Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Guest Speaker - Brian

           With humble beginnings as an elementary school teacher, Brian Forth ventured into the unrelenting and unforgiving world of entrepreneurship. That introduction sounds kind of like an underdog fighting against the odds to achieve greatness like in Rocky. Truth be told, fancy wording aside that isn’t too far from the truth. The journey can be long and hard but the gains are worth the struggle.
            A past experience he had took place in the San Francisco Bay Area. Him along with others from Microsoft, Sega, and Atari (among others) were working together on a project, though were axed not long after. He didn’t want his company, SiteCrafting, to be the type of company that cared only for profits. His goal was to build a company with the type of culture that values its employees. It was to be the kind of workplace they could retire from and not need to worry over being fired from. It is a web application development company based in Tacoma that also creates training kits on how to code and builds websites. Gear Lab is a stemmed off company on the other hand that does product offering (with a separate LLC). He has run other projects like the Mobile Wine Tour App, which died off because they couldn’t keep up with new wine locations opening up.

            He 3 C’s he offered to us during his session: Core, Company, and Community. Core is being true to oneself, Company relates to the culture he wanted to build in his enterprise, and Community means to actively participate and give back to Tacoma. I think his model of a company is probably one of the safest working environments I have ever heard of. Usually you would hear of the negatives aspects of larger corporations, though his company puts value in the employee and the willingness to work with them instead of having them work like a grunt under him. It isn’t something I hear of often so I am glad to know there exist a few out there.

No comments:

Post a Comment