Welcome to a special edition of the Gartrell Group Team Bios! I’ve been trying to nail down this particular person since starting this series, but he keeps sneaking away. Not this time! We have nearly reached the Gartrell Group’s 20th Anniversary, and so I’ve made it my mission to track down my pal, your pal, our PrinciPAL (Consultant,) Bryce Gartrell!

Welcome, Bryce! Thanks so much for taking the time. Congratulations on making it to twenty years. That’s a huge milestone.

You caught me! Thank you! Yes, there are many ways to measure a journey like this. Twenty years can sneak up on you, kind of like you just did.

What made you decide to make the leap and run your own business?

Inspiration from sleep deprivation? My youngest son was born in December of 2003. His older brother was three. I was on paternity leave for a couple of months. It occurred to me that maybe I could quit my commute… make a living building and caretaking GIS applications from my basement. I think the notion was that I would create beautiful maps, apps, and visualizations in pristine solitude…or under the calming thunder of toddler feet, as things turned out (see Sam’s bio). A collaborator-friend, Marcus, who shared a thirst for adventure and a fondness for the absurd, agreed this was a great idea. We cleared away some legos, built several rack-mounted servers, made some desks and a website, and the Gartrell Group was a thing. Now, what do we do?! Twenty years later, I’m still always grateful for those first clients. This company is about their leap of faith as much as ours. But, you know, things went well enough in the first few months that I decided to quit my job and do this thing full-time!

That’s a pretty scary leap! How did you rope your sister, Molly, into it?

It was the spring of 2004. Things were ramping up a bit. We had a loosely affiliated ‘group’ of collaborators and some good projects underway, but we needed some help getting organized. Molly was a grade school teacher and fearless before the chaos. She came to Portland on her summer break, plugged into what was happening with the business, and ended up staying the course. She’s now our President and Teacher in Charge.

You guys make a great team. We’ve covered the definitive history of The Gartrell Group in a previous post, and I don’t want to bore our regular readers (thanks for the clicks, Mom!), so let’s move on to other subjects. Tell us a bit about where you grew up.

I grew up in a tiny town called Warner, New Hampshire. We made our own fun in Warner. It’s an excellent place for those who like rolling hills, forests, dirt roads, lakes, streams, and pit parties. It hosts the locally famous Fall Foliage Festival, which draws a crowd from several towns away and has more cotton candy and belt buckles than you can shake a stick at. I had a lot of opportunities to tromp around in the woods, ski in the winter, and pursue other forms of unsupervised delinquency - like at the beaver pond out behind your grandmother’s house.

That was always a good time! What brought you to Oregon?

I went to Reed College and fell in love with Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. All those things I enjoyed as a kid are so wonderfully accessible here, too!

Did you major in GIS, Spatial Data Science, or maybe Cartography?

Like all great GIS practitioners, I majored in French Literature. I eventually went to graduate school and got a degree in spatial data science and engineering. There was a bit of a song and dance involved to get in there with the French Lit thing. But I had found my way into mapping and gotten totally engrossed. It wasn’t a field I’d known about, but once I encountered it, I was absolutely taken by it and still am.

A wise choice. You’ve been in business for twenty years now. How have things changed for you?

I’m a bit less involved in the details of each project. I spend more time thinking about how our growing team works together and how our solutions tie together different aspects of our client’s organizations. It’s a step or two away from being directly hands-on with every project. I also spend more time on business development. We’re a small company, but we still have a lot of mouths to feed. I enjoy looking for ‘right fit’ opportunities to connect our awesome team with the right kinds of clients and projects.

That sounds like it can get a bit overwhelming. What do you do outside of work to relax?

I like being outside with my friends and my family. I like moving through the backcountry on skis. Fishing, and especially finding fishing spots! Foraging for treasures in the woods. Reading. Cooking. And I often seem to have a carpentry project going. I love working with my hands. It helps ground me after a day of working on a computer and building things in a virtual space.

Well, I, for one, am happy you made that choice in 2003 to start The Gartrell Group. I know a whole lot of other people who would agree with me. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us!