SnapShot Interactive is a digital agency that uses high-quality video production and animation, award-winning web design and creative online marketing strategies to deliver unexpected experiences to their clients in new and engaging ways. Headquartered in Nashville, TN, they opened their first satellite office in St. Louis in June of 2013.

We sat down with SnapShot partner Kurt Reinheimer, who manages the St. Louis office based in Industrious, to learn more about what it’s like to incorporate two teams hundreds of miles apart into a cohesive everyday work environment.

Being born and raised in St. Louis, how did you get connected with a company in Nashville?

Networking. I play soccer with this guy every Sunday, and I let him know I was in the market to make a job change. I was tired of the big corporate world and wanted to work for a smaller company. I knew he was involved in the startup community in St. Louis. He actually didn’t know anyone in his startup space that could afford a business developer, but he had a former fraternity brother who lived in Nashville and was looking to open a St. Louis office.

You mentioned you are a business developer. What did you do before SnapShot?

My background is in business development. I spent the previous five years in financial services sales, and the company I was with was bought three times and ended up being absorbed into a very large corporate structure. I didn’t like getting up and going to work anymore, and I was really interested in working for a smaller company.

I was brought on board at SnapShot to acquire clients and start to give us a base of revenue, and the business is really growing. We have a local videographer who also does animation as a full-time member of our team now, which is something we didn’t have when we launched.

SnapShot is a smaller company, but you have offices in two cities. What is it like managing two teams from so far apart?

It can be challenging trying to stay connected to a team that is 300 miles away, but as a company, we do things to keep that connection. The first part is easy because simply out of workflow my team here has daily interaction over email and phone with over half of our Nashville team.

We also utilize technology and get to see our teammates every morning when we do a video conference call to start the day where everyone in the company states the one thing they will absolutely get done that day.

The final piece is making an investment in bringing me and the rest of the St. Louis office to the Nashville office once a quarter for company meetings.  We are able to work on our goals as a company, but also when the meetings are finished, spend some quality time with our SnapShot team and get to know each other a little bit more.

How do you compare your daily life now with the corporate world you worked in before?

In some respects, the job itself is not very different as far as reaching out to clients and growing the business. What is different is the fact I’m working for a company that’s five and a half years old, and reporting directly to the president allows me to have a direct impact on the company. And because we’re smaller and newer, we’re able to be very flexible and nimble. So, it’s exciting that we can make quick decisions when a client asks us to consider trying something new that we haven’t done before, but we know our people have the skill sets to pull it off. That has allowed SnapShot to grow leaps and bounds over the last couple of years.

And being at Industrious, the facilities are amazing. The all-inclusive perks make things so much easier. It gives me, as the partner here in St. Louis, time to work on my business instead of dealing with the headaches of managing a workspace. And it gives us a place to grow. My job is to keep growing Snapshot. Industrious takes care of the rest.

What’s next for SnapShot?

Just being a part of something here in St. Louis that didn’t exist a couple of years ago is great. And now here we are with two full-time employees. In 3-5 years, we’ll probably have 10-12 people. To be the first guy here is really cool.

As the revenue grows, we start looking at more of what we need. Some of that is growing our talent, and we’ll need additional resources based here in St. Louis.

My job is to keep growing and developing SnapShot, and one thing that makes it a lot easier is having coworking space at Industrious. You don’t have to worry about the things a larger company does like overhead business costs.

It’s a no-effort type of office. And the fact that there is no extended lease, that they are no contract, month-to-month makes it really easy to move into a larger office within the space.

When we need to add new people and jump up to a 5 or 10 person office, Industrious allows us to do that as we grow and expand our business.