Do you still need an office?

In a world where your employees can work from home, do you still need an office?

I've recently started to mentor other agency owners and this is one of the first things they always ask me. I think Specno is known for our quirky offices where employees drive scooters/skateboards to and from their desks, there is pretty much a full-time chef and our lunch area looks more like an arcade than an office, so this is what I tell them:

In the early days of starting our company, Jacques Jordaan and I converted my spare room into a home office and Jacques moved into the hallway on a blowup mattress. We would hide the mattress when clients came over, and when we started getting other students to work for us we had turned the whole apartment into a makeshift space.

I still remember thinking it was weird that Dane Brouwer preferred to code outside in the sun, but we didn't care much about that. Living and working with your new co-founder is a quick way to get to know one another and develop a working relationship (that lasted 4 years).

Then we graduated and had to decide whether to get an office or save the money and "reinvest" it into growth. A part of my ego had always wanted to build an office where the brightest minds would want to come work. Another part of me knew that culture and leadership development were foundational requirements to building a great company, neither of which I knew how to do, and I asked myself whether it would be easier to learn if we were in one shared space or all working over computers.

We opted for the office but also knew that if we wanted to be the best in the world, we'd need a hybrid culture, where employees could work online, and where leaders could come into the office to receive?training at a level we hadn't figured out how to teach remotely (or at least not yet). We were remote-friendly long before covid made it a thing, and covid actually felt like it was removing our freedom to work from the office, so we were pretty excited to get back.

Our first real office didn't even have windows, but man we loved that space and were so proud to call it our own. We'd have clients come over all the time, and we'd do simulation days where future employees would spend a day working with us and feeling the culture before deciding where to work.

Our culture was luring top talent away from big corporates and getting them to come work at a scrappy little startup. Clients would walk in and say "Wait, this is it? This is the whole company? You're just a bunch of kids in a room". Then by the end of meeting us, they'd say that this is exactly what they are looking for: Young, smart, driven kids that give a damn about them and their work, and who made their visits exciting. I often had clients say that visiting us was the most exciting part of their week.?

Then after two years in our little box with no windows (it was at least glass so we could see into other offices that had sunlight) we had grown to a team of 14, and people were working on makeshift?desks, and it was getting cramped and smelly enough to move.?

And we didn't just move offices, we moved towns. The whole company moved to a town 40 minutes away. I guess the benefit of employing a young team was that we could all move too. Everyone gave up their apartments and we moved closer to the city, so that we would have a bigger talent pool, and be closer to more customers.?

At the start of our third year we grew from 14 to 20 people within a month, and then had doubled by the end of the year. When you break the 20 person mark, you can no longer run a company by talking to everyone every day, so you need to start building systems for organising people, projects, and information.

Every Friday we would break the company into teams and go over our list of experiments and improvements we had made the week prior. The company was evolving rapidly, and I don't think we could have undergone that level of change within one year if we weren't face-to-face.

That year we also decided to go after the number one spot in South Africa. We wanted to be the highest-rated agency, so everyone had a mission they were working towards. Specno was a stressful, chaotic, and beautiful place. A place where people could experiment, fail, try again, and do things they'd never otherwise be allowed to do. People and processes were growing at crazy speeds, and I genuinely loved coming to work every day.

We didn't expect to double within one year, but things were working, and then for a second year in a row, we had to pack up the whole office and move towns again. This time we opted for a much bigger office, so that we'd have room to grow.

Now we've reached a size where Specno is global, with our employees in multiple cities, with me leading from a different country, but we still have our Cape Town office, and I am still advocating for our investment companies to open their own offices in their cities (we might do a share office model, much like our partners at Qgroup) but we've definitely?reached a point where leaders can be trained remotely, and where high-performers choose where they work, but I still believe that for someone to really accelerate their career full throttle, being surrounded by your team members every day is one of the best things you can do.

So yes, I am advocating for an office. It has major benefits for employees, managers, sales, and creates a culture and space that makes it easier to build a company.

Outside of the perks listed above, there are also some major benefits that I wouldn't share as publicly, but they come through in the leadership sessions I have been having with Specno managers and our new investment opportunities.

I've really been enjoying plugging our leanings and resources into the agency founders we are engaging with. I will continue to share what we are learning. Reach out if you are an agency founder, or want to challenge me on my views!