The Remarketer

You could say that’s our mantra…

You must be thinking that’s an odd thing to say, after all, shouldn’t a company be “inspiring,” “amazing” and all those other superlatives? I don’t disagree, but it all starts with doing everyday things in a less annoying manner.

The fact is that every company has tasks that are bound to annoy either those doing them or their clients. Our goal is to make these interactions more human, and by doing so, hopefully our staff and clients’ days are a bit less stressful. Here are some ways in which we’re less annoying:

Two weeks ago, two of our best techs, Erick and Kris, informed me that Slashdot’s 10th Anniversary was upon us and that we had to host a regional anniversary party for them. Of course I agreed, because all of the following are awesome: Erick and Kris, Slashdot, Slashdotters and Parties.

I reeled in approval from the top to throw some money at this and put the techs in charge of planning and organizing. Last night we had the party here and I think the results were pretty great.

(Lindsi rolled all the photos and videos into a great montage.)

The Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal’s 9th annual “Best Places to Work” publication came out on Friday, and Vibrant ranked in the top 20 small businesses. It’s a great honor to work for a company that is even considered, and especially for one of the winners.

I love working for Vibrant - and I’m quick to share stories about my time here with friends or family. The “perks” of working for an edgy, innovative company range from Video Game Happy Hours to themed summer and holiday parties - but while those events provide occasional entertainment, the fun part is the bonding that takes place between employees.

Interop Las Vegas 2007 was a successful show for Vibrant. We met many current networking clients as well as hopefully several future ones. There are definitely many end-users and resellers interested in used Cisco, used Servers and the secondary IT hardware market.

The show was very active with close to 20,000 attendees, 450 exhibitors and all varieties of stunts, costumes and give-aways. Vibrant gave away two Night Vision Monoculars (to spot our great Cisco deals ). The winners guessed the correct number of Cisco Thing-a-ma-jigs in a fishbowl (38), which drew many questions and were actually old school cable management kits. Congrats to our two winners!

What is a Twitter hunt?

It’s a simple treasure hunt, except the clues are given out via Twitter. In our case, we’ll be giving out $200 in chips to the person who can find Vibrant’s own Lindsi Gish somewhere within Interop Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center.

Between 2 and 4PM on Wednesday, May 23rd, clues will be given out every 10-15 minutes via Vibrant’s Twitter profile (www.twitter.com/vibrant) regarding the profile and location of Lindsi. The first one to find her wins.

What is Interop?

Fun news today at Vibrant Technologies as our CEO, Jennifer VanDerHorst was recognized as one of the top 40 “accomplished professionals” under the age of forty in the annual special section of the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal. She was chosen out of a field of 280 nominees for this prestigious list.

Thanks to Heidi Carpenter of Fafinski Mark & Johnson, P.A. for nominating Jen.
The write-up was spot on in describing Jennifer’s entrepreneurial spirit and detailed how she has started and continues to run two tech companies as well as Holland Center for children with Autism.

Describing Holland Center:

An “I Love Minnnesota” meme has been started by Aaron Weiche of the Find Buffalo Blog and we’ve been tagged by Patrick Schaber of Transition Networks and local marketing blog, The Lonely Marketer!

Spring is a great time of year to kick off this meme, because if it had been launched in February instead, I’m pretty sure I would have come up with the reasons why I wanted to move to Cali instead! Despite a giant CO-2 encrusted snow pile still melting at Eden Prairie Mall, I’m feeling MN again, so here we go:

Things have been quiet at The Remarketer the past week, but we’ve been quite busy behind the scenes. Blog posts are on the way here soon, but I just wanted to list some of the opportunities that we’ve been lucky enough to have get in the way.

Hiring

As a growing firm, we’re almost always hiring, but lately we’ve encountered some terrific candidates and have been appropriately engaged. At Vibrant, growth is a priority, but only if it’s smart growth with the right people. We met a lot of those right people in recent hires including Bruce, Dede, Nicole, Mike, Patrick and Kolby (and hopefully a few more that we’re still in negotiations with). On a shout-out Friday, I just wanted to send a warm welcome to our newest team members.

To celebrate the end of the shortest (yet longest) month of the year, to do some fun team-building and just to have fun, Vibrant hosted its first Video Game Happy Hour.

We had video games (Boxing & Tennis on the Wii, Guitar Hero projected on a 15′ wall, DDR, Parapa, NES, etc…) set up throughout the office. Face-melting guitar heroes and old-school Super Mario gamers alike found a game to their liking and all had a blast. Our Mac-whiz Lindsi Gish put together the above comic book photo-log of the evening.

From our experience running booths at college and university job fairs, there is a simple sure-fire way to attract and recruit IT and IS students to your booth.

Include the word “technologies” or “technology” in your company name or in big wording on your display materials.

The funny thing is, Vibrant generally doesn’t go to college career fairs to recruit IS graduates, because we require several years experience in the field before we consider a systems engineer candidate (we’re looking for entry-level sales and customer service).