Back in May of 2008, my family moved to Oregon so my wife could go to grad school. Shortly after arriving, I contacted my old friend Bryce. I hadn’t seen Bryce since high school but our connection goes back to Kindergarten. We decided to meet up for lunch at a restaurant near his office. He had just set up an office in a real office building after running his business, The Gartrell Group (TGG), out of his basement for the past five years! After lunch we went over to the office so I could say hi to his sister, Molly. He and Molly were running the business; it was the two of them and a few part-time, contract developers.
Bryce had started The Gartrell Group on a bit of a whim back in 2003. He was home on paternity leave after the birth of his second son when he decided to see if he could drum up some independent projects sufficient to justify the establishment of a business focused on GIS services. It worked, so he quit his job (his employer then went on to become a client!) and started down the path of offering a niche speciality service in GIS consulting, application development and hosting.
While Bryce was starting his company in the Pacific Northwest, his sister Molly was teaching Math & Science in The Bahamas and Florida. In June of 2004, after school was out, Molly came to Portland to help Bryce on a project. Her plan was to work on the project for the summer and return to teaching in the fall. The siblings enjoyed working together and decided to keep going with it. Molly’s organizational skills helped keep the lights and servers on while Bryce was able to concentrate on technical services and solutions. Bryce’s college buddy Marcus was instrumental in setting up that first server and in subsequent server configurations.
In addition to app development and hosting, TGG did quite a bit of analysis work in those first few years. There were some projects for siting wind farms, micro-hydro facilities, GIS training facilitation for local municipalities, and some site location analysis solutions for large, Fortune-500 Companies (let’s just say they were companies everyone reading this is familiar with). TGG had also moved the servers out of Bryce’s basement and into a local server farm.
In that first year of living in Oregon, my wife was crazy BUSY with grad school and I was CRAZY busy being a stay-at-home Dad to our two young sons. Bryce and I stayed close and I started doing some work with him on responses to RFPs coming from various state and federal government agencies. In that year, The Gartrell Group hired their first full-time, non-family member, employee. Tim Fiez came onboard as TGG’s first Solution Architect in early 2009.
I was hired full-time in 2010 to manage TGG’s growing number of projects. It was a period of great growth for the business. We brought in many contract developers and refined some of our project management and implementation skills. It was around this time that we first started experimenting with cloud solutions. Being able to scale up or down was extremely appealing to many of our clients.
My work with TGG has evolved over the years. I wasn’t really the best Project Manager, but I could understand our clients’ needs and express them in a succinct manner from which our Solution Architect could create a blueprint for our developers. I moved onto doing discovery and testing, while we hired a Project Manager who was good at cracking the whip. We also hired a couple of full-time developers. TGG had enough business to move past the need for contract developers and sustain some full-time help.
Tim left TGG in 2015 to get Top-Secret credentials working for a satellite imagery company. Our first full-time Developer, Ben Sainsbury stepped in to fill the Solution Architect role. One of Ben’s side projects was a web app that would pull together disparate data types and make them work together. He was the perfect guy for the job!
It was around this time that the siblings took a hard look at where they were and where they wanted to go. In order to reflect their solidifying roles and Molly’s increased investment and responsibility in the business, she became the Majority Owner/CEO of the company.
I’ve watched The Gartrell Group grow from a tiny little shop into a bustling enterprise employing more than 15 geo-spatial developers. They are all focused on improving our customers' ability to better visualize and understand their work within a geospatial context. We help realize and capitalize on the role that location plays in their work.
While there are other, similar, medium-sized GIS shops around the country, the thing that really sets The Gartrell Group apart from the crowd is the fact that we have a full-time QA team onboard. In 2020, we hired Erick Caceres to be TGG’s first Director of Quality Assurance. Erick has a deep background in software testing and brings with him processes and workflows that help us ensure a bug-free product for our clients.
It’s been amazing to watch two of my oldest friends grow a company from nothing to something that provides employment to something like 20 people (we keep growing; it’s hard to keep count!) and reliable software and hosting solutions to over 100 organizations. It’s because of their hard work, dedication, and loving and fun attitudes that The Gartrell Group has grown. It’s because of their dedication to family, and their playful and open attitudes that The Gartrell Group has created and maintained a culture of work hard, play hard, and love your family.
If you want to work with the best team out there, look no further. You’ve found your place. Contact us today!
