eROI Days Email Agency

I also learned a few lessons:
1. I made the huge mistake of thinking that walking around and talking to folks informally meant that I knew what was really going on in people’s lives and how people interacted within the company. Formalizing these one-on-one meetings at least twice a year with me and managers outside of your department will become a MUST for eROI moving forward. Having a confidential format to share ideas is critical and something we have been missing for a while.

2. There is a perception based on a lot of reality that eROI is a sales-driven company. Let me take that one step further, there is a strong perception that I lead the company but ultimately default to a sales mentality on nearly all decisions. Therefore, I’m perceived to play favorites to the Sales team and don’t empower other departments equally. I understand that perception and think there is some truth to it from a historical perspective.

When I founded the company in Dec ’02, I had just come off of a failed startup that lost a considerable amount of my own money and 2 ½ years of my life. I learned a ton and did not want to make the same mistakes twice. One of those mistakes was to spend well over a year developing the content for a product from scratch and being far too patient with slow (and almost non-existent) sales. Along came emailROI (now eROI). We brought in over a dozen clients in the first few months including Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and Cingular. We also leveraged our old product to become the new ecommerce and event registration engines and started selling websites for $3k, then $5k a year later, then $10k a year after that, and now $60k or more in many cases. Sales was how we survived as a tiny company and how we were able to start feeding our families and for me, also paying off debts from the failed startup.

Now, it’s 2007 and we’re no longer a startup. At the very beginning of this year, I outlined 3 top priorities for the company (Technology Reliability, Quality Work, and Customer Service) and none of those were sales-related because the thought was that clients would come back to us more and more if we executed upon those. The funny thing is that it’s working – we’re getting a ton of new work from existing clients because we are doing AMAZING work by designing and producing cutting-edge sites, blogs, and social networking projects by insanely talented designers, production artists and programmers. We are making a name for ourselves locally and at some point noticeable on a national scale. Even now, there is some recognition among the rest of the company of the value of sales, but this could be vastly improved by formalizing internal training meetings of sales scenarios and client meetings. In short, sales should be valued highly, but not at the expense of other departments.

While my mind was in the right place, my actions were NOT. I clearly emphasized Sales numbers too much (they are still important, but I will discuss these less often publicly). I’m sure I verbalized a certain pride in the team bringing in a new client or project. I’m sure there are other examples as well. Also, there are over 100 clients where I am the salesperson. That won’t change. What will change is everything that I’m aware of. I’ll also be much more cognizant of supporting ALL teams equally. If you’ve read this far, I’m going to BOLD this statement so it stands out: I am actively working on changing my demeanor, actions, and ultimately your perceptions so that you feel that you are each being listened to and empowered equally. It’s really easy to complain, but I need you to take some initiative and work to implement solutions so we can improve this across all departments.

I need each of you to make changes as well, but I will wait until I meet with each employee before being specific about that. As we continue to have these one-on-one meetings this week, please keep being candid in your conversations. It is most helpful.

3. There is some friction between certain departments (not just the sales dept). I understand that and think there are many specific solutions that have been suggested by a lot of you and we will likely implement many of your suggestions.

4. Nearly everyone in the company is aligned on ONE primary goal – to be known for our Quality Work (creative + innovation from every department). We all want to make our mark on our community, society, and the online marketing WORLD. We are in the process of doing that. I need every employee to send me opportunities (unpaid and paid – especially unpaid) to submit our creative to relevant places to get recognized for Design, for CSS standards, for Viral campaigns, for Web 2.0 awards. More importantly, we need to formalize how we celebrate creative within the company. We have dozens of email and web creative launches every month, so we need to formalize the process of educating employees on the one thing that is most inspirational to all of us – creative (from a work and product feature perspective).
There are a lot of other things that we will cover this week and the next few weeks leading up to our Black Butte Retreat, but I didn’t want to wait a month to address some frustrations that are in some areas of the company. I wanted you to know that I am open to all of your thoughts and ideas and these conversations are making an impact – they are creating change. I ask that you open your perspectives to change as well, because ultimately there will be compromises to get the solution everyone is happy with. But, it will create better process, a better company, and a better life for all of us if we can implement these changes effectively.

Looking forward to our conversations tomorrow and Wed this week!