After years of remote work, MarketBeat opens office space in downtown Sioux Falls

Matt Paulson knows this is a strange time to open a physical office for a business traditionally focused on remote work, with much of America's workforce sent home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There’s definitely some irony there,” said the founder of MarketBeat, which provides various stock research tools to investors and topped a million subscribers last year.

Since it began in 2011, the company had always been about how the work was done, not where, Paulson said.

If you worked best from home, or a coworking space, or a coffee shop, that was perfectly fine — and most staff meetings took place at Queen City Bakery.

So when a location opened up just steps away from Queen City, it made sense.

“It was the right size, right price, the right confluence of things,” Paulson said.

Paulson said the decision to get a physical space was fairly recent. “We wanted to have a headquarters for company meetings,” he said.

Rebuilding America:How COVID-19 brought banks and small businesses closer through PPP loans

When he spoke Wednesday afternoon, three of MarketBeat’s eight employees — himself included — were using the space.

They’ve had the lease for only three months, and the office only just opened last week, but they’ve still made it feel like home.

Paulson said the guiding principle was “if we had an office, what would we want it to look like?”

Accordingly, they’ve filled the space — which already had exposed brick and duct work — with modern furniture, an espresso machine and a wall of art made by the children of employees.

COVID-19 COVERAGE:Unemployment payments could top $140 million this year due to coronavirus

That freedom of where you work hasn’t shifted, Paulson noted, and employees might only be in the office once or twice a week.

He still thinks of MarketBeat as a trendsetter in the field of remote work — and that informs who works there, he added. “We hire people we don’t have to babysit.”