Author: wilreynolds

Almost 2 years ago Rand Fishkin and I announced that we were going to try a little experiment, swapping CEO roles and running each other’s company for a week – see how tired I am every time they cut to me? It wasn’t an easy task.

Anyway, I wanted to say thank you Rand & Moz & Moz’s investors  & Seer Execs for letting us do the swap, here we are 2 years later (My 3 week old son, Rio is literally crying as I write this on my last day, so expect typos) and I can see things at Seer that we are doing, that have impacted our company in big and small ways.

Hey Moz, Rio is wondering if there are onsies out there somewhere? 🙂

Ok, on to the changes we’ve made…

Moz vs Seer – Maternity Leave & Paternity Leave

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In one of my conversations it came to my attention that Moz has equal maternity and paternity leave, I believe its 4 months, paid at 100%.  While I couldn’t match that (Seer was 3 months, at like 70%-90% pay), but we didn’t have paternity leave for the dads.  Me being the kind of guy I am, I said, we should do that too, and we did.  By implementing that company wide, I was just able to spend 6 weeks working an extremely reduced schedule (I was probably at 10-15 hours a week vs my typical 55-60 ish) and spend time with my new son, Rio and my wife. I am also easing back over the next 2 weeks.  I don’t know if I would have had a facility to do that w/o the swap, b/c I might not have ever been challenged on that.  

As such, I have gotten to spend SO much time with my son, and be an equal partner with my wife. It feels good to have done that and invested this time, it feels GREAT to have made it a part of Seer that every mother and father have equal access to, it costs us a lot of money, its some of the best spent money in our budget.

Moz vs Seer – Nursing Rooms

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Newsflash, I don’t nurse babies as a result I didn’t know much about the process.  

During the swap Rand dropped the idea of building a room for mothers under our stairs…for Crystal and any other mothers (we’ve had a ton of babies born since Crystal’s little one). Now moms don’t have to try to book a conference room, look for a room with locks, etc.

I’m glad to say Rand, we have space for 3 stations for mothers in our new office. Without the swap, that may have never happened, and my lack of exposure would have made a lot of people at Seer’s lives a bit tougher.

Guess what Rand?  When one of our folks (Charlotte) who interviewed us both after the swap had her little one, Ryan who runs the San Diego office, rallied the team and somehow they turned a closet into a pump room, that was all them, they saw what we did in Philly and found a way in a cramped office to make a nursing area a priority.

Moz vs Seer – Google Groups

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I remember when I was answering emails, that one day a Moz LGBT list popped into my inbox (as I understand it its for anyone who wants to keep on top of issues / support, etc, so its all inclusive).  I had no idea you all had such an active list, and while Seer has had a couple openly LGBT folks, if we do today they are not open.  But if we ever have a few, a group will be made if they want it.  I am pretty sure, that you also had a group for parents. Seer now does too, as a result of me seeing how you all use groups at Moz.  That list provides us parents with anything from a “here’s where to save money” to a “OMG what did you do” to a place to share pictures with one another.

Its a support system, and I never thought of creating groups like that within a company.

Thanks again Rand, you might not know if the impact was felt – I hope this post shows you that a year and a half later, not only have I made some changes (more to come in part II), but Seer has made institutional changes, we’ve learned and put things in action.

As you are aware, I try to take a mix of heart driven and data driven approach to working at SEER.

So I decided to look at our Holiday Policy with a little data after years of looking at it with heart.

In brief our holiday policy lasts from Dec 23rd – Jan 3rd (usually).It is a don’t come INTO the office, stay home with your family, but be available for your clients and co-workers if they need you, policy. If you wanna be “off-off” then just use your vacation days which are unlimited anyway.

That could be 1 hour a day, 0, or 10 depending on if a fire comes up or not. As a big fan of Speed of Trust – we don’t monitor people’s time, we just believe that they’ll do what’s right when it comes to helping teammates and clients. So this year many people tacked on a day or two and were out of the office working a heavily reduced schedule for 2 weeks. Perfect, it gives people time.

For some reason I wanted to see if I could get a pulse on how many emails were sent during the holiday as a one barometer of are we giving a “false” perk, but people are working all the time? So I asked our IT manager if Gmail gives reports on how many emails were sent, upon which I then found that we could go all the way back to July 9th to look at emails sent by day.

I found some very interesting data, by simply converting the dates in the CVS export from MIke. I was able to get this data set . A little pivot table magic, and voila!

 

First, my assumptions:

• July-January SEER had an average of 90 employees.
• Sent emails is a better gauge of what you have to respond to vs what you receive
• This obviously would miss things like working on projects / hours and updates in basecamp, but we work so much in email that this is a decent barometer.
• Let me say again, a lot of our work can be outside of email. So I am using email more as a relative scale (how much does it drop) over the typical daily workflow.

Warning: I don’t even know if we can do this at the individual level, but DONT DO IT! This is about a barometer on the company, if you start looking at individuals and how many emails they sent, you have LOW TRUST in your team and you’ll have a lot bigger problems.

First thing I noticed:

 

Holy shit people’s emails sent drop by 95.81% from the peak (wednesday) to saturday at an average of .68 emails sent per employee, and 1.168 on Sunday.

Average emails sent: Saturday = 61.2

Average emails sent : Sunday = 104.4

What inflates this number is the 6 person leadership team. Anecdotally I know we work more on weekends, because I get emails from them on weekends more than anyone. To check that I used conspire to look at my personal weekend emails as you can see on Saturday Dec 20th, I sent 34 emails

 

 

The whole darn company only sent 58!

 

 

So on Saturday Dec 20th, 20 emails were sent by 89 people (of which most of the 20 were probably leadership team). That makes me pretty happy.

Since that was the holiday break I picked another random date October 18th. I sent 13 emails, the company sent 66. Again knowing that the exec team is probably 50%, not bad. Especially on Sundays when Crystal does her updates, she’s been known to put out 15-20 emails starting on Sunday 9:00pm EST, as she gets ready for the week 🙂

I also decided to look at hours, even though I don’t like using hours b/c its too dirty, as getting 100 people to track their hours the same way is impossible, like I didn’t clock any hours on Oct 18th, but obviously I worked, you saw the email sends above (I’m, bad I know), so that means this number is under reporting in terms of hours, but it was a check against the issue of e-mail only work vs reporting, strategy work.

 

Saturday was 98.09% less hours than the peak of Tuesday

Sunday was 95.91% less hours than the peak of Tuesday

How can you use the data to check your company trends, you can also look at days of the week benchmark this against yourself.

 

 

Hours Trend

 

 

Hours Trend

 

 

(note, someone let their timer go ape shit and forgot to stop it!)

Individual day peak email sent (holiday week) = 470
Individual day peak email sent (random selected week) = 1388

66% drop in emails during the holiday break, I like that!

 

Individual day peak hours work (holiday week) = 266
Individual day peak hours work (random selected week) = 775

66% drop in hours during the holiday break, I like that!

There are so many gray areas in perks, that maybe a check against them from time to time is one way to make sure you are staying true.

The next thing for us to do is interview our clients and see if we did a good job covering their bases and getting things done when they needed us.

At a time when company after company is releasing its diversity data

http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html

http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-shares-workforce-diversity-data

http://www.microsoft.com/global/en-us/diversity/RenderingAssets/Microsoft_EEO-1_Report_2014.pdf

Maybe we could start looking at other important metrics too, vacation days used, sick days, emails sent, you name it.

I also realize that sending email is not the only way to measure but again its a barometer and a start, its why I also looked at hours. Maybe we can evaluate every quarter @ SEER.

The goal is not to compare yourselves to anyone, the goal is to look at the numbers and as a leader ask yourself, is that what I’d like? Am I happy with it? Then based on that stay the course or change direction.

If you find other ways to look at this data let me know, I’d love to use it to help make SEER just slightly better tomorrow than it was today.

Thank you!

–Wil

I’ve never been afraid to talk about turnover or hiring at SEER, I started 5 years ago writing about the stuff, never been afraid to go open kimono, after all it is the TRUTH! For me, I write about turnover for a few reasons.

1. Personally, its a record of my growth, change in perspectives, etc as I grow up.  Its funny to see how I felt about turnover at 25 people vs 100 people.
2. Not enough people write about this and share their feelings or data publicly, I’ve never been worried about that transparency, b/c the open honest data speaks for itself.
3. It helps future hires know our approach. Some people might say its bad PR for SEER, I disagree, I think we owe it to future hires, current team mates, and to ourselves to take a data driven and heart driven look at turnover and the impact of our decisions.

That post from 5 years ago still gets play– and people are still saying it helps them. About 18 months ago I wrote this part where I looked more for the data side, and learned a ton of lessons.

In that post I even talked about my early days when I wasn’t a student of the interview, how I had involuntary turnover at the 60-65% range in the early early days.  I trusted everyone in the interview, didn’t dig in, and as a result within weeks I knew I made a mistake.  I knew I had to fire quick if I wasn’t going to be good at hiring, that sucked, and I vowed to get better.

Turnover is scary and managers need to realize that, as we have all the whole story locked up in our brains, but the friends of the people you let go don’t.

So here I am 18 months later, more data, let me show you what i am tracking to see if SEER is truly getting better at hiring.

Here is a snapshot of my data set, there are some small discrepancies, but overall I feel very confident about the numbers. 

(I’ve deleted the exact #’s so people don’t spend time trying to figure out who is who as that was not my intention at all, but just to be really transparent, you’ll have to trust me on that).

First the categories.

Raw vs Adjusted Quits – If someone left to start a family or take care of a sick family member, I first hope they enjoy the time starting a family, or that their sick family members are doing better. But that, people who move for sig others jobs, to move back home, or to totally leave the industry are different than someone who moves b/c they wanted to work at a competitor, or they were a bad match for SEER, or were recruited away. Some people overlap both categories, like we have had someone move, who we both knew this wasn’t a match, those are the people who I put in the bad match category. I wasn’t sad to see them leave when they moved, which is different than those I was.

I defined a lot of my categories above
Mutual bad match is one where we and that person knew it wasn’t a great match, this happens.

Recruited away is one where someone who we wanted to stay was recruited away and in the exit interview stated such.  They were not actively looking.

Fired Culture is for the super haters, sorry to say it this way but spitting on employees while you are angry with them, sexually harassing a colleagues friends, and showing up at people’s houses at 2-3am uninvited wasted repeatedly are just examples of firing for culture. 

Fired wrong person / not enough time to train is for the people who I shouldn’t have let us hire in the first place, but I did. They then needed a ton of training to potentially add value greater than their cost, and we had to make the tough call.

Fired my mistake is the introspective view of myself.  Its someone I fired who it wasn’t the right thing for us, for us or for our clients, I jumped the gun. I shouldn’t have. I wish this person was here.

Fired performance is someone who has the skills to do a job in SEO/SEM/Marketing/Etc –  but we made the mistake of hiring someone competent just at the wrong level at that time (many people have been let go and completely leveled up later in their careers, we knew they would). This also includes promoting someone into a role that was too big for them. We should have taken it slower and give them training and support to grow into it, and given OUR growth @ SEER the amount of leveling up needed was almost insurmountable, much less without official training. it was one of those tough decision, do we train and hope they level up or alleviate the pressure on them, so they can find their next opportunity? Sometimes we train and wait but sometimes we have to part ways.

Question 1 – Are we hiring just to replace who we lost or are we really growing?

Then I wanted to break this down further, some turnover it inevitable, if that comment above was all people who quit for reasons related to not wanting to be at SEER, that would be a bigger problem.

The 50% line would have been break even (I know I could have used a better chart), but in that month I’m able to see it was still pretty bad, as only added net 1 hire.

I recommend you create an acceptable, ideal, and unacceptable range, quarters when you hit unacceptable, you must re-evaluate yourself, you company’s ability to retain, your managers ability to work with your team, after all bad managers are the #1 reason why people leave. This will help you keep yourself honest.  You must do exit interviews so you can categorize people better.

Note, as Anne Holland once said to me when we had 100% retention (minus involuntary turnover).  If no one ever wants to leave that is a problem, she said.

Question 2: Are you not seeing bad matches that are not willing to quit? Are you letting culture issues stay? Managers fire people sometimes, it sucks for all included, but it is part of the job.

Remember firing people is a time for deep-self reflection, most times, YOU missed something in the interview process or YOU promoted someone into the wrong role, or too early, or YOU didn’t give someone the support they needed to do the job at the level you expected. Yes its always nice to remove a burden on other team members or yourself, but you put your team in that position.  People don’t hire themselves, YOU DO. People don’t promote themselves, YOU DO!

People are…people.  They will interview well, they will say the right things, so hoping to have 0% baseline is not realistic for a company who wants to push the envelope.  Again, a highly innovative company might be hire than one who is OK with a certain group being there w/o innovating. 

Some big old companies have set this bar at 10%, like GE. With 305,000 employees worldwide, that is 30k firings per year.  Its their way of addressing innovation. I applaud them building something that scales (as it has to).  Sticking it to though, forces you to fire fire people who might otherwise be good people, so I’d never do that!! Microsoft got rid of their system.

Remember its good to have a quarter or two where you have 0, but if as you get bigger some firings mean you are not leveling up, as you ask your entire company to pivot or level up, its only inevitable that some people may not.

“What got you here, may not get you there”

Question 3: Why do they quit?

You can make your own categories, but fight your desire to put people in categories that make you feel better about yourself.  I do this, I stack the # of quits graph on top of one another!

Additionally you should also create a baseline.  

At SEER I see we are on Raw at an average of around 5% and adjusted at around 2%. For adjusted we’ve held down Under 2% for 20 months, I’ll take it. For raw, we are also under 5%, I don’t know how that stacks up to other agencies, but it feels right to me. A spike or dip may happen, the overall trend will tell you if you are getting better or not. We are in a highly competitive industry with a LOT of recruiters calling, so consider that.

Note: One thing to be careful of, is your numbers can be artificially low, so keep an eye on if people are just putting in “their 1 year” and leaving. If you’ve made a lot of hires recently, this could make this seem smaller than it is.

So that leads me to the next chart. You have to discount people who are staying their 1 year, so this is how I am doing it…any ideas on how to do this better?

The thing I care most about is that this is going down over the 5 quarters that matter most, however if we don’t keep growing we could run into a position where people want to advance in their careers and we don’t have roles, which is OK, or that we are not creating stronger Individual contributor tracks causing people who don’t want to go into management to leave.

I bet you feel different about your company at 25 than you do at 100 or 200, or 500?  People may opt out of that kind of company as you grow, that is also OK.  You may now realize and they may realize that something is different.  I tend to believe, and have blogged about the fact that growth is a retention strategy.

For every 1-2 few who opt out and leave b/c they enjoy the smaller company, there are maybe 6-7 who enjoy the opportunities growth opens up to them, allowing them to stay at a company and level up in their careers.

Note, people who are quitting in their first year, is a major red flag, if you see more than a few of these you should start digging in immediately, are you not setting expectations right?

Questions I can not answer yet, but have the data in the right format.

How many people who have been here for 12 months make it to 24 months trended out.  How is our retention of year 2 employees, year 3, etc, etc.  I feel like getting that info will help us understand roles / opps for people who have done 18+ months at SEER.  Any ideas?

Firing in clumps happens, its scary, but in an industry that constantly evolves, and in a company that constantly attracts talent, our clients deserve working with people with tenacity, they might not know everything about every change at Google, but they are constantly learning, improving and getting better.

You can not improve what you do not measure, and I think any exec in  a growing company must evaluate this.  We need benchmarks, I am just now making these up, but we should have benchmarks to make sure our lack of patience at times does not lead to us making rash decisions.

Also to make your company better exit interviews are key.

I’ve said it several times, but former employees, are some of SEER’s best referral sources, for business and for team mates. I wrote about it here in a post about 5 ex-employees I still have tight bonds with.

People leaving or getting fired is part of life, how we treat each other after is up to us.  Whats most awesome is that is what my role and our managers role is, people will come and go, that is inevitable, how we treat each other on the way out, how do we set people up for their next opportunity that is all that TRULY matters!

NOT EVERYTHING IS going to show up in your spreadsheet!! That is why the combination of heart and data is always the way to look at turnover.

Managers remember to check the qualitative parts too, how do people leave? Are people referring you employees or business, how much notice are you Of our last 6 departures we had:

• (1) 3 months notice
• (2) 2 months notice
• (3) 1 month notice
• (1) 3 week notice + consulting

I wanted to look back and see if we are really loving the employees who leave, like I said in that post, well in the last 6 weeks (as you saw) we have had a good amount of departures, some aren’t recorded yet but when I went to check that gut I found all these opportunities to ask, are we trying to do the right thing?  Given what I saw below, I think we are getting better every day!

Here is me, introducing one to a client for a job opp in SF!

A little birdie who just left, referred us a new team member:

The adios emails as people leave are often pretty touching!

or this one:

or this one

Heck even some we had to let go the first one, and someone who mutually realized we weren’t the right fit even wrote us days ago!

Heck, sometimes we even refer them business for their new consulting business or keep them on as consultants!

Being a  good “boss” is about one of my core beliefs, Kaizen.  

You must seek to get better everyday, you need to repeat yourself more, and just when you feel like everyone in your company knows how you feel about something, repeat it again! 

You never become a good boss, everyone is different, every situation is new. Use a mix of data and heart, and you can keep working on being a good boss, but its not a destination, its a journey. 

Every hire you make that is wrong is YOUR FAULT!  Start with that belief, whether they quit or you have to fire them, start with it being your fault.  Look for what you could have learned then work backwards.

Sometimes people leave for family, could you have given them 6 month unpaid leave?

People want to move, could you have let them work remote?

Then ask yourself if that the kind of company you want to build?? If the answer is no, there you have it…management.

No solution is ever 100% so have a guiding principle and stick to it, it’ll make tougher decisions easier to make. 

Like Ron Garrett commented on this post, Jeff Bezos says…“Be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details”. I couldn’t agree more.

I look forward to updating the data and updating my journey, this job is tough, keeping 10 people happy is hard, 100 is impossible, so be prepared to be stubborn on your vision.

“The only person that doesn’t care about titles is the CEO.” – Stephen Gerard

It hit me like a ton of bricks over a year ago. One of my advisors said that to me, and I let it sink in, the man has a way better than anyone else I’ve worked with to get me to be less pig headed about my “ideals”.

Before I get into my new take, let’s go back to why I didn’t have a title when it was just me, and where we have evolved to.

I didn’t want a title, ever. When SEER was just 1 person my cards said “associate”.

• I never wanted people to think I was “important” based on my title.
• I didn’t want to get attention because of my title.
• I never wanted my team to confuse a title, with having a tangible impact.
• Lastly, I never wanted to overweight my importance to SEER.

That last part was most important. I believe we’re like a group of people in a boat rowing, we all play a different role, and maybe at times roles become more important in certain situations, but the role becomes more important, not the person..

See, that there is a team that wants to win, that there is a team who picks up the QB, and you better believe that there were times when I needed my team to pick me up.

Your clients are going to want a Senior in the room

For years advisors would tell me, Wil, you need titles because clients will want to know they have a “senior” so and so in the room. I scoffed and hated that concept. It was the easy way out, I’d rather people show their talents to the point where no one cares what their title is. Might that mean SEER gets “smaller” clients? Great! If they believe what we believe and vice versa that is all that matters to me.

Titles grow margin w/o giving a riase

“See, if you give someone a title, they’ll stay longer and you don’t have to give them as much of a raise.” – Unnamed Advisor

Ouch that was even worse advice than plop factor. Are you serious? To me while the psychology of this is true, and I LOVE behavioral psychology with every fiber of my being, I don’t want to be manipulating my team with that. Nor do I care about adding 1-2% on margin b/c I’m giving titles.

Why will SEER move to titles in 2014?

Ben Horowitz that’s why. Somewhere between Las Cruces, NM and Tuscon AZ, while my wife and dog and I did our annual pilgrimage cross country for me to work from our other office for a few months.

I put in Ben Horowitz’s book on audio, the Hard Thing about Hard Things. It was recommended by an advisor.

In the book, I learned a ton. But one of the many lessons, was on titles.

Ben talks about how when you don’t give titles, you don’t show peoples progression at your company. OOOOH now we’re talking.

I care a lot about people’s path AFTER SEER, if they have been good to us and have helped us achieve our goals and objectives, why the heck wouldn’t we help them on the way out?

Anyone hiring a solid 2 yr PPC’er in Boston? Got someone leaving @SEERInteractive to move back home & want to find her a GREAT place to work

— Wil Reynolds (@wilreynolds)

October 17, 2013

Its why we often get 4 weeks and sometimes as much as 3 months notice. People know we will invest that time trying to help them on their new journey / new path and that they can tell us they are leaving w/o us acting like this:

But if I we TRULY cared about people’s path post SEER, are we making it harder for them to articulate the great things they’ve done and their advancement by not using titles? That is what Ben said to me, 3 months ago, and today I know Titles, like other absolutes I had at SEER are going to go. Being in this role is about growth and keeping your mind open, even to your “absolutes”, testing yourself, messing stuff up sometimes, and learning.

If your company doesn’t have titles, wear that proudly. But ask yourself one thing, when someone’s path takes them away from your company, and they have done great work, are you making it harder for them to stand out in that next job? Have you handicapped them in the eyes of HR who will see one person who got three promotions on their resume, and your team member got 3 “internal promotions” but their title never changed. Might that keep them from getting their next dream job, I think maybe. That risk is too great to me, so we’re gonna change some stuff @ SEER.

Hey Ben, who did the audio for that book? Dude had a f’ed up voice…hearing him quote Nas and Game, was gut wrenching.

“Wil, stop looking over the hood. You look over the hood with your peripheral vision, your eyes should be pointed out of the driver side window!”

Was kindly yelled at me again and again, by my driving instructor as I raced a few super cars around a mini track at Leguna Seca during my driving school.

It was fighting instinct…you are supposed to keep your eyes straight ahead right? WRONG!

My instructor Jeff, a burly man, with more broken bones from years racing bikes and cars had to repeat that several times to me, and in my 1 day it still didn’t sink in. I was fighting instinct, and 20+ years of driving.

I never actually got that right, but it did start to sink in on the way home. (note: if you go to a racing school and push cars to their absolute limits, have someone else drive you home, the cops wait right outside of the school and write tickets like mofos).

I digress.

What sank in is the metaphor, don’t look over the hood, see the hood in your peripheral, but keep your eyes looking out the drivers wide or passenger window. It rings over and over again like an echo in my head now. You need to trust your peripheral to see what is ahead, and use your eyes for what is coming up next in a split second, think 1-2 turns ahead and trust the car and your training to take you through this turn, but never keep your eyes off of the next one.

I’ve run the operations of my business looking over the hood, and the vision of my business with my peripherals. I spoke about this at LENGTH here in this video, the link starts at the right point to talk about mistakes I made in hiring too late or as my instructor Jeff would say, looking over the hood.

Are you looking over the hood of your business?

I’ve put my company through some sharp cornering we weren’t prepared for. I hired every position that would help SEER run better operationally (President, HR, IT, Finance) way too late. I realized that our clients were leveling up at a rate faster than my team was 18 months ago, leading to some rough patches, out of blind loyalty I worked with clients who I lost money on for months and months and months. All of that is looking over the hood with your eyes, not preparing for what was coming. I wasn’t looking far enough out to see processes that wouldn’t scale, I was getting through the “turns” just really slowly and with a lot of friction.

or

Are you looking through the drivers window?

See, when comment spam, keyword stuffing, link networks, and directories worked, I used my peripherals to rank well today (aka, did the least possible) with my eye 2-3 turns ahead (hiring journalists, direct marketers, web marketers, PR people, etc) as SEOs. It prepared us for the turns we knew were coming well before they were right on us. That meant we were accelerating out of the apex, not breaking because we took the wrong angle. Today that means that we’re the RCS company, heck people use RCS or real company shit/stuff as a terminology. RCS was looking out the side window, not over the hood. We that shifted, pivoted, saw the turns and got out of them a bit quicker, not much quicker but a bit. Remember winning a race is a matter of shaving ½ a second on 10 turns per lap, over 50 laps.

Today, when I see the Cooper Tires foot bridge at Leguna Seca I no longer see a straightaway…

I’ll always see a forgiving right turn (meaning I can get more aggressive) a little straightaway and a mildly sharp left, I’m still working on remembering the next one, but I’m getting better. Minds eye first, real eyes second. Thanks Jeff, that’s gonna stick with me.

Oh for those watching the video here is my slideshare too: