Good things come to those who talk. ICM was founded by two women who have grown our business by talking to EVERYONE. As Carrie mentioned in a previous post, we truly believe in good business karma, and often our business benefits from networking and collaborating. Women are notoriously good at talking, so when Marisa Smith’s company The Whole Brain Group was looking to move out of her home office and into downtown Ann Arbor in 2006, Carrie suggested she come check out our new space, as we had an area that was ready to be developed. Within a week, Marisa took the leap and started working on a plan to move into the new space. A year later, Whole Brain has grown from 3 to 6 employees.

Besides the shared space, Whole Brain and ICM have collaborated on a variety of business issues: we share the same fantastic bookkeeper and we developed a website for their product AccrediStation. Both of our companies develop web-based applications and sell web-based products. Both of our companies work with universities, we share a great telephone system company, and we have swapped IKEA ideas for our office equipment and furniture. Our lawyer gave us a good explanation of how to protect our reusable work product, (i.e., code we developed that we want to use across multiple projects), so we shared the ideas with Marisa so she could intelligently talk to her lawyer about it.

Marisa even loaned me maternity clothes when I was pregnant with my son–now that is true collaboration!