Your Steamboat Corner Office

Steamboat Springs has it all, the mountains, Champagne Powder® snow, the Yampa River. It’s a vacationer’s paradise, a little slice of heaven just far enough off the beaten path to remain unspoiled yet accessible. It’s also a real town with a true sense of community. Tourists remark that, “this would be a beautiful place to live.” Warren Miller said it best when talking about moving to your favorite mountain town, “if you don’t do it this year, you’ll be one year older when you do.” This is the first of many future blog posts describing what it’s like to live and work in beautiful Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Hopefully you’ll see soon realize how easy it is to run your business or work remotely for an employer while living in “Ski Town USA.”

Steamboat also offers all the essentials of doing business: high speed Internet, 3G wireless service, and easily accessible private and commercial air service.

Beyond the recreational activities typically associated with a mountain town, Steamboat has the same amenities you’d expect to find in a larger city: public transportation, a first-class hospital, amazing schools, plentiful shopping, splendid dining, exciting nightlife, vibrant civic clubs and community programs, and more parks than stoplights. Steamboat also offers all the essentials of doing business: high speed Internet, 3G wireless service, and easily accessible private and commercial air service. More recently, we now have a place for entrepreneurs and tech-junkies to simply “hang out” and network, thanks to Ignite Steamboat.

What’s missing in Steamboat is traffic jams, hour-long commutes, smog, friends and business associates who are too far away to ever get together with, and jam-packed high rise office buildings. That’s exactly why most of us moved here!

Recent innovations in technology have allowed more and more people to choose where to live based on the quality of life rather than necessity. A little over ten years ago my team was all co-located in a suburban office building with heavy CRT monitors sitting on top of large desktop computers connected to wired Ethernet. “Working from Home” meant I had to temporarily check out a laptop from my IT department, copy any necessary files from my desktop’s hard drive to the laptop before leaving the office, and login to a 56k dial-up VPN connection if I wanted to check emails.

Now I work on a laptop that weighs less than 4 lbs, store most of my data in the “cloud,” and frequently collaborate remotely with team members and clients over telephone and web conferences from my mountain view office. If I need to meet with a co-worker or client face-to-face, it’s only a 20 minute drive to the Yampa Valley Airport where I can arrive 15 minutes before my flight, park less than 50 yards from the plane, breeze through a short security line, and board a regional jet for easy access to a wide variety of both US and international destinations.

In addition to the hundreds of “location neutral” employees who work remotely for a corporation hundreds or thousands of miles away, Steamboat also has a long list of local business success stories.
Smartwool
The 65+ employees at Smartwool sold millions of dollars in wool socks last year alone.

Moots
Titanium Bicycle Frame manufacturer, Moots, was recently named a Colorado “Company to Watch.”

Big Agnes
Big Agnes continues to grow their line of outdoor gear and recently expanded into the energy bar business with their wildly successful Honey Stinger brand.

Countless other businesses in Steamboat are off to a great start in reaching this same success, some of which even take advantage of the free office space and startup mentoring provided by local incubator Storm Peak Innovations.

Steamboat Springs offers that “work hard, play hard” way of life that is too often over-quoted yet under-realized.

Future blog posts will describe in more detail the many benefits our little town has to offer for business people while also talking about some of the challenges those of us who live here do experience. We’ll feature guest posts from business owners who will tell you why they’ve chosen Steamboat for their business. We’ll have specific advice from location neutral employees describing how they were able to convince their manager to let them move to Steamboat and how their career has enjoyed even more success because of that decision. We’ll respond to any questions or concerns you may have about these topics through the post comments section.

We might even throw up a couple pictures of the lifestyle Steamboat employees and business owners enjoy on a daily basis, just to make you a little jealous and to remind you of Warren Miller’s advice!