Client Portal
When Linden and Letecia started Agile IT in 2007, the picture in our heads was simple. Build a business we would be proud to own in twenty years' time. Look after clients properly. Be the kind of people who pick up the phone when it matters. We did not have a plan for an architect-designed office on the Peninsula. That came later.
Eighteen years on, that office is being built. Building C, 6/41 Watt Road, Mornington. We have written about the decision to move to Free Form already (our new home at Free Form, Mornington). This post is about what it has been like to watch it actually happen , visit by visit, panel by panel, light fitting by light fitting.
Where it sits
Free Form is a Gestalt Property development on Watt Road. The design brief was the opposite of the standard industrial estate: light concrete, white brickwork, timber that ages well over time, an on-site cafe, landscaped shared spaces, and a community of other owner-operated businesses around us.
The first few visits, the whole site looked like every other half-built industrial development. Trade vehicles, scaffolding, dust, dirt. You had to use your imagination to see the finished thing. We took photos anyway, because we knew we would want them later.
Then the building started to look like the renders
The shift from "anonymous concrete shell" to "this is going to be a place we are proud of" happened around the time the timber feature wall went on and the large painted "C" was lifted into place. From that visit on, every drive past felt different. It was no longer someone else's construction site. It was ours.
The little white oval marker says C · 6. Building C, unit 6. That is us. A two-character address that took eighteen years of business to earn the right to put on a wall.
Inside
The interior fit-out crept up on us. You can stand outside a building for months and feel like nothing is changing. You step inside one afternoon and the floor is down, the ceilings are in, the windows frame a view of the construction site that will, in a few weeks, be landscaping.
The fit-out details matter to us. Plywood panels with a real grain. Counters that you can stand at and have a real conversation, not a "where do I sign" exchange. A kitchen that lets you actually make someone a coffee, the way you would at home.
What this means to us
It is an office. We know that. But after eighteen years of running a business out of various places, having a permanent home that we designed deliberately, in a community we chose, with a front door that says C · 6, that means something to both of us.
The cliche about small business is that the founders pour themselves into the work and there is not much left over for anything else. We have lived that. The trade-off has been worth it, the clients we have kept for fifteen and twenty years, the team that has stayed and grown with us, the standard of work we get to put out every week. But it has been quiet trade-offs, internal ones. Nothing you could point at.
The new office is something you can point at. It is an architectural render that became a concrete shell that became an office. It is the visible side of the decision we made eighteen years ago to do this properly. And on the days the windows are washed and the doors are working and the kettle is on, we will know exactly what every previous year of running the business was for.
Almost there
The build is in its final stretch. The "Coming Soon" label still sits next to the Mornington address in our website footer, because it is still true. When we open the doors properly, we will let the world know.
If you have been a client through some or all of the last eighteen years, and many of you have, you will get an invite when we open. The kettle will be on. Bring stories.
, Linden & Letecia Jackson