General Thoughts
Also mentioned…
Over at Cleveland.com…
SparkBase LLC, a Solon technology company, also plans to move to the building in May. The company provides data center services to merchants for the processing of gift and loyalty card transactions.
Doug Hardman, the company’s owner and chief technology officer, said SparkBase will quadruple the size of its old office by renting 3,500 square feet at Tyler. That will allow the company to expand its staff from seven to 13.
I’ll take a mention like that any day. Shaheen Samavati and I talked for about 30min, I’m surprised that we only got a small mention though. O-Well…life goes on.
Back to work.
We wait no more
Permit approved! Now we get into the fun stuff. The plan is to take a few photos from the same spot every couple of days to show the progress. Maybe at the end we will turn it into some sort of virtual flip book.
The Waiting Game
And now…we wait.
The plans have been submitted to the City of Cleveland for review. We should hear something back in the next week or so, but it can take up to a month…so I’m not holding my breath.
In the meantime, the contractor has started prepping the space by re-paining the ceiling, and taking the walls back to brick. I’ll post some pictures of the progress in the next few days.
SparkBase & Tyler Village article Crains!
Here’s the article that was printed in this week’s Crain’s Cleveland Business. Too bad they don’t know about this site!
Data services biz plots Tyler Village move
By CHUCK SODER
4:30 am, January 21, 2008
Data services company SparkBase LLC of Solon is planning to move its headquarters to Tyler Village in Cleveland.
The company, which processes transactions for businesses that sell gift and loyalty cards to retailers, is in the process of finalizing a lease to take 3,500 square feet on the third floor of Building 44 of the sprawling industrial complex, which was once the home of Tyler Elevator Products.
SparkBase will have the option to take another 2,400 square feet nearby, and it might need it, said company president Doug Hardman. The company, which aims to move in by March 1, will have seven or eight employees by the time it leaves its 1,000-square-foot headquarters on Bainbridge Road in Solon. It aims to employ 13 by the end of 2008.
“My company’s growing like a weed right now,” Mr. Hardman said, declining to give revenue or profit figures.
Mr. Hardman said he is moving the company to Cleveland because of the growing number of technology companies located downtown. He chose Tyler Village, which is just east of downtown on Superior Avenue, partly because interactive marketing company DigiKnow Inc. already is there.
“They gave it a lot of credence,” Mr. Hardman said.
Cleveland developer Graystone Properties Inc. is recruiting technology companies to Tyler Village in its effort to revitalize the 1.2 million-square-foot complex, which consists of more than 20 interconnected buildings.
The developer offers high-speed and wireless Internet access at the location, and it is trying to build community among tenants by adding more common space, said David Fleming, Graystone leasing agent.
The developer also is interested in recruiting biotechnology companies, Mr. Fleming said. For instance, Analiza Inc., a company that analyzes potential drugs for pharmaceutical companies, moved to Tyler Village from Solon last fall.
“We’re close to the Clinic, we’re close to downtown, we’re close to the freeways,” Mr. Fleming said.
If you get a chance to bust Dave’s chops about “adding more common space”, you are more than welcome. Everyone else in the office is. Overall, I think it was a pretty good read. I had some better quotes, but these will work. ;)
Tyler it is!
So after a few weeks of hunting/looking, we settled on Tyler Village.
(:: insert fanfare ::)
We felt that the overall direction of the developers and community were in line with what we were looking for. Geoff and I see this as being one of the next hot-spots in Cleveland, so we put it all together and started working on getting plans to build the space.
In other news, I got a call from a reporter for Crain’s Cleveland today. They were very interested in talking about the impending move, and about relocating to Cleveland. We talked for about an hour, and I’m excited to see what it is they find to write.
So…now the fun part starts!
Ikea Trip
Anyone that knows me knows that I’m quite impatient.
Angie and I had an afternoon to kill, so we headed out to Ikea in Pittsburgh to look for random ideas for the new space. Since this is a family affair…I figured I’d get her involved. She reluctantly agreed to throw Garrett in the car and trek to Pittsburgh with me. Here’s what we saw.
You’ll notice a lot of green stuff. That’s because we’re finishing up a Re-Branding of SparkBase. More on that later…
Can Cleveland Help?
There was an article in the Plain Dealer recently that was talking about the drain of talent and people from Cleveland. I thought “Cool, I’ve got a high-tech company, and want to move to Cleveland!” I figured they’d be more than happy to help my company relocate from Solon to Cleveland!
Wrong!
It turns out, there is VERY little to entice small companies like mine to move to the city. Here’s a list of what the city can do to help. I’d talked to them last year when I bought SparkBase to see what they could do. I couldn’t move the company at the time, but I figured it was only about 11mos later, so it couldn’t be that different. Wrong again. Here’s what changed.
Last year: $25,000 in interest-free loans for every job that I created for the city.
Now: That’s gone.
Last year: $75,000 low-interest loan with a $5,000 grant for moving the company to Cleveland.
Now: Nope. Nothing.
Last Year: Various Tax Abatements.
Now: Nada.
Here’s what they CAN do…
Give me a low-interest, 1 year loan on 40% of the cost of moving the company and build-out. So if we spend $100,000 on the new space, they’ll lend me $40,000 at 3% under prime for one year. To GET this magnificent deal, I need to fill out 3 sets of forms, present it to a committee, a second committee if it’s one of the 15 of 200 they look at on a quarterly basis, and yet another meeting with the Mayor if it’s chosen. Thanks, but I have better things to do with my time to save $600 in interest. (On a 1-year loan none the less!)
I really hope our city can get a Mayor that understands simple things like…a non-school tax abatement doesn’t hurt schools.
Here we go…
Welcome to the SparkBase “New Office” blog!
This is where we’ll be writing about our move to Cleveland and the trials/tribulations that happen along the way. We’ll take you through what we look at, who the players are, why we choose what we do. Hopefully, we’ll end with a big party that everyone can come to!
So here we are. It’s November 15th 2007, I know where my son is, and we’re ready to get started. Let’s see what we come up with!