Words on the Street
Business owners share stories of survival and hope as downtown comes to life.
By Nathan Christensen, Mineral CEO
Where: 100 S.W. Market St., Portland
What it does: Human resources and compliance software and consulting for small and mid-sized businesses
Employees: 240 total, 80 based in the Portland office
We provide HR and compliance software and tech enabled services to small and mid-sized businesses. We moved to downtown in 2014 because we see HR and compliance as at the heart of the organizations that we work with (and) we see downtown as the heart of the city.
Our office is right by Keller Auditorium. We love to take advantage of the cultural amenities of being downtown: the restaurants, the events, the activities. We also like the transportation access. And historically, we’ve done a lot to engage with downtown and take advantage of those amenities.
We have about 240 employees and 80 are based in the Portland office. On March 12, 2020 we announced to the company that we’re closing the office indefinitely and asked everyone to go home and take care of themselves and their families. As soon as it became clear that asking people to commute into an office and be together indoors was no longer a safe and responsible thing to do, we knew that we needed to make a change. We also wanted to be a good corporate citizen and support public health initiatives around us.
Our clients have been hit particularly hard by this pandemic, a lot of them rely on retail foot traffic. And we had to provide crisis counseling to those clients. In the March, April, May timeframe, we were seeing client needs of three to 4x. In the long term, the pandemic has raised the importance of great HR and compliance practices. So we’re having more valuable conversations with companies now.
Over the last year-and-a-half, our company, like so many other companies, has had to ask itself questions about what is the future of our office going to be like and where are we going to be based. We’ve never wavered from wanting to be part of Portland’s downtown community. It’s been difficult to see the city go through such a challenging time. I’m hopeful that there are important lessons in the events of the last year and a half and that the city and our company can be stronger coming out of it.
We decided to reopen our office because we believe that we can do so safely and responsibly by implementing some new processes, new policies, new protocols. We’re excited to be able to enable those employees to come back in, we also have employees who are not eager to come back to the office. Our focus is really on supporting and respecting each individual and trying to create an environment where everyone can thrive no
matter where they are on that spectrum.
I’ve been going downtown periodically. And downtown feels much different. It’s much quieter. Obviously, a number of businesses are closed. So the energy level is just much lower. But I’m hoping we can be part of bringing that energy back to downtown. I think downtown has a bright future. I think it’s going to take all of us to really create the future of downtown that we all want to see.
— As told to Malia Spencer