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Inside eROI: Startup Grows Up - Lessons Learned (Part 5)

July 30, 2007

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.

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 6:57 AM | Permalink

Internet Rage: Guy loses online fight and drives 1300 miles to burn other guy's trailer

July 29, 2007

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.

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 6:54 AM | Permalink

Show us what ya got

July 27, 2007

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!

Comments (0) | Posted by maureen at 2:22 PM | Permalink

eROI Idol Annual Party Beats American Idol by a Mile

July 24, 2007

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.

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 6:29 AM | Permalink

Inside eROI: Startup Grows Up - Transition (Part 4)

July 23, 2007

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."

Results and Ongoing Measurement
The pain we experienced over the past couple months has made us stronger. I'm glad to report that this story has a happy ending, although you'll need to drop me an email to see if we have sustained our sense of internal alignment and emanating blissful exuberance. Here's some of our results:
• The Process Team has implemented improvements between and within departments including ways to give each employee more ownership and voice in our client projects, operations, and company direction. In fact, we used these new processes to involve people at the very beginning of these three new projects. The results are phenomenal. I'm amazed at how much our strategy, usability, functionality, and creative has improved when everyone involved in the project is on the same page:
o Konami - www.musicineverydirection.com/americanidol
o Widmer - www.lemonyourwidmer.com
o CircleHoe ecommerce site - www.circlehoe.com
• Through the internal branding workshop, we found our brand voice and incorporated into the new www.eroi.com to launch 7/15/07
• The company all chose a community service project to get our hands dirty at an all-company urban farm clean-up and planting party at Zenger Farm on 7/6/07
• My favorite result is a personal one. As a business owner, I have an enormous amount of pride and satisfaction of reaching the next level of synergy of this growing family of connected employees accomplishing work we never thought possible.

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 6:49 AM | Permalink

Inside eROI: Startup Grows Up (Part 3)

July 16, 2007

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.

In the weeks leading up to the retreat, I challenged our VP of Client Services, Maureen Pimley, to pull together a branding workshop that would involve the entire company. She assembled a team of five folks that all had branding backgrounds. As important, they represented a cross section of new and old-guard employees.

There were three objectives for the workshop: establish a clear and consistent brand voice, define our core brand attributes and define our corporate values. They narrowed down and assembled a dozen branding exercises that would each in their own way begin the process of meeting the objectives of the workshop. Also, to level the playing field for the non-vocal vs. vocal employees, each person was presented with their own workbook to write their answers on. But this was not all business. They incorporated a fun ice-breaker exercise with prizes, used a lot of visuals and inserted a couple of exercises towards the end that prompted group interaction to come up with their thoughts. Each exercise, bit by bit, helped to narrow the focus on the essence of the eROI brand.

The brand team led the workshop in the morning, introducing each exercise and guiding the discussion to keep things on track. Once each exercise was complete, the company broke for lunch and the brand team regrouped to compile the results for presentation back to the group in the afternoon. The purpose wasn't to provide the answers to meet the objectives, it was to share and discuss our answers. It was here that the benefits of the one-on-one interviews again came into play.

While I had the benefit of hearing each employee's constructive information and opinions in those interviews, for the most part, the rest of the company had not shared them with each other. What ensued was a very lively, mostly constructive, three hour long discussion about our brand, our values and our direction. I sat back and let the discussion happen - participating when appropriate. Okay, I was 'instructed' by the brand team to do this. It was very difficult at times but I took a ton of notes to keep myself occupied. Were there periods where we got off track and wandered into prickly topics? Yes. But in all, the information that came out of the entire day was then and is now proving to be invaluable for our culture, our company and our brand. Not to mention, as the founder of this company, it was an awesome sight to see that the majority of the people working here are truly passionate about eROI. We all want nothing less than to be the best.

Comments (1) | Posted by ryan at 7:41 AM | Permalink

eROI Team Gets Dirty at Zenger Farm Off-Site

July 15, 2007

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 >>

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 1:54 PM | Permalink

Portland Ad Fed Softball Gets Tough

July 13, 2007

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 >>

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 11:55 AM | Permalink

iPhone Mania: isn't it just a Pretty Blackberry

July 11, 2007

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.

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 11:09 AM | Permalink

Email Marketing: Changing the 'Average' Opinion

July 9, 2007

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.

It's you and your company's belief that your product is better than any other in your market. Why would you settle for "average" results? It's so easy to fall back on your averages to gage whether or not a particular campaign is successful, but how creative was it? How was it different than any other email you've sent in the past? Were your customers so enthralled that they felt inclined to forward it to their peers so that THEY can see what you had to offer?

I ask you, the email marketing guru, to come up with a different type of strategy. Break free from the standard email you send week in and week out, and come up with something unique. You know your product and market better than anyone, so these are merely just suggestions that might help start the brainstorming process:

Promote Online Shopping Security - If your email is product heavy, create an email promoting your "shopping cart safety" or "customer purchasing experience" and how you take care of your customer throughout the entire process.

Create Buzz - If you only offer 10% or free shipping with every email, offer a special time-restricted sale off large margin or clearance products to create "buzz" throughout your contact list.

Increase Repeat Customers - If your goal is to increase repeat customers, offer an additional 10% off a customers 2nd order.

Obtain New Customers - If you provide a service, maybe an SEO or hosting service, offer 3 months' free hosting and optimization for referring another company.

Promote Corporate Responsibility - A company like Neiman Marcus sends an inbox cluttering 10 emails or more a week. To show their company is focused on today's issues, they could offer a special 2-week promotion where 10% of every order is donated to the charity of their choice.

These types of offers may help your email stand out from the many others that are sent every day, and can help increase brand awareness. They're elementary in their premise, but they give your customer a reason to click.

An offer is only as good as the company that provides it. To consistently offer the same promotion week in and week out is an easy way to ruin your email marketing efforts. Include creativity with every campaign. Be the first in your market to provide something different each time you send an email. Create a campaign that incites a purchasing frenzy, instead of an "average" experience.

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 11:10 AM | Permalink

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

July 5, 2007

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.

Comments (1) | Posted by ryan at 8:44 AM | Permalink

Seth Godin is Right: Small is the New Big

July 2, 2007

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.

Comments (1) | Posted by ryan at 8:43 AM | Permalink