Mr. Doug

We're just getting all situated here at our shiny new office here in Tyler. I've still got to go and back-blog at http://office.sparkbase.com with all the construction photos from the last few weeks. Special Thanks to Jared from PC Helps for lending us his conference room last Friday. We hadn't received our Cert of Occupancy yet, and had a meeting scheduled. All in all...we love it here.

That was a fun movie to go see in the theater. Everybody walked out thinking they could be Karate experts by waxing cars and painting fences. I'm sure a LOT of wifes got their "Honey Do" lists done in record time that summer. Rob (employee at the time) wasn't a nerd in the typical sense. Decent programmer...Devoted Christian...Father...and he could break every bone in your arm in 3sec. He runs "KajukenboCafe.com" if anyone is interested in such things. Anyway... Tyler: Looks like things are finally back on track for us. Electrician is starting to get everything wired in. I'm hoping that by the time I get back from Chicago next week, we've got lights and are waiting on our next round of inspections so we can get drywall up and get moved in! Progress pics: http://office.sparkbase.com/

Safety: I employ "nerds"... not fighters. If I felt that any of them were in harms way, we'd have picked somewhere else. When we had an office on W-6th that one of my employees got jumped out back of it. Un-lucky for the mugger, he picked a Kajukenbo Grand-Master, so it was more comical than anything.

No problem. I just didn't want to put things where they didn't belong.

What section should I start a build-out thread in? Or is this not the appropriate site for that kind of thing? In my other hobbies, we always have threads for projects the members are working on. Should I make one in this section? We're kinda doing that on out Blog, but I'd be happy to double-efforts if that gets more exposure for people moving their companies to Cleveland.

Yeah, I looked into that too. The issue was that in order for him to get to the office at a reasonable time, it'd be close to 1:45min commute. As it stands now, it's only 40 for him. Once we move the office, I have a feeling he;ll be looking for an apartment downtown. Tower Press was impressive, and right in the wheel-house for what my employees generally want.

Sidenote... As an audiophile, I'm really looking forward to having my gear in my office where I'll be able to spend all day with it, instead of having one-two hours a night. My vinyl is going to get un-dusty in a hurry. :-D (mocked-up view from my desk)

Here are a few of the places we looked at... http://office.sparkbase.com/scouting/west-6th-spaces-with-sandy-coakley.html The Bradley Building was nice, but the lack of parking was the determining factor there. We give our employees monthly RTA passes if they want, but it's not a realistic option for some of our guys that live way out in Twinsburg. This space was pretty cool too... http://office.sparkbase.com/scouting/space-hunting-with-rose-strauss.html But the "walking past dumpsters to get in the front door" part wasn't all that conducive to having clients come by. I want to say the rent on that place was about $1,000 a month...which is KILLER...but we couldn't make the location work for us. We also looked at a few places in the Cloak Factory...nothing jumped out at us. Dave Berkowski has some great space coming up in the Bloch Building further up Superior, but we weren't going to be on a time schedule that worked for us. That project seems like it's about 2 years from where we'd need it to be to move in. The bonus for us was that there is SO MUCH space available at Tyler, if we out-grow our space in a year or two, we'd be able to move somewhere else in the complex, and not have to move everything all that far.

Moving to Cleveland was something that we decided on back in November. We (my brother Geoff and I) kept telling people how cool Cleveland was, and needed to "put up or shut up" on where we moved the company. Tyler Village was the first place we looked at, and kept comparing everything to it. So it was a pretty easy decision at the end of the process. There are SO MANY cool options in Cleveland if you know where to look. If we didn't need parking, some of the properties that we looked at with Sandy Coakley and Rose Strause were pretty great. At the end of the day, Tyler Village let us build what we wanted and got us a TON of space at a good rate. I'm headed over there in a few min to check the progress. I'll post some pics here when I get back. Thanks for the warm welcome gang.

Hey gang...first post! My name is Doug Hardman, and I'm the Founder/CEO of SparkBase. We're moving into TV in a month or so...whenever they finish the build-out. Speaking of build-out... http://office.sparkbase.com/ That's the blog we put together for our move to Cleveland. We documented the whole process from the day we decided to leave Solon for Cleveland. Read it backwards and it's a neat story. Anyway...thought I'd pop in and introduce myself. We're REALLY looking forward to getting into Tyler Village.