New Start Warehouse and Office (the process!)

If you are new here we wanted to share a little behind the scenes on our office/warehouse! 

We STARTed on the garage floor of Kristy's home in 2015. Jenny in Portland and the hype of the START system caused quick growth! 

Started on the garage floor and this was above the garage where we ran the offices. 

In this photo below we had our first employee and you can see my August at maybe age 4 assisting us with taping packages. 

We built out the office above the garage to work and realized quickly we were outgrowing that space and we then signed our first lease. Which meant bigger shipments and being able to unload using a pallet jack! More learning all weaved in. 

Again a couple of years of growth and outgrowing space we aligned ourselves to buy a warehouse at the end of 2017 so we wouldn't continue leasing. It was much bigger than we needed but we had plans of growing into it. 

And we acquired the START HQ building in 2018.

The growth we experienced here was astounding but layer in COVID a couple of years later and a hard economy we felt it deep with our company so we decided to help cover some of the overhead by subleasing out part of the warehouse. Which was perfect and allowed us to make it work for everyone. It also taught us a lot about business and pivoting and figuring it all out. 

I then moved more north up to the lake with my personal life and I found myself not wanting to go down to the office as much and wanting to move it more north. I also didn't realize until we moved how inefficient I allowed the warehouse to start to operate. The bigger the house the more stuff you put in it, right?  After much debate and letting the market and my heart guide me, I decided to lease out the warehouse fully and move the offices north. You think that would be clear cut as well but it wasn't. I was going to build a space and then I came across this old home that was next to my commercial property. I needed the back land for the commercial development but I felt called to get the house and I debated not building and moving our offices in that home. After dialing in the logistics, the structure of the home, and realizing for it to fully work we would need to add a garage. It just didn't make sense. We shifted efforts fully to building out the START garage/warehouse. This is where we just moved into! I feel like so much has come full circle and lessons and growth weaved in it all for purposes! 

I could have just shared the finished product but it is ALL part of the story. The process and the journey and I do believe all gearing us up to do some amazing things for others within these walls because we are "home"! And I don't feel like I have been "home" for a couple of years if that makes sense. We will be dialing in everywhere so we can take bigger steps with focused effort to help others START! 

Here are some behind the scenes and we also made a fun reel on Instagram if you want to see it go up quickly... which is not what it did at all! Curious if you are interested in the business side of the cost of what financial calculations drove these decisions? 

 The foundation and framing getting laid out. As you can see, the rain also gave us some delays... 

All the framing is finally up and starting to look like an actual warehouse/office!