Intereactive Web Design - Sugar Land, TX

I’ve always believed in the policy that if you take care of your employees, they will be happier and more productive. And so much so, that the company will grow beyond the growth rate if you had taken that same time and money and put it into the company itself. I’ll never forget working for a boss and asking for a specific software and laptop and the response I got was, “If we really need it and it will help… buy two.” I was completely floored and what resulted was me working very hard to complete the project.

This morning I picked up an article called, Workplace Experiments from 37signals where they posted about some of the things that they are doing to take care of employees and encourage them to grow. Being that 37signals is making a ton of money and can afford to throw some money around I think the normal small design firm will say.. “Yeah I want to do that some day!”, but the truth is that any company can apply these kinds of things no matter what their income is. I figured I’d make a similar post about things that our company has done from day one… even when we had almost no money and were just 2 guys going, “Uh.. I think we should build websites.”

One of the first things we did when we outlined money flow for the company was put at least 20% - 25% of the gross income from every project back into the company. This money was primarily used to pay for client lunches, gas to/from meetings, general client expenses, etc… We could have just taken payment on the balance of that money but we choose instead to keep it in the company. We had several categories that money would be available for:

Software Upgrades
We always wanted to stay current with what is out there so we can buy upgrades for Adobe/Macromedia products, plugins for various software, movie loops for animations, fonts, and/or pay versions of free software if it made it easier (i.e. FTP Programs). What we found is that there is an excitement around getting new software. It makes you want to use it and do something cool with it. Sure you get the same feeling with free software, but there is something to be said for taking hard earned money, buying a nice product… and then using it.

Books
Anytime we’d see something that we really felt we could use for better understanding.. we’d buy it. Of course we’d always hit the Half-Priced Bookstore first! We didn’t want any barrier to learning something new.

Conferences/Tutorials
The company always foots the bill for conferences. Signup fees, gas, hotel, food… the whole nine yards. We feel if we think it necessary to go, then the company will benefit. And being away from family is a hard thing to do no matter what the reason so hopefully not having any out of pocket expenses helps with that.

Personal Lunches
Anytime we all go to lunch, even for just hang out time, Intereactive picks up the bill. Having things like “planned team building” is good, but real community and friendships are built over coffee, lunches, dinners or breakfast. We find it much easier to work through conflict of vision and ideas if we’ve already established friendships along the way.

Gifts
The internet is a great place to learn and there are a ton of forums out there. Every so often you run across a person that has gone out of their way to help you get something done and a nice gift card to Amazon is always nice to give. While these people aren’t official employees of Intereactive, they are helping us get our jobs done!

Our mindset is that even though we are only a 2-4 person company we want to think like a larger company. We want to feel like what we get paid for is ours and that there is a definitive split between the company money and personal money. Please note that we are not advocating haphazard spending. You have to set up a budget and allocate that money. Currently in our transition of our company we’ve had to limit alot of that spending because income has drastically decreased. For instance, the first thing we scaled back was company paid personal lunches and we now have to plan for other purchases a little more. But we still have that element of taking care of and encouraging the employees no matter what our income. I love working for Intereactive.. not just because I own part of it, but because we’ve made it a fun company to be a part of.