Building a new team, in a new city
5 tips for opening your company’s satellite office
Congratulations! Needing more space in a new market means business is going well. Brace yourself for the adventure ahead. Opening a new office is a lot of work: part startup, part growth hacking, and lot of relationship building. I’ll share what I learned when opening the Pivotal Labs office in Berlin and what I’ve observed since joining the Mailchimp team in their Brooklyn office.
1. Maintain the values, create your own culture
This is advice I got from Co-founder and CEO of Mailchimp, Ben Chestnut, and CEO of Pivotal, Rob Mee. I couldn’t agree more. Without shared values, your office and HQ are different companies with shared HR.
The first few hundred hires will shape the culture and norms, whether you intend it or not. Make this known to each new hire — we are building this together and you are here to shape this office. Create time for regular conversations and time where folks on the team experiment with this. Sketch Your Happy Workplace is one of my favorite activities.
2. Hire an office manager
I cannot stress this enough. An office manager is one of the best hires you can make. Someone to think about furniture, greeting guests, meals, packages, and events, is a full-time job. It wears on team health and cost tens of thousands of dollars when product teams are context switching doing these tasks. Consider hiring someone from IT locally. Some problems are very hard to solve remotely.
3. Seed with folks from HQ, hire locally
Tenured employees of the company are the connective tissue with the home office. Send folks over for a 1–2 year contract in the new city or permanently relocate employees interested in moving. For teams understaffed, borrow employees from HQ for a few weeks or months to work on projects until you can hire. Temporary rotations between offices can be a great way to ramp up new teammates and cross-pollinate. However, hire folks who know the local customs, language, and market. Invite your new office take on pace, diet, hours, holidays, and customs of the local city.
4. Write. Host events. Announce your arrival.
Build your footprint, intentionally. Get help from your marketing and comms teams to lean on the brand your company already built. In the beginning, your office will be an elephant graveyard of boxes, unassembled furniture, and snacks in a corner. Until then, co-host events with other companies, rent spaces nearby, write articles, and give talks. Wait to host a talk or gathering until a photo of your office is tweetable. When you’re ready, launch your office.
5. Have fun
Seriously. Enjoying the ride will make everything about this job easier — and could become the biggest adventure of your career. The endless list of to-dos only gets longer. HQ fomo is real.
Work in pairs. Play music. And absolutely, definitely, certainly, crack a joke.
