As we have grown from the company that started in my apartment, I always wanted to follow 4 principles – here they are:
Share in the success of the company with the people who create it, yes thats 8 of us:
Its SEER Bonus time!! For some reason, I love this day more than most. Every time I take substantial parts of the SEER profits and turn them over to the people who create them, it reminds me that I am keeping true to one of my core beliefs. The core belief is in sharing in the success of the company with the people who create it.
There are a ton of things I could have done with the $$ over the last few years, I could stockpile it and buy out a 2-3 person social media firm, since I want to build a social practice here. I could have done the same with a conversion optimization firm, but didn’t. I could have leased my dream car (all in due time):
Keep in mind that most people at SEER get substantial raises as well, so this bonus is not given because we cheap out & gave out 2-4 percent raises this year – so naysayers take that!
Another one of my goals is to make SEER a conduit to help people achieve what they want in life. Our bonuses can make it easy for people to make BIG steps in life, like buy cars, put down down payments on homes, pay off student loans, get out of debt, pay medical bills, give it to charity, whatever they want – that is ofcourse assuming they are GREAT!
Volunteerism – Helping people other than your (frikin) self:
SEER has always been big on volunteering (in a few weeks 10 of us will going to be cooking a meal for families at the ronald mcdonald house – you should sign your company up). After looking at our budget last year I realized we spent less on our charitable giving than we wanted to. So this year Crystal created a volunteer plan, one that allows members of our team who are volunteering regularly to select any one of their charities to give $700 to, a different team member will be picked every month. We have a ton of other things we give to, but we want to put this in the budget & create a program to make sure it gets spent.
Being a Good Dad:
All I want in life is to be a good parent, right now all I got is this dog, coltrane 🙂
But there will come a time in my life where I have a family, and when my 7 year old has a tea party at 12:00 on a Tuesday, I wanna be there. I don’t want some boss telling me I am out of vacation days! I want the ultimate responsibility and control over whether or not I end up being a good dad, and if I look back and don’t go to events, I want to be able to just look at myself and shoulder all the blame. For the record, YES I pay this same courtesy to every single person who comes to work with me – Family first, ALWAYS!
Oh and the obligatory – continue to work with GREAT clients and provide amazing service to them with a smart and talented team. Which leads me to my last point.
Don’t be GREEDY:
Today as I addressed a team of about 24 people, I realized that wow, this company got big. Not too big, but BIG! And now I have to spend some time slowing it down. As such SEER is likely going to hire another 1-2 SEO people and maybe another 1 SEM person and will stop hiring, unless someone leaves (which really doesn’t happen often). Then we’re going to take a little break to re-examine our direction and make sure we are on a path that stays true to our beliefs. Its hard for me as a hyper-competitive soul to slow down, but I think its a wise investment – I gotta see what it is like to turn away projects we want because we don’t want to add tons more headcount – I could see that being VERY difficult – if it hurts bad enough, we can change and continue some kind of growth – if it doesn’t then I’m content where we are growing more at a steady pace, then this rocketship pace we’ve been on – cause I am not missing that tea party when the time comes.