Going Local
Back around 2006-2007, as Obtiva was growing beyond our initial client, we started asking ourselves what sort of company we wanted to be. We had a couple of successful examples nearby that we could have chosen to emulate. We could have tried to be like my former employer, ThoughtWorks, which had scaled a successful transnational consultancy with a world-class culture around software development. Or we could try to be like Object Mentor, and keep it small and focus exclusively on high margin training and coaching gigs, built around a few uniquely gifted personalities. We liked both of these companies, but for us, the fundamental problem with their business models was that we didn’t want to travel. Kevin and I are both married, with kids in elementary school, and we didn’t like the idea of leaving them on a weekly basis for most of their childhood.
As we pondered our future, I thought back to my tenure at ThoughtWorks (2004-2006). Wow, what an awesome experience that was! Seriously life-changing for me. But I was always perplexed at how few Chicago clients they had, despite their global headquarters’ location in the Windy City. I remember getting on my 20th consecutive Monday morning jet to Detroit and imagining other ThoughtWorkers east of me crossing me in the air, flying west to some other gig, maybe even in Chicago. I remembered feeling lucky to get a Chicago gig, and working on a great team of people who were flying in from all over the country, but then scratching my head when I considered how many Chicagoans would have been just as effective. Finally, I pulled up Chicago in Google Maps and marveled at its size. Surely there was enough business in this huge metropolis to keep us busy for years to come? Why not just do what we already wanted to do and focus on local work?
Well, that’s what we did. We don’t travel for client work. We’ll travel occasionally to do a training. And we actually enjoy traveling to go to conferences. But we’re lucky enough to live near a huge city, so there’s more than enough work to scale several companies like us. What’s a company like us? Well, we’re all unique snowflakes of course, but Obtiva settled into the dual niches of doing end-to-end project work from our studio while also augmenting teams in the some of best development shops in Chicago. I wish I could tell you our full client list, because I’m very proud of it, but I signed some paperwork that forbids me from telling you some of our clients. :| One client I can mention publicly is Groupon, who we’ve been working closely with for a year. (Just FYI, they’ve had quite a year, to say the least.) Lots of software folks will turn up their noses at “staff aug”, but I’ve learned that not all “staff aug” is created equal. Just ask two of our subcontractors, Corey Haines and Dave Astels, currently doing “staff aug” for us right now at two of our awesome clients.
There is an environmental benefit to focusing locally. Harkening back to 2006 again, I remember sitting in the Hard Rock Hotel in Chicago at ThoughtWorks’ internal conference. It was an awesome January day that assembled most of the US-based ThoughtWorkers to learn about all sorts of cool stuff (and a controversial new web framework called “Ruby on Rails”). Anyway, one of the more memorable parts of the day was a lunchtime keynote given by one of the head guys at Greenpeace. This was four months before An Inconvenient Truth was released, so this guy definitely grabbed our attention with tales of shrinking glaciers and projections of shrinking continents. Then he called our attention to the amount of pollution that air travel creates, mentioning that he had flown in to talk to us, but also pointing out the problematic environmental impact of ThoughtWorks’ travel tendencies. Now, I think back to my four years at Obtiva, and how tiny our footprint (per capita) is compared to a company that sends its people across the country (or globe) every week. Consider the energy/emissions it requires to fly hundreds of miles. Consider the energy/emissions required to drive a car dozens of miles. Now consider that almost no one at Obtiva even drives to work! We’re blessed to live in a city with public transportation, so we all take trains, buses, and bikes every day. And what do a lot of us do on the train? We read, we code, we learn!
While the environmental benefits are cool, I prefer to consider the effect that our local focus has on our families, since that was our original motivation. Last summer, I wrote a blog post, citing some of Obtiva’s remarkable statistics over its first 4 years, such as 6 births, 2 weddings, and 0 divorces. I’m happy to say that almost a year later, these numbers are still looking great: 10 births, 2 weddings, 0 divorces. I continue to believe that these numbers are strong positive indicators that we work at a sustainable pace. And for me and many other Obtivians, going local is fundamental to our sustainability.
Thanks to Fred Polgardy for retweeting this article, which inspired me to connect some of those ideas to Obtiva.
