Last week was big for the Howell Companies. The culmination of many years' worth of work, and after lots of thinking, rethinking, considering and re-considering, I finally pulled the trigger on our new home. It has been said that you can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been. This is a simple sentence that I’ve said to myself countless times over the last 27 years.
It feels like I started the company yesterday, working alongside Joe Russella in a single room that used to be a veterinarian's office on a farm. We plugged in two Gateway computers, loaded AutoCAD on one, and were off and running. I ran QuickBooks on a laptop I bought at Office Max, did payroll and paid bills at night.
It didn’t take long before we moved into 1,800 SF of office space on Hagerty Boulevard, and I thought to myself, “This is all we will ever need.”
A few years later, we had grown and moved to McDermott Drive off Greenhill Road, and we had almost doubled the space to 3,400 SF. I thought to myself, “Now… THIS is all we will ever need.”
We worked hard, stayed busy, made mistakes, learned from mistakes and soon found a need to expand into the suite next to our space. I then said, “Alright, this is it, we will not need more than this, we have room to grow now for sure.”
Then, I made the mistake of visiting my good friend and competitor's office in King of Prussia and thought to myself, “THIS is what I need for my company… we need our OWN building.” And this time, I wasn’t playing around, I was going to build something we could be in for the life of the companies. A place we could all fit in, grow in and most importantly be happy in. 1250 Wrights Lane was born… 14,300 SF of just what we needed!!!!
We designed the site and the building specifically for our use, and bam… THIS was now finally, and officially, all we will ever need. I knew with absolute certainty this was the case because when I left EB Walsh many years before, I borrowed my old boss and mentor’s book, Staying Small Successfully (don’t even think of making a joke here), and it said, pretty clearly, a successful “boutique” engineering firm is typically 17-24 people. Perfect, I thought… we have room for everyone, our files and even an exercise room for employees. Heck, we had a kitchen and even a server room for our IT department to call home. I thought to myself, "I have done it; I have created a home for our company, and it has everything we will ever need." I can finally settle in and just be an engineer, without worrying about whether we have room to expand… right? Wrong.
In 2026, we need more space, and we have entered a new era! 1247 Ward Avenue will become our new home in a few months (we are doing renovations) and will have room for Howell Engineering, Howell Surveying, Howell Construction Stakeout, Howell Environmental, ePhase and Smith and Howell Design Co. Along with all of this “room”, we will have a café, an in-house chef for our team and an outside fenced-in office pet area.
Much more to come, but the question is, “Is this all we will ever need?” I hope not, I have too much fun rising to the challenge!
OnWARD (avenue) and upWARD (avenue).
