In true Portland Fashion, the FMYI team hit the opening day of Oregon Brewers Fest using the only acceptable mode of transportation for such happenings: BICYCLES!  We figured there is no better way to enjoy the summer and facilitate a “team building meeting” than with bikes and brews. To that - we say cheers!

From FMYI’s blog:

At a reception held last [Thursday] night, the Portland Business Journal unveiled its 2010 Top 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies in Oregon. “Like a mighty salmon, these 100 businesses are King of the River and successfully made it upstream in this challenged economy,“ said Craig Wessel, Portland Business Journal Publisher. (more…)

Two of the Portland Business Journal’s Top 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies in Oregon are members of the Leftbank community. Sockeye came in at 57, and FMYI ranked lucky 13. Congratulations to both! Keep swimming upstream, you kings of the river. We’re cheering you on, here from the Leftbank.

Portland Business Journal and Sustainable Business Oregon invite you to the Sustainable Business Oregon Innovation Awards event.

Leftbank’s own FMYI is the small business winner!  They’re in the good company of Miller Paint and Truitt Bros., Inc. (medium and large business winners, respectively), as well as the Sustainable Vision Award winner, Zero Waste Alliance.

So next Thursday, May 27th, join the excitement at the Portland Art Museum from 11:30 to 1:00.  Bill Reinert, National Manager for Toyota’s Advanced Technology Group, will deliver a keynote address.

From the FMYI blog:

One of the goals I had when creating FMYI was to grow the business while offering worklife balance for our team members. This seems paradoxical and insane. But if you think about what a startup is all about, it’s putting ideas into practice. And the only way to come up with ideas or think strategically is to make sure your brain isn’t fatigued. Worklife isn’t just a nice to have, it’s essential to coming up with new ideas and tackling all the challenges that come your way. You need to be able to take a step back constantly to evaluate where the startup is headed in order to make needed course corrections along the way.

The irony of this blog post is I put it off in order to spend time with my family. Our second child was born a week before our FMYI 6.0 release, which presented some challenges. I touched on this topic briefly in the The Oregonian recently. I want to live a full life with family and friends, while contributing to the economy by helping to create jobs in a sustainable way. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive, but it is a challenge to balance them.

So how do you enable worklife balance in a fast paced startup environment? Fortunately, technology makes so much possible these days. A lot of attention is on real time tools like live videoconferencing, but most of your day isn’t meetings (and if it is, maybe it’s time to work somewhere else =) ). It’s emails and “water-cooler” chats. This allows you to reflect on what’s being said, rather than the immediate reaction required at meetings. Most of the FMYI team members were telecommuters in the early days and many still are telecommuters, and we rely heavily on our own collaboration system to make everything run smoothly. Similar to the phenomenon of Facebook where you can stay up to date with what your old friends are doing in between phone calls and seeing each other face to face, browsing your FMYI site keeps you up to date on what’s going on — but at work.

In the end, it’s all about the quality of your work, not how many hours you’re investing, and whether you’re in the office or not. This applies to startups and big organizations (definitely check out Best Buy’s successes with results-oriented work). We’ve found that offering your team worklife options like telecommuting, flexible schedules, fewer meetings, family leaves, and involving friends and families with events and work opportunities can help. Of course, there are times when balance is difficult due to new projects. But it’s the new projects that enable you to grow and provide worklife benefits.

Next up in my series on starting a business: leveraging technology and social media. In the meantime, have fun enjoying your own worklife balance with friends and family!
-Justin

The entire FMYI team will be in town (including the folks from Orlando and New Orleans!) to celebrate the opening of our new HQ offices in The Leftbank Project and the recent BusinessWeek/GigaOM article about us. Please join us for drinks, appetizers and the opportunity to hang out with the FMYI family. Check out our new office and this great sustainable building.

Some things to know about the party:

1. We’ll have a cash bar and appetizers for you to enjoy from 5-7 pm and an introduction to our new space after that! Also, the party is kid friendly - feel free to bring the little ones!

2. Our building is easily accessible by car, Max, bus, and bike. Here are the details. Parking is free in the lot in front of the cafe and on the street. There’s a lot of bike racks in front by the cafe. And we’re just a few blocks from the Rose Quarter Max/bus stop.

3. Your travel to our party is going to be offset by FMYI through a partnership with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation! Be sure to put your name down on the list when you come in to register the offset (no cost to you).

4. See more party info and some photos and a video of the space on our Evite and Facebook pages. We’ll also be taking photos and videos at the party to capture the energy!

Props to Justin Gorman for painting the FMYI logo and some oversized text on our wall! Swing by suite 126 and take a look…

FMYI is an online collaboration software company that empowers teams to make a difference. Since 2004, businesses, government, universities and non-profits have been using its proven platform to take action and achieve goals (by tracking files, projects, resources, contacts, calendar, etc.) Guided by the triple bottom line (people, planet and profit), it endeavors to be a business with minimal ecological impact and maximum social value. FMYI enables customers’ sustainability with paperless work processes, tracking and reporting tools, and purchasing renewable energy credits for their FMYI power usage. FMYI offers free support as a key part of making technology work for people and its tagline, “Powered by human energy. ®”