David Cummings on Startups

Category: Corp Culture

  • Non-Standard Employee Benefits

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    When talking about employee benefits most people think of common things like health, dental, and 401k benefits. Lately, we’ve been talking internally about what other benefits we can provide to our team to make our environment and company that much better. Here are some of the non-standard employee benefits we already have:

    • Free food and drinks (the regular stuff plus nice coffees, teas, fruit juices, energy drinks, and more)
    • Catered lunches every Friday
    • Short term and long term disability with no co-pay
    • 1% of time paid for non-profit work
    • Quarterly off-site celebrations with food and drink

    Here are some ideas we’re thinking about:

    • Company-sponsored personal financial education to help team members interested in things like paying off debt, buying a house, and planning for retirement
    • Massages and personal wellness clinics
    • More frequent catered lunches as well as breakfasts
    • More frequent Friday afternoon happy hours

    What else? What are some other non-standard employee benefits that you like?

  • Defining a Great Corporate Culture

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    Several times now I’ve said that a great corporate culture is the only sustainable competitive advantage. How do you define a great corporate culture? Here’s how we define and measure our culture to determine if we are doing a good job:

    • We measure ourselves against the core foundation of good work, good people, and good pay:
      Good work – fun, interesting, and challenging
      Good people – positive, self-starting, and supportive
      Good pay – well above average compensation with strong benefits
    • We have an anonymous quarterly survey sent to all employees asking if they agree or don’t agree that we meet the core foundation (last quarter we had 100% somewhat agree or agree and we typically have 92%+ agree) as well as asking the Ultimate Question (how likely are you to recommend this as a place to work to your friends)
    • We measure employee turnover and typically only have one or two employees leave per year
    • We require unanimous consent for any new hires (anyone in the hiring process can say ‘no’ and the candidate will not move to the next round)

    Defining a great corporate culture is hard. We’ve set out our own standards and methodology and feel confident we have an awesome corporate culture.

  • Success Recipe: Great Corporate Culture with Strong Engineering and Sales

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    There is no recipe for success in startups. Every startup is different. There is a pattern for success I’ve seen many times: Build a great corporate culture with strong engineering and sales teams. Yes, all departments like marketing, services, support, operations, and finance are critically important. The reality is that engineering and sales are the most difficult to get right.

    A product doesn’t have to be the best to win but it does have to be good. Engineering teams matter. As much as B2B tech entrepreneurs would like to have self-service products, people buy from other people. Sales teams matter.

    The corporate culture is the over-arching fabric of a company and the only truly sustainable competitive advantage.

    Build a great corporate culture with strong engineering and sales and you’ll be successful.

  • #1 Interview Question for Startups

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    Interviewing is one of the most important jobs for startup founders. According to Fred Wilson, the three most important things a CEO does include sets overall vision and communicates it with stakeholders; hires, recruits, and retains the very best people; and makes sure there’s always enough cash in the bank. For our interview process we do a combination of interviewing with a half dozen people, two page essay, product exercise, reference checks, and more to make sure we hire the right people. Nothing is more important than getting the right people on the bus.

    Here’s the number one interview question we like to ask:

    Tell us what we do and why you want to join our team?

    This seems like such a simple question but it really reveals how serious and excited they are about the position and company. The key is getting them to talk about your company because it shows how much research they’ve done, how much they’ve visualized working for you, and what type of team member they’ll be. My recommendation is to incorporate this question into your interview process and never settle hiring anyone but a great fit for your team.

  • Weekly Tactical Meetings

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    As part of our meeting rhythm, which is a hybrid of Patrick Lencioni and Rockefeller Habits, we have weekly tactical meetings. These are similar to staff meetings but are comprised of the management team and have a very defined process. The meetings typically last 30 – 45 minutes, but can be as short at 15 minutes. Here’s what we do in them:

    • Discussion of weekly dashboard KPIs, but only if the KPI is not on target (way below or above goal) so that we don’t waste time on things that are going according to plan
    • Top three priorities of the week for each person
    • Ad-hoc agenda of anything people want to talk about (meatier topics get tabled for monthly strategic meetings, which don’t happen as often)

    Now, this approach is overkill for a two person team but it works well once you have three or more people on your management team. This strategy works well for us and I’d recommend giving it a try.

  • The Challenging Employee Conversation

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    The most common mistakes startups make are pricing their product/service too low and not firing employees that don’t fit fast enough. I want to talk a bit about that second example: employees that don’t fit. The pattern that I’ve seen emerge over the past 10 years is when an employee with challenges has been brought up in a management meeting, the issues addressed, and then something else repeatedly comes up, it isn’t going to work out.

    We do a weekly tactical as part of our Rockefeller Habits rhythm. The goal is to do a very brief KPI review, priorities for the week, and any immediate agenda items. My experience has been that if a challenging employee has come up in conversation over and over again at these meetings then we as the leadership team are doing a poor job of setting expectations and building a great corporate culture. Employees want to know where they stand and to receive honest feedback, in addition to written warnings in many cases, as that is more desirable than tip toeing around issues and not letting on to the severity of the problem.

    My recommendation is to not sugar coat issues with employee challenges and know that one of the most common startup mistakes is not letting go of bad fits fast enough. It isn’t that the employee isn’t a good person, it’s that they aren’t a good fit for your startup and there are better places for them to shine.

  • Customer Service Shouldn’t Be Hard

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    One of the simplest and best ways to differentiate your startup is through customer service. I know this sounds basic but it is amazing how low the bar is set when it comes to getting help. Lately, I’ve had to interact with sales reps from two different companies — yes, people who are making a commission off my business — only to have them take 48 hours to respond to my emails. 48 hours for a response!

    Here are a few customer service tips:

    • Build high quality customer service into the core of your corporate culture
    • Work to have customer service and sales questions answered within 15 minutes and no longer than two hours, if possible
    • Set the tone that employees on the front line should use out of office autoresponders when they won’t be able to get back to the inquiry within a reasonable amount of time
    • Celebrate and store customer praise for great service, put customer testimonials on the wall, and recognize employees who go beyond the call of duty

    My recommendation is to deliver great customer service and make it a core of the business.

    What else? What other customer service practices should be employed?

  • Monthly CEO Letter

    A couple months ago we reached a point where we had too many employees to fit in our large conference room for the monthly all-hands meeting. Now, we do weekly team meetings with smaller teams and make sure the meetings have a good, quick pace. Yes, it is more meetings. The good part is that the meetings are faster, making them more enjoyable as people go around celebrating their accomplishments for the week.

    Because we’re no longer together once a month, I now do a simple monthly CEO letter. In the letter I talk about each product and hit on the major metrics for the month. Some of the metrics include:

    • New customers
    • Lost customers
    • Customer upgrades
    • Website traffic

    As a team, we still have our quarterly celebrations outside the office, which provides a rhythm for all employees to get together regularly and social. Communications and alignment are some of the most difficult tasks of scaling a company and we’ve found this works well for us.

  • 3 Keys to a Strong Corporate Culture

    As an entrepreneur, I most underestimated the importance of a strong corporate culture when building a company. Yes, having a great office, fun toys (like Razor Scooters and a Segway), and free food+drinks set the tone, but they aren’t nearly as important the three areas both Dan Pink in the book Drive (autonomy, mastery, and purpose) and John Bogle in the book Enough (autonomy, connectedness, and competence) identify. Here’s what I view as the three keys to a strong corporate culture, and personal happiness:

    1. Autonomy – empowering team members to make and own their own decisions
    2. Camaraderie – knowing that others in the company care about each team member on a personal level, especially managers and direct reports
    3. Mastery – truly excelling at your given role and achieving a level of confidence and proficiency

    My recommendation is to spend time on your corporate culture knowing it is one of the most important things your company can do to be successful. I agree with Richard Branson when he says that employees come before shareholders, customers, and vendors.

  • Employee 1% Community Time

    We value our corporate culture as one of the most important aspects of the company, and one way we give back is by employing 1% community time. What that means is all employees get to spend 1% of their time helping a non-profit in the community, fully paid for by the company. With a typical 50 week year, and 40 hours per week, for a total of 2,000 hours, 1% comes out to 20 hours, or 2.5 days of community service time. Yes, it is optional, but a good number of team members take advantage of it.

    What are some advantages of 1% time? Let’s take a look:

    • Great for employee morale
    • Powerful for team building and cross team rapport building
    • Positive impact for the community
    • Helps put things in perspective

    We’ve had events with Junior Achievement, helped clean up a park in South Atlanta, and have an event with the Boys & Girls Club coming up.

    My recommendation is to consider 1% community time for your company.