Our team has hit 500 years of total service!
We have 19 people who have been with us over 10 years.
The 42 people who were here during the pandemic are all still here. We have 81 now, so we have about doubled our team since early 2020. Our business has grown faster – about 2. 5X larger in terms of transactions.
The benefit of long term employees is the efficiency of our business. We have created a Virtuous circle of employees and customers make our company successful.
The experience is why we are growing market share in endurance and having success in P2P and Tickets. And profitable.
That is why we are a long term employee owned company.
Compound Interest of Long Term Employees
We think of long term employees in a similar manner to how compound interest works. THe longer a person works in our company, the better they understand our customers and our technology. For example, working with the same race for a decade gives a level of insight to that race and what they need. Employees are better able to understand how new technology we bring out can make that customer more successful. The experience also helps us understand customer needs faster and with a deeper understanding of our product, we are able to come up wit the best solutions. Contrast this with a company like Eventbrite who downsizes their US employees and has customer service done by new low cost offshore employees. They might save money in the short term, but their customers are less happy and it actually takes longer to solve customer issues because the people are new.
Compound interest also applies to developers. We have over 2 Million lines of code and nearly 3,000 database tables. That is not something that can be handed over to a rolling set of developers. Our long term development team knows the code base better. They also learn from what they have done in the past and how to get better. They also know each others strengths – and can seek our the help they need from their coworkers. And the deep sense of trust with each other allows that interaction to happen without fear.
Long Term Employees are Great for the Company
Boiling it down, long term employees are great:
- Knowledge of product and customers increase with time
- Build trust with each other
- Continue to get better and find ways to add more value
Customers Stay – More Compound Interest
As we report quarterly and yearly, our customer stick around a long time. We have very low churn (customers leaving us). In that yearly report, we show a Cohort Analysis. This chart might be hard to understand at first, but each row represents the amount of business that customers who moved to RunSignup in that year did in each successive year. For example, the first row shows customers who started in 2010 did $66K of transactions (we were very small back then!). That same cohort (group) that started in 2010 did $768K of transactions in 2024 (the last column on the right).
What is amazing, is that every cohort year has grown – compound interest!
We obviously build the best technology and have a stellar support organization, which is why customer stay with us. But the fact they stay and grow proves the value of long term employees.
To put it another way, customers like to know the people they do business with, and feel good about a long term relationship.
Why Employee Owners Stay
The reason our Employee Owners stick with us goes back to our guiding principles:
- They enjoy their jobs – they wake up and want to work, learn, and have fun as part of a collaborative effort.
- They enjoy our customers and feel good about helping them.
- They are fairly compensated.
- Our customers are willing to pay for the best software and quality support.
- We have gotten to a level of efficiency that we are the low cost provider – especially for the differentiated product we provide
- They feel ownership, responsibility, trust
We look forward to the next 500 years together!
