eROI Days Email Agency » eROI culture

Q & A with Rich Nevins, eROI

emily — Mon, 03 May 2010 22:53:51 +0000

Last week eROI welcomed Rich Nevin, our new Product Manager, to the team. He’s a great guy to have around the office, and we’re excited to introduce him to you.

eROI: What do you do here?
Rich: I am the Product Manager for all eROI software products and services.

eROI: What did you do before?
Rich: Most recently I built a personalized children’s book company – a mash-up of a web-driven personalization interface, children’s picture books/content, and on-demand book publishing. Behind that I have a pretty varied (I like to call it “dynamic”) career, like: driving product development for a video-based e-learning company; creating a sales/marketing team for a medical device company while developing a medical device; sales engineering big streaming media deals with a little company called Enron; knowing way too much about optical microlithography and its implementation in a high-volume semiconductor manufacturing environment.

eROI: So far, what’s the coolest thing about working at eROI?
Rich: It’s an easy answer – the people. I think having smart, motivated people excited to create and deliver greatness is pretty cool.

eROI: What do you feel that you’ll bring to your team?
Rich: Having been on the customer side for these products and on the development side of other (reasonably similar) software products, I think I have a unique perspective and skill set that I hope can help make these products great.

eROI: What was your first job?
Rich: During a teachers’ strike in high school, I took a job as a bark spreader. I got in trouble for spreading the bark too quickly, which was a great lesson in “work environments to avoid.”

eROI: What was your worst job?
Rich: Fencing. I used to resurface tennis courts and one summer I had to do a bunch of fence work around some big high school’s courts. Never. Again.

eROI: What were you like in high school?
Rich: I lettered in football, basketball, and chess (yes, I won a few matches at State). Never a cool kid, never a nerd, but a little bit of both.

eROI: Do you have kids?
Rich: Yes. My wife Jessica and I have two kids: Jackson (8) and Addie (6).

eROI: Where are you from?
Rich: Though I was born in Michigan, most of my growing up was in a tiny town of 4,000 people in Kentucky.

eROI: What’s your favorite thing about Portland?
Rich: It’s just the right size and full of interesting people doing interesting things.

eROI: Where’s the coolest place you’ve traveled?
Rich: That’s a hard question – I love to travel and have lots of favorite places for different reasons. Our family just went to Brazil in February and had an absolutely amazing time. I still dream about the food in South Korea. But I don’t think anything is prettier that being back country in Banff/Yoho/Jasper.

eROI: What do you like to do when you’re not at work?
Rich: I’m a family guy – my life revolves around friends and family. I coach several sports teams for my kids (baseball, t-ball, soccer) and play soccer and basketball too. I read a lot, am big into music, and rarely turn down a chance to play a ridiculous game (ping-pong, bowling, foosball, darts, ad nauseum) or to have a drink on the porch with friends.

eROI: If you could build a robot to do an everyday task for you, what would it be?
Rich: It would convince my daughter to get dressed in under 35 minutes. EVERY morning.

eROI: What’s something that may surprise us about you?
Rich: I learned to ski in Kentucky. Yes, snow ski.

Inside eROI: Startup Grows Up, Heartfelt Email to Employees (Part 2)

Ryan Buchanan — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 16:44:54 +0000

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:

—–Original Message—–
From: Ryan Buchanan [mailto:ryan@eroi.com]
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2007 10:42 PM
To: All Employees
Subject: Day 1 of learning, Improvements to make us Stronger
Team,
While completely mentally drained from stepping into each of your shoes (albeit only 15+ minutes at a time for the 15 employees I talked with today), I have learned a lot today and last week. The process has been phenomenal, healthy, philosophical, and challenging simultaneously. Coming up with the questions got me thinking about how we as a company can approach each employee’s life holistically and value how eROI plays a part in achieving your life and work goals.

It stimulated some phenomenal conversation that began with some very candid discussions between Maureen, Dylan, and I last week of some known areas of improvement. But today was even more eye-opening on many levels. I was inspired by each and every employee I talked to today – the majority of each discussion was overwhelmingly positive and provided a whole new perspective that I hadn’t considered.

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!

–Ryan

One-on-one meetings continued on Day 2 and 3. There was a huge relief and high level of appreciation that I recognized the problem and wanted to do something about it. Employees opened up more about specific process that we should implement which would improve things greatly and overall discussions were even more powerful and constructive. Employees (across all departments) started to feel more ownership of the future direction of the company.

Mind and Body at eROI

Ryan Buchanan — Mon, 07 May 2007 14:19:35 +0000

Just like keeping your lists in good shape, we have brought in Yoga every Friday AM to the eROI team to keep mind and body in top notch condition. Ryan was great in arranging this for the team so that we could end each week not behind a keyboard, but in the downward dog bringing the flow of blood to our minds.

Account Execs, Designers, Support and Management took part in the first weekly class.

With the amount of work and stress our team takes on each week, it is a wonderful practice to invest in the team itself. Who knew that our wood floors would be good for things besides break dancing competitions.

eROI: Not Taking Ourselves Too Seriously

Ryan Buchanan — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 19:08:07 +0000

If you haven’t had a chance to watch our holiday video, you are missing out on a few good laughs. It’s home-grown, hand made, and poor video production, but the content is original and it’s always fun to watch a group of people that really enjoy one another and have a good time.Check out the eROI Holiday Video >>

www.eroi.com/holiday

Email Maketing Needs to be Creative

Ryan Buchanan — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 16:51:13 +0000

So after moving in, we were rewarded with some new toys. I mean Darts, Foosball, Guns and Liquor should have been enough for anyone, but we needed a Lil’ Chick.

This new Green Machine is the envy of inter-office transporation. Living in a “Bike Friendly” city like Portland, we needed to bring the bike inside to really hold up to the hype.

And who can’t solve problems better with an increase in blood flow? We know Lil’ Jeff can.

Alaskan Adventures of a Co-Worker

Ryan Buchanan — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 00:32:44 +0000

I got this email from a co-worker who is stuck in Alaska. If the email wasn’t so elaborate, I might not have believed him and thought he was trying to make excuses for missing work, but the story is just so good. The best line is: “Sorry this meessage is so messed up, it’s missing half it’s keys.”

“Just wanted to give you all a little update. I’m currently stuck in Russian Mission calling every airline in western Alaska trying to get to Anchorage. We’ve been waiting for a plan for well over 24 hours now, but due to a serious of blizzards and freezing fog the planes have remained on the ground. So the rest of this trip might be an attemp to get back to work on Monday with no time in anchorage at all. Hopefully that won’t happen though. So far this trip I have caught two 2′ pike from whole in the Yukon. (we fish with a stick and lower a rope into a hole in the ice). We’ve gone on some long snowmobile rides up the yukon which can be little scary when the water sits on top of the ice you can’t tellif you are going to go through or not. At one point we saw a bunch of moose and tried to get closer but got stuck in a snow drift and had to spend a half an hour digging them out of the snow, with the moose staring us down, and stuck in 5 ft. of snow which made it virtually impossiblle to walk.

Hung out with the natives in their sweat lodges and helped pull up a fish trap which is the point at which i fell partially into the frozen Yukon river. It’s cold. We’ll there is a slight chance we will be leaving now so i ‘ll let you go. Sorry this meessage is so messed up, it’s missing half it’s keys.”

We Need More Space

Ryan Buchanan — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 23:43:30 +0000

Well the time came recently (as you might have seen from earlier posts of Art under his desk trying to make a call) to move into some larger space. We had maxxed our office space as much as possible and were geniunely concerned about an Outbreak of Hong Kong Birdy Flu that would have taken us all down and left us in an episode of LOST other then the world we live in that closely resembles THE OFFICE.

So out with the OLD….

And in with the NEW.

If you happen to be in the area sometime, drop in and see the place. And Check any notions of a CORPORATE environment at the Door. It takes hard work to make a place that works so hard.

Open Office Layout – Sometimes it gets a little Loud

Ryan Buchanan — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 18:40:49 +0000

What do you do when it gets a little loud in an open office environment? One eROI employee, who was on an important client call, created a sound barrier under his desk. Yep, we’re pretty creative here at eROI.
Cheers.