First employee, first office

Today was a big day in the life of NewOrbit. Our first employee, Technical Director Pete Kendall, joined us and we moved into a joint office.

Sean (co-owner of NewOrbit) and I  have so far been working out of our respective homes but with new staff joining us, it was time for a change. We are currently in the process of actually building a dedicated office but it’s not quite finished yet so we have taken a large spare bedroom and converted it into a temporary office.

I have always been a firm believer in the idea that people need proper tools to do their jobs. For IT people that means good monitors, computers and chairs and the software you need. Dell are selling 24” flat-screen monitors for £200 each so that was a no-brainer, one for each of us, which works very nicely when combined with the laptop’s 15.4” on a docking station.

For chairs we are fortunate that so many businesses in London are cutting back as it meant we could get 3 Aeron chairs for a little over £300 each. So now we can sit comfortably and write code or whatever else we need to do on big, bright monitors. Microsoft’s BizSpark programme has us sorted with regards to software.

Life’s too short not to have the right tools for the job.

When we started NewOrbit last year we focused primarily on consulting work to get the business off the ground and that has been very successful. However, it was always our intention to do something other than consulting; Consulting is a day’s pay for a day’s work so whenever you are not working, you are not making any money. There is good money in consulting but it is a treadmill and doesn’t help us achieve what we really want. Our main focus now is on our NewOrbit Rapid Systems business unit, where we build bespoke business systems for companies. We are using an application builder platform to do this, which allows us to very rapidly develop bespoke, hosted systems. Sean’s and my background are in business management and optimisation, meaning that we have a lot of experience in process optimisation and business integration, experience which we are putting to use analysing client’s requirements and building systems for them.