MINDSCAPE is celebrating 20 years!! As we look back at this tremendous milestone, we want to celebrate the people who made the journey a great experience. Pete Brand, MINDSCAPE’s CEO and co-founder, has certainly created plenty of great experiences.
“More than anything else, I wanted to build a company with my friends and make a place where you could enjoy yourself during the workday.”
In 2001, business culture was much more formal than it was today. Pete saw an opportunity to create an environment where people could enjoy themselves and let productivity follow.
“I know I never thrived in any overly formal business environment and I know a lot of other people didn’t either. You can have fun and joke around while producing top-level, professional work.”
Even in places where others may no longer be looking for a great experience or have resigned themselves to having a poor experience, Pete can’t help but still look for ways to improve. Of all MINDSCAPE’s founding members, Pete enjoyed the undertaking of creating a business from the ground up more than anyone.
“I loved all of it but it was an extremely painful time. We started business two months after 9/11. We had meetings every month about possibly closing. It felt like the phone would keep ringing right at the last second before we really had to close shop.”
For the other founding members, the stressful highs and lows would be the one thing they would change towards the path to success. Not Pete.
“I wouldn’t want to change any of it. It was frickin’ awesome. It was painful and it sucked and we lost a lot of sleep. There’s hard and depressing times in any story but the whole thing is beautiful. That’s the way I feel about MINDSCAPE.”
That stress; that level of urgency is something that has stuck with Pete since day one, and is something he has tried to instill in the MINDSCAPE culture. We work hard everyday so that our team and our clients don’t have to feel the same stress we felt when building a business and to always be reflecting back on how far MINDSCAPE has come since its humble beginnings.
After a couple of turbulent years, MINDSCAPE would come into a sustained stream of success that all of MINDSCAPE has worked hard to maintain for the past 20 years. Since day one and to this day, Pete has felt a need to share his success with the people and communities that have helped him thrive. When trying to get MINDSCAPE off the ground, he’d set goals for the staff and if they were met, the whole team would get something big. And these were no trinkets, Pete was doing things like taking the whole team to Florida because he felt so grateful to have such success come his way.
“For a while there it felt like we were completing our goals faster than we could come up with them.”
Today Pete spends much of his time searching for great experiences with his family and on the hiking trail but he’s laid a foundation for generating even more great experiences working with and for MINDSCAPE. Check out the great work we could create for you.
