Aaron Maass has had his share of office horror stories.
Maass, 43, who founded analytics consultancy MaassMedia, got thrown out of his very first office, back in 2008, because it turns out his landlord at the time, a restaurateur whose local chain shut down a few years later, wasn’t paying his rent. The building owner showed up at the Center City building with a cop and told Maass and his three employees that he had five minutes to get out. Bewildered, they fled to Misconduct Tavern across the street.
At his most recent office, they had the misfortune of being right next to the garbage disposal room. There were multiple ceiling leaks (he took a video for posterity) and a baby cockroach infestation, he said.
“I knew it was time to leave when we found them in our Keurig,” said the bald-headed Maass, who was sporting a five o’clock shadow, a heather gray blazer and chestnut-hued brogues, when we visited him Friday morning in his new Center City digs.
He points to the coffeemaker in the kitchen.
“We have a new one now.”
So, all things considered, Maass feels pretty good about his new spot — one of a handful of changes in his life recently: he just got married and also moved from Rittenhouse Square to Mt. Airy.
Maass gave us the lowdown on the new office, as his team carried on its weekly all-hands meeting in a nearby conference room.
The office, on the second floor of 1880 JFK Blvd., is bigger (2,700 square feet, up from the 2,000 square feet in the leaky spot) and came at a great price ($19.50 per square foot, while other places he looked at in Center City clocked in at around $27), he said, while absentmindedly squeezing a ball of blue silly putty.
The building is certainly more traditional than the ones that many tech companies are moving into — this one has carpeting, drop ceilings and bathroom keys — but Maass wanted to stay close to one of his biggest customers: Comcast. (Maass used to be head of ecommerce at Comcast.) Plus, he said, the building is run very professionally. He’s gotten great service so far.
Maass has ties to the startup world (he cofounded a traffic-tracking startup in Boston just before the bubble burst and was once neighbors with startups like RJMetrics at the Philadelphia Building at 13th and Chestnut), but he’s firmly planted in the professional services sphere now.
“Professional services aren’t as sexy, but they’re just as needed,” he told us when we met him for coffee at Elixr last year, after he emailed us to introduce himself.
MaassMedia’s team of 17 (seven work out of the Center City office, while the rest work remotely) help corporations like Lenovo, ESPN and Comcast get the most of out analytics tools — think RJMetrics, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics.
“I’m sticking with analytics now,” he wrote in an email to us. “That’s where the opportunity is and will be for a very long time.”
We wish him better office luck.
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