*warning: this article contains a lot of red*

We’ve been speaking about “our big move” for what feels like an eternity, but finally it happened. It was literally the last working day of July when we packed up our things from the original Firefish HQ in Glasgow’s leafy West End and headed up the road to Port Dundas where our new home tank awaited. We’ve spent all of August having furniture delivered, building shelves, plugging in computers and working out where the nearest shops are but we finally feel at home. We were so keen to get here we moved in with the bare minimum – that is, our laptops, desks and chairs- so it’s been a labour of love ever since and it’s finally ready to show off. Well, save for a few finishing touches which should be in place for our grand unveiling in September.

This really does feel like a new beginning for Firefish. Over the last five years, we’ve grown in terms of the number of users, number of countries we serve and we’ve added to our Firefish family too with a talented line-up of new starts. We’ve also been nominated for and won lots of awards and welcomed plenty of new customers to the ‘Firefish Club’. The past few years have been incredibly busy for us and such a journey, no question, but with our new office we can finally see all of the hard work paying off.

More importantly, our team are completely re-focussed on their goals and morale has never been higher. We were practically sitting on top of one another in the old office but here we have space to move around, communicate better, collaborate and grow our business in the way we want. Our CEO, Wendy, loves seeing the team so refreshed and optimistic about the future;

“When Andrew and I started Firefish in 2010, a space like this had always been our dream so it is amazing to finally be here! Like everything we do, it’s a bit different. We’ve got techies, recruiters, marketers, sales execs and happiness experts all collaborating together to deliver our vision. We want to inspire the next generation of recruiters all around the world to adopt a predictive recruitment model and this office is allowing us to push this forward more than ever. The day we moved we all felt the difference!”

Our Happiness team have adopted a corner of the office and have already introduced one unicorn, we’ve been warned that over time there’ll be plenty more where he came from. If you know our Happiness team, you know that’s more of a promise than a threat! Our Development team aren’t split up between little crowded rooms anymore so they can bounce ideas off one another and even write their targets, codes and formulas on the walls- there are plenty of ways to be innovative.

Earlier in the year, our Sales and Marketing teams joined together to form our Growth team and it’s amazing for them all to be able to sit together now, knowledge sharing about the market and ensuring our users, social followers and blog readers are all up-to-date with what’s happening at Firefish, in the world of recruitment and with our product. Even better; sales demos can be carried out in dedicated booths now so the marketing guys don’t need to wear their big over-ear headphones all day, every day to block them out. Everyone’s a winner!

A huge bonus has also been our kitchen space. The old office kitchen was actually a cupboard and only one person could fit in. Seriously, if you were washing the dishes you were also wedging the fridge shut. Now it’s a case of THERE’S SO MUCH ROOM FOR ACTIVITIES! We even have seats (would you believe?! Luxurious or what?) so nobody’s confined to dining at their desk and we can actually speak to one another, play games… lunchtimes will never be the same again! It definitely makes beer o’clock on a Friday afternoon a hundred times better.

It’s going to be an on-going project to get everything ‘perfect’ – when is anything ever perfect straight away?- but we’re all determined to put our stamp on it and take pride in our business, this office and our successes so far.  

We officially opened the new office with a Housewarming Party on 17th September. Bill Boorman kindly took over ribbon cutting duties and announced the good ship Firefish open, read all about it here.