The New Office: Working from Anywhere

COVID-19 has forced technological evolution and adoption at an unanticipated rate. One resulting trend is working from anywhere. At an American Business Journal "Future of Cities" event earlier this year, urban studies expert Richard Florida noted that for the first time, people are asking themselves deep questions about how they want to live and work with the understanding that they have more choices today in how to organize their lives. In this episode, three professionals representing different industries share their experiences living the work from anywhere lifestyle: Erin Lonoff, Principal with New York-based HR&A advisors, Brandon Hendrickson, founder of the online learning platform Science is Weird, and Aaron Brossoit, CEO of marketing and communications firm Golden Shovel.

HR&A Advisors: https://www.hraadvisors.com/
Science is Weird: https://www.scienceisweird.com/
Golden Shovel Agency: https://www.goldenshovelagency.com/
Destination Medical Center: https://dmc.mn/

Transcript

 Urban Evolution Podcast Episode 13 – Work From Anywhere

Bill Von Bank:

The Urban Evolution Podcast is brought to you by Destination Medical Center, creating the global destination for health and wellness in Rochester, Minnesota. More at dmc.mn.

Erin Lonoff:

My husband and I were not going to feel comfortable going back into our offices until there was a vaccine. And it sort of struck us that well, I don't think a vaccine is going to be released in the next month, and I don't think we can do this for another two months, and that was in May of 2020. So we made the decision to move back to the Midwest.

Brandon Hendrickson:

Part of the desire to move back to the Midwest was just to live the life that we actually have long wanted to live. And my goodness, Rochester definitely allows all that, everything is really cheaper here, and it makes so much of life so much less stressful.

Aaron Brossoit:

Tech is no longer going to be centered around San Francisco and Silicon Valley, that's already been clear. There's tech hubs now popping up all across the country. And some of them are going to be very competitive even for the California market.

Bill Von Bank:

Welcome to Urban Evolution, a podcast about harnessing creativity and innovation, to transform communities. I'm your host Bill Von Bank. COVID-19 has forced technological evolution and adoption at an unanticipated rate. One resulting trend is working from anywhere. At an American business journal, Future of Cities event earlier this year, urban studies expert, Richard Florida noted that for the first time, people are asking themselves deep questions about how they want to live and work with the understanding that they have more choices today in how to organize their lives.

Bill Von Bank:

Today I'm joined by three guests, representing different professions, who are living the work from anywhere lifestyle. We begin with Erin Lonoff, a principal with New York based HR&A Advisors. In the summer of 2020 and in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, she and her husband and their young daughter moved from their tiny apartment in Brooklyn, New York to Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was a homecoming of sorts and a new beginning for Erin and her family.

Erin Lonoff:

I grew up in Eastern suburb of the Twin Cities. I went to Carleton College which is in Northfield, Minnesota, and studied political science there, and at the time had a really strong passion for local government and the ways that it can really significantly change communities. That led me to a master's in city planning at UPenn. In between my two years in grad school, I interned with HR&A Advisors which is headquartered in New York. At the time I didn't have any intention of moving to New York, it really wasn't on my radar. And literally on my second day of my internship, I called up my husband and I said, "I really liked this job, what do you think about moving to New York after we graduate from grad school?" And luckily he was on board, so I got a full-time offer from HR&A, and the rest is sort of history. We moved to New York and we were there for over six years.

Bill Von Bank:

Tell us more about HR&A Advisors.

Erin Lonoff:

Yeah. HR&A Advisors is a real estate and economic development and public policy consulting firm. We work on projects across the country and internationally, related to economic development and public policy. And a lot of our work really relates to public private partnerships, so this idea of the public sector, collaborating with the private sector to realize mission led goals that align with market economics. That really translates itself into a lot of different kinds of projects, so things related to transit investment, park investment, inclusive growth strategies, economic development strategies, economic impact studies, I could go on forever. But the idea is really about the public-private partnership.

Bill Von Bank:

Some of your work with HR&A Advisors has been to help communities navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Most recently, your organization assisted the Destination Medical Center, Economic Development Agency in Rochester, Minnesota, with some scenario planning around COVID-19. Can you provide some insight into your work for Destination Medical Center?

Erin Lonoff:

The idea with that project and that study was really to help the DMC begin its planning or work through its planning for its five-year update for the master plan, the DMC master plan. And with COVID at its peak last summer, the DMC was saying to itself, well, how do we plan for the future of downtown development when we're in the middle of a huge national crisis that was affecting both Rochester and everywhere globally, as we all know. Our study was focused on, what would the impacts of COVID be for development in Rochester. What we did with this study is, first we looked at previous epidemics and pandemics to understand the economic impacts of those epidemics and pandemics globally, to understand what the shocks and the recovery looked like. To start to begin to create a model for Rochester.

Erin Lonoff:

And our model really had three components. One was, what would the depth of this recession be? And what was the depth of that shock because of COVID? What might the timing for that recovery look like? And what would be the milestone marker to guide recovery? And in that case, what we landed on was the release of a vaccine would start to turn the curve for this pandemic. Then the final piece of this model was really looking at, what might the new normal be in Rochester? Is there going to be permanent work from home or work from anywhere? Is there going to be a decrease in conventions, a decrease in the length of stay for patients visiting Rochester and the Mayo Clinic? So those were sort of the components of our model, and we worked on that in last summer, so the summer of 2020. Now as we look retrospectively of where we are now, it's incredible these scenarios and how much we got a lot right.

Bill Von Bank:

How it's playing out.

Erin Lonoff:

Yeah, how it's playing out that our baseline midline scenario was that, the vaccine would be rolling out at the time that it did, and that people would be immunized over this time period. We had a more aggressive scenario and a more conservative scenario, and all seems to have landed right in the middle.

Bill Von Bank:

So now as you look past, I think your results were published later in the year in 2020, are you doing work for other communities or other organizations now that we have more data, now that the vaccines are rolling out, now that more people are getting immunized? Can you talk a little bit more about the here and now around this topic?

Erin Lonoff:

Yeah. At this point where we're seeing this conversation really play out is, with all of our work, we are constantly having to think about, what's the future? How does COVID impact our spaces, our development, our public policies? And this plays out in a lot of different kinds of projects. So for example, in the park planning world, which I do a lot of open space planning, during COVID we saw huge increases in usage of parks, because that was something that people could do. You could go outside, and this was a great thing for mental health exercise, getting to see other people.

Erin Lonoff:

And as we move forward right now, one of the things that we're talking and thinking a lot about is, what does this look like post COVID? Frankly my hypothesis is that, we all have created a new habit and love of open space and renewed passion for being in parks. And it's really hard to imagine people leaving that behind when we are coming out of this pandemic. So how does that shape park planning and the uses and how we design public spaces? I think we're going to continue to have increased usage and people wanting to be outdoors, even after this pandemic.

Bill Von Bank:

And what a great connection to a healthier lifestyle?

Erin Lonoff:

Right.

Bill Von Bank:

It was on your website, and I found a guide that HR&A along with the Ford Foundation have a produce together called a just and resilient recovery, which is a free download. Can you give some insight into that project?

Erin Lonoff:

Yeah. We released this last spring. The idea behind this is that going into the pandemic, we did not have a just society, there's incredible amounts of inequality. And the idea is that there's a lot of rebuilding that we're going to be doing coming out of this pandemic. The idea of this report and this study is about, how do we do that in a way that is more equitable than what we had before? How do we make sure that we as communities are improving and not just going back to the status quo of what we were in the winter of 2020.

Bill Von Bank:

You living in New York for six years, in the middle of the pandemic you decided to move back to Minnesota, tell us why.

Erin Lonoff:

It sounds crazy, and I guess it was in a sense. I'll take a step back, I had a baby in the fall of 2019. My first day back from parental leave was actually March 15th. So I haven't been in my office in New York since the fall of 2019 [crosstalk 00:09:26]. There we are in our Brooklyn apartment, which was going to be great if my husband and I were each going to our respective offices and our daughter was going to be going to her daycare. So it's March 15th and we are all working from home, or both of us are working from home, my daughter is not working. And we have our daughter there who at the time is five months old, so we're doing full-time childcare and full-time work and trying to juggle it all, also without having any space to actually do these things.

Bill Von Bank:

I'm wondering in Brooklyn, probably not the biggest apartment.

Erin Lonoff:

No, it was not big at all. Also two cats too, it was chaos. We did that for about two months and we had this realization really that, even before we were working on this DMC model, for our own personal lives, we realized my husband and I were not going to feel comfortable going back into our offices until there was a vaccine. And it struck us that, well, I don't think a vaccine is going to be released in the next month, and I don't think we can do this for another two months. That was in May of 2020. So we made the decision to move back to the Midwest. My husband's from the Chicago area, I grew up here obviously in the Twin Cities. It just made sense to head home and get some help from family, and frankly get a little bit more space, so we could actually do this work from home thing.

Bill Von Bank:

And your husband's doing it as well?

Erin Lonoff:

Yep. His company already had employees who are working remotely before the pandemic. So this was not a big stretch for them to all go remote and for him to head across the country. And for my company, it really wasn't a stretch either. Because our work is across the country and national, we're constantly traveling for projects and constantly having to collaborate with one another while not being in the same room. So we were unsure how that would look in March of 2020 as a company, but it was less challenging than I think we were all expecting, in the end.

Bill Von Bank:

You fell in love with New York as an intern. You've been there for many years and then you left, was it hard to leave?

Erin Lonoff:

Yeah, it was tough. I do miss it, we have wonderful friends and I love the city, I miss the subway. It was really lovely. And as we were driving away, so we drove to the Midwest because again we're in the middle of the pandemic. So that was also quite the scene. I mean, we rented a car, so it's my husband and I, then seven month old baby and two cats. We drove straight from New York to Chicago, to his parents' house in one stretch, which I don't recommend, but it was probably it was the only way to do it. We sort of just tore off that band-aid, and it was just an incredible experience driving across the Brooklyn Bridge and sort of saying goodbye, and not really knowing when the next time would be that we'd get to be back in New York.

Bill Von Bank:

Do you have a crystal ball about whether or not you would return to New York, or is Minnesota now home?

Erin Lonoff:

Minnesota is now home, we just closed on a house for we're here.

Bill Von Bank:

Graduations.

Erin Lonoff:

Thank you. Yeah, we're really excited to be here. This is, I miss New York, we loved it, it was a really good fit for us, but with a kid now, and frankly professionally, it's just it's really been nice being home in Minnesota. I didn't miss the winters, that was a rude awakening this year.

Bill Von Bank:

And you live in Minneapolis?

Erin Lonoff:

Yep, we live in Minneapolis

Bill Von Bank:

In 2020 Brandon Hendrickson and his family moved to Rochester, Minnesota from Seattle Washington. He founded an online learning platform called Science is Weird. His one year old business has seen great success with a global client base. And he couldn't be happier with his move to the Midwest with its impressive quality of life and affordability.

Brandon Hendrickson:

My wife and I, our goal in life was to start a new kind of school. As a step toward that, we took jobs as curriculum architects at a startup school outside of Seattle, and got to design the whole curriculum, and it was fantastic. Then COVID hits, and we weirdly had, this sounds just dark to say this, but we had this advantage when COVID hit. We were living in the outskirts of Seattle and Kirkland, Washington. The first major outbreak that was known at the time of COVID was literally on our block. So our elementary school was, I believe tied for second in the nation to close and go fully online. We had a few extra weeks of practice and experimentation to just figure out like, how do we do online education wonderfully? And we're just tremendously enjoying that when we had our spring break.

Brandon Hendrickson:

I randomly put up on Facebook that if any of my friends would like me to teach the same science classes I was teaching in the classroom to their kids over Zoom that week, I would be delighted to do it. We said we would do it if we had 10 signups, and we had nearly 30. So it was just kind of snowballed from there. Every one of our lessons that we do, just starts with some sort of really simple, stupid question. And we treat that as a riddle, and I don't tell the kids the answer. I have them work really hard to come to the answer. I make it hard for every class, I lie to them at least once. I give them a bunch of just little like hints, metaphors and stories and experiments that they do in real time. I make it weird, and it's not one of those things where I pat them on the head when they know things. I pat them head when they come up with crazy ideas.

Bill Von Bank:

Give us an example.

Brandon Hendrickson:

Sure. Couple of hours ago, I did one of the ones that I do for free every Sunday which is, why is bread delicious? I said we start with a riddle, but a riddle is a question that has some sort of really strange, amazing answer, that is already something that you know about, but you don't know that you know about it, and it forces you to see the world in a new way.

Bill Von Bank:

Tell us where the name Science is Weird came from.

Brandon Hendrickson:

I suppose it's just my conviction that, the thing that got me back into loving science is the fact that you ask a simple stupid question, like why is water wet? And what you end up finding when you chase it down all the way down to the sort of intermolecular bonds of water or whatever, is something really bizarre. Because I got into the history of science, I recognized that before science became an industry, and even now that science isn't an industry, this is what so many scientists have been chasing all along. They've been chasing that dragon of a shock to your worldview that shows you that everything that you assumed was dry and boring, and that the way that the world really works is bizarre, is weird.

Bill Von Bank:

Last year in the middle of a pandemic, you moved your family to Rochester, Minnesota from Seattle, Washington, why?

Brandon Hendrickson:

I'm from Milwaukee, my wife is from Fargo. We met in Arizona. We never intended to end up in Seattle for as long as we were there, which is I think 10, 11 years. She's always wanted to be back closer to her family. One of the other big things that we have wanted to do, though, even before we had kids was to homeschool. And we couldn't do it in Seattle on an educator's salary, we can do it here on an educator salary. So part of the desire to move back to the Midwest was just to live the life that we actually have long wanted to live. And my goodness Rochester definitely allows all that, everything is really cheaper here. And it makes so much of life so much less stressful.

Brandon Hendrickson:

But we decided to do this really scientifically, we decided to sort of probe out, what are the great cities between Milwaukee and Fargo? And that it would allow us to both swing by and see our parents and have our parents come and visit us. We did our research, we looked at census data, we looked at the crime rates. We looked at cultural touchstones, we looked at everything. We've picked out, I think three or four or five cities. And so one summer, I guess, two summers ago now, we got in a minivan and we zipped around to all of them staying at cheap camp sites out of them. A lot of them were university towns. Some of those university towns won't name names were, I would say too boozy, and some of them were too shishi, were too expensive and sort of excerpts of the Twin Cities. And we wanted to live in a place that really was itself, was its own sort of destination and its own unity as a city.

Brandon Hendrickson:

When we came here, we camped next to some cornfields, about a half an hour South of town in a little town called the Grant Meadows. Every day we'd just drive into Rochester and see the things to see and stop by [inaudible 00:18:49], the best pizza within a hundred mile radius, so fantastically good. And just absolutely fell in love with the town. And since living here have not been disappointed by our choice. The human capital of this town is so great. In some ways it feels like a better intellectual mill you, just in terms of sort of like individual firepower than even Seattle was for us, which was a fantastic place for that. Because since there are a hundred thousand people, 600, 000 people, something like them inside the city from it?

Bill Von Bank:

About 112,000 in Rochester.

Brandon Hendrickson:

Thank you. You don't get people segregating into their own disciplines as much. You do really have this sort of fervid mix of smart people who are very different from one another. One of the other reasons that we were excited to move to Rochester is because we have really committed to raising our kids in a diverse and an intellectually diverse mill U and Seattle was increasingly not becoming that. Rochester is this perfectly purple town where you can meet people and argue with people and love people who politically are very much not the same as you. And somehow we managed to do this in a way that doesn't end up with all of us stabbing each other to death, which I feel like nationally is really like a local accomplishment.

Bill Von Bank:

This online platform really gave you the opportunity to work from anywhere. And that's become such a buzz phrase. And more than that, it's starting to become really important for people who now can work from anywhere in certain industries, certain businesses to say, "we always wanted to have a hobby farm in rural America." Or "We always wanted to have this." So over the course of this past year, you tracked considerable mileage from Seattle, Washington to Rochester, Minnesota. You now have an online platform and you're pretty much living the work from anywhere lifestyle.

Brandon Hendrickson:

Yeah. And it's fantastic. One of the things that I have really appreciated about the current moment is that, not only do I have the ability to work with clients across literally the whole world, but people across the whole world are more open to doing that than I think any would have been one, two, three years ago. I work with a number of families who are inside of Rochester or who are inside of Minnesota. But the bulk of our people are from very far away, the biggest sort of nest of people that we have are in Silicon Valley. So I had another side [crosstalk 00:21:40].

Brandon Hendrickson:

Yeah, just had another sign up from Cupertino this afternoon, Mountain View, San Jose, that sort of thing. Lots of New York increasing numbers overseas first from Ireland, a couple of days ago, Belgium, Switzerland, Australia, tons in Canada. It really is a global world. All of a sudden it feels like for me, I was really resistant to teaching online. I was lazy. So for me, the essence of a great education was that it had to be done in three dimensional space. And I was just so totally wrong about that.

Bill Von Bank:

Aaron Brossoit started his marketing and communications firm over 10 years ago. He was an early adopter of work from anywhere, not just for himself, but for his 40 team members who are scattered throughout the country.

Aaron Brossoit:

Golden Shovel Agency, we're an economic development communications firm. We attract talent and businesses to communities, and we help cities, counties, regions, states, and now countries promote themselves so that they can attract businesses and talent. When we started, we really cut our teeth on website development, and made a whole suite of tools that economic developers need in order to promote themselves online. And that over the last 10 years, and I guess going into our 11th year now, we just had our 10 year anniversary, we've expanded. We've faster got into doing a lot of social media and content creation. A few years back, we expanded into a full service communications firm. Since then. One of the things that we've really been focusing on is virtual reality and using the new, the virtual reality and augmented reality technology in order to help economic developers show their places from afar.

Bill Von Bank:

You have an interesting working model and you at the start over 10 years ago, it's my understanding that you created a virtual work environment for you and your team members. And now that has become such a rage because of many factors, most notably COVID 19 pandemic. Talk a little bit about you 10 years ago, deciding even though you do have a home base for this office in Minnesota, but your employees from the beginning were allowed to work remote. Correct?

Aaron Brossoit:

Yeah, that's right. From the very beginning, we decided to be a virtual company. My business partners and myself, we all had experience with previous businesses. And from my experience, we had an office, we had all the people working in the office that came every day. One of the things that you realize is it's a little difficult to sometimes retain the talent. We were in St. Cloud Minnesota, which was only an hour from the cities, and you'd bring in different talent, designers, programmers that come out of the university. You could train them in, but then they could quickly go to one of the 450 agencies that were in Minneapolis. And it got difficult to always keep the talent versus just continue to train the talent.

Aaron Brossoit:

When we started Golden Shovel Agency, we decided, you know what, first of all people should be able to choose their own workspace, not everybody has the same idea of what the perfect workspace is. Even with my old business, we had a really neat workspace, it was an old opera house. But that's even just for me to be able to say, I know what the best work environment is for everyone else to work in. I think it does a couple of things. First of all, it creates a group think where people all start coming into the same office, acting the same way, dressing a little bit the same way versus having complete freedom.

Aaron Brossoit:

So when we started Golden Shovel Agency, we went on a full-out contractor model and had everybody be allowed to work where they want, work when they want, and choose what their best environment was going to be. And you know what, the thing I love about it the most is that it brought trust back where you can truly trust where everybody they're going to do their job. It's like the handshake, no one has to look over your shoulder, nobody has to set your schedule for you, everybody can lead themselves. That's really created a really interesting culture and Golden Shovel Agency that I'm really proud of.

Bill Von Bank:

How many team members do you have with your agency?

Aaron Brossoit:

Just over 40 right now.

Bill Von Bank:

Okay. So for 10 years, and as you build your organization, you're up to 40 employees now, and basically your employees can work wherever they want. Where do they work? What are some of the places that your employees work, including you? Again, you have a home base for this office in Minnesota, but you don't live there.

Aaron Brossoit:

That's correct, yep. But right now, and for the last nine years I've been in Santa Cruz, California. I was the only person from our company that was on California, and just recently had another person join us. But we are scattered all across the country. We're in something like 15, 16 states of a couple of different countries that have got a couple of people working in Mexico. Right now we have somebody working in Jamaica. Sometimes that's people that we've worked with and they've moved there, and other times we've hired people there and they just choose to live there.

Bill Von Bank:

I learned about some of your work through a white paper that you had published through LinkedIn. And I happened to download it, it's called Rethinking Workforce Attraction the Age of Remote Work. Give us a little insight into this document, and what are some interesting scenarios for communities or states looking to compete for remote workers.

Aaron Brossoit:

Especially when COVID hit, everybody went to, it was the ultimate test and ultimate experiment, and everybody worked from home. For us that was not of too much issue since we had been doing it for 10 years already, we didn't lose too much strides. But as you might imagine, as an economic development communications firm, we were called into action immediately by all of our clients at once to make sure that information got out to save the jobs that were inside those communities. Regarding the remote work, once everybody started working at home, and I'm a perfect example, because I live in the Bay Area right now, the companies realized that they don't necessarily need all their people in the office. And what that meant is that the people realize that they don't necessarily need to be in the location that they're at, if they can work from anywhere.

Aaron Brossoit:

Now, it's not every type of job that can do this, there's certainly jobs that you just aren't physically capable of doing remote work on. But it opened up this huge opportunity across the nation and started a mass migration of people. And it went from, somebody that's saying, "You know what? I don't necessarily need to be in this small apartment, that's costing me a million dollars here, when instead could go to any other place around the country that might get me a completely different scenario for, a million dollars." Maybe, but whatever, there's just so much more that could get somewhere else for the same cost. There wasn't a reason that they had to commute to their job anymore.

Bill Von Bank:

Right. Or somebody who maybe was in a urban setting, but decided, "Hey, I've always wanted a hobby farm." And they could go to a rural setting because now they have that opportunity, granted they'll need to make sure the internet works. And the opportunities almost become endless in terms of fulfilling a passion, whether it's new land or moving from a rural setting to an urban setting, it's just opened up so many opportunities for workers.

Aaron Brossoit:

Absolutely. It also opened up a lot of opportunities for rural communities and for suburbs to do economic development promotion, to the remote workers, to try to attract them in. There's a couple key things and you hit on one of them, it's internet access, that absolutely is requirement. Housing is a large issue. So suddenly if you're going to bring in a bunch of remote workers, they need a place to live. And that's been a steady focus over the last year. Quality of life becomes a big issue because if someone's going to be moving, they're going to want to suddenly choose a place where they can live, like hobby farm is perfect example. Fourthly, the cost of living is a giant driver for people moving. Right now, certainly in the housing market is difficult in general, but the difference of costs between say the Bay Area and Rochester, Minnesota is significant.

Bill Von Bank:

Would you predicted that the pandemic would have brought about these changes so fast?

Aaron Brossoit:

It makes sense looking back at it, why it happened. Right away we got pretty quick into helping the communities get messaging that goes directly to the remote workers, especially from the urban areas out. So we could literally target to the right type of talent that we knew could work remotely, and so inside those communities, were basically targeted right into the community to attract. I think that's been going. I mean, there are communities all across this country that are right now just paying people to actually move there and do remote work, which is a whole new game, and in some ways-

Bill Von Bank:

Tulsa, for example.

Aaron Brossoit:

Tulsa, Oklahoma has an excellent remote work program. Yep, it's been very successful.

Bill Von Bank:

If you could crystal ball the competition then, because this is a very competitive marketplace right now for remote workers, will we see significant competition from maybe states or cities that you normally wouldn't expect to compete for remote workers, whether it's Midwest or the Heartland area? Because you're seeing people leaving California, for example, and Phoenix and Austin, Texas, are plucking from California left and right. Do you see any hotbeds of recruitment opportunities?

Aaron Brossoit:

Yeah. Absolutely. I would say, large number of our clients are doing remote work strategies and going out of their way to market sometimes directly into California, sometimes into local urban centers. I don't think the cities are going to die, cities are incredibly resilient. They're always going to be people coming back in, there's always going to be opportunities there, but it is such an exciting opportunity for these other communities to grow. Like one thing is that tech is no longer going to be centered around San Francisco and Silicon Valley. That's already been clear, there's tech hubs now popping up all across the country. And some of them are going to be very competitive even for the California market. Austin, Apple is putting a brand new headquarters over in the research triangle. And it's just this shift and it's flowing all the way across. New York is still incredibly powerful in tech and tech just being one example.

Bill Von Bank:

Google, for example, just announced its first Minnesota office in Rochester, Minnesota, thanks to a partnership with Mayo Clinic.

Aaron Brossoit:

Yep. That's right, and IBM is there?

Bill Von Bank:

So Aaron you counsel and consult with over 200 economic development agencies all around the country and some of them around the world around, around this topic and many others, you have spent the last eight years in California, but it's time for you to move back home to Minnesota. Can you tell us a little bit about your story?

Aaron Brossoit:

Yeah, absolutely. So once again, I've been out here for nine years since we could work remotely, my wife and I said, let's go on an adventure and chose a, kind of like a copywriter running off to Hollywood. We took our small web company at the time and ran off to Silicon Valley and make contacts and meet people here. It's been a phenomenal experience, I've been living out here. But there were a lot of things that happened over this last year, as you know over COVID between feeling a little disconnected with our families to being able to choose maybe a different environment with more space. Kind of like you said, running off and getting a hobby farm, we thought, you know what? I think we'd like a little more, a little bit more space to live.

Aaron Brossoit:

In Minnesota we have a great connections and we had a roots that are back here. And so it seemed like a really good opportunity to make a shift back in that direction. A couple of other things too, including, that certainly the cost of living out here is higher, but also there were fires. We evacuated our mountain home last fall, which was frightening, to say the least. And then the cold, but also just having, being so much more restricted and not being able to get out quite as much. I do believe things will return to some sort of normal, but certainly not the same as it was. Because we can work from anywhere we can choose to move.

Bill Von Bank:

The Golden Shovel Agencies, white paper, Rethinking Workforce Attraction, in the Age of Remote Work, highlights many benefits of remote workers to local economies. For example, telecommuters reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an amount equal to 600,000 cars. Remote workers are renters and home purchasers. They spend money at local businesses. They contribute to placemaking and help solve critical workforce needs for employers. Learn more about this podcast and our guests at urbanevolutionpodcast.com. Urban Evolution is a production of Destination Medical Center, Economic Development Agency based in Rochester, Minnesota, a work from anywhere city. More at dmc.mn. Thank you for tuning in. Stay safe and be well.