You have to be just a little arrogant to start your own company, right? The first conversation we had wasn't about how we were going to get clients and make a living, but how we were going to attract staff and run our internal business.

<jumping around here, but they'll follow, right?....>

I remember sitting across from a young lady early in my career who was studying for her MBA at night while working as an architect during the day. We were about the same age, and one morning she came in talking about mission statements and decrying that our company did not have one. I brashly responded "why the hell do we need a mission statement. We're architects. Our mission is to make money and stay in business." I'm paraphrasing, and I'm sure in reality I said this in an exceptionally rude manner (as I am prone to do).

I can admit, years later, that I was wrong. Both in the delivery and the substance of the comment. The mission statement for us wasn't a marketing piece for future clients. It was a statement of how we wanted to run our business for the people that work for us.

Project Luong. Great People Creating Better Architecture.

As we talked about it over Thai food, we started bouncing around ideas about how we would get great people to come work for us. And how do we keep great people? How do we attract talent as a startup with minimal capital means? So we started throwing ideas out, and it occurred to us that what we need to do was not the minimum to attract talent, but do everything we possibly could and absorb the impacts over time.

Policy Wonk 101.

I really wanted an employee handbook, says nobody ever. Question - what are the minimum number of policies it takes to attract talent with the least cost? Response - No idea. Better question - what are the best policies we can put together that will attract the best talent with a fair salary with impacts that we can absorb over time?

Float Holidays. The American calendar is a Christian Calendar. Providing additional holidays to create a more inclusive workplace is a no brainer.

Family Leave. We will pay for 4 weeks of family leave for both mothers and fathers. There is an insidious push for young, working mothers out of the industry and we need to find ways to end that. This notion that the birth of a child is somehow a vacation and that time off should be deducted as vacation is nonsense as well - for both mothers and fathers.

Work from Anywhere. We're doing Tuesdays and Thursdays in the office as mandatory days for all staff, and one additional day at the employees discretion. We provided laptops and cloud computing for a reason. What we've found is that on most days, everyone is in the office because...

Location. Location. Location. We setup in a place where people want to be. Being in City Center is probably one of the best decisions we've made. Being able to walk to eat lunch, sit outside under a shade tree, or leave the office to grab a quick coffee. These are all passive amenities that make it worth wild to come to work.

There are dozens more. But after three months we have no regrets on the policies we chose. As we roll out our new splash page at projectluong.com, the first thing on the page is our mission statement - Great People Creating Better Architecture - loud and clear. Time and again we've had clients come to us and express how much more comfortable they feel working with a startup because they feel the energy and the satisfaction emanating from our employees.

Part III to continue.

I think this should be interactive in some way. These are highlights of a much more complex story and don't fill in every detail for sure. If you have questions please drop a comment and we will get back to addressing them.

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