CEO Corner: Problem-Solving Local Perks
By Paige Craig
It’s already been awhile since I posted an update... It's been a busy Q1 with 2012 planning, a trip to Vegas to learn about the community being built, San Francisco and New York visits to meet BetterWorks customers and prospects, and then SXSW fast approaching at the beginning of March.
It’s crazy to think just a little over a year ago Be
tterWorks was just an idea. We had barely started coding, and were selling from a tiny cramped office on the Santa Monica promenade with only angel funding and a skeleton crew to get started. Now we’re live in LA, SF, NY, Austin, Orange County and San Diego and feature more than 4,000 local vendors delivering a customized perk experience to thousands of employees at hundreds of companies.
I’m not surprised the BetterWorks approach is resonating so strongly with customers. Based on personal experience as founders and investors, Zao, George and I knew fundamentally that great companies are built by great teams of people and it can be a challenge to reward employees in ways they’ll individually appreciate. We witnessed healthy industry response to the topic and many opinions on what it takes to build great culture, work groups and taking employees from “employed” to “engaged”.
What we didn’t see were practical tools that reflected the workplace of the future. Traditional “perks” didn’t help make employees' lives easier. They weren’t convenient or customized. Everything was antiquated and didn’t resonate with multi-generations in a workforce. While other rewards platforms took a different approach offering gift cards and large volumes of discount catalogs, we imagined a world of perks and rewards that provided relevant and real-time satisfaction to our users.
We decided we’d be the ones to revolutionize this practice with a new approach to employee perks and rewards. We were going local and making it personal. We chose this path because we believed local perks had more “value”; we bet that employees would prefer the variety of choices as well as personal nature of these rewards, but it wasn’t easy.
Building $#!& From Scratch
When taking any idea from concept to execution, especially as large scale as this vision, there are going to be massive challenges to overcome. We focused efforts on solving the most difficult challenge of our vision: serving personalized, local perks to any company. We quickly realized delivering on a promise of local perks was going to destroy us if we didn’t come up with a cost effective way to acquire and onboard thousands of local vendors.
Our product and engineering teams went to the drawing board to develop a proprietary software platform and backend tools to scale to handle hundreds of categories and hundreds of thousands of vendors. We had to develop a consistent way to handle mountains of unstructured data; process one-off, recurring, voucher and menu-based ordering as well as handling individual, team and company wide orders and payments; deliver a consistent search, delivery and fulfillment experience; and all the while compress this complexity into a simple and visually appealing platform that made it easy to recognize and reward employees.
If that wasn’t challenging enough, our sales and operations teams were built from scratch. We recruited and trained an inside sales team that could cost effectively acquire the right local vendors and handle dozens of complex business decisions during the sale. Our operations team onboarded thousands of traditionally offline vendors and got them quickly up and running: digitizing their services, content and business rules; conducting quality control and end-to-end testing; providing vendor training and onboarding; and running a customer service team.
This is one of the beautiful things about being a business owner of a start-up - watching your team create innovative solutions to unsolved problems.
The Pay-Off
We now have a full-service platform that allows businesses to set up personalized company-wide local perks programs in minutes. And it works. We saw immediate response getting employees to socialize through meals together, fitness classes, and building social bonds and camaraderie.
Connecting employees with local perks started to solve practical needs of employers and employees – saving them time and money and reducing stress and friction through such perks as home cleaning, pet sitting, meal deliveries and auto care. I’ve even heard of employees using BetterWorks for “date nights” and weekend outings.
Companies are building robust health and wellness programs that give employees choice at a variety of places including gyms, yoga, climbing, boxing, kayaking, even surf lessons. We’ve also seen companies organizing team events around paintball and fitness challenges, and co-workers booking spa appointments or buying go-kart racing vouchers. Managers and executives also use the platform to order team meals, celebration dinners, catered meals for busy engineers and 5-star dining experiences for outstanding employees.
Going local has also allowed local companies to drive new business to the vendors and merchants in their neighborhood. We recognize that’s not the main motivator for most companies, but some of our larger clients have a mission to support their local communities and our local perks approach delivers that solution in meaningful and profitable ways for all parties.
Building $#!& from scratch is a thrill. I’ve been doing it my whole life, either helping someone else or leading my own charge. It’s rewarding to build a team you trust and to tackle the big challenges together to achieve a common vision.
And now we’re on to 2012 which is going to be a big year. Look forward to catching up with many of you at SXSW to tell you more.
Got some feedback or ideas to share? Give me a shout in the comments below or connect with me on Twitter.
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