Our next Vivid Vision is out, and if you missed it click below to see and hear about it.
One thing to explain before I get into the new HQ from our Vivid Vision is BHAG.
BHAG = Big Hairy Audacious Goal
A BHAG should be front and center in your Vivid Vision. Why? To make everyone go “OH SNAP” that’s insane! And well, I think I did that with my vision for our next office.
To put this in perspective, from 2008-2013, I had my home office.
In 2013 we opened a gym, CrossFit The Tracks, and I had an office there, along with my home office. Neither was needed a lot since most of my work was done at my client’s locations.
Then, in 2016, I realized the energy and focus I would gain by being around other people, so I got a membership at a shared workspace in downtown Cincinnati. At that time, I had two employees, so I would hang out downtown in the common spaces and then, a few times per week, lock myself in the private rooms like above and FOCUS! This was when I realized we were onto something with our restaurant marketing programs, and I had to spend a lot of time laying out the future of our company.
From 2016 to 2018, pictures like the one below were common, and the team and I mapped out the future on the common whiteboards. In 2019, when Doug Smith joined the team, we realized we needed our own whiteboards, which we didn’t have to erase at the end of the day. So we started looking for a space we could call our own. I was pretty scared with this step. Getting a permanent office was a big step, not only financially but mentally. It started to put in concrete that this wasn’t a “small business” any longer. Hiring Ashley in 2013 was tough for that reason, but now in 2019, we were up to four employees and signing a lease!
And in June 2019, we found a fantastic place to call home for two years in OTR. And go figure, it came with ORANGE conference room chairs.
This is the space where we began to expand our team and mindset. Having this permanent office suddenly made what we were building more REAL! We grew to nine employees in this space while also navigating Covid.
Now, this is where I started to make employees wonder if I was out of my mind. In December 2020, I started to think about finding an office closer to my home in Northern Kentucky and also about owning vs renting. I bought a few books on commercial real estate and went on the hunt. If you know me, you know I don’t wait long to take action. This search only took a few weeks before I put an offer in on a property. I found the building from an old expired listing and called the phone number on the banner in one of the pictures (the one on the banner below). That was on January 12th, and by January 14th I’d overnighted the owner a deposit check and put the property under contract.
This was one of my very first BHAG’s! At the time, we had nine employees, of which only two of us, Doug and myself, worked out of the office daily. So when I told our team I’d just bought a 9,000-square-foot office that 60 employees once called home, they thought I’d fallen and hit my head.
I still recall the conversations: “Matt, the space is great, but who will work here?”
My vision with the space was a spot for our marketing agency, Restaurant Marketing That Works, a spot to do live events, and a shared workspace. Honestly, the shared workspace was only a “placeholder” in my mind. I really didn’t want that long-term, but that was the only way I could convince myself we could afford such a large space while only two of us worked there in person.
Well, flash forward to 2024, and pretty much everything in that video happened. The only thing I didn’t end up doing was the outdoor work and play area, maybe I’ll get that done next year. Our company is now 57 strong and around forty people come into the office most days. We turned the downstairs area I had slated for a training center into our sales department, and the upstairs is mostly operations. We also have a full editing suite downstairs next to the weight room where a team of six professional editors create the ABR Roadshow from America’s Best Restaurants.
Now, onto 2027, May 17th, 2027, to be exact.
Why 48,000 square feet? Well, I saw this video while researching cool office buildings, and I came across the Hoonigan Motorsports HQ. I thought it was BADASS! It really embodied what I wanted to do, so that’s where I got a lot of my ideas.
CLICK HERE to watch the video I watched.
This HQ was 12,000, and I thought “Let’s do four times that size!” So, 48,000 square feet it is!
My vision for our next HQ is three-prong. I want a space where we can get excellent work done, a place where my team can take care of themselves and consider a second home, and finally, a spot where restaurant owners can come to for the ULTIMATE restaurant marketing deep dive. Read the back page of our Vivid Vision and you’ll get a feel for what’s coming.
