Q: What role does the corporate headquarters play at the company?
Ueber: With 870 hospitals spread throughout the country, with hospitals in Puerto Rico and one hospital in Mexico City, we actually refer to ourselves here as “central team support.” What this building and everyone in it is focused on is supporting our hospitals; making sure our hospitals have what they need to take care of our clients and to take care of those clients’ pets. So we’ve got all the functions in here from human resources, finance, IT and medicine.
Q: What brought about the decision to move the headquarters to Vancouver?
Ueber: This has been a great location for us here [in Portland]. In fact, we are right across the street from our original hospital. But we are growing so quickly that we’re soon going to outgrow the size of this building. So we looked at lots of different options with this building and what we could do to accommodate our growth. There really wasn’t anything that made sense. So about a year ago we started looking on both sides of the river. We wanted to stay committed to this region so there was no sense to move somewhere outside of the region. We really wanted to minimize disruption for our associates because we think we’ve got very highly talented associates. We set a target of no more than 10 miles from our current location. We looked at seven locations in Oregon, four locations in Washington. We had several criteria that we looked at in making a decision. The location that we settled on in Vancouver was the best one for meeting most of our criteria, but it was really to accommodate our future growth.
Q: What details can you share about the new location?
Ueber: We’re going to start with three buildings, I think it’s 230,000 square feet. We have 600 associates today, so we’ll be moving 600 associates into the new location – but it will have space for 850 in the buildings that we’re going to put up first. [The site] can accommodate double our size because we still have space to put an additional one or two buildings on the campus.
We’ll have numerous amenities in there. It will be a very interesting, innovative workspace. Not just desks and conference rooms, but we’ll have informal meeting spaces, cafes … we’ll have a very nice fitness facility and on-site cafeteria … We’re going to try to make it a real showcase – something we can be proud of; something that the Vancouver area and the Portland-Vancouver region can be very proud of as far as a corporate campus.
Q: What role did various incentives play in selecting the Vancouver location?
Ueber: I think the various incentives are a piece of the puzzle. They are by no means the only factor. There were multiple factors that we looked at: a big enough space; the ability to accommodate the kind of buildings that we wanted to have; the amenities that were the local area; [and] the community. Literally, we had 15 or 20 criteria that we looked at in making a final decision for where we were going to relocate the campus … I think incentives are important, but [they are] just one of many factors.
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