MWI’s History of Office Spaces

MWI is moving up in the world. We’ll be moving into new office space within the same building, except this time it’s on the second floor. The new space will give us more total square footage, a true break room (finally), a friendlier floor plan, and a larger conference room, amongst other things.

This will be the fifth office space I’ve worked in since starting my agency under the original name of Mindwire Interactive (changed to MWI in 2003). The first was at 106 West Center Street in Provo, right above where the Provo Pharmacy used to be located, which is kiddie-corner from NuSkin. We had a window placed diagonally on the corner of the office space that faced the diagonal side of the NuSkin building and I used to think what a great idea it would be to get a water balloon launcher, fill a balloon with mayonaise, and launch it out of our office against the glass-paned side of the NuSkin building. Unless someone was looking at our window at the exact second we launched it nobody would ever know. Like most of my ideas of that nature nothing ever came of it.

A year later we moved into our second space at 108 West Center Street on the other side of the wall from our first office space. The move was made because we had way too much space at 106 and were able to cut our lease payment in half by moving, plus the space was much nicer looking. We sub-leased space from a graphic design agency there called RRO (Rushford Ross Orton) which does not exist in the form it did at that time since one of the Rs and the O have left. The space is now occupied by Chair Entertainment, a video game developer.

After a year and a half or so in that space I sold Mindwire to Avalon Digital and started MWI. MWI’s home since January of 2003 has been in Draper near Point of the Mountain. The building is unfortunately named “Tech Center 2000″ which means that the name has been outdated since December 31st, 1999. Luckily the sign isn’t too visible and nobody knows it by that name.

We moved into the north side of the building on the 1st floor along with a company called Digital Tuesday. They had invited us into the space which was shared equally, half and half, and their half didn’t exactly appeal to our aesthetics, but there wasn’t much we could do about it. But DT went under within a few months, and then it was even worse because there were just six of us in a 5,000 sq. ft. space. About a year and half into things the landlord came to us and we worked out a deal wherein we would move to another part of the building that would be built out per our requirements if we would be willing to move out of the space. We readily agreed and moved to where we are today.

This space has been pretty good to us for the last year and a half, but there are just a few things we don’t fully like about it. Part of that probably has to do with decor, which is more our fault, but part of it is that the open space doesn’t fit cubes well, the bare concerete floor hasn’t turned out to be as cool as we thought it would be, and our receptionist area is a bit awkward.

The upstairs space will take things a step further. First of all, I get a huge office with a large window looking at the mountains. Well, it looks at Point of the Mountain, which has some green on it some of the time. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with all the space in there, but somebody had to take the big office and because of the layout there wasn’t any way to make it smaller in a way that made sense.

We’ll have a larger conference room that should look pretty snappy with a full wall of plate glass. Our receptionist area will feel more like it’s there on purpose than squeezed in. The individual offices will be about a foot larger either way, and our open space is of such a shape and size that we can probably fit 10-12 people comfortably in cubes. We’ll also be on the shady side of the building for most of the time so our conference room won’t get overheated compared to the rest of the office which does happen in our current space.

How long will we last up there? We can fit 16-17 people up there, so until we get to that number we should be just fine, and I think there won’t be anything lacking as far as the space is concerned so we won’t have any other reason to move.