Jonathan Anderstrom is the president of Creed Interactive, a web development and design company based in St Pauls, Minneapolis. In this episode, we talk about the importance of setting company values, how to hire A-players, how to balance time in the office with time outside of the office for teams, and the value of having a beautifully designed office.

Ready to take action?

Check out Leadformly

Transcription

You’re listening to the 10X Your Agency Podcast Your Agency podcast where every Wednesday for the next 12 weeks, you’ll be learning strategies on how to scale up your agency and grow your client base from successful agency owners who’ve been there, done it and built a highly successful agency. You’ll learn how they attract clients, what their biggest causes of client churn were and what their challenges were at different stages of building their agency. My name is Marcus Taylor and I’ll be your host.

Marcus: Hey guys welcome to another episode of the 10X Your Agency Podcast. Today Iím joined by a very special guest, Jonathan Anderstrom, who’s the president of Creed Interactive. Today Iím going to be talking to Jonathan about how to set company values, how to hire A players, the pros and cons of allowing a team to work remotely as well as some of the effects that Jonathan saw after investing in an amazing office for the Creed Interactive team. Jonathan, it’s a huge pleasure having you here on the show, how are you doing?

Jonathan: Hey, good morning Marcus, going great. It’s a cold and snowy morning here in Minnesota in the United States.

Marcus: Not much better here in Oxford in England to be honest.

Jonathan: [laughs]

Marcus: So to kick things off, I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about what Creed Interactive is and perhaps what makes you different as an agency?

Jonathan: Certainly. Creed Interactive is a web development and design shop here based in St. Paul Minnesota. What makes us different is that we are able to go very deep on the technology side with our great user experience and staying on brand and on message along the way. So we are a great blend of design and technology.

Marcus: Awesome. First things first, I saw that a couple of months ago, you guys just moved into an amazing new office in St. Paul. First of all, congratulations on that. I was just wondering, what differences have you noticed since upgrading the agency’s work environment?

Jonathan: Yes thank you. Well, the differences have been primarily just focused on our team. One of the things that we’ve done is, ranked our team, our clients, our work and our growth in order. And we’ve done that to really decide where to focus. So we’ve decided to put our team first and a part of that is creating a great working environment for them. So I’ve been a part of some very large [inaudible02:13 ] agencies in the past that have used their workspace as a new business tool to try to land large clients and my experience has shown me that the clients donít really care where you are. It can portray an image but what we found much more important is the actual working conditions for our employees. So some of the larger agencies that have these beautiful conference rooms and then all of their employees would be in tiny cubicles in the basement and it just doesnít make any sense. So what we’ve decided to do is to really invest in our team by giving them a beautiful wonderful workspace to work in. And so we actually purchased part of a building in lower town St. Paul next to a new minor league baseball stadium. So it’s kind of a trendy part of town. And we renovated it completely with this in mind, keeping the employees first. How they can work, how they can collaborate, how they can come together and how they can produce the best work.

Marcus: And what kind of things have the teamÖhave you noticed anything in terms of productivity or anything kind of tangible as a result of that change?

Jonathan: Yes, I think the biggest thing that I’ve seen is the pride in which our team members have talked to their friends and family about their work. There’s a real sense of identity with having the space be theirs. And so it hasnít been uncommon for employees to bring in their friends and family on the evenings on the weekends to give them private tours and I think the respect that theyíve gotten from their loved ones has been at a different level. So with that pride of ownership within the team, what I’ve noticed is that, the work has elevated too. I’ve heard of things around the office like, we are leveling up a notch here and that the old way of doing things isnít good enough anymore; we need to match our processes or our work product with our space. Those types of things, I think, gives management the opportunity to set the bar high and the opportunity for the team members to meet the challenge. So it’s been a very positive thing across the board.

Marcus: And so despite having this amazing new office, I noticed from your website that theÖI believe the team works remotely three days a week.

Jonathan: That’s correct.

Marcus: I was just wondering, what’s the thinking behind clearly investing quite a lot in having this amazing office and then having the team spend the majority of their working time outside of the office.

Jonathan: Absolutely. 10 years ago, I was at a conference where Jason Fried who is the founder of 37 signals and their company’s written Basecamp and Highrise and some other products. He was in town speaking and one of the topics that he discussed just briefly was the idea of what he called REM Work. So REM work, he correlated it to REM sleep which is rapid eye moments sleep where all of your deep rest comes from. And he argued that work is the same way. That deep work is much more productive and lasting than highly interrupted light work. So what we’ve done is we’ve taken that concept and we’ve structured our weeks around having times where our team members can have deep work and this is multifaceted not the least of which is that we build really complicated back-end web applications and it takes a lot of deep thinking to create those. So we’ve really focused on having passive communication on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and those are the task-oriented days where our entire team works remotely. So it’s not that you can’t collaborate that you can’t contact one another but it’s done in a passive way. So it’s done via either e-mail or in Jira or via Slack messenger tool. And each team member has the opportunity to block off sections of time to focus dedicated on tasks. So most people have experienced being highly productive in the evenings, late at nights, on a weekend when there’s no interruptions. And we’ve tried to build that into our everyday work environment. The thing that needs to happen to make that work is collaboration days. So on Tuesdays and Thursdays we really have those be as tied to collaborative days as possible. So our office is designed for high collaboration and we really use those days to have our [inaudible06:31 ] meetings or status meetings come along one side, one another to overcome roadblocks and plow through any obstacles together as a team in efforts so that the following day, or days, dedicated tasks can be assigned and completed when we’re all working remotely. Another advantage of that is on a day like today in Minnesota here we got six inches of snow yesterday and the roads are icy and everyone can get an extra couple hours of working and by not battling the roads and the traffic into the office today.

Marcus: Really fascinating. What was it that led you to three days? I’m particularly interested in the structure of Tuesday and Thursday. Was there sort of some playing around with trying to find the kind of the right balance or did you start off with three days and have kind of stuck with it? What was the approach to get to that point?

Jonathan: We’ve had 10 years to tinker with the formula. We’re still tinkering with it today. So we started off completely virtual in what we found is that people got to isolated; roadblocks would pop-up and without having the face-to-face communication, it was difficult to really have one put their finger on what the exact issue was that was creating a roadblock. And so we started off with one day a week and realized that wasn’t enough and then we went to two. That worked better. Recently we’ve tried going to two and a half days and what we found is that that actually half-day doesn’t help at all. So now we’re ratcheting back down to two days again and I think what we found is the Tuesdays and Thursdays you know Mondays are really great day to lay out the foundation of the week and we actually have created a whole agency model where all work assignments happen on the Friday before the Monday on two week iterations toÖso that on Monday is really kind of a framing up day, we’re getting all the foundational elements laid for the week and then identifying what risk factors or roadblocks or potentials. So then on Tuesday we can tackle those in person. Wednesday we can respond to the tasks assigned and then Thursday again is another chance to check in. So it’s been done very methodically and massaged over time but we feel like this current formula works very well for ou