Archive for the ‘culture’ Category


Thoughts On Hiring – Our Approach

Posted by jeb on July 20th, 2009

I think a lot about hiring. How to attract and retain top talent. I’ve worked with companies that have had major turnover issues and I’ve seen the negative impact it has had on their growth and their clients. I’ve also seen companies that have been afraid to let long time employees go even though the company had moved on and the employee was clearly no longer the right fit. So, how do you achieve healthy, sustained growth?

Small Box has a different approach to hiring and it seems to be working. We’ve had no turnover in almost 4 years of business. Here’s how we approach it.

No-one starts full time. I believe in a good “courting” period before “marriage”. All full time employees, outside of Joe and myself who founded the company, have started part time. This gives us a good chance, on both sides, to figure out if there is a match on a professional and cultural level. Can they do the job and do we get along?

Sometimes it becomes clear that a full time position isn’t the right relationship for either party. Sometimes we move quickly into full time when it’s clear we have a rising star.

I don’t spend much time, if any, looking at resumes. I do like to look at what people have done but I find resumes next to worthless in general. Every employee we have hired has come through our various networks. As we hire more employees we increase our network.

Some business folk will argue that you shouldn’t hire friends. I disagree. Now, firing friends can be hard but I’ve done it before, at a past company, and if done right it’s not too horrible. I see many upsides to working with friends.

Communication: you know how to communicate since you’ve been doing it for a while already.

Culture: you already share this so it’s easy to have a good vibe around the office.

Accountability: you know this person isn’t going to flake.

Tough Times: if your company goes through a tough patch there is no better team than one that is on a friendly basis with each other.

I don’t want to act like we have it all figured out. I expect many HR challenges as we continue to grow. But I do feel that limiting a company’s growth around a healthy hiring process will result in a much more profitable business down the road.

Posted in culture, smallbox | 12 Comments »

Easily Approachable and Quite Deep

Posted by pj on July 10th, 2009

Seth Godin writes

“There are very few products, services or organizations that are simultaneously easily approachable and quite deep. That’s an opportunity for you if you can figure out how to be both, but choosing just one is a more likely scenario. So, which are you?”

It’s a good question, here’s how I would answer:

The web seems really complicated but not to me. I just see it as a series of decisions that require particular expertise to do correctly. The best decision is the one that makes the next one seem more apparent. There is never going to be one person who is right about everything all the time. What’s important in doing a web site, or marketing strategy, or making any series of decisions is to make each one as close to right as you can so the next one is clearer.

We do that by first and foremost attracting the top talent in the region. Then we challenge them to do more, to understand the implications of these important decisions. Then we provide what we hope to be the top level of customer service for our clients.

The results are clear to me, some are big and some are small. I take a small amount of pride in knowing that we are growing while other web companies are going out of business or shrinking. But what I take the most pride above all is the relationships that I have built with those in the box with me, and the way we extend it to our clients. Of the huge number of sites we have helped produce, 99% of them are still online exactly as we launched them.

Key to our growth is the way we have extended our services beyond designing and programming websites. It is a complete array of services our clients need, and some they don’t. That’s the real Small Box difference right there, whatever people think they know about us, there is more.

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Posted in Everything Else, content management systems, culture, design, indianapolis, marketing, pay per click, search engine optimization, sem, seo, smallbox, technology, usability, web design, web development | 1 Comment »

Thoughts on a Company’s Culture and Hiring Process

Posted by jeb on January 8th, 2009
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3078/2325322297_3f035d6bcb.jpg?v=0
Zappos’ Dance Dance Revolution for employees and visitors

How important is a company’s culture?

Jack Shepler recently sent me a great blog about Zappos’ company culture and branding written by the company’s CEO/COO. The basic gist is that the company’s branding flows from its culture so they work hard to protect their culture.

This really hit home with me. It ties into my belief that the web is forcing transparency on businesses. A company used to be able to run an ad campaign protraying their company or service as being X whereas the reality was Y. Other companies, like Angie’s List and Yelp.com, have created a business reporting on the difference between X and Y. Essentially they serve to either confirm, deny or modify a company’s marketing claim. Now blogs, forums and social media in general act in this capacity on a larger scale.

Bottom line is you can’t lie to your customers anymore,  eventually you will be found out and everyone else will know. What a bummer!

Of course this is actually a good thing. Forcing a company to address and not ignore problems actually serves them well in the long run. There is nothing like a public shaming to get a CEO out of their office and actually interacting with their customers.

So to have great branding it needs to follow from a great culture. A company’s culture flows from the executive team but is kept alive by the entire company. New hires are essentially new “ingredients”. Make sure you add the right ones or the dough will turn sour.

On a related note: I heard someone remark today that they overheard someone at a company saying they would “remove all the negative feedback” before sending along this person’s comments to their boss. What a horrible idea! The negative feedback is the most valuable stuff.

The CEO of Zappos makes many good points in his blog about culture and branding so I recommend you read it all. The one I found most relevant and interesting was how it plays into hiring. They have one round of questions that deal with the job itself (i.e. can you do it) but another round of interviews that deal with the company’s culture. If the person is a good fit for the job description but not the culture then they would pass on the hire. He even states that they have passed on hires that could have been very beneficially for their bottomline but not their culture. He realizes that the culture is where their success springs from and to mess with it might be toxic to the company’s future.

I know at Small Box we typically work on a freelance basis with a potential hire for at least 6 months before they come on full time. It really helps us see if they are a good fit for the team. I realize that isn’t possible in all industries but it seems to work with ours. I think with more people un-employed and looking for whatever they can get this might be an opportunity for more companies to have a courtship period prior to hiring on someone full time.

What do you think? Does your company’s culture match its brand? What is your hiring process?

Posted in culture, smallbox | 5 Comments »

Here Come The Millennials!

Posted by jeb on December 12th, 2008
I saw Rebecca Ryan speak yesterday at a luncheon for the Indiana Chamber of Commerce. I first worked with Rebecca via a MediaSauce job and have stayed in touch since then. She is a wonderful person and it was great to re-connect with her at the luncheon. Rebecca owns a company called Next Generation Consulting in Madison Wisconsin. I sat and watched Rebecca tell the leaders of the Indianapolis business community that in order to attrack the best and brightest we needed to value the arts, green space, mass transit, work-life balance etc. (I sent her a text later that I saw a distinct ruffling of feathers among some audience members. She was happy to hear that.)

This is the subtle but meaningful contribution the current crop of Millennials (also known as Generation Y) are bringing to the community and workplace. It may be the ticket to our economic recovery. Rebecca posted a graphic showing the market capitalization of GM, Ford, Lockheed Martin and a couple other big companies. Then she showed a graphic of Google which equaled all the others added together.

This up and coming generation is perfectly positioned to create more Googles. They are tech saavy, the first generation raised with the Web, creative and willing to take risks. And they can work hard, I’ve seen that time and time again. They just work differently than previous generations.

Millennials value the overall good more than immediate monetary gain. They want to have a positive impact on this world while getting a decent paycheck. I don’t think that is a bad thing at all.

Some look down on this new generation as being an ADD mash up of all previous generations with no soul of its own. I have to respectfully disagree. Shouldn’t every generation try to take the best of all that came before and create their own stew from those experiences? Isn’t that the point of civilization?

I employ a number of Millennials at Small Box and also teach three classes at Franklin College. Although I get bummed out sometimes at gaps in their depth of understanding and knowledge overall I am encouraged and excited to see them come into their own. I think we will be pleasantly surprised. They are much more competent than I think the
older generations are aware. We are in good hands.

Posted in culture, smallbox | 1 Comment »