Company.Location = new OfficeSpace(); // 4th time the charm

Exactly 9 years ago, Hibernating Rhinos had a major breakthrough. We moved to our own offices for the first time. Before that, I was mostly working from a home office of clients’ locations.  Well, I say we, but I mean I. At the time, the change mostly involved me having to put on some shoes and going out of the house to work alone in a big empty office. The rest of the team at the time was completely remote.

I got the office because I needed to. Some people can manage a proper life / work balance while working from home. I find it very hard. I’m the kind of person that would get up at 2 AM to get something to drink, see a new mail notification on the monitor, and start working until 8 AM. Having a separate office was hugely beneficial for me.  The other reason was that it allowed me to hire more people locally. The first real employee I had was hired within three months of moving to the new office.

That first office was great, but small. Just 5 rooms about about 120 m² (1300 ft²). We stayed in the office until we got to about 12 people. At this point, we really didn’t have enough room to swing a cat (to be fair, we didn’t have an office cat, nor a real good reason to want to swing one). We moved offices in 2015, from the center of the industrial zone of the city to the periphery of the business zone). The new offices were 250 m² (2700 ft²) and gave us a lot of room to expand, it also had two major advantages. It was nice to be able to walk downstairs and be able to walk to pretty much anywhere we needed to and we no longer had to deal with having a garage next door.

When we moved to the 2nd office, it felt like we had a huge amount of room, but it filled up quite quickly. It was certain that we would outgrow the new place in a short order, so we started looking for a permeant home that would suffice for the next 10 years or so. We got one, smack down in the center of the business zone of the city. Next door to city hall, actually. Well, I say “got one”. What we actually got was a piece of paper and a hole in the ground. Before we could move into the new offices, they had to be built first.

We stayed in the second office space for 3 years, but we run out of room before the new offices were ready. So we moved for the third time. Because our new offices weren’t ready, we moved to a shared working space (like WeWork). We planned on being there for a short while, but it ended up for over a year. The plus side, we were able to expand much more easily. We hired quite a few people this year and was able to simple add more offices as we grew. The down side was that this is very much not our office, so we really want to move.

This week, however, we are going to finally move. The new offices have more than enough space  415 m² (4500 ft²) for the new five to ten years of growth, it covers two floors in a brand new location, centrally located and beautifully done. I’m not posting any pictures because the vast majority of our own team haven’t seen it yet (we have a unveiling party tomorrow), but I’m super happy that we got to this point and just had to share in the blog.