RTA's Blog
Celebrating Next Chapters in a Building Worthy of Our Great Team
Jun
A little over a week ago, we opened our new office building to more than 100 customers, family and friends – celebrating not only the new office building housing RTA, but also the second anniversary of my 30th birthday.
To tell the truth, the 15,000 sq. ft. building gives me goose bumps; it’s hard to believe our company roots, in the back bedroom of my home, with a folding table and the occasional dead mouse our cat would drag up from the basement. I’d still have that if it hadn’t been “suggested” by my wife that other quarters may be more appropriate for me and my tiny business.
The first office was a real dump. The first day, the mailman casually remarks about how this office floods out every spring. “Only an inch”, he says, and only a few times a year and only in the spring. I must have missed that detail when I signed the lease. And I’ll never forget Barb the beautician, who spent her days next door to me, immersed in coloring the hair of older women this odd blue color. The aroma of that hair dye is still with me today.
One winter we moved RTA to the third floor of that building. We had huge southern facing windows and I enjoyed being away from the hair dye and the spring floods. Until summer. I didn’t realize in December how much heat can penetrate through those huge southern facing windows during a long summer; we’d gone from working in a lake to a sauna.
Next up was a larger, slightly more elegant basement facility in another part of town, with an odd neighbor, Don, some sort of accountant who analyzed some sort of tax payments, and from whom we inherited furniture after he moved out. There were some surprising discoveries in his office; I think Jessica scoured his furniture about 16 times with the strongest cleansers known to man!
After that we moved into much better space, right at the economic downturn of 2009, when we stayed in business by the hair of our chinny-chin-chin. That space was in a nice office park, much better and more impressive facilities. Now we are in our new digs:
Jeff, Drew, Jessica, Jamin, Emily, Carlos, and the rest of the amazing RTA staff, have built a business capable of buying the great building we’re in now – a building that awes me every time I drive into the parking lot. It’s a building worthy of our great team.
I’m humbled and grateful. If you couldn’t make the RTA Open House, I’d be honored to have you visit and take a tour.
