An Ideal startup
Firm that moved to Santa Fe from Washington, D.C., specializes in a better experience for employees
For the city of Santa Fe and its desire to attract businesses powered by younger owners, Ideal State on Lena Street is a dream come true. The new offices are spartan but comfortable, with workstations for its seven employees, whiteboards filled with ideas and strategy, and even two friendly dogs.
Ideal State owners Sara Teitelman and Jeremy Nurse recently moved from Washington, D.C., and chose to do business in Santa Fe over everywhere else.
“We think it is a great place to invest in,” Teitelman said. “We would love to see more young people living here. We would love to see more professional jobs for them to do.”
Eventually, creating more jobs in Santa Fe is a goal of Ideal State, which is a self-funded startup. To do that, however, Ideal State seeks to expand its business by helping companies clean up their internal information technology act.
“Our approach is to bring design thinking into the workplace,” Teitelman said. “We feel we are on the leading edge of a movement.”
The movement, as Nurse and Teitelman see it, is to help companies that have spent so much effort being customer-focused realize that they have forgotten one key ingredient — their employees. One of Ideal State’s first challenges was a huge one — Catholic Relief Services, a 5,000-plus employee nonprofit that focuses on the needs of the poor in more than 100 countries.
To help the relief agency clear its muddled communications between many far-flung offices, Ideal State went to its playbook, which it calls “the knowledge ecosystem.”
According to its website, there are four primary things that make up a healthy system:
Strategy: Where you’re trying to go and a road map for how to get there;
Community and collaboration: How people connect, learn and work better together;
Content management: How meaningful content is produced, discovered and used;
Data and information management: How data are transformed into useful, accessible information.
Most everyone who works in a modern office has seen an unhealthy one. The office printer is usually called everything but a printer. Communicating with people down the hall, much less in offices hundreds or even thousands of miles away, is much harder than it should be. And who hasn’t spent a highpressure hour or two searching for a file on a server that is a must-have at a crucial upcoming meeting?
“[Employees] are interacting with all this tech all day long, and no one is thinking about that experience,” Teitelman said. Nurse quickly agreed. “There is a growing awareness about how you implement these systems,” he said. “It’s a lot like a garden that has to be designed and curated.”
Ideal State maps the chaos of most large
companies and then draws a new, cleaner and more efficient map, a more ideal environment.
The focus is on the end user, with particular attention to “the user where everything is always breaking for them,” said Teitelman. “We want to bring these people into the fold as soon as possible. We want those people to be part of our stakeholder group. So often they don’t feel they are included.”
Ideal State doesn’t have its own technology, but focuses on recommending off-the-shelf solutions.
“We don’t develop our own technology; we help choose the right technology,” Teitelman said. “We help companies choose the right system and then make sure it is used correctly.”
The founding partners saw plenty of this in previous jobs working with large nonprofits and private-sector companies doing business with the federal government. As a consultant,
Nurse supported the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ enterprise architecture division that oversees the department’s $4.2 billion IT budget. Teitelman worked for the Gates Foundation and the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation and Pact.
Ideal State focuses on companies with 500 or more employees, works mainly with nonprofits and has a particular emphasis on helping companies that want to focus on the “social good.”
“We realized if we could fix these problems at organizations doing social good, then the payoff would be 10 or 15 times more,” Teitelman said. Projects can cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They have found their decision to locate in Santa Fe a perfect fit.
“We were looking for a lifestyle change,” Nurse said. “Santa Fe turned out to be central for us to reach our clients on the West Coast and the East Coast. It’s a combination of things that make it awesome to live here.”