Espotel Wroclaw office just got 5 years old !

Of the Espotel's total ~300 people, 70 persons are working at our Wroclaw office. The office is located quite close to Wroclaw airport, so You only need to get Yourselt to Wroclaw and You are almoset there.

The office location is not that fancy (well, none of our offices really are), but we like to keep a low profile, and concentrate on the essential :

And inside it looks like this :

It all began five years ago, when we had a golden opportunity to open our first non-Finland based location. Actually the search had began at least a year before that. At that time Espotel had already several offices in Finland, but none abroad. We had been searching for the right location and visited several possible sites in different countries and cities. As always, opening a Design Center requires several things to click : the location must have right kind of work force available and there should be good customer potential. It's beneficial if the location is in same time zone and culturally close. And it wouldn't hurt if we can improve our cost efficiency when providing services to Finland also.

Well, Wroclaw met all these goals, some better and some less so, some things have come as a surprise, positive ones really. The golden opportunity refers to the fact that we immediately had one largish and kind of friendly Customer available to start working on a new site from scratch. That made the investment decision easier, but by no means was enough to start the work. We also had a strong belief, that we are able to find other Customer in Finland for the service as well. But what has really been a bit of a positive surprise is the amount of Local Customers we have been able to find ! The Wroclaw operation started so that all the Customers were from Finland, but at the moment there is way more Local Customers. Which is a very much healthier situation. We are also able to support some of our Customers more globally now.

So, we are serving a lot of Central European companies that have operations also in Wroclaw locally. Those companies could never have been reached by operating in Finland also.

So, how has it been ?

Well, it always comes to getting the right people to work. 

First of all, the location has been a good one. Wroclaw is a really good location because of it's pool of talented engineers. It's a big University city, and one with strong embedded design focus also. And because of that, there are also several well known companies and their Design Centers, doing really demanding R&D projects. And thus a healthy pool of competent and experienced designers as well as fresh graduates also. There is also some competition of the best people naturally, which is sometimes less nice... At the beginning we had one Finnish guy working for half a year at Wroclaw, recruiting designers and most importantly, hiring the Site Manager. And since then the development of the Wroclaw site has been his responsibility. 

Culturally Poland doesn't feel too different to Finland. A Polish engineer is hard to tell from a Finnish one. Both are very much focused on facts and getting things done and problems solved. Of course there are subtle differencies which should be understood also. But nothing really spectacular or fancy. We both have our history in between superpowers, and it's left it's marks to people's minds. But now we are living a peaceful and modern times which hopefully continue to be so...

So does everything always go well ?

Quite well, but of course there are hiccups and learning to do. Neither does everything always go smoothly when doing projects within one country or one site purely. The longer the distance gets, the more work it needs to get people stay on same page. In my opinion the success has less to do with whether we do a project from Wroclaw to Espoo, from Kuopio to Espoo or from Espoo to Tampere, than it has to do with getting a right mix of people working on a project. We always need a good and well communicating technical lead designer or project manager close to customer, and then we should have focused teams working on a project. So that either the whole project or a clear part of it can be designed and tested on one location. Not everybody needs to be a Senior Expert, but there must be enough Seniority  within the project, and on location, to make the Delivery successful. Not Rocket Science, but sometimes hard work, especially when there are only a few people available and several projects needing to start :) That's when the Companys true Values are tested.

Anyway, Wroclaw office is our second largest one and doing great work, so I'll open a bottle of 5 year old Red Wine to celebrate it tonight !

PS. Excellent wine, and just in time for our Downton Abbey evening...