eROI Days Email Agency

If you are up and about and wandering the streets of Portland contemplating the businesses you watch come and go you may want to peek at the August 2010 Oregon Business Magazines article titled “The New Deal” written by Ben Jacklet. Yes! There are people working behind the scenes of Portland’s start up ventures and they are working hard to secure Portland’s economy in more ways than one.

These guys know small businesses drive the economy and in Portland that is just what we need now, being known as a pretty slow start up scene when compared with fast runners Seattle and San Francisco. They may not seem so glamorous to the naked eye but these small start ups need investors to get them off the ground and angel investors in Portland have not been so quick to spread their wings.

Oregon Business Magazine has just published the article to explain who is out there and what they are doing to get these small businesses and startups funded and on a steady growth pattern. The young business leaders featured here bring with them a wealth of new ideas to “ignite the startup scene”. These are the guys who are investing in Portland’s small startups not only financially but with new ideas and dynamic views on how to succeed.

Find out who they are and what they have been doing.

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.”

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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:

(more…)

Over the past three months, I met with all 34 employees in my company and asked them tough questions about the role work plays in their lives and ended up receiving more tough answers than I was prepared to hear. My e-marketing agency, eROI, is 4 ½ years old and has been growing fast and furious from the start. We’ve had growing pains and transition times before, but nothing like this. If you are a company owner or an employee of a growing startup who likes the company but are frustrated about aspects of it, then you will get a lot out of my learnings.

The following story is a transparent view into my company’s transition with growth. The story starts with preparing for our four-day retreat in the snowy Cascade Mountains in sunny Central Oregon. All the preparation and internal discussions took place in Portland, Oregon six weeks before the actual retreat happened in late May. The goal of the retreat was to go through an internal branding discussion to get internal alignment on who we are as a company, as a brand, and where we want to take the company in the next year. However, the preparation work produced information that I was oblivious to.

Preparing for our Annual Company Retreat
In early April ’07, I requested one-on-one meetings with all of my 34 employees. I asked them to answer in advance five questions in preparation for their meetings. The email that I sent out to the team requesting this was:

______________________________________________________________

From: Ryan Buchanan [mailto:ryan@eroi.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 3:00 PM
To: All Employees
Subject: fun + important exercise leading to Black Butte – personal branding + eROI

Team,
I know I talk to almost everyone a bit here and there on a daily basis, but I want to ask a few questions in one-on-one meetings with each individual person (you + me for 15 minute meetings next week) where your answers will remain anonymous. Collectively, your input will help inform a much larger branding discussion at Black Butte (all day Friday) around what eROI should be in the near future.

I’ll walk around now to schedule these 15min meetings next week w/ folks.
Thx,
Ryan

(more…)