Scott Christiansen, CEO and Founder of Root3 Growth Marketing, has spent more than 20 years uncovering marketing insights and delivering growth strategies for clients, but when it came to evaluating the real estate needs of his own company, his vision wasn’t as clear.

In a two-part series, Christiansen shares his first-person story about how Bespoke opened his eyes. In this installment, he outlines the benefits of finding the right real estate partner, making the decision to move, and visualizing the next phase of growth.

Don’t even think about trying this alone.

I’m like you. I know my business better than anyone. I know what it needs and when it needs it. Except when I don’t.

With this post, I want to chronical how simply communicating with the team at Bespoke opened my eyes to several overlooked operational needs of my business, which prompted my decision to upgrade my firm’s office space. And then, I’ll tell you how their expertise saved time and money through the entire search, negotiate, fund, and move process.

Deciding to move.

I don’t like overhead. I’ve had the corner office downtown and it was very nice. But I don’t need it, so I didn’t want to pay for it. Rather than invest in Class A real estate, I invested in people and technology; things that help me serve more business and serve it efficiently. Sound familiar?

I was perfectly willing to cram another 10 employees in my existing space – a loft-style open office. They would have fit, but squeezing each new hire in would have been a disaster and I would have missed out on incredible growth. By chance, I read a blog about open offices on Bespoke’s website and I saw my office clearly for what it was:

1. Rather than promoting communication, my open office design was killing it. People didn’t talk because they didn’t want to interrupt coworkers. If one person was on a call with a client, others waited to call their clients.
2. My managers needed private offices. My core team of leaders helped start the business, but after two years of growth, their job was to build and nurture teams under them. They needed a space to have private conversations.
3. Sharing one bathroom with a floor of 12 other companies was no longer working. I’ll spare you the full details.
4. Recruiting was getting tougher. It is easy to recruit for a start-up company in a start-up space, but once you turn into a real business, not so much. In my case, not looking like an established organization was hurting both current employee retention and new employee recruiting.

Visualizing the next stage of growth.

Before detailing some of the process Bespoke guided me through, which I guarantee is riveting, I want to jump ahead in time to walking through the first potential site. I had been working on forecasts in excel and had wonderful financial projections, but I couldn’t visualize what my company would look like at that expanded number of employees and clients. Then, in the very first space we walked through, I saw it. The office space (which I ended up leasing) was basically a life-sized model of my growth objectives. I could finally visualize what next stage growth looked like, and knew I needed this kind of space to land the next phase of clients I was targeting, and the employees I’d need to serve the business efficiently.

Interested in learning more? Watch for part two of this blog series and join our conversation via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.