Java Jack’s coffee shop in south Minneapolis doubles as an office for SGF Consulting, a Twin Cities software-development firm. There is nothing official about the arrangement. It’s just that Joe Throndson, who handles business development, and Greg Dougherty, David Hussman, and Ryan Danielson, SGF’s principals, meet at Java Jack’s regularly, spending hours at a time in a nook of the L-shaped shop, laptop computers open and cell phones on.
Other than this, SGF has no office to call its own. The partners work mostly at client locations and “we all have an office at home,” Dougherty explains, “but a lot of the time, we go to a coffee shop to break up the day.”
To work at home takes a lot of discipline, Hussman adds: “We come here to get something done.”
“Our meetings are usually in a restaurant or coffee shop,” Throndson says. That includes monthly and quarterly business planning meetings among the partners, as well as meetings with subcontractors and sometimes clients.
Customers who come in to do their own business are good for business because of the charges they ring up at the register and because of the caffeinated buzz they generate—a steady hum of commerce that makes the atmosphere as stimulating as another cup of joe.
Java Jack’s is a favorite, but by no means SGF’s only corporate address. A downtown Dunn Brothers location has an oversized table in a back room that works elegantly for larger meetings. Otherwise, the principals’ main criteria for choosing a location are that Wi-Fi Internet access should be available—with free access a distinct plus—and that they should like the coffee shop’s staff.
SGF is not some tiny, fly-by-night operation. The partners work on projects around the world and farm out software-development jobs to some 30 subcontractors. But so much of their business is conducted at client sites that “if we had an office, we wouldn’t be sitting there all day anyway,” Hussman says. “Meeting [in coffee shops] is more efficient in some ways, because when we do meet we’re more focused. It’s not as if we’ll see each other randomly in the hallway.”
