Involve employees at all levels. It’s a small office and everyone is aware of everything we’re doing. They’re involved in the naming of it, the packaging of it and their opinion on the script of the commercial.
All eight or 10 of us have something to say, so everyone is involved from the receptionist all the way up to me. That’s what keeps everyone in the loop, and everyone feels like they’ve contributed to the commercial because they have.
It’s kind of fun because you have different opinions, from different people, from different places in the country as well as different age groups. I thought one product would be very good, but it was a female product and (all the) females rejected it — they said it was horrible.
That’s one thing, I know what I don’t know, and I don’t know anything about female products. So I let the experts tell me, and they rejected it.
Keep the employee number small. Other people in our industry, or who are the same size company as we are, have between 50 and 60 employees. I believe most people that get to that go out of business. For me, I keep it under 10, and we do the same amount of volume with people who have 60. We outsource a lot of our things.
The team concept does work. Once you get too big, you lose it. I’d rather keep my company this size and continue to have one hit a year or two hits a year than grow bigger and try to hit 10 because you lose it, your company.
All these big, huge companies, it’s impossible to keep (an inclusive) culture when there’s that many employees.
Create an idea-fostering environment. We’re a very relaxed culture here. We have a lounge area instead of a conference room with big cushy chairs with a TV and people can go back there for 15 to 20 minutes at a time.
If you’ve ever been to Microsoft or any of these large companies, it’s like a think tank. People have to be relaxed. They have to have their brains think. They can’t have me telling them what to do, so we’re the opposite of that.
When we hire people, we tell them basically what their job is, but there really isn’t a job structure. We are a think tank here, we’re only as good as our last product so we need the next product, and everyone in here, anyone who has an idea, we listen to it.
But that’s just the nature of what we do, and that seems to help everybody work together.
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