One of the more important things, aside from actually enjoying the work you do, is the environment in which you do it. People always say to work effectively, your chair can’t be too rigid, and it can’t be too comfortable‒its finding that balance between your happy place and a productive work space that is often tough to achieve. Personally, I am an advocate for creating an ideal work environment before I can even think about being productive. If you aren’t content in your situation, you will be grumpy regardless of the work you produce. At the same time, it seems that the best work is produced when an employee is as happy as can be.

My last job was an engineering position at a small start up company: the walls were blank, everyone was 30+ years older than me and my boss was crabby. There was nothing except bad coffee and my bike ride to work to keep me happy. Yuck! After that experience, you could say I was scared to death of my future in the job market. Luckily, there was a position at Synotac which fit me perfectly.

At Synotac, I have found a lovely balance between working in a professional, effective environment, and being comfortable. For the most part, when I am in the world of programming or web design‒staring at the lovely, glowing goodness that is my flat-screen monitor‒I have my headphones on. This plays into the same chair-theory that i mentioned before. I suppose if the music were too loud or distracting, I wouldn’t be very productive, but it always seems to keep me sane. In the last 15 years of my life, its a rare day when I don’t enjoy some form of music. Especially when it comes to getting work done, I encourage all of you to find some music that is the perfect blend of mentally stimulating and relaxing. Lyrics can be distracting sometimes, so good instrumental tunes are always a plus. Some of my personal work-favorites include Led Zeppelin, DJ Shadow, The Shins, The Talking Heads, and A Tribe Called Quest. Here at Synotac, many of us share our music libraries, so if I’m curious I can always find out what other people are listening to.

Besides the music, there’s a plethora things at Synotac which keep me happy…

-Twelve-foot windows illuminate the walls of our lofty office, each of which is covered in beautiful paintings by Mama-Synotac, Jan Madill; having a well-lit, nicely decorated office can do a lot for a dreary morning. You can see her art at www.jamimi.com.

-Another thing which helps is a nice cup of coffee. Lately, we have been frequenting Stumptown Coffee Roasters for our beans, which is yet to let us down.

-Recently, we scattered several house plants around the office, giving it a nice jungle feel. Office plants are always nice; its something pretty to look at, and its always fun to take a quick break from work to water them.

-Similar to Google (check out their workspaces), here at Synotac we work in one giant room, all interacting with one another and having fun while we work. I think it gives a feeling of connectivity and unity. My best work is done when I am working for a clear common goal, and it is a great motivation when you are constantly face to face with co-workers that you care about.

-Another key element is food. I love food. Without it, my afternoon productivity would come to a grinding halt. As many of my co-workers (playfully) criticize me for eating out all the time, I can’t help but indulge in going to “The Carts” as we call them. There are about 10-20 carts on SW 5th between Oak and Stark streets. Each cart is a family-owned mobile food vehicle which serve everything you could ever want: Thai, Indian, Polish, Mexican…you name it. Check them out.

So, if you aren’t feeling happy and productive at work, try some of the things we do at Synotac…It might work for you.

Does speaking in front of a group of people send you careening over the cliff of reality and into a panic attack-filled chasm thousands of feet below? No? Well, that’s wonderful! I’m better these days, but people who know me well are aware that I’m more than a little bit shy. Most of the gregarious crew at Synotac are members of various business organizations: Metropolitan Business Association, American Marketing Association, Sustainable Business Network of Portland, the Accelerator Group.

Though my official role at Synotac isn’t sales-related, I’ve been wanting to meet new people, get involved in the business community, do my part at Synotac —and maybe step outside of my shell at the same time. So, when my friend Marsha of Bridgetown Therapeutic Massage started talking positively about a business group she has involved in for about 5 years, it piqued my interest. Marsha is an excellent massage therapist, but I’ve always respected the way she ran her business as well. She’s organized, professional and dynamic—she has changed her business model to meet changing clients and trends and is now teaching classes. As someone who was a massage therapist for a time, I know how difficult it can be to get out there and market yourself in a crowded market—if you’re shy, the not-so-fun part.

The name of the organization Marsha introduced me to is BNI (Business Network International). Her chapter (the Rose Quarter) has weekly meetings on Fridays at 7am. Despite my apprehension about both the hour and the activity, I pushed my excuses aside and took Marsha up on her invitation. When I arrived it was more or less what I had expected for a early morning meeting: Lots of folks gathering in a meeting room, chatting with caffeinated beverages in hand. Something was unexpected though—everyone was smiling, laughing, talking about their week—genuinely enjoying each other’s company.

Let me back up for second. At some events and trade shows I’ve attended over the years, this last element was often missing—the ‘genuine’ part. I’ve often felt as though I had giant dollar signs on my forehead, was being pelted by finger guns, accompanied by faux smirks, winks and backslaps. Once I’m asked actually about myself and start into my story, I have often received the thousand-yard stare and got the impression the person I was speaking to was mentally calculating their taxes or thinking about their next prospect across the room. Unless I am an anomaly, this aspect probably turns a lot of folks off to networking in general—making it more of an obligation than a way to meet some interesting people. What made this group different?

Everyone took a seat at the tables in a square around the room and the meeting started on time. After a few announcements and a welcoming of visitors, everyone around the room gave a 30 second ‘commercial,’ a short summary of the business they represent. Most were sole proprietorships, others part of small or large companies. The approaches on delivery ranged from reading from notes to one woman breaking out into a summary of her business (a mobile car mechanic) to the melody of the Gilligan’s Island-theme song. Good morning! Marsha mentioned ahead of time that I would need to give my own commercial, so I had stayed up late crafting and practicing with my patient wife. When my turn came around, I plowed through the impending tunnel vision and delivered my commercial—with minor flaws. Whew.

BNI works on a referral system. You give leads to other members and indicate the intensity of the lead on a card with all of the relevant contact information on it. The better you know someone in the group—and their business—the more effective the referral trading you can do with them. The whole concept is built on relationships. If they know you are a decent person and that you run an honest business, they will want to spend time with you, share ideas and send business your way, should the opportunity arise. Everyone is putting their reputation on the line by vouching for each other. BNI seems to foster these relationships by encouraging folks to meet with members outside of the weekly meeting to get to know each other and their businesses. If an opportunity comes up, they can refer you with confidence and accuracy. Accountability, genuine relationships, positive attitudes, meeting new people from an incredibly diverse set of businesses—each with their own ideas and aspirations? Alright, I’m with it so far.

Several people welcomed me before and afterwards. They wanted to hear my story. They looked me in the eye when they talked to me. They listened and didn’t seem in a hurry to move on. They smiled and were in a heck of a good mood for a Friday morning. And most surprising—I felt comfortable. Some of them approached me with a “I’d like to talk to you later about web stuff,” but I was a person first and someone they might be able to help—rather than sizing me up for what benefit they could receive. Now, before your eyes roll out of your head with my idealistic mumbo jumbo, let me be clear—this is a business organization. People wouldn’t jump out of bed at 5am on a Friday to be a part of a business organization if they weren’t making money. My point is that the concept works because of the genuine relationships that the members seem to be cultivating with other members. You want to help them because they want to help you. I’d argue that hose are the type of relationships worth cultivating.

Maybe my rose-colored glasses will come flying off at some point and I’ll go back to hiding behind my monitors and let my coworkers be the social butterflies, but my membership application was accepted last week and I’m already looking forward to seeing everyone on Friday morning—there’s some really interesting people in my group I’d like to get to know.

One of the most common questions I get is, What does your name mean? Well, it’s actually a bit of a long story…

Back in 2003, when I was pretending to have a plan for my life, my Dad, my Mom and I were all sitting around the dining room table talking about possible company names. I don’t remember what my Dad suggested, but my Mom wanted names that were very “Oregon,” such as Big Green Tree Design, or Sustainable Rushing Water that Contains Happy Salmon Web Development. (She’s very sweet, so she won’t mind me writing this. Plus, she does amazing art. Actually, she often makes comments about being in labor with me for 48 hours.) Anyway, I wasn’t really happy with these names, because I felt like they were too limiting.

A brilliant idea

Brilliant, that is, if you like our company name. I decided to look up “father” and “son” in a bunch of different languages and paste them together in as many different ways as I could think of to see what we would come up with. After struggling to figure out how to do this for a while, I found the solution in a great website that will look up any word in English in hundreds of other languages: Logos Language Services. After coming up with such memorable combinations as Wawabab (Quechua and Romansch), Fizzupie (Sardinian and Galician), and Buwafi (Nepali and Wallon, whatever that is), we settled on Synotac, which comes from the Polish word for son (syn) and the Croatian word for father (otac). What do you think - how’d we do?

Our hosting company, Total Choice Hosting, does a great job for us. We’ve been with them since Cameron and I started the company in 2003. We started with a single small hosting account, then moved to a resellers account, a larger resellers account, and in May 2006 decided we should have our own dedicated server. It worked really well for us and the TCH tech staff kept our system software up to date and were very quick to fix our problems. While TCH managed the systems software, the machine was physically in a co-location facility in Phoenix.

Last spring, TCH said they were building their own operations center and would be moving all the servers from the co-lo facilities into their NOC. TCH feels they did not get the quickest of responses from some of the co-los when there were hardware failures and wanted to do a better job for their clients (like us!).

Our turn came up for this Labor Day weekend. The week before, we spent a lot of time making sure we were ready and calling and emailing our clients to make sure they were prepared. The move would be invisible to most of our clients since the techs would copy all the accounts over a few days before the move. The shift from the old to the new server is instantaneous because they change the local DNS servers to point to the new server so the outside world did not have to change. (Later we changed the official nameservers to directly point to the new server.) However several of our clients have quite active online businesses so we had to take extra care to copy databases at the last minute and in one case, I actually took one website offline during the changover.

The move started Friday night around 9 p.m. I watched things for a while but it was pretty boring so went to bed. It’s hard to get excited watching packets go across the network. Saturday morning I found out that all but one website had already been moved so started testing the sites. They were looking good so brought the one offline website back online and went out to play.

About then I found out we had a few things that didn’t go as planned. There were a couple databases that had some minor corruption which was easy to fix. The new server had different firewall rules and that caused one feature on a website to break. The techs opened the correct outbound port to fix that. The server also has stricter rules on what websites can do which caused problems for a couple websites. I fixed those problems. Some files were changed late Friday on the old server and had to be manually moved to the new one. There were a couple email glitches that were fixed. And a few nightly scripts that were lonely for the old server and blew up but with the appropriate introductions, they seem to running happily on the new server.

By the Tuesday afternoon after Labor Day, we had solved all the problems we knew about. It was time to send out an email to our clients asking if they are had any other problems. And apparently there weren’t other problems because all we got were some “thank you” emails.

So how did it go? Overall, pretty well in spite of the hiccups. The vast majority of clients had no problems during the transition and the ones that did were rapidly fixed. In retrospect, we were too cocky about how well prepared we were. The team held a “lessons learned” meeting so we will be better prepared if we have another server move. We have documented various items we will specifically check and will have more of the staff available to do that testing. I am comfortable it will go better next time.

Actually, the rest of the company will do a better job next time. I plan to be on vacation.

STOOTS Fine Photography is presenting the work of Magnum photographer

BRUCE DAVIDSON

in the Ideal Theater building • 2405 NW Thurman Street • Portland, Oregon

This exhibition will be open to the public
Saturday September 8, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. and Sunday September 9, 12 - 5 p.m.

*Mr. Davidson will be presenting a survey of his career
“Journey of Consciousness: 50 Years in Photography”
in the Whitsell Auditorium of the Portland Art Museum
on Saturday September 8 at 6 p.m.
TICKETS are available at www.portlandartmuseum.org

For more information, please visit www.photostoots.com