A crowd, a speech, the smash of an excavator bucket. That’s how LRS ushered in the latest chapter of our ongoing story. It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized how hard it was going to be to find a parking space in the coming year. Let me explain.
In 1979, LRS started out as a three-person IT consulting company serving clients in central Illinois from a rented second-story office in downtown Springfield, Illinois (just down the street from Abraham Lincoln’s own second-floor office). We soon outgrew our rented office space and purchased a larger brick office building on the west side of Springfield. For several years, our entire staff worked together in this space.
Original LRS Building 1
The office, known as “Building One” was soon joined by nearby Buildings 2, 3, and 4 after the successful commercial launch of our popular VPS print management software product.
By 1989, most of the software team moved to the newly-constructed Building 5. In addition to a large data center and dozens of new offices, Building 5 featured a health club with a pool, running track, weight rooms, and two racquetball courts.
LRS Building 5 during construction
Building 5 is still where the software group goes to stay fit, but we no longer work there. In 1999, the all-new Building 7 became the home of our Enterprise Output Management (EOM) teams. Today, all of our Springfield-based EOM software development, support, and sales teams work on the fourth floor of Building 7. The lower three levels are dedicated to parking. (Luckily, more than 100 of our EOM co-workers are located in other offices around the world, so we don’t have to compete with them for a spot.)
LRS Building 7
On June 28th of this year, LRS founder Dick Levi pulled a hydraulic lever on an excavating machine to start the demolition of Buildings 1-4. Some long-time employees had mixed feelings about seeing them level the offices where we started our careers. But we are just as eager to see what will replace them.
On this site, LRS will be building our largest facility to date. The new structure will feature two levels of office space with 185 offices and workspaces, another auditorium, nine conference rooms, and more. It will connect to other offices on the LRS campus via a skywalk, and will offer 237 additional parking spaces for our current and future co-workers.
If all goes according to plan, the new building should be ready in about a year and a half. Until then, it’s fairly close quarters here, as employees who used to work in the recently-demolished buildings have taken over the few remaining workspaces in Buildings 5, 6 and 7.
You can watch the progress of the construction via our webcam on the following page: https://www.lrs.com/LRS-Campus-Expansion/. By investing in our future growth, LRS is ensuring we can provide innovative output management software solutions and support our expanding customer base.
For those of us struggling each morning to find a parking spot, the future — and the new multi-level garage — can’t come fast enough.
