I have a hand in a lot of what leaves these walls, but not in everything. I spend time thinking about growth, HR, compliance, the team. We are small by choice, we've passed up investment opportunities, we even said "see ya" to someone who offered us a tempting sum to take us over... but we are here doing what we love because it is what we love. Every member of this team is integral, valuable and responsible for what they undertake. It is the only way it works.
Recently I have heard fellow entrepreneurs and those outside of the entrepreneurial space discussing the necessity of their working all of the time to accomplish what is required for their roles. This works so starkly against my ideology of work, and it is our core value that we call "every member of the team" that led us to grow this business from tiny slice of nothing to a boutique firm with a list of top tier clients in a few short years on 40 hours a week.
One of the biggest learning curves for our team members, because what we do is so unique and different from the marketing space that they were trained in or are accustomed to, is the realization that I am not here to assign and grade work. I am here to lead a company, to spend my time focusing forward on a vision that I have for where we are going. My team uses a few different tools to keep their work in order, their goals aligned and their work completed on time, every time. When there is a hiccup in that process it ripples throughout the agency. Tools we love are Asana, Google Inbox and Slack.
One aspect of agency life that I am unrelenting on is the fact that every member of our team is accountable to every other member of our team. From the moment you enter this work culture, that feeling is at the heart of everything we do. This understanding of mutual accountability makes it difficult to not push to be successful in your role. This also keeps the team on top of their workloads. Slacking off is not an option here, we move quickly, we pride ourselves on being agile and we use that agility as a core value proposition for our clients. We are very serious about our workloads, and we are very serious about completing our tasks within our work day.
Coming off of a big non profit event with a team 12 strong, and working here, I felt compelled to share this because I get asked how it all gets done. We are busy and we are committed and we are working normal work hours. I hate the idea that to be a profitable business you have to keep your staff working beyond the hours they committed to you for. I do my best to ensure that they don't have to worry about their work life outside of the office, and in return I expect and receive top notch work from fulfilled people who have the creativity that a full cup allows. I think we actually do better work in 40 hours than we ever could if we spent more time working.