eROI Days Email Agency

Lessons Learned
When you go through an emotional and professional journey like this one, it only makes sense to share my mistakes and the few things I did right. There are hundreds of lessons in just this one story, but I’ll share my top five:

1. As a business owner, never assume that informal socializing with employees is good enough. You must regularly meet one-on-one with your employees in a professional, confidential environment where true sharing is encouraged and rewarded. Additionally, I learned that employees that seem to get along socially do not necessarily respect one another professionally.

2. Take action quickly.

3. If your company is out of alignment, listen to your employees and let them know you are listening by sharing their suggestions with the whole company.

4. Get advice from other entrepreneurs. I was fortunate to have co-founded a group of 18 founders of high-growth startups called Starve Ups and received a lot of trusted advice from the trenches. Additionally, I am part of another group of advertising agency owners called Agency Owner Roundtable which is run through the Portland Advertising Federation. Both of these groups gave me pointers of real-world experiences on employee advice, branding advice, and strategic direction that I couldn’t get anywhere else.

5. You think you’ve delegated and given up a lot of control of your company, but you haven’t. If you want your company to soar, embrace delegation on every level and truly give key pieces of control to your employees. The Process Team is a result of this.

Bonus: Celebrate success when it happens.

This Boing Boing article was so outrageous that I had to post it on my blog. To read the full article, go to http://www.boingboing.net/2007/07/27/guy_who_lost_online_.html.

A dude on the internet referred to Navy Fire Controlman 2nd Class Petty Officer Russell Tavares as “a nerd” in an online trollfight. In one of the more dramatic tales of internet rage we’ve seen lately, the 27-year-old Tavares, who believed himself to not be a nerd, hopped in his car and sped off 1,300 miles from Virginia to Texas, where the name-caller lived.
Tavares photographed road snapshots along his route, and posted the images online, as if to prove to his internet peers that he was not a luzer. When he got to there, he burned the dude’s trailer down. Tavares has been sentenced to 7 years in prison for arson. Snip:

The feud started when Anderson, who runs a haunted house near Waco, joined a picture-sharing Web site and posted his artwork and political views. After he blocked some people from his page because of insults and foul language, they retaliated by making obscene digitally altered pictures of him, he said.
Anderson, who went by the screen name “Johnny Darkness,” traded barbs with Tavares, aka “PyroDice.” Investigators say Tavares boiled over when Anderson called him a nerd and posted a digitally altered photo making Tavares look like a skinny boy in high-water pants, holding a gun and a laptop under a “Revenge of the Nerds” sign.

To read the full article, go to http://www.boingboing.net/2007/07/27/guy_who_lost_online_.html.

Are you a curious on-looker or someone that wants to jump into the mosh pit? Maybe you’ve read about our yoga in the office and super fun parties and are thinking you no longer want to read about it, you want to live it. You are in luck. We have an immediate opening in our Account Services Team for an Account Executive. Read the details and let us know why you want to live it!

eROI’s July 20th shindig was ridiculously entertaining. As you’ll see from just a few examples below (edited for only the appropriate content), eROI Idol singers and the audience needed a little liquid courage from the ice luge to get on stage and perform in front of 500 adoring fans. For now, only the pics below are what I can provide, but in a few days, we’ll post the entire slideshow which will be edited (sorry, you had to be at the party to get the unedited version). I’m still sporting a perma-smile from how hilarious the performances were (by our very own clients), followed by insane free-style rapping by eROI’s own C. Masagatani.

A transition: Three employees leave on good terms
The company has had almost no turnover in its 4 ½ year history. A couple employees haven’t worked out, but for the most part eROI is loyal to its employees and employees remain loyal to eROI. There are a few exceptions where employees moved states to be closer to family or chose family. But, on the whole, it was a steady growth of new employees to add to the stable community of old-timer employees (in the startup world, this is defined as the formative three years with the company).

Interestingly over the past 6 weeks, three employees left the company. They left for similar reasons and the 31 remaining employees are more aligned and stronger because of this healthy transition process. These three employees were in dual-roles to provide an opportunity to grow into an area they were passionate about, but there wasn’t enough work in the new area to sustain a full-time position. These employees were excited about creating their own job descriptions for half of their job, but ultimately lost the passion in the core area of the other role of their job. Furthermore, all three of the employees that left saw how aligned the whole company was becoming. The collective motivation to make our mark on the world and do amazing quality work meant a renewed commitment to the company, more attention to detail and more hours, in some cases. These were some of the subtle reasons why a couple of the employees chose to become freelancers. Here is an excerpt from one of the former employee’s blog:

“I resigned from my job about two weeks ago and I wanted to wait until everything was finished before I started blogging again. It’s been a really emotional (ahh damn I’ve gone emo) and stressful last few months for me. I’m sure many people have left jobs before and have gone through similar scenarios. You start getting really combative, you aren’t easily motivated; maybe you’re even unmotivated, you start affecting those who are around you. It can get ugly, and while I was definitely in a bad state of mind, I would like to think I pulled myself together enough to leave on good terms with my former company. After all, it was they who gave me my shot and fostered my learning for all of this stuff.”

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If you missed Part 2 of the “Inside eROI” story, please read it before you read this blog post. Read Part 2 here >>

Next steps
On the evening of Day 3, I put in another late night and accumulated all of the process improvement ideas that employees had given me in our one-on-one meetings. There were over 50 improvements with the same primary objective: to get people from all departments talking to one another and involved earlier in projects to have more strategic input and ownership. The suggestion with the biggest impact was to create a Process Team with representatives from each department to roll out new processes across the company. All employees really liked this suggestion.

On Day 4, I called an all-company meeting and printed a copy of the 50 improvement suggestions for each employee. We reviewed the first five suggestions as a group then decided to have the Process Team continue the discussion and create an action plan for implementing the chosen process improvements. These improvements all fell into the following categories:

1. Training and education improvements
2. Project strategy process improvements
3. Support tracking
4. Q/A improvements
5. Project launch improvements
6. Better centralization of resources

A week later, we held our annual departmental goals meeting. In this meeting we review and discuss the strategic and performance related goals each department establishes for itself. Normally this is a very dry, low participatory event but this year, it was much different. The energy and enthusiasm that began with the one-on-one interviews carried over into the meeting where the annual goals we discussed. There were some phenomenal takeaways. Despite being out of alignment as a company, it was clear that we all had similar ideas for getting re-aligned. Each department presented and talked about similar concerns, goals and even ideas for reaching their goals. The energy continued to build.

The next week, the Process Team was formed. They met, outlined their rules of engagement, some of their objectives and agreement on weekly meetings. I am not in these meetings, but received a presentation (along with the rest of the company) with an explanation of what was covered and next steps. Ultimately, I’ll be in the loop on all process changes, but the Process Team is truly driving these improvements.

Internal Branding Workshop at Black Butte Ranch, Central Oregon
In years past, we had always utilized this retreat to review the forecasted goals each department had set for itself. This year, I had decided to do things differently. Even prior to the one-on-one interviews, I felt our time at Black Butte would be better spent diving into a company-wide branding workshop. Call it fate, planets aligning or dumb luck - the timing couldn’t have worked out better.

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A little manual labor is good for everyone, especially at a beatiful urban farm and wetlands area in Portland called Zenger Farm. In an effort to connect with the community, give back to this organic, sustainable farm, and do some actual physical labor, everyone at eROI headed for the farm Friday afternoon.

Garrett Gonzales was the Ansel Adams of the day (mainly to avoid physical labor), but he took some great shots at this slideshow. Check out the pics >>

One of our programmers is a line-drive hitter and a lefty. This, my friend, is a dangerous combo for the fielding team’s second baseperson. This week’s game was the first of the season and it started out with a bang. Even though I didn’t hit the ball, I still have that “Ouch” expression every time I see this photo. Read more about it on the Boo Boos Journal blog >>

It reminds me a bit of the picture of our own Creative Director Sam White when he didn’t hit a project deadline. Read more about it at www.SendaHighFive.com >>

My buddy, Paul Anthony, sent me this YouTube video of his client buying a licensed song through his company’s website. As Paul mentions, it’s the first time anyone has ever licensed a song for business purposes on an iPhone. I like everything about the video, but it got me thinking just how pervasive the buzz and media hype has gotten around this thing. What’s next - iPhone usage in the bathroom? How far will it go?

Full disclosure: I don’t have an iPhone, so I’m purely commenting on what I’ve read.

Tim Brown, Email Marketing Manager at Active Web Group

In the days of spam-riddled inboxes, everyone has an opinion on how to raise the average conversion, the average sale, average open rate, or the average click-thru. Years of data from some of the best, and worst, companies who specialize in online marketing have been analyzed and published to help construct “best practices” for email marketers. For that, I say “Congratulations!” You’re on course to bring email marketing, a gateway of infinite marketing possibilities and unlimited ROI potential, to an “average” level.

Email marketing is a channel, a unique marketing avenue unlike any other, for you to showcase your product or service to the world. Whether your company is B2B or B2C, it can help propel you to levels unattainable 10 years ago. But how do you get there? What do you do to get your email to stand out? What type of campaign is going to impact your customer…giving them no other choice but to click on your email and purchase your product?

The answers we’ve seen include “segment your email lists”, or “A/B test your email designs” and even “make sure your offer lies above the fold”. These are all very good answers, and key ways in helping create a successful email campaign. But something is missing. Something that will ultimately make the difference between maximizing your profit or resulting in another “average” email.

That something is creativity. It seems simple really. After all, marketing is creativity. Without creativity, we’d never know about the caveman’s struggle to adapt to human society or about a duck that can provide supplemental insurance.

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If you missed Part I of the “Inside eROI” story, please read it before you read this blog post. Read Part I here >>

Part 2 (in a weekly blog series that is a 5-part case study of “A Startup Grows Up”)

Meeting one-on-one with each employee
The first day of one-on-one meetings, I met with 15 employees and I was blown away by their insight and aspirations to make eROI the best company possible. It was amazing! We all wanted the same thing - to produce top-quality creative work online with innovative software tools to support it. But, there was huge friction to get there because we were out of alignment internally. We grew so fast that we began to create silos between departments. For example, the Creative department was not feeling valued by the Sales and Account Service departments. Nearly half the company did not feel they had an equal voice in the direction of the company. There was a lot of merit and reality to what everyone was recognizing. The big realization was that I was a significant part of the problem.

Mentally exhausted after day 1, I spent all evening writing a heart-felt email to all employees. I realized that many employees were new to eROI, to the agency world, and even to the working world (coming right out of top creative, interactive, and technical schools to work at eROI). So, this email provided some context of how we got to this point, recognition that there was a problem, and most importantly, that we were going to do something about it. Here’s what I sent:

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If you haven’t read any of Seth Godin’s books or his blog, you probably aren’t in the eMarketing, online marketing, interactive marketing, viral marketing or just plain old marketing world. He’s phenomenal, he’s candid, and the insight you learn from each of his books and blog posts is power-packed with solid, proven ways to improve your marketing and steadily grow your company by doing lots of little things remarkably well.

I just finished his book “Small is the New Big” which is a compilation of hundreds of his blog posts over the past 4 years. On a local level, I find that I learn from some small, entrepreneurial companies that specialize in a certain niche and share their learning with the world through their blog and with me at lunch or happy hour. Stephen Landau with Substance is one of those people. He and his business partner David have one of the best blogs I’ve seen on Flash and user experiences. Their idealism in truly changing the world is infectious and they are already making a difference. Check out their blog >>

Another blog that provides some creative inspiration as one of the smallest of the “big guys” (although they are the largest independent advertising agency in the country) is Wieden + Kennedy’s Portland blog and their London blog. Both of these blogs are either inspiring or so insanely obscure that it’s pretty funny.