The Blueprint
Six years ago Ryan, Phil, and I were part of the launch team for a local Church. From a group of about 30 initial members, the church has grown to over 400 regular attendees, two services, dozens of community groups and hundreds of volunteers. During this time the three of us have been involved in both serving and leading various servant teams within the church. After 6 years of leading hundreds of volunteers we have developed organizational tools and strategies that are rooted in team theory but tailored to the modern church servant team. Mosaic is our companies effort to provide other churches with proven organizational and communication tools.
Mosaic is described as an ancient and contemporary art form which uses individual pieces of materials placed together to create a unified whole. Individual pieces (tesserae) are arranged in groups that move and flow (andamento) throughout the entire work of art. This fluid organization of individuals into a seamless whole is what we are creating with mosaic. Our tesserae are not pieces of tile or glass but people and our andamento is not a pattern in art but structure and organization of servant teams in the modern church.
Mosaic is not designed to be your traditional “membership/volunteer” database. While we recognize the need of some organizations to employ large complicated software to track everything from birthdays to anniversaries, and family trees to blood type we believe that most groups simply need a tool to manage the organization, scheduling, and communication between volunteers. Mosaic is intentionally simple. We don’t ask for members’ maternal grandmother’s maiden name. You don’t even need a complete organizational plan to get started. All you need are people…we’ll help you organize and stay in contact with them.
Over the next few months we will be posting more detail about features within the application and screen shots of the four core areas that comprise Mosaic.
Teams
All your info about your people and teams in one place
Messaging
Communicate easily with people and teams through Mosaic or email
Event Calendar
Tie your teams to events to easily track who is needed, when
Sub-Finder
Know when people can’t show up and easily find a replacement
These four core areas will work together to solve the major issues that surround team management even if you’ve never had to manage people before. The best part is that we’ve built Mosaic based on our years of experience (good and bad) managing servant teams. Our goal is to take the headache out of managing your servant teams and just let you serve.
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.
Okay this is really cool. We browse the excellent articles of Smashing Magazine on a regular basis and today we were extremely surprised and honored to see that the design of our main menu made the list of Navigation Menus: Trends and Examples. A lot of care went into our menu when we designed it and it’s awesome to get recognition for our hard work.
Allow me to throw a little love back to Smashing Magazine. If you are a designer or developer and are not familiar with Smashing Magazine, then you owe it to yourself to visit their site and subscribe to their article RSS feed. It has proved to be a great resource of inspiration and information for us. Plus you can clearly see that they have good taste.
Well, leave it to us to launch a site geared for us to take over the world of web design and 6 months later we completely re-purpose our entire company. This blog was stunningly quiet for months after the first post and eventually was removed altogether because it’s not a real blog if we aren’t making posts right? I figured it was time to catch everyone up on where the company is and where it is headed in 2008.
Starting last year at SXSW we realized we weren’t taking business as serious as we should. As a result we began to take some small business classes and getting some council from various mentors that we meet with. What we realized was that we were unhappy with our current business model and began to brainstorm ways to change it.
The following weeks we went from completely closing our doors to hiring some staff to help us work through the areas we have struggled in. What we finally landed on was a departure from pure and simple Web Design to Web Application development. We’ve had many ideas that we think an online solution would help several groups we are involved with, so we have taken a step of Faith and gone with our gut and made the move. The grayness of our future is beginning to clear up as we work through this transition and we are all very excited about the months to come.
Which brings me to our next piece of news that I’m most excited about. In order to make this work Phil and I knew that we would need some help with something the size of an application, especially given our new found knowledge of our company analysis. We called a lunch with Chris Nilsson… a guy that has helped us for years work through our harder UI and coding problems on various projects. The result of that lunch is Intereactive bringing on another full partner in the business!
So here we sit.. Chris, Phil and Ryan… ready to take on the thousands of Web Applications that have failed. We believe that ours has a chance not becuase it has the potential to make money, but becuase we feel there is a need for it. Our eggs are in one basket, the blog is resurrected, and in the words of Jesse James… all we lack is finishing.
After 3 years, it’s time to say goodbye to the first version of our site and welcome in its successor. This is a moment we have been excited about for awhile now and it’s awesome to finally be at this point and watch the transition take place.
Launching “V1 - Creation” back in 2004 was a big moment for us and the site got the job done for the most part, but was lacking in multiple areas and needed an overhaul. The site was just not reflecting who we are and what we’re about as a design company. If we go to such great lengths to ensure that the sites we build for our clients accurately reflect who they are, then obviously our site should do the same. Our new site, “The Exodus”, was built to do just that.
One of the biggest areas that needed updating was our portfolio. Our work is the main ingredient of our company and so with our new site we’ve given our projects more focus as well as elaborating on their individual details. We also beefed up our who we are section to include detailed bios of our team members which really show off each member’s individuality. In addition we incorporated this blog which we feel will help communicate our personality as a company, as well as individually.
So have a look around and let us know what you think.