Ten Years and Three Tables
May 15, 2008This year marks our firm’s ten year anniversary. In addition to planning celebrations in San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Honolulu, I will reflect on how the firm has evolved in a series of blog entries.
La Piana Associates, Inc. was officially launched on July 1, 1998. The late 90s was bursting with paradigm shifts in the workplace. While some trends were merely passing fads of the collective millennium fever and dot-com decadence, other paradigm shifts in the workplace, such as telecommuting and team-based management, had lasting merit.
La Piana Associates has always been a virtual firm, with full-time consultants working out of their homes. This approach reduces the firm’s overhead—especially considering the Bay Area real estate market’s peak since 1998. The virtual office also allows us the flexibility to better serve our clients, both locally and nationally.
This model was so successful that as the firm grew, I even hired an executive assistant, our first support staffer, who worked from her home, a half hour drive from mine.
While we built the firm virtually, we also held in-person staff meetings regularly, to help foster team-building and forge the unique collaborative culture that defines La Piana Associates today.
In the early days, staff meetings were held around my dining room table. I live in a small house with a very small dining room, so this didn’t last long.
As the firm grew, we moved staff meetings to Bill Coy’s house—he has a big dining room. This served us well for years.
But meeting clients in my living room lost some of its charm and Bill’s dining room table soon reached capacity.
Since 2004, we have rented a modest office space in a converted warehouse in Emeryville, home to Pixar and Novartis, among others. We learned the space had once housed a factory for Jelly Belly Jelly Beans. Some would say that we are in good company.
Today, we internally recall the firm’s history as three phases: the days of David’s dining room table, Bill’s dining room table, and now, the Emeryville office table.
While the meeting table we share as a firm has changed throughout our ten year history, our innovative approach to collaborative teamwork and personalized client service remains constant.
