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Internal “I told you so!” memo leaked

A couple months ago I stayed up late writing an all-staff email. By the time I awoke it had been leaked, right here on this blog. Some of it somehow ended up in Twin Cities Business magazine. Psst, hey, WikiLeaks, my staff more recently found this in their inbox:

All,

As you may have heard, we have been honored with the #1 ranking in the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal’s Best Places To Work awards project. This ranking is a result of your responses to a web-based survey earlier this year. Your survey responses earned us the #1 ranking in the “Medium Companies” category, which includes companies with 100-1,000 Minnesota employees.

Let me finish by saying, “I told you so!” But let me start by saying a bunch of other stuff that leads up to my dramatic finish (which is when I will say, “I told you so!”).

Over the past few years we have become players on the local and national Business Awards Circuit. It is true that we nominate ourselves for awards all the time. 40% of Mark Malmberg’s job is to keep redialing business magazines to try and win prizes, such as “Be our 25th caller and win # 1.471 in the Inc. 5000 List!” Many years ago, I was recognized in the Business Journal’s prestigious “40 under 40″ award thanks to a much younger Mark Malmberg’s redialing skills. Dialing a 1-800 number over and over using a rotary phone takes dedication and lubrication. That was back when Mark was youthful. Nowadays, the other 60% of his job involves him banging his cane on the ground and complaining about “those darn kids with their WiiTari games!” Please take no offense – that’s just an old man’s cry for help. And by “help,” I mean 16 individually-wrapped Werthers Originals candies in a small dish on his desk where a young person would normally keep an optical mouse.

Enough about Mark; let’s talk about us for a little while. We have grown at a rate that outpaces most business in the country. We have managed this growth organically, meaning we haven’t grown through acquisition or by means of investment capital. In our growth, we have been recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in Minnesota, as well as in the country for each of the past three years. We should all feel proud for our growth achievements, but our growth only tells part of our story. Our growth is about dollars, not about people. The Inc. 5000 and Biz Journal’s Fast 50 don’t measure us by how many jobs we have created, or how happy people are with those jobs. But those things are a priority for us over pure revenue growth.

As proud as I am of our revenue growth, and our recognition in both the Inc. 5000 and the Fast 50, our recognition as a “Best Place to Work” is a more significant accomplishment for all of us to be proud of. Though Mike Derheim will take credit for the black “Suggestions Box” in the lunchroom, this working environment has always been a collaborative effort and everyone here is responsible for our culture. You took the survey, and overwhelmingly gave your co-workers, your managers and the leadership high rankings. Furthermore, you took the time to provide positive commentary regarding the company’s strengths, weaknesses and food/beverage selection. As a result of your input, we were awarded first place in the project, and that tells a more complete story.

I don’t have a plan for your workplace enjoyment, and I can’t tell you how we will continue to be an awesome place to work as we grow, but that’s exactly how we got to where we are today. Pentathanerd, Light the Light Walk events, Game Night, Overnight Website Challenge,  user groups meetings, and Bottle Cap Talk (formerly Minh’s Friday Fiesta) don’t make for a fun, respectful and caring community – they are a result of it. This award is all about you and your Interpersonal Awesomeness, and you damn well better keep it that way as we grow or your whole nerdy community will become flooded with a bunch of gossiping, back-stabbing disrespectful Prima Donnas and when it implodes, I will stand upon the heap of social rubble that remains and yell, “I told you so!”

- Luke

Staff email, leaked

(This was an email to Nerdery staff – and perhaps, dear reader, you’ll join us soon and come to expect such communiqués)

All,

You may have noticed that we never held a Q4 2009 wrap-up meeting. If you didn’t notice, it may be because there’s a 24% chance that you didn’t even work here that last time we did one of our quarterly(ish) update meetings. I finally decided that we are so close to the end of Q1 that we’d just wait and do a Q4 & Q1 wrap-up meeting combo. But, there’s lots of stuff going on and I feel compelled to provide some summary updates here.

Sales Summary:

We closed 2009 with sales of $8,609,108, which is about 5% over our adjusted plan of $8,200,000. Ugh. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice the word “adjusted” in that first sentence, but obviously I can’t slip anything past you folks. Our original sales goal for 2009 (which we baked at the end of 2008) was $10,000,000. We decided to adjust (un-bake) this plan in May of 2009 after we finally sat down and watched the news.

We grew our revenue by 35% from 2008 to 2009, which is a more-than-respectable achievement. We should all be proud of being part of an organization that was able to establish a strong growth rates in 2009.

Our sales goal for 2010 is $11,200,000, which is 30% growth over 2009 actual revenue. We haven’t finished the first quarter of this year yet, but we are on track for meeting (and possibly exceeding) our sales goal. By “possibly exceeding”, I mean, “we’re going to pwn our sales goal!” We only need like… umm.. carry the one… $118,000 more in sales this month. Get up, go find a sales rep, give him or her a big hug and say, “I believe in you!” Then, sign an order for $1,180. If we all do this, we WILL reach our goal.

Employment Summary:

In 2009, we had a net increase of 16 employees. We started 2010 with 85 employees, added 18 new people and lost one – leaving us with 102 employees (this number includes full-time contractors, excludes dogs, and includes the two people that are scheduled to start in the next week or so). Of the 18 new people this year, 17 of them are in the development department and they recommend sugarless gum for people that chew gum. Are you trying to figure out who the other one is? It’s our newest sales engineer, Bill Titler. I don’t know why he hates sugarless gum; maybe he moonlights as a dentist.

Space Summary:

We have about 17,000 square feet at The Nerdery. We are adding an additional 7,000 square feet in about two months. The lease is signed, the plans are in place and construction is ready to begin any time. We are taking over the two vacant office suites to the north of our space. The diagonal wall will be removed (Nerdery Science Theater will be preserved), new bathrooms will be added, and we’ll have some new conference rooms and a few new offices. If Mike Derheim makes you nervous whenever he takes a tape measure to your workspace, rest assured that his intentions are good. He’s not trying to figure out how many boxes or additional people will fit in your cube. To be honest, I really don’t know why he does that. Perhaps it’s some sort of tape-measuring neurosis that isn’t even work-related.

The new space comes complete with all new cube furniture. All of our cubicles are going to be replaced with new(er) and super(ior) equipment. Mainly, the new cubes have noise-dampening properties that should result in a quieter working environment. But, more importantly, the new space comes with new large bathrooms AND our existing bathrooms up front are being remodeled. Unfortunately, they need to remodel our existing bathrooms before building our new ones. You got the memo, so you know the deal. We’ve survived worse bathroom conditions than this. I just hope the reduced bathroom capacity doesn’t create chair-dampening properties.

Summery Summary:

About the time that our Nerdery Expansion project is complete, we’ll be starting our geographic expansion initiative in earnest. “Geo-what-phic expansion,” you say? This summer, we’ll be opening our first fully-functional remote office – equipped with sales and development staff. Due to the combination of market opportunity, proximity and the option to bribe our way to business success, we have selected Chicago as the venue. And we can keep a closer eye on Matt Albiniak.

We feel that opening offices in remote markets is key to our long-term success. Due to our local presence, we are so much more effective at penetrating the Twin Cities market than we are any other market. By establishing a real local presence in remote markets, we can repeat the success we have seen in the Twin Cities.

This expansion will create a much greater demand on the organization for leadership skills resulting in greater opportunities for individual career growth. For example, who wants Tom O’Neill’s job when he’s busy bootstrapping a new remote office? Anyone? Hello? Is this thing on (thump thump)? I was afraid of that…

We plan to launch the Chicago office with as many current employees as possible. It’s imperative that we start it off right and foster the kind of culture that we have here in Bloomington. Do any of you developers want to move to Chicago to help launch this new office? If so, talk to Tom. To make the conversation more entertaining, start by following this protocol:

You: “So, I hear Chicago is nice this time of year.”

Tom: “Chicago is going to be much nicer in August because we’ll have a badass office there with badass devs and badass sales reps and a badass refrigerator and badass dogs!”

You: “Hells Yeah!”

Tom: “Hells Yeah!”

Summary Summary:

Sales are good. Our team is awesome. More space and bathrooms are on the way. Chicago is hells yeah.

Thanks,

Luke

A company update in 11 tweets

Resilience

Last year at this time we were having a blast at The Nerdery figuring out how we were going to get all of our projects handled. We spent a lot of energy in recruiting and refining our on-boarding process for new hires, and spent the year doubling our head count from 40 to 80 highly-skilled people. We put our applicants through the ringer with coding assignments and panel interviews, resulting in a 3% acceptance rate. We had our first Overnight Website Challenge, we moved into our new digs, and we created at least 50 partnerships with ad and marketing agencies nationwide. 2008 was a steady stream of wins for Sierra Bravo.

Just as we’ve celebrated our successes, we feel it’s appropriate to also acknowledge that it’s not always sunny at The Nerdery. Last week, we made the difficult decision to reduce our staff. This is something that we don’t take lightly, since our people are the essence of our company.

This year has felt like we’re running as fast as we can up the stairs of the down escalator. After spending 2008 setting ourselves up to conquer a much bigger 2009, we found ourselves a bit overdressed for the party. We have watched the slumping economy cause our friends in the ad, design and marketing industry to fight for their survival as their clients tighten their belts. Our success in 2008 was the result of our unique ability to help our agency partners win on delivering solid interactive solutions to their clients. Our 2009 success will require us to understand how we can best serve our partners in this economic climate.

We need to be financially healthy to best serve our clients. This means we needed to remove some redundancies from our team, making sure that we preserve the unstoppable force that is the army of web nerds we deploy against the challenges our partners and clients face. In all, we reduced our staff by seven people (a little under 9%) – with cuts split between sales and programming. These are people we respect and thank for the personal and professional contributions they have made toward our work and our culture.

We are very strong believers in the “measure twice, cut once” philosophy when it comes to things as important as our team. Though these decisions are heartbreaking for our leadership, we are confident that we’ve positioned ourselves to best serve our customers and our bottom line without any further changes.

The bottom line for our partners and clients is this: We’re more ready than ever. The Nerdery remains stocked with web geniuses collectively versed in all the tools and technology you need to help you succeed. We still have bandwidth for challenging projects on tight timelines. The Nerdery is here to stay and we will continue to stand by our work in support of our agency partners and clients.

We have many reasons to be optimistic about our future, starting with the more than 70 professionals on our team. Our sales pipeline has never been larger or more promising than it is today, which makes us optimistic about the future of our agency partners, too. We’ve never been more committed to helping our partners win business and deliver award-winning work. We are smarter than ever and this week’s shipment of Red Bull just got here — so bring it on.