Today's view from "the office"
The secret is out. Live Oak 360 has been operating as a virtual company for several months. Our “experiment” is over and the result is a resounding success. As a company, we’re healthier and happier than ever. As we celebrate 8 years in business this month, we wanted to share our story about how we arrived at this point and what tools we use to make it happen.
How We Got Here
When the time came to look for new office space last year, we tried really hard to find just the right location. Our existing office was no longer the best solution for us. Other spaces were attractive, but nothing seemed to fit just right. The Austin office space market hasn’t softened as much as the rest of the country so there weren’t many “deals” to be found. Locking into a 3-year lease means you’re either paying for space you don’t yet need or you’ll outgrow the space and get stuck with a sublease. One afternoon, as I walked back into our office from touring new possible locations, I realized that over half of our team was working remotely that day and things were running smoothly. The more I thought about it, the more I realized we had all been working remotely a lot more often lately. Everyone was happy. Work was getting done on time. Things were working quite well.
After talking it over with the team, we decided to do a 90-day trial. Our lease was up on Sept. 30th. We would work remotely for 90 days. If it wasn’t working, we’d be back in a new office on January 1st. Through the magic of a hosted VOIP phone system for our hosting team, Skype Business for our development team, some technical wizardry, and lots of coordination from our team, our office made the leap.
It has been five months now since we moved out of our office and into, well, everywhere else. Our hosting team is tethered to their homes, but that’s not really a bad thing. Our developers work from home and several hand-picked coffee shops and restaurants around Austin and San Antonio. We are fortunate enough to be close enough together that we still meet up several times a week in small groups. Since we don’t have a big rent payment anymore, that means we can get together, as a company and with our families, and enjoy the plentiful Texas BBQ options that Austin has to offer!
The Tools We Use
We are often asked about the tools we use to keep us connected and in sync.
Basecamp – we’re all 37Signals fanatics at Live Oak 360 and tend to use as many of their tools as possible (when they fit). Basecamp is the hub of all of our activity. Every development client and internal project goes into Basecamp. If you manage a small team or group and haven’t taken a look at Basecamp, do yourself a favor and sign up for the free trial.
Campfire – another 37Signals gem, Campfire is essential to our day-to-day office chatter. We all stay logged in when we’re “on the clock” unless we need super-focused time to dig deep. Otherwise, we’re continually logged into Campfire and hang out in a single room together. We have various rooms for specific projects, but we mostly use a single room for our chatter. It really helps to keep us connected, share stories/photos/movies about our surroundings, and keep the camaraderie flowing. We use Propane (a Mac app for Campfire) as it adds the “rockstar” factor to Campfire.
Harvest – most of our development work is done on client projects and managing our time allocation is critical to our success. Having a great program to track your time in an easy-to-use format is important for us. Harvest makes it easy to record, track, and share our time among projects and with clients.
Beanstalk – since we’re always working on code of some sort, a great subversion repository is critical. We transitioned to Beanstalk from our internal SVN repository many months ago and never looked back. It’s the only way to go.
Skype Business – each of our developers has a dedicated Skype number with a subscription for inbound and outbound calls. We use the integrated instant messaging for one-on-one chats and often use the click-to-conference feature for impromptu conference calls with our team. I find a new use for Skype or a new usability feature almost every week. Their customer service is terrible, but I’ve only needed it twice. I underestimated Skype several years ago, but it has really matured.
Dropbox & JungleDisk – JungleDisk Workgroup serves as our repository for files shared across our team. We don’t access them a lot, but the storage is cheap and access is easy. Dropbox is being used more for accessing company files as it keeps things synchronized, saves endless versions, and access through the desktop, web, and iPhone make it incredibly convenient.
Jive Communications – our hosting business does a tremendous amount of telephone support to make sure our customers are well taken care of for web and email hosting. We turned to Jive for their hosted VOIP phone system. I’ll admit that we had a pretty rocky start when we first transitioned and learned more about the continually evolving VOIP world, but we’re pretty happy with their service. The phone system is far better than our old system, the pricing is very reasonable, and they do not require a contract.
Grasshopper – we have enough paper coming through our virtual office. Everything that is important gets converted to PDF anyway. Why not let it start digital? Grasshopper has a great eFax service and we were able to port our fax number directly to them and avoid the mess of re-routing calls.
Do we miss the office?
Personally, I don’t miss the office one bit. What I miss is the people. They are my extended family. When we see each other (which is really quite often), it is usually over a hot cup of coffee or a cold beer – and food is almost always involved. We talk every day on Campfire and share photos of our kids and weekend plans. I don’t miss “coming into the office” at all, but it wasn’t “the office” that I was coming to see.
