Manage, Maintain and Evolve: Can Startup Culture Survive Growth?

By Alex Yohn

Aug 26, 2015

This is a three-part series of articles on building, growing and supporting company culture — something the teams at Kin, DoneDone.com and We Are Mammoth have all wrestled with over the last eight-plus years. This article, the first in the series, discusses how a startup’s culture can survive its initial phases of growth.

Few things can be as rewarding as watching a company you helped found grow and thrive. The flip side to this growth though, feels a lot like the growing pains we all experienced right around middle school: Internal and external forces put enormous strain on an identity that proves much more malleable than we would have guessed.

For small companies, this awkward phase tends to land around the time employee No. 20 is hired. It’s in that range that founders are no longer able to keep track of what everyone is doing, that the first team members take on leadership roles, and that habits calcify into key components of company culture.

Small teams will ignore that last transformation at their own peril.

“As something intangible, it can be easy for establishing and maintaining a suitable company culture to be bypassed in favor of seemingly more urgent priorities,” Sarah Willis writes at TalentCulture.

Willis notes that mismanaging company culture at this stage can lead to a whole variety of foundational weaknesses: Potential recruits are put off, existing employees become disengaged and total productivity dips.

While they’re not guarantees of pain-free growth, establishing a vision and core values at a company will help guide the company habits that soon become company culture.

The Importance of Establishing Values Early

Kin’s product manager, Craig Bryant, wrote about a practice called “visioning” back in 2013: Imagining and documenting how you think a company will look at a specific point in the future if every team member gives 100% effort and every process developed is reliably solid.

Creating a company vision helps inform a core set of values and goals that everyone on the team can adopt. This roadmap helps build and solidify a company’s personality, the thing so malleable during an early stage of growth.

Here are a few questions to ask during this process of establishing values, courtesy of the team at Lighthouse:

• “What are the habits everyone follows?
• “How do you celebrate wins? (Do you?)
• “How are failures handled?
• “What does the team do to find joy in their work?
• “How do you communicate?
• “Are problems resolved or swept under the rug?”

Be thoughtful in your answers to those questions, and in how you analyze your answers to those questions. These are the values you will want to scale alongside your processes and your customer base.

Identifying Those Same Values in Potential Hires

“The people you invite into your company to extend and expand its capabilities ARE YOUR CULTURE,” Homebrew partner Hunter Walk writes. “If you can interview for these qualities and show the discipline to not hire people who lack or are in opposition to these attributes, then you have a foundation that will solidify over time. One which will make the successive hires and functioning of the team easier.”

This often frustrates team members who are in charge of hiring, though, who follow some commonly shared advice about hiring for culture fit. “Culture fit” confuses cause and effect. Instead, they will want to determine whether a potential hire fits their company’s values.

“There is no one interview question you can ask to find out for sure if a candidate is a fit with your values,” 15Five CEO David Hassell writes at TechCrunch. “The key is to ask questions about the candidate’s personal and professional lives and try to understand why they have made the decisions they did.”

Of course, these potential hires will also need to understand what a company stands for right up front. The company’s website, blog and social media outlets are perfect for communicating a company’s values and a company’s personality to potential applicants, Glassdoor’s Head of Global Recruiting Will Stanley writes.

“Rather than simply listing corporate values, be creative and share stories that demonstrate those values put in action. For instance, post brief interviews with current employees sharing examples of how the company’s team celebrates successes together or exactly how it is a family-friendly workplace.”

Overcoming Breakpoints

As a company continues to grow, it will encounter many breakpoints that force leaders to step back and think about bigger issues than a company’s day-to-day operations and spend more time communicating with their team, and re-iterating the company’s vision and values.

“As your company grows, your people need more attention than you can give them, which is why developing leaders in your organization is so important,” they write. “Your leaders, your first layers of managers, need to emerge at this time so they can start taking care of your people working so hard to make the company succeed. And the single best tool for any leader is the one-on-one.”

The Northridge Group’s Vice President of Human Capital, Terri Burke, stresses the importance of clear communication at this stage.

“Transparency is critical,” she writes. “Be clear about the plan and vision for the company. Give the ‘what’ and the ‘why.’ Share expectations and measure desired business outcomes while embracing the diversity of thought as employees share their point of view. Communicate consistently. Personal, departmental or organizational feedback should be shared. As organizations become increasingly remote, it becomes more essential than ever that all employees feel included and part of the organization.”

“Keeping that warm, family feeling as you grow requires a commitment to the staff and the customers that comes from the very top,” small business owner Mary Liz Curtin tells the Wall Street Journal.

“If the owners and managers of a business work to keep their staff, and customers feel special, appreciated and respected, that attitude will resonate throughout the business no matter how large it gets.”

Small Giants and Lean Startups

Startups, which by their very nature embrace rapid growth, follow a model that looks much more like a controlled explosion when they successfully scale. But the fundamental business principle of embracing a set of values still applies.

“Profit and expansion aren’t the only lightning-speed factors startup leaders need to worry about,” Kate L. Harrison writes at Forbes. “Because industries and their respective technologies and consumers also evolve at a rapid pace, startups must establish and cheerlead core values to maintain stability for their team and maintain focus on the core mission.”

Walter Chen at the iDoneThis blog uses the example of Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Zingerman’s founders, Paul Saginaw and Ari Weinzweig, increased their company’s revenue by an order of magnitude ($5 million to $50 million) by translating its company values into an innovative organizational structure.

“So in 1994, with the deli producing $5 million in annual revenue, the founders sat down and wrote their vision statement for what they called ‘Zingerman’s Community of Businesses,’ a loosely organized group of local businesses under the Zingerman’s umbrella that gave its employees an opportunity to become partners,” Chen writes.

“Each ZCoB business would be founded and operated by a Zingerman’s employee-turned managing partner who had gone through extensive in-house training on Zingerman’s company culture, values, and how it does business. Both the managing partner and Zingerman’s would contribute capital to get the business going. The result is a bunch of small startups based on the Zingerman’s company culture and brand, all based locally in Ann Arbor.”

At the time of Chen’s writing, the Zingerman’s community boasted 650 employees and 18 managing partners.

images by:
José Martín
Tante Tati
StartupStockPhotos

Our spotlight this month is on eHouse Studio, a long-time customer and friend of Kin. Located in beautiful Charleston, South Carolina, eHouse Studio specializes in user experience via web, mobile, and marketing and branding. As a small, family business, they face many challenges but have managed to overcome them by staying honest, transparent, and ensuring everyone on the team feels the love. Read on to learn more!

Who are you, what’s your role, and your favorite hand-held food?

[CQ] My name is Chris Quinn and I’m a Founder and the Director of Operations for eHouse Studio. Tacos all the way!

What’s the story of eHouse Studio?

[CQ] eHouse Studio was founded in 2002 in Boulder, CO by my husband Aaron Quinn. The company was a “one man” show for the first few years, which is why it was easy for us to pick up and move locations to Charleston, SC in 2006. After a year in Charleston, we decided it was the place for us to call home so we decided it was time to start growing eHouse as well! I joined the team, as well as Aaron’s father, Rick, and we’ve been growing ever since. Now, we’re a team of 17 in Charleston (and Texas), along with a great team of 5 partners we work with on a regular basis across the country.

Our expertise has always been in the craft of creating quality customer experiences online. Our focus is trending in eComm and we truly enjoy creating great experiences for our client’s customers.

What’s great about working at eHouse Studio? 

[CQ] At eHouse Studio we’re all about honesty and respect. As a family-run business we realize that there are no perfect employees, leaders, and/or owners so we do our best to embrace everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, and encourage people to be upfront and honest about them versus trying to hide them like rocks in your pockets.

There are going to be great and challenging times at the office, but if the team feels supported and respected, it always ends up ok. Kind of like family. I think being able to truly be yourself is kind of awesome in and of itself. Every Friday, we have a “happy hour high five” to end the week. Working in the digital space, we’re always problem solving (which we love), but at times it can leave you feeling like you’re always fighting an uphill battle. During our high fives, we take the time to recognize great things from the past week. This can be anything from “Hey, great job on the client presentation, I heard you rocked it,” to “Hey, thanks for running out over lunch to get the office more toilet paper!” All recognition is equal and is a great way to start the weekend by feeling like you made a few strides up that hill!

Also, we are very excited to announce that Inc. has included eHouse Studio in their 2015 list of the fastest-growing private U.S. companies. Check out our blog post on the honor.

By Alex Yohn

Aug 13, 2015

We just pushed out a few great improvements to Kin – the most noteworthy of which is Employee Objectives. It’s a build up to our Performance Review tool which will be out toward the end of September. In addition, there’s a new font face in Kin that’ll support our ever-growing population outside of the US. Finally, we’ve improved Kin’s performance. Please read on for details, and let us know if you have any questions.

Employee Objectives

Employee objectives are core elements of employee reviews. They’re like building blocks that help employees grow professionally with the company. We’ve wrapped up this portion of Kin’s Reviews & Objectives feature (the Performance Reviews feature is due out toward the end of September) and are excited to share it with you and your team!

Creating Objectives

An employee can create their own objectives in their profile in Kin. Any HR Manager or the employee’s assigned Manager can also create objectives for employees.

Objectives include a title and description, along with a status of the objective’s progress and when it’s due.

As an employee works toward their objective, they can leave Progress Notes sharing how the objective is coming along and if they’re running into any roadblocks. The employee’s assigned Manager will receive notification of the update and can leave a note themselves. These notes are a good way to track the history of the objective’s completion and are super useful during an employee’s review.

Other Noteworthy Improvements

Along with Employee Objectives, we’ve made a few other updates to Kin!

A New Typeface for Kin

We’ve swapped out Kin’s app font, Avenir, for Proxima Nova, to better support our non-US customers. It’s a subtle difference style-wise that makes a huge improvement for folks who were getting the short end of the glyph-stick (looking at you, Czech Republic!).

Time-Off Requests – Default to Work Schedule

Previously when creating a time-off request, the start and end times within the request would default to the standard 9am-5pm work schedule regardless of the one set for that particular time-off policy. Now when creating a request, after the time-off policy is selected the start and end times will populate with that policy’s set work schedule, including applicable break-time.

Performance Improvements to the App

Finally, there are a few performance improvements we’ve made around the app that’ll help things move along more quickly:

• We’ve streamlined & removed excess images to reduce page weight
• We’ve implemented a new system for optimizing JavaScript for the site – so users only load what they need when they need it (for the technically inclined, Kin now sports an implementation of asynchronous module definition).
• Kin’s also doing a better job caching assets that can be reused later in sessions instead of being downloaded again.

By Alex Yohn

Jul 27, 2015

In a previous post, we offered some universally applicable advice on setting up a home workspace. Getting the home office set up is only half of the equation for distributed companies, though.

Having a remote workforce also introduces new challenges and responsibilities for the company’s management, for its human resources department, and for the company’s own culture.

This is the followup to that guide, then. For employers, here are some key factors to take into consideration when your company begins to introduce work-from-home arrangements. Knowing this in advance will go a long way toward creating conditions that set your employees up to succeed.

What’s In It For The Employer?

One easy case that is often made by the pro-remote work camp is distributed teams can save money on a company’s bottom line.

Jennifer Parris at WorkFlexilibilty.org cites a study that concludes remote workers can save their companies $11,000 annually in overhead costs. Sarah White at Monster.com cites another that pegs the figure closer to $2,000.

Either figure might indicate a view that’s too myopic, anyway. As Parris’ piece points out, remote employees tend to reward the employers’ trust with uncommon loyalty. That translates to motivated team members who are less likely to pursue jobs elsewhere.

“It’s a fact: employees who are allowed to telecommute show more dedication and loyalty to their organizations than those who have to schlep into an office five days a week,” she writes.

“That might not seem that important, but consider this: It’s estimated that for an employee who earns $50,000 a year or less, it costs about 20 percent of his salary to hire a replacement. When you consider the cost of hiring a new employee (and the time it will take to train said employee), it’s a huge benefit to allow employees to work remotely.”

Often, however, a company’s first hurdle toward implementing remote-work policies is a lingering bias toward individuals who seek obvious work-life balances, Maria Wood writes at SkilledUp.

Wood cites Harvard organizational behavior professor Lakshmi Ramarajan in the piece as introducing the term scholars use, “flexibility stigma.”

“Employers perceive both male and female workers negatively if they request to work remotely or want a more flexible work arrangement,” Wood writes.

The Employer’s Special Legal Obligations

Having employees in different states creates a complex web of jurisdictional issues.

For every employer, this will mean tax-filing requirements across a number of states, each of which has its own reporting requirements. The company’s bookkeepers and accountants are good resources for helping sort tax-filing requirements.

Legal counsel might also be required, as many courts are currently putting their states’ labor laws to the test. These are far too numerous to get into here, but California attorney Sebastian Miller demonstrates how nuanced these issues can be in his state.

Miller writes about a case in which a trial court said remote workers only needed compensation for marginal costs on a cell phone bill. So, for example, if an employee’s data plan allows for 5 GB of data per month, but work requirements pushed data usage into 6 GB for a month, that marginal cost of 1 GB was the employer’s liability.

A California appeals court rejected this marginal costs argument.

“The Court of Appeal reasoned that limiting expense reimbursement to marginal costs would allow an employer to get something for nothing (in this case, an employee who is available to take calls remotely),” Miller writes.

“So adopting the trial court’s view would permit precisely what [Labor Code § 2802] is designed to prevent — having the employee bear operating expenses that the employer would otherwise have needed to incur in order to ensure the employee’s remote.

“Hence, an employee’s fixed-cost, remote-work expenses must be reimbursed even if, irrespective of her employer’s demands, the employee still would have incurred the expense; by, for example, purchasing a personal cell phone, paying for data and minute plans, or supplying a home with internet access.”

It’s not so important to know how much California employers must compensate their remote employees for cell phone usage; rather, just understand that state courts are hashing out similar arguments around the country, and some legal due diligence may be necessary to determine your company’s own legal responsibilities to its remote employees.

The Technology Connecting Distributed Teams

It’s useful to imagine an office itself as a piece of technology. The space itself plus its infrastructure create this built-up environment that groups of people can leverage to synchronize tasks and work effectively as a unit.

From that frame, it’s easier to make the jump to remote work arrangements, which employ suites of collaborative technology to replace the need for physical proximity.

Every organization’s needs are different, so it would be impossible for us to say which of these collaborative tools you definitely need. Here are a few possible options:

• Trello for collaborative to-do lists
• Slack for integrating project-specific conversations, file sharing and dozens of other tasks into one central hub
• Basecamp for project management
• GoToMeeting for group calls.
• HipChat for instant messaging other team members
• Harvest for time tracking
• 1Password for managing passwords

Ghost founder John O’Nolan has a post titled “11 Tools That Allow us to Work from Anywhere on Earth as a Distributed Company” that explores his team’s experiences with some of the above tools, as well as some others. Also, Buffer’s Kevan Lee has a list of 17 tools for remote workers that overlaps a bit with those already been mentioned but also introduces several other options.

Collaborative technology is only part of a remote team’s IT suite, though. Next comes the much thornier issue of setting up remote access to the company’s main network and securing the information that flows along those pathways.

Setting Up and Securing a Virtual Private Network

Granting network access while protecting against data breaches is a delicate balancing act, but all too often this gets de-prioritized among many companies.

David Howell at TechRadar points to one survey in which 51% of companies that responded said their access control technology was at least three years old.

A modern, up-to-date VPN creates a safe passageway for sensitive data to travel between a company’s headquarters and wherever a remote employee is located. TechSoup’s Nick Mediati aptly uses a tunnel metaphor to describe how VPNs provide a channel through the more Wild West regions of the Internet.

As with collaborative tech, VPNs come in a variety of flavors to suit the needs of a particular organization. Howell’s piece at TechRadar lists five things a company should consider when selecting a VPN:

Audit company data to understand what features are necessary for a VPN.

Calculate how much bandwidth is currently available; a VPN can consume a significant portion of that bandwidth.

Determine what processes are in place to secure the VPN (“As a VPN could be in front of or behind a firewall, its security is of paramount importance,” Howell writes. “Antivirus software should be in place and up-to-date.”).

Make arrangements for any employees who might want to access the VPN from public WiFi.

Perform due diligence to ensure that the VPN client itself is secure.

The Infosec Institute has a great list of possible methods for breaching a VPN’s security and some policies a company could put in place to help prevent those.

Managing a Remote Workforce

Aligning the efforts of a remote team requires open communication and trust, which isn’t conceptually different from managing a local team. Still, setting up remote team members, who might be spread across time zones, to succeed in their work requires a slightly different mindset, some different approaches to building rapport, and a few tricky balancing acts.

Giving the Team Structure

David and Carrie McKeegan, co-founders of Greenback Expat Tax Services, shared their own experiences with running a worldwide remote team in a piece for Entrepreneur.com, where they said one thing they’ve found is that a remote team requires a clearer structure.

“Because virtual companies already operate without a central physical location, it is even more critical to have structures and disciplines in place to have a smooth, integrated and effective workforce,” they wrote.

The McKeegans mention two things in particular that help give team structure some rigidity:

• Documenting processes carefully, and
• Crystallizing team members’ flexible work time into a predictable schedule

Not all teams will agree with the fixed-hours recommendation, and maybe that won’t work for certain creatives or developers on the team.

“Having just left big corporations where a strict 9-to-5 schedule was the norm, we agreed to accommodate [flexible schedules], wanting our workforce to be empowered in both their work and time,” the McKeegans wrote. For them, however, this arrangement just didn’t work.

“And while allowing every employee to work whenever they wanted may have served their needs, it didn’t serve the needs of co-workers, customers or the company.

Setting Expectations and Building Trust

The hours question ultimately comes down to what is expected of team members. If there is an expectation that he/she will be available during morning hours EST, then a schedule must reflect that expectation.

If those expectations have a rolling Friday deadline, perhaps there is more flexibility.

“Ultimately, though, this comes down to trust, and trust can be found or lost on every page of a company’s policies,” Scott Hanselman wrote back in early 2013. “You [the employee] were hired as a professional; are you trusted to be a professional? Working remotely requires your company to trust you can do the work not only without them seeing you, but also without constant physical interaction with your teammates.”

Ideally, as WooThemes founder Adii Pienaar wrote for UC Berkeley’s Scalable Startups, that trust is earned during the team member’s initial hiring.

“This means that from day one, new team members know what’s expected from them, and they know that we won’t be around (sometimes because it’s physically impossible) to check up on them to make sure they meet those expectations,” Pienaar wrote.

“This trust also creates a blank canvas for team members to do their best work, where they have the freedom to solve a problem in the best way they see fit, whilst possessing the opportunity to be accountable and responsible for their own work.”

In Hanselman’s arrangement, his team would receive a list of to-dos on Monday, then he would follow up with them on Friday to find out what was accomplished and what needed work.

Communication, then, is the key to facilitating the kind of trust needed to keep these teams focused.

Communication

“While we all need to work on mastering our communication skills, I can’t begin to stress enough how vital communication is when remote working is taking place,” social media and content strategist Fernando Ramirez writes at Recruiter.com.

This is where that suite of collaborative tools comes in; remote teams have to rely on those heavily to communicate, and there is a strategy to doing so that evolves across each team.

Ramirez has three big-picture recommendations for approaching communication across remote team members:

• Leaders and managers need to make themselves available for Q&A, especially in a project’s initial stages. “Being on the same wavelength requires talking and being transparent about the work that needs to be done,” he says.
• Let other team members know when they can expect a response. This goes back to David and Carrie McKeegan’s suggestion that team members have regular — or at least predictable — hours. “Remote workers need to be able to move around freely to access resources and information they will need,” Ramirez says. “This is done by minimizing or eliminating any roadblocks remote workers may encounter.”
• Make sure lines of communications go both ways. This includes supportive and encouraging comments, but this also includes team leaders taking the time to give individual employees feedback on their work. (That’s why we advocate regular employee reviews.)

Treehouse co-founder Ryan Carson described the communicational hierarchies in his company’s flat, remote structure that might help some teams struggling with their own internal communications.

First, the Treehouse team uses email as a very last resort. Instead, a collection of collaborative tools are used relative to how urgent the issue is:

• Phone calls or real-time Hangouts when an answer is needed immediately
• Text or IM if an answer is needed in an hour
• The team’s project management platform if an answer is needed in the next 24 to 48 hours
• Email if an answer has a similar one- or two-day urgency but doesn’t fit into the project management software

Building a Team Culture

One thing that gets lost among remote teams is water cooler chatter, or opportunities to simply catch up with someone when you bump into him/her in an office.

Rebecca Knight, writing for the Harvard Business Review, offers a couple of steps team leaders can take to compensate for these lost opportunities:

• Invite team members to always have video ready to go for impromptu, face-to-face chats. The experts she cites in her piece admit that this can feel weird at first, but after a while an invitation to hop on Skype or Google Hangouts can become normal.
• Also, team leaders should take time at the beginning of group chats to simply check in with everyone, she writes, and let team members share anything interesting that might be going on in their lives.

Highfive’s head of growth, Michael Freeman, reiterates the power of video and social chatter among team members. “A weekly team standup, one-on-ones and impromptu huddles enabled us to coordinate our work,” he writes. “More importantly, though, seeing each other helped us build the bonds that made everything else we did so much more effective (and fun). At Highfive, all of our meetings use video.”

Freeman also recommends leaving room on communication platforms — especially IM or something like Slack — for a reasonable amount of banter.

Work Retreats That Include Far-Flung Team Members

We are all social people; team members who work remotely still need or may demand a chance to meet up in person. Work retreats are great for this because they allow everyone to come together on unfamiliar ground and build that in-person rapport from scratch.

Zapier co-founder and CEO Wade Foster has an excellent post on how to plan, throw and get feedback on a company retreat. Zapier’s all-remote team has had several stateside company retreats at this point, and his insight on making that work is worth sharing here.

Here are four things Foster says you should consider when planning a work retreat for a remote team:

1. “Make it somewhere easy for folks to get (i.e. less than two hour drive from an airport).
2. “Go somewhere that can hold everyone. We’ve done AirBnB and HomeAway houses. Hotels feel sterile, but houses feel inviting. Get a really big house that folks couldn’t normally afford on their own.
3. “Don’t worry so much about being close to tons of activities. We used to think having a really active city nearby would be important, but then realized we rarely took advantage of the full city amenities.
4. “That said, do have some activities very near the house. Beachside houses or houses with big games rooms (pool, ping pong, etc) are great because people can entertain themselves in downtime without driving places.”

Embracing Remote Work

Whether in a startup or a more mature company, remote work requires a commitment from the employer. In our experience at Kin, this has played out in a couple of ways.

First, remote work has to be woven into the company’s culture so that employees not physically in the office don’t feel left out or of secondary importance. Even little mistakes such as forgetting to dial a team member into a video conference can contribute to a perception that remote workers are not as respected.

Second, companies have an extra level of filtering when they hire for remote positions. Remote work is not for everyone. Some people think they can work remotely, but in practice they just cannot bridge that gap. A good way to test this is to first see how a candidate communicates via email and video. In the next step of the hiring process, it might be useful to give a candidate an ambiguous assignment that forces them to ask followup questions.

Making a Switch to Remote Work

Finally, it is worth briefly discussing the changes a company or team has to undergo when it makes a dedicated shift toward remote work.

The team at The Future of Work Collective cite three stumbling blocks [PDF] for many organizations:

• A lack of leadership. “Leaders at any level in the organization who give only lukewarm support (or active resistance) to distributed work programs doom them from the beginning,” they write. “The resulting attitude of ‘We’re doing this because corporate told us to do it’ can sabotage any change program almost immediately.”
• Rushing the changes and giving up too soon. “A thick skin and a willingness to ‘tough it out’ through the inevitable battles and short-term productivity declines as the changes take hold are almost as important as aggressive sponsorship and a well-designed program.”
• Failing to incorporate continuous learning. “Other organizations have learned to thrive in very stable environments and so have had little need for continuous learning and adaptation. So, when a major change in the work environment comes along they simply don’t know how to adjust. The absence of long-term experience with change as a way of life, or the lack of a formal change/adaptation process, will wreak havoc with even the best-designed programs.”

images by:
Seemi Peltoniemi
William Iven
Luis Llerena

Company: eHouse Studio

Location: Charleston, SC

Customer since: September, 2013

Interviewee: Christine Quinn, Cofounder and Director of Operations

1. What are some differences between the company you were 2 years ago, and the company you are today?

GOODS: In the past 2 years we have grown in size (people and physical space), we have a great team, a new office that we love, and our projects continue to challenge us in a good way. We have continued to showcase our work in the luxury real estate space and have now moved into the retail eComm world of design as well. We love problem solving for our clients and their customers and really love when we see the real life results.

BADS: If you are growing (which we always hope to be growing in some aspect,) there is always learning and change which is not always easy. So growth is kind of a double edged sword, you need to grow to stay successful but it can be a challenge at times. We have also found that in the past couple of years, we are spending less time putting out the daily tactical “fires” on projects and needing to spend more time on the strategic vision of the company itself. This is only bad because there needs to be about 48 hours in every day instead of only 24. Another exciting challenge!

UGLIES:  I think the growth thing could potentially be an ugly too because when you are trying to find your way, you make mistakes but it is how you recover that can has the potential to take the “ugly” and bump it into the “good” category!

2. Your company has been around a while! What advice do you have for other company’s ramping up their people and workplace operations? 

Nobody has it all figured out and the sooner you realize this and can have honest and transparent conversations with your team, the better. At House, we always say there are no perfect employees, managers or owners and the sooner we realize that we all have flaws, the better we will work together as a team to embrace and leverage each individuals strengths and help them out with their weaknesses. As far as operations, we have been trying to focus on process and then finding a tool to support a process instead of the vice versa. KinHR has really helped me by providing a place to organize information that is relevant to the team, create process for employees and also help me see where I have areas that need operational improvements.

3. What are some of the most significant milestones or events at your company in the past two years?

In the past 2 years we have gone through a visual re-branding which has been a lot of fun. We timed the release of our new logo with the timing of our new office renovation and move in. The new office has enabled us to host events and be more involved in the community which has been for us and we hope for others as well. We have also been working on some really exciting projects which will release in the next year so we are pumped up about sharing those soon.

4. What’s the most personally fulfilling aspect of running your shop?

Personally the most fulfilling aspect of my job is seeing people grow both professionally and personally. We strive to create a place where people can be happy and work and in life. I love when someone on the team is falling in love, getting married, having kids, joining a sports team, etc.  Anything that makes them a happy individual which also resonates at the office is very fulfilling.

Company: The Starter League

Location: Chicago, IL

Customer since: July, 2013

Interviewee: Vince Cabansag, Director of Operations

1. What are some differences between the company you were 2 years ago, and the company you are today?

We work remotely. We used to stand-ups every morning Monday through Friday at 7:50am. When I told Neal, one of our founders, that I was moving to Wisconsin for my wife’s job, he said “Let’s figure it out.” I’ve been train commuting to Chicago three times a week for the past two and a half years — and it’s been just fine. That started a trend where our team members make their own schedules. These days everyone has ownership over their schedule. It’s more about the body of work instead of a body at the office.

We’re still trying to figure it out. In 2011, we were the only coding school that existed — that’s before the tidal wave of bootcamps. Now, we’re one of many throughout the world. Our challenge is finding students, as I suspect that’s similar for other schools. Whenever someone goes through our program, they’re more than satisfied with the instruction and the skills they obtain. We’re proud of being the first school, but more so, that we teach raw beginners how to code, design and build web applications.

We leverage tools to scale our work. We’re a smaller team than we were two years ago. That means everyone has taken on more, but we’ve also leveraged tools to help scale that additional work. Our bread and butter tools are Basecamp and Hipchat — they’re the main way we communicate with one another. Hatchbuck has been great for managing our applications and enrollment pipeline. And I wouldn’t be able to manage our human resources without KinHR, ZenPayroll, Bill.com, Maxwell Health and our controller, Red Granite.

2. Your company has been around a while! What advice do you have for other company’s ramping up their people and workplace operations? 

Start with things that don’t scale. It’s effective in the beginning. When you start feeling the pain of a manual process, identify the choke points and develop a solution. Automating your processes won’t happen overnight, so it’s okay to try different tools before deciding on what you want long term. That will cost you less resources than building your own piece of software.

3. What are some of the most significant milestones or events at your company in the past two years?

We built a product.While it cost us a lot of resources to build a product, there was nothing out there that was remotely close to what we needed. We teach a lot of students. And we needed a simple tool to enrich and manage our student’s learning experience. That’s one of our big accomplishments — building and shipping Lantern.

4. What’s the most personally fulfilling aspect of running your shop? 

Opening doors. Not in the literal sense, but in the way that gives people new and exciting opportunities in life. We’re not dogmatic about our student outcomes. Not every student that goes through The Starter League needs to become a professional developer. Many of our alumni have gone on to start companies like (We Deliver and Launch Pad Lab). They’ve also become designers, developers, product managers, growth hackers, or have gone back to their jobs to add more value to their business. That’s what I get excited about.

Company: Yellow Pencil

Location: Edmonton, Canada

Customer since: January, 2014

Interviewee: Scott Baldwin, Director of User Experience and Design

1. What are some differences between the company you were 2 years ago, and the company you are today? 

A lot has changed over the past two years – likely more than our list below – but here’s some of the highlights:

We’re a better team. While we’ve always had a great group of staff that is friends as much as colleagues, there’s been a real change in how they collaborate and work together. They are now a team that supports one another continually, day-in and day-out. The only down part of team change is that we’ve had some great people leave us for other opportunities too.

We have a significantly better portfolio of work. A lot of our projects two years ago were just getting started or in-progress. Many projects have launched, and this now allows us to better tell our story and let people understand our capabilities.

Our marketing and communications has improved. We launched a new website for our company last year (it took a bit longer than planned given other work priorities), but it’s been great for telling our story. Check it out at: yellowpencil.com

Our processes have improved, but we still have a long way to go. As a growing agency we didn’t invest in setting a lot of these things up when we were smaller, so we’re playing a bit of catch-up here. Some examples:

Simple, yet obvious people stuff like time off, vacations, sick time – like we can do and manage with KIN now. Thank you!

Internal work processes. We’re still doing work here, but there are some really solid tools and methods in place that our teams can rally around.

We’re still about the same size as we were two years ago. Deep down I think we would have liked to be bigger, but this seems to be the right size right now for us. We’re nimble, able to pivot, and have a diverse practice in two Canadian cities, with clients in Canada and the U.S. that we love to work with.

2. Your company has been around a while! What advice do you have for other company’s ramping up their people and workplace operations? 

Be transparent – make sure your team knows what’s going on with the business – talk about your sales, your profit, and what needs to happen to be successful and grow

Take the time to listen and involve your staff – seek input before coming to conclusions and involve them in setting a direction for key initiatives.

3. What are some of the most significant milestones or events at your company in the past two years?

Over the past two years we’ve really matured as a company. We’ve been able to improve our team and develop our people to better meet our customers needs; established and built out some of our processes to more consistently do our work; and have grown the diversity of our portfolio of work. Some significant milestones:

We invested in building a strong and capable management team that can help our business grow in the long-term. We introduced this in 2014 and have found it invaluable for keeping our entire company focused on what matters. They’ve been integral to creating a team that’s more aware of our business.

Lean and Kanban. We made a move to Lean and Kanban methods in 2014 and it’s really allowed us to more effectively understand the work we have, complete the work we need to, and understand when and why we have blockers to getting work done.

4. What’s the most personally fulfilling aspect of running your shop? 

The most fulfilling aspect of our work has been transforming how our customers work and do business online. A lot of our work is in the public sector (yes, we do private sector too), and it’s amazing to see them become truly web-first organizations, change the way they communicate, do business online, and grow their internal teams and capacity as a result of our work and collaborative approach to getting it done.

You may have heard of a handy tool called Slack. Well, Kin’s customer in the spotlight this month is responsible for Slack’s much lauded UI design. Their name is MetaLab and the keys to their workplace success, according to COO Tim Wilkinson, is autonomy and keeping the workplace red-tape free. 

Who are you, what’s your role, and your favorite hand-held food?

Also worth mentioning would be the recent yoga session we had at the office. Some nice, relaxing team bonding. :-)

We’ve also just recently moved into our new office in Victoria. Finally moved out of our 550 square foot apartment that we had long grown out of!