In the Office: North Dakota startup builds trust, encourages risk among team members
There are many paths to success. You could follow the rules, meet all expectations, maintain the status quo, and be on your way.
Or, you could make your own rules, set new expectations, create your own destiny.
And triumph.
CoSchedule is a four-year-old startup based in Bismarck, North Dakota, right in the middle of a state awash in entrepreneurs, but you don’t need to dig deep to notice them. CoSchedule isn’t your average startup.
“We don’t even have a foosball table or an XBox!” quips co-founder Garrett Moon. Ok, they might have a few toys, “but the secret is that no one actually uses them!”
Garrett and his co-founder, Justin Walsh, have a few other secrets up their sleeve, but it’s what all entrepreneurs need to hear: They do things their own way, and even though that helps to produce a wildly successful product, it’s how they tick internally that’s worth sharing today.
They are an enviable team.
Failing Fast
CoSchedule is a technology software company that creates calendars, a marketing productivity tool for solopreneurs, small businesses and professional agencies. Businesses come to them when they’ve exhausted their efforts with complex spreadsheets and are eager for a more unified workflow and smooth collaborative efforts.
“We empower marketing teams to do their jobs efficiently and well,” Garrett says.
Today, they have over 8,000 customers in over 100 countries and employ over 60 team members across Bismarck and Fargo, more than doubling their employee head-count in the past year alone.
“Being a 100 percent North Dakota-based team is something I am very proud of,” Garrett says.
And the team is proud of their work.
“We are pretty serious about the work we do,” Garrett says. “Our mantra is ‘Do What You Love, Love What You Do,’ and we want to prove something to ourselves. We are very ambitious, and we want to see results.”
Garrett sees this type of commitment from the moment a new employee joins the team. He knows that at CoSchedule — and anywhere, really — people are anxious to please the boss, right? But it’s an erroneous mentality, he says, and CoSchedule has other expectations.
“People will come in thinking their job is to execute perfectly, to not make mistakes because mistakes will be noticed and then criticized, and that’s what prevents you from moving forward and getting raises and so on,” Garrett explains. “But here, for the first three months of a new employee’s tenure, we will say, ‘You’re doing fine, but you’re not failing enough. You are being too cautious.”
Instead, they want to see their team “fail fast,” because it accelerates the way to which they improve.
“We can tell if an employee is not failing enough by their speed,” he explains. “If you’re not moving quickly enough, that tells us that you’re trying too hard to perfect your work and make it better or that you are trying to avoid mistakes. But what we want is for an employee to just get your work out there, get feedback from your team, fail a little bit more and move on quickly.”
Garrett says the other problem with trying to avoid mistakes is that it means an employee isn’t taking risks.
If you’re not taking risks, you’re not learning!
“And if you’re not taking risks, you’re not learning!” he says. But once the team becomes comfortable pushing work as best they can, the benefits are tremendous.
“Our customers are always impressed with how quickly we move,” Garrett says. “Speed is our №1 indicator of success on most things. Our standard of excellence remains the same, we just want to figure out a way to get there as quickly as possible.”
Building Trust
Garrett and Justin are able to push their team as tenaciously as they do, because they trust them. And that trust is built before a new employee is even offered the job.
“Our hiring process is a very big deal,” Garrett says. “It’s all about building trust. In a lot of companies, as soon as you get hired, your job is to earn trust, right? That’s why so many employees are afraid to fail! So we flip that. We might grill you during the interview session, and it’s going to be a long, intense interview that you might have to go through to get in here, but once you’re in, that trust is assumed, and we are able to challenge you from the get-go.”
With such great trust in place, CoSchedule is able to offer unique policies like unlimited vacation.
“We already assume that you are really good at what you do and that you are going to work hard. Therefore, we don’t need to micro-manage your time,” Garrett says. “You are capable as an adult to decide what the right amount of vacation is for you. We trust everyone to make their own schedules, and it’s never been a problem.”
They also offer learning allowances, a fund to use for books, audio memberships or local conferences.
“As long as you can make the case that it will help you get better at what you do, we will cover it.”
Something CoSchedule is not interested in? Team retreats.
“I think annual retreats are a way for companies to feel like they are being productive at something, but they are really just expensive, disruptive and unnecessary,” Garrett says. “And why should you only focus on that stuff once a year? You have to build a culture where that stuff is just baked in, chipping away at it all the time.”
Garrett understands the intention behind strategic plans or annual goal setting. “But what that fails to realize is how much your business, the world, your product and customers’ demand is going to change over that time!”
Instead, CoSchedule comes up with a basic set of daily or weekly goals they are able to constantly reiterate.
“Our teams will discuss goals for the week, or ‘start-stop-continues’ — what we should start doing, what we should stop doing, and what we can continue,” he explains. “It’s a retrospective conversation on our work, our way of accountability.”
And it’s a way for the team to remain productive, efficient, aware of one another’s workload and supportive.
“The whole team has more confidence because they know we care,” Garrett says.
What about values?
CoSchedule is most interested in producing the best product on the market, and they don’t need a list of values to achieve those goals. Core values in a company do matter, Garrett says, but actions matter more.
“I don’t know if anybody here could honestly list our values verbatim,” he says. “We don’t focus on them that much. But I can tell you that we internalize them. It’s just sort of a big, giant apprenticeship here where we just wear off on each other!”
Their success is not so much in words, but in actions, and it’s just another way CoSchedule has forged its own path.
“Writing something down is fine. It’s good,” Garrett ensures. “But regardless of the values you have written down, you must have a certain set of behaviors and cultural tendencies that your team needs to follow, no matter what.
“You need to have the right tools and attitudes in place to be successful.”
A foosball table or Legos in the corner? Sure. But a team that trusts one another fervently and believes in one another’s work and in their ability to help the business prosper? That’s beyond success.
That’s how CoSchedule triumphs.
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