brick-and-mortar space for a team no longer using it.
As you know from past posts, Outsell started in a remote environment. In late 1997, when the firm started, we were working out of our homes, earlier than pretty much anyone else on the planet and in a world of dial-up.
Fast forward to 2000, and it felt like we were living at our work. Our home had been overtaken by Outsell, printers, filing cabinets, FedEx men ringing the doorbell. It was too much, so we found our first (and last) office: 330 Primrose Road, Suite 510. Ironically, our office in London would be on Floral Street, and our two locations worked well together. Then our UK staff wanted to work remotely, like their US colleagues, and we found ourselves with office space we didn’t need in the UK. We parted ways with it, maintaining our local phone numbers, with the belief that our staff belonged with our clients in their offices and being out and about in the market was better than the reverse.
But HQ in Burlingame persisted, including a period of time when we moved all operating positions there while sales, analysts, and market-facing staff worked from home. That was the era of hybrid, before the world used the term, and I can tell you it was the era when we had to manage the emergence of dual cultures vigorously to ensure we kept one.
Then the high cost of living struck in the Bay Area, when all things tech went crazy, and from 2012 to 2019 the expense of living close enough to our office became a challenge for many of our staff. They too wanted to work remotely or left so they could work closer to home in lower-cost areas. One of our office administrators even moved to Hawaii, to follow her husband’s sales job. She too remains with our company but in Maui rather than Burlingame.
And so it continued, until there were just three of us: me, my Chief of Staff, and our Head of Finance. And then the pandemic struck. My last meeting in Burlingame was with our partner, Charles Thiede, Co-founder & CEO of Zapnito, where we brainstormed the platform initiative we were launching last April. He and I white-boarded away, just the two of us. Then he flew home to London, and the world shut down a few days later — and with it, our office.
In the last year, the office hasn’t been used. I’ve gone twice, our Chief of Staff never, and our Head of Finance once a week. But everything was digitized: files, AR/AP, personnel files, it was all in the cloud. Even our use of office phone lines went by the wayside as Zoom (our tool of choice even prior to COVID-19) went mainstream and the world realized calls could be better made F2F than with a “headless voice,” as my colleague in London used to call phone calls (which he loathed).
And so it became clear, by end of last year, when we budgeted for 2021, that an office was really not our best use of resources. Our company was functioning fine without one during COVID and in a way, we’d gone full circle. We started out virtual in 1997 and here we were in 2021 doing it again. And so, this week we gave our notice after decades in our HQ location. We are leaving Suite 510.
So, ladies and gentlemen, I wanted you to know that Outsell HQ is moving to a place in California better suited to our future. Our world has indelibly changed, and while I understand larger companies needing a hybrid environment, I’ve watched our company innovate, build camaraderie, re-platform, and have fun doing good, meaningful work from wherever the best team members live, 100% virtually. And when the world opens up, I’d like our staff to be in the market and not commuting to offices that no longer serve us.
So, it’s time to follow suit; it’s time to say goodbye to our physical office. Outsell was born virtual and will remain virtual. Because really, HQ is where the heart is. That is one thing that will never change here at Outsell.