“It was so clear to me how important a vision for this space was, but it was hard to know what form that vision would take, and how to get everyone on board,” says Alan Armstrong on the office of his Guelph, Ontario-based data analysis company, Eigenworks. “Scottt and Pilot Projects helped develop and affirm this vision, and take it further than I could have on my own.”
A strong vision is at the heart of every successful business, and Eigenworks is no exception. As founder and CEO, Alan’s vision for his company has grown and reshaped since its beginnings in 2008, when it was 100% virtual: he and his employees all worked in different offices. As the business grew, Alan brought a few members of the team together in one of Guelph’s tech-oriented co-working spaces—an arrangement that began to hint at the power of working all together in one place. Within a few years, Alan realized that “if we were going to accelerate and grow, we would all need to be in the same space a lot more. We needed to talk to each other more, have water cooler conversations, capture a few humanizing seconds together here and there amid the busyness of work. That’s almost impossible to do when you’re in different places.”
Alan began looking for a space he could make Eigenworks’ own. He found a 1,300-square-foot storefront in Guelph’s historic downtown, and asked Scott to help him envision what his company’s new home could look like. The twenty-year veteran of the software industry explained that his line of work can feel “invisible, and hard to put your hands on.” People don’t use software in a tactile way, and the absence of that connection to the work (as opposed to, say, a vocation like carpentry) was something he felt at Eigenworks and wanted to address.
Alan engaged Pilot Projects to help him take the next step in this more physical, personal direction. He explained that he loved the raw space, but understood that how he designed it could either fit, benefit, and elevate Eigenworks, or reduce it to a “normal,” bland, unexciting office that didn’t have much to do with his unique company. And he was concerned not only with making the best use of the space for his employees and clients, he also wanted to make sure that Eigenworks’ personality and values were clearly expressed in the way the office looked and functioned. “I wanted to brand the Eigenworks experience here,” he says.