Our Farewell and Advice to Tacoma

Posted by Nathan Kaiser on Wed Sep 16 14:26:00 UTC 2009

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With our announced departure from Tacoma, I wanted to write to clarify our feelings for the city. We love Tacoma and continue to believe that it is a great city to live and work in! I was raised in Tacoma through Jr. High School and came back to the city for college. It provided a fantastic incubator for Blue Box Group with its aggressively priced rent and ample services. For the last 6 years, Tacoma provided a solid foundation that allowed Blue Box Group to grow into the success story that we’ve become. Between our offices on 6th Ave, to our various locations in downtown, we’ve enjoyed everything that Tacoma has to offer.

So why are we moving?

We’ve experienced incredible growth rates over the last 4 years, which have in turn prompted rapid job growth within our organization. We’ve had the patience to go through very long interview cycles to be able to find the right candidates to staff these positions. In spite of these unusually long cycles, we have been fortunate to find what I believe are the most amazing staff I could ask for. However, as our growth has continued, our patience and ability to wait through these long interview time lines has impacted our ability to grow at the accelerated rate we see as our business opportunity.

In addition to this, we found that the recent economic environment has put enough pressure on price of commercial space in Seattle to be very competitive to what we were finding in Tacoma. As we looked at our business goals, challenges and expectations over the next several years, we felt like taking advantage of these discounted real estate pricing would be an opportunity we couldn’t pass up.

For a technology company experiencing extreme growth, Tacoma is a city that today presents some challenges. Regardless of the city wide fiber of Click Network or the access to the University of Washington branch office, or any of the other number of amenities offered, the limited number of high-level technology candidates is a big problem. With the regional mass transit system in a bit of disarray, it is terribly difficult to convince potential employees from outside Tacoma to brave the commute into town. Waiting for the right person to become unemployed isn’t a good strategy either. At the end of the day, our need to be able to quickly recruit talented staff is our primary motivation for this move, and is something I believe will continue to be a challenge for Tacoma unless action is taken.

This is an opportunity for Tacoma.

The departure of Russell, while unfortunate, does create a unique opportunity for the city to re-invent itself. Tacoma now has a chance to make a new name for itself in the financial and technological fields, and work to attract new businesses and new industries. Just as much of the downtown core has undergone a physical transformation, city leaders should be determining what they can do to attract and nurture the next generation of technology companies. This in turn will allow UW Tacoma to place its graduates in local technology jobs, and will then provide the candidate pool that future technology companies can pull from.

I’ve been amazed at the online conversation this move has created, and I think there’s an opportunity to engage in a conversation about our experiences, and what decisions we faced as a business. I am happy to share with any entrepreneur, or members of the community as to what some of the elements we felt were important for running and growing our business.

We’re sad to go and there’s much we will miss from such a great town. But we’re also very excited at the possibility that Seattle now holds for us.

• Jesse Proudman
  

CEO
Blue Box Group