In my Talent Acquisition (fancy word for recruiting) endeavors, a potential candidate asked the following question: What is the culture of TechRev? Good question candidate, good question. It was a hard question to answer for 3 reasons:
- TechRev is still very new (est 2013) and continuously growing.
- Our current team is spread out across 4 and often 5 states (FL, CO, OR, TX, VA).
- I live and breathe TechRev (I proudly claim the pseudo-title of 2nd employee!) day in and day out so I’ve never really looked at it from an outsider’s perspective.
As the Operations Manager and unofficial Social Butterfly of our tech headquarters in Melbourne, FL, I take great pride in building and fostering relationships with each of my co-workers, those near and far. For reference, half of our employees work remotely or onsite and out of state full time. Our President, Michael Ballard, makes it a top priority to check in a few times a week, and sometimes even daily with each of our team members. Through Scrum calls, Skype messages, video chats, and shared OneNotes we COMMUNICATE often. Our team knows I am always available to assist them with any questions or concerns they may have regarding internal processes and when their need is technical and/or customer facing they have senior-level engineers and architects to turn to among our team.
Together, whether through email or conference calls, we celebrate small and big victories: receiving a contract award, closing a large software sale, hiring a new resource, or even something as small as finding a patch that fixes an application bug, we rejoice…together. When things don’t go as planned, which can happen in the tech world, we discuss the pitfalls, we collaborate and conquer how to best avoid this same error in the future, often finding an innovative solution in the process.
Our company’s culture foundation is built on the fact that we started off as a 1-man gig in a garage (no real garage, that’s just for dramatic effect – It was actually a formal dining room turned home office), with a vision that having the right software tools wasn’t enough to be successful, utilizing the tools in an effective manner to be successful with your project was the key. 3 years later, with this vision as our foundation, we are a team of 12 individuals who enjoy watching others succeed and want to be part of the story of their success. The culture here is that we’re a team…we do it all together, but we’re also individuals, which means each of us have our own quirks and preferences, and that individuality gives us a family-like culture.
So, I responded to that candidate, "Well, you know how in a family you have the goofy one, the super smart one, the token always late to everything one, and the always right one? Well, we have a lot of that going on here. Our culture is similar to a family with a common goal to deliver quality services to our customers, and have fun along the way."