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David Ciccarelli started his entrepreneurial journey when he opened his own independent studio. He ended up partnering with his first customer (now his wife), and building the world's largest library of voice talent: Voices.com. Voices.com has grown exponentially since raising $18M USD from Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and the organization is continuing on an aggressive growth trajectory with everyone rowing in the same direction.
In this episode, David does a deep dive into the importance of setting clear goals, how to write a one-sentence job description, how he sets up employees for success (and keeps them on track), and the specific process that Voices.com uses for performance reviews. This is a playbook for onboarding new employees, and setting them up for success in a high-growth company.
The Ivey Entrepreneur Podcast is sponsored by Connie Clerici, QS ’08, and Closing the Gap Healthcare Group, Inc.
Transcript
You're listening to the Ivey entrepreneur podcast from the Pierre L. Morrissette Institute for entrepreneurship at the Ivey Business School. In this series Ivey, entrepreneur and Ivey faculty member Eric Janssen will anchor the session.
Eric Janssen
All right here with David Ciccarelli from Voices.com. David, thanks for being on the podcast.
David Ciccarelli
Awesome. Hey, Eric. Thanks for having me, great to be here.
Eric Janssen
Yeah, it's interesting, still doing these podcasts remote, I always prefer to do them in person. But actually, it's been sort of easier to schedule around a little bit more flexibility, getting to schedule people when they're at home so.
David Ciccarelli
Well, and I'm sure you got a glimpse into everyone's homes as well, too. That's probably pretty fun.
Eric Janssen
I do. Yeah, I get to see everybody's home office. So a few reasons why I thought it'd be really interesting to chat with you. One, I want to hear your founding story to share with the audience or founding story of Voices.com, and two, wanted to do a deeper dive into feedback, specifically, how you set people up in the right way, hire the right people, and then give them feedback to course adjust as you need to, because I really, you have a really interesting system for doing that. So I want to dig into that with you. Our audience, however, is super interested in people's founding stories, and generally hear that people, you know, start businesses to either scratch their own itch, they have a super deep domain expertise or sort of stumbled into entrepreneurship. And your story is an interesting combination of almost of all three, and then some, so I thought I'd turn it over to you just to share a little bit about your founding story.
David Ciccarelli
Yeah, sure. Love to. Thank you. I mean, it's my own story. So I feel like I can tell it well, you know, growing up, I was always fascinated with sound and music production. You know, mom and dad put me through music lessons, and even helped out actually at the local church for a while doing sound with the youth group. So there was that kind of thread weaving through my life. When I graduated from high school, I looked for a audio engineering or some kind of recording production program and came across one actually here in London, Ontario, called the Ontario Institute of Audio Recording Technology. And it's there where I learned to record and edit and produce really sound for everything from music, to sound for film, and TV commercials. And when I graduated, I actually opened up a small recording studio of my own and got my name in the local newspaper on my birthday. And that's when I met Stephanie, Stephanie's now, of course, my wife and co founder in Voices, at the time, she was in the music major at Western University. She was a classically trained singer. And she actually came into the studio to record her singing repertoire. And we ended up hitting it off, but because of that same newspaper article, there were other small businesses locally, that wanted a female voice talent to record some commercials and some phone system greetings. And I only knew one person in the city that would fulfill that gig. And that was Stephanie. So I gave her a call. I said, my pitch to her actually was, do you think you could record this page a copy, I'll be the engineer, and you'd be the vocal talent. And she agreed, and we were in business together and pursued that for a while. And you know, we're pretty successful. I you know, in a modest way, here, you know, in London, and I should insert that, of course, one thing led to another we dated, got married, and now have four kids. So I sometimes jokingly say that I married my first customer, which is, which is not marital advice whatsoever. But nonetheless, it's how it actually all happened. We did pursue that for quite a while, you know, for the next kind of year or so, again, myself as the engineer, Stephanie as the voice talent. And we put up a very, you know, pretty primitive website, we actually went down to the local public library, took a web design for dummies and hacked together our own brochures style website that really just promoted the recording studio. And it wasn't long before other freelancers that hey, do you need somebody who speaks French? Or somebody who can speak Spanish? Or do you need somebody just character voices or narrates those long documentaries or corporate training? And we've always just said, yes, we're like, yeah, sure, we can list your name. And here's a link to you, we're a little audio player, you could click play and listen to them. And concurrently, there were clients at ad agencies and all businesses that were just looking to get a voiceover done for a number of different really use cases. But they would find the website and say, how do I get in touch with that person? And so that was the, you know, the proverbial aha moment, right? Like, oh, well, what if we get out of the production business ourselves. And instead, let's be that facilitator, let's connect the buyer and service provider together and really build what's now known as a marketplace. These are very popular business models, they're frankly pretty hard to pull off. We did somewhat, you know, we were pursuing a passion both of us, Stephanie in the kind of arts, and performing arts, and music and myself on the more tech and engineering side. And yet what we didn't realize that there was this global demand that there was so many freelancers out there that didn't know how to either enter into the space, and then likewise, not every production, let's call it whether it's an advertising And it didn't need a celebrity, it didn't need somebody part of the Screen Actors Guild, the big union in the United States, they just wanted somebody with a great voice, who had an excellent home recording studio, that they could go on to website and hire them. And so this was one of the earlier freelance websites. And that's really what Voices.com is. It's a freelance website, it's a marketplace that connects the voice buying client, as I said, ad agencies, video producers, and so forth with that voice selling talent. And these are people who have a background in arts, maybe in radio, some kind of, you know, theater or live performance. And they're looking to pursue that as a career in voice acting. So that's kind of how it all came about.
Eric Janssen
So way, way back, the first step that you took in opening your own studio, you'd always been interested in this, why open your own and not go work for somebody else right away, because like, there wasn't like an entrepreneurial decision down the road where this eventually it grew. But in the beginning, you chose right away to do your own thing. So why not work for somebody else?
David Ciccarelli
I think that was partly my dad, to be honest with you, he actually encouraged me to debate actually, at the time that we were having, as you know, father and son was do I go to business school, or because I wanted to complement the engineering and business, I felt equally intrigued by both. And he actually encouraged me to say, look, you can, you know, you can take out a loan and go to business school and learn that way. Or you can, you know, take more of the street-smart approach, and just go figure it out. And you're going to, you know, learn a ton either way, and for whatever reason, I mean, I was a bit more of a, I guess, you know, if I daresay so a bit more kind of like the hustler, like, I'm going to just grind this thing out, you know, and there's just lots of incidents in my past where that was kind of more my, I guess, more my personality, you know, I had stories of like, selling pop out of my locker in high school for like, $1 apiece. And I was always the guy coordinating, like the hockey and baseball card shows and selling tables for $10 a piece like I'd coordinate a show, or participate in a show, the garage sales with mom and dad when we were really much younger. So I kind of always had that not intuition, but I guess like self motivation, to just go well this seems like it's an opportunity, let's just go pursue it. So there wasn't a whole lot of disa-, your right. I mean, I did think about joining on a cruise line, actually, at one point to become like an audio engineer, and something more adventurous, but I suppose there's very few things that I like the fact that there is no like real rulebook to be perfectly honest with you, I'm like, you know what, you can start your business, if you think that there's an opportunity there, you know, as long as there's, you're abiding by the laws, and you know, it's you can't really get it wrong in a lot of ways. It's often more about timing, and, you know, maybe the maybe there wasn't as big of a need in the market. But day to day, you can't, you know, you just need to go spend your time and energy in the best place that you see fit.
Eric Janssen
Right. So was your dad pushed you a bit? Was he an entrepreneur? Did he have his own business?
David Ciccarelli
In a lot of ways, I'd say yes. He actually worked as an investment advisor for Investors Group for years. And in you know, as I say, in a lot of ways, that's you're your own, you know, boss, you're your own manager, yeah, you're flying a flag of a larger kind of investment company. Yet at the same time, you have to manage your own book of clients, you have to market to them, develop the relationships, like I learned a ton, including, you know, stuffing envelopes for 10 cents apiece and sending out mailers, so you just develop a great work ethic, but we always had ideas of just fine. You know, they didn't necessarily turn into businesses, but we often just, I guess noodled on ideas, my parents were very adverse to us having the skateboard when we were younger. So we actually invented what we called the block board, which was basically a skateboard with like blocks instead of wheels. So it didn't go and still, like do all the tricks and stuff, it would like kick flips, and it was pretty cool. And of course all the other mothers thought these were like just genius because like no kids were breaking their arms, right? But you still got to do all the tricks and like just in the driveway stuff. So we always had ideas like that, that we pursued and didn't see it necessarily as entrepreneurship but I can looking back now I know it was pretty rewarding to be able to hav, you know, come from an environment like that that a family they encourage their kids to take risks.
Eric Janssen
Okay, fast forward to where you're at today, because it's a very different business from you and Stephanie running a sound studio and even beginning days of the marketplace. I want to set the context for why feedback is important because this is a very different business than it was when you first got it going, so where are things at today with Voices.com?
David Ciccarelli
Yeah, and then just in the last couple years, we were successful in raising our series A Round of Capital, and so you know up to that point you know, you're really getting every business is going to need cash from to survive, right, it's often referred to as like the oxygen that just like you need it to keep pushing forward. And cash is either gonna come from cash from customers, which case you're actually selling something of value and they're rewarding you with their money, cash from debt, which case we actually borrowed financing over the years from various banks and institutions, which originally started as a $30,000 loan, and it was 50. And then I think 90, 150, 250, 502 million. And each time, of course, you're kind of paying off or paying out the earlier lenders. But I mean, once I reached a 2 million, I realize I'm doubtful that another institution is going to come in and lend us $2 million to continue, yet, we saw a lot of runway. So we actually ended up as I say, taking long, which is the third source of cash, is cash from an equity partner where you're, you know, of course, selling a portion of your company to them, and you're really co owners together. So we were successful in raising $18 million, US, from Morgan Stanley expansion capital. So it's Morgan Stanley's, their global investment bank, and they have really a private equity group that's based out of San Francisco, Silicon Valley. And with them, of course, came a board of directors, which we didn't have up to that point. And I would say all of the management and governance professionalism that was installed at the same time or, you know, suddenly became required of us that it was no longer David and Stephanie owning the company 50-50, we now had really professional investors that wanted to upskill our people, our reporting pack, and so forth. And so part of the use of proceeds in that was that we were going to be growing our team. And so the team's just north of 100 full time employees. And so over the years, we've really learned how important it is, to not only find the right people, but to have proper performance expectations in a performance management system. But that's probably the biggest thing that's changed is the need to mature and professionalize our organization.
Eric Janssen
Yeah, and that comes, especially when you get a investment partner, like the one that you brought on, there's certain rigor that they would expect with your team. So I want to break down your feedback components. One of the critical pieces is hiring the right people. And you had a really great framework for how to think through at least on your team, it seems to be a model that works for you. How do you think through hiring the right people? What's the framework that you use to figure that out,
David Ciccarelli
So we call it the three C's. And it stands for curious, competitive and coachable. And I would even go in that order. And what we needed to find was something that I could communicate to other people that might either be doing initial interviews, or even somebody in HR that's actually doing recruiting. And we needed some way that serves as like a heuristic of like, hardly determining whether this person is a quote, unquote, cultural fit. Because if you just use the term cultural fit, frankly, too many companies use that as a way to actually introduce bias into whether they like the person or not, and they can't really pinpoint why it is. And I think that does, you're either missing out on really talented people that just aren't like you. And that's terrible. Or the flip side is all you do or hire people who are just like you, they either look like you, they behave like you, they think like you, in which case, there's literally no diversity of thought, there's no difference of opinions, there's no willingness to actually have constructive conversations. So right from the outset, we tried to find some attributes that we felt were demonstrative of high performing people, and what we landed on were these three C's. And so first off is curiosity. And if someone's curious, you can throw them a problem. And they can go solve the problem. They don't, they're actually, they ask, you know, the five why's, and they kind of go deep in terms of like root cause analysis, they might have a framework for trying to understand they're often would want to reverse engineer a challenge, or maybe the reverse engineer like the solution, and to understand why someone else did it, there's never this sense of like, okay, well, status quo, let's just, you know, rest on our laurels, so to speak, be happy with how it is, there's this desire to constantly improve. So I thought that was these are all things that we really liked about those who are curious. And that might look like, you know, asking questions of, you know, how do you go about solving a problem, tell me about a difficult situation to navigate through. And I even use the words like, I'm curious, why did you decide that? Or, you know, what was the alternative? Were you weighing three different options? Why did you go with this one versus the other one, and just trying to get to the thought process in during those interviews, then that leads to competitiveness. And so those people who are competitive, it's not just that you have a background in sports, although that is a great kind of, there's a lot of analogies between business and sports, but even someone who can often be competitive with themselves, you know, artists or musicians are highly competitive with themselves, you know, even on a debate team, I mean, most people have some goals that they're setting. So, you know, I would ask kind of, you know, what is the goal that you have for yourself at the beginning of the year, you know, what have you achieved, what books have you read towards improving that goal, like what are the tactics that you're actually showing that you're taking steps and just instead of just saying, oh, yeah, I'm gonna beat the sales record. Well, really, what what have you done in you know, in your life up to this point? Where's that? The evidence that you're competitive and that you're a winner, and then recognizing that you're not going to make that all on your own, that somewhere along the way, somebody is going to give you some advice, nobody makes it on their own, they're going to be coached. And that coach could be just like I was mentioning off the top, you know, early on, my father served as like a business coach and a mentor, but anyone's going to have somebody who's in that, that role of the guide that can shepherd them to help them make those decisions. And even now, actually, one of our board members is an executive coach, for me, I do a weekly one on one, which I had just a few hours ago. And same story, you know, I present the challenge that I'm facing the week, how do they handle it in their career? What were the alternatives? What have they seen what's worked and what hasn't, and, I'm constantly trying to learn from other people's successes and mistakes. But I think that notion of someone being coachable and asking them like, who was a coach for you growing up, if you don't have a list of people that you can go, like I've learned from these folks, to me, you either just, you really believe that you did it all on your own, which I'm concerned about that, because that means well, when your sales managers giving you advice on how things work here, and how it can how you can be most effective. If you're not receiving that I think this is just going to be a really tough relationship going forward. And this isn't just in sales. I mean, that's in every role, frankly, in the company. So we look for those three C's, you got to kind of a handful of questions around them. But it's not just saying, Are you curious? Yes, no, it's like, I'm looking for the evidence that this has been a lifelong pattern, that you've exhibited around curiosity, competitiveness, and coachability.
Eric Janssen
Cool. And did you have those C's before your investment partners not going to say force, but you know, introduced a little bit more rigor, or you introduce that rigor with the partners? Like, could you sit down and say, all right, we've raised money. Now we need to come up with our three C's, when did that come into the process?
David Ciccarelli
We actually had it quite a while beforehand. However, what I recognized is, I was once given this advice is that the CEO should do while really, it's not just the CEO, it's everyone should do only that, which you can do. And I'll say that again. So for me, the CEO should do only that which the CEO can do. So that might mean interacting with investors interacting with the board, interacting with media, or being the leader in the company to deliver a tough message or a celebratory message. And I realized that I'm like, well, I probably should not be doing the first interview, maybe I do the second or third interview prior to somebody joining. So I need to equip the rest of the kind of hiring manager and hiring process people involved in that. I need to equip them with the framework and perhaps this is my engineering bent to me of like, how do I engineer myself out of this process? How do I give somebody else a framework that they can follow? So that's since evolved actually into, you know, hiring scorecards, and so forth, it's definitely gotten a lot more rigid, as I think most things do. But at least having a few attributes. And I would encourage those who are building a team, you don't have to pick those three C's, you can have I've heard of, you know, trust and humility and intellect is kind of being three other like there's usually some combination of like, what it is that you want to amplify in your culture as it grows.
Eric Janssen
I like the engineering brain, how do I manufacturer engineer myself out of this process? Great, here's the framework. Now everybody can just do it that way. Okay. So that's the first step is getting the right people on the bus. And then the second part is making sure that they are set up in the right way. So we've made a decision that these people meet your criteria, they're a good fit for the through the team, they've gone through your interview process, how do you make sure that they're set up for success,
David Ciccarelli
It actually starts with the job description, which is a bit of a stodgy artifact in businesses, but yet at the same time, there's a lot of freedom that can be relayed, if somebody truly understands where my role starts and stops. And this isn't about having like artificial boundaries, where it's, you know, and it kind of invokes that, like, that's not my job, attitude. We're not talking about that. We're saying actually, within this area, you have total free rein, you have total autonomy, you have ownership over the results within this area. And you know, that could be a phase in the customer journey that you're responsible for. It could be security at, you know, so whatever the area is, I like carving that out by being clear on the job description, keeping it to one page and then we've actually even boiled that down to one line or one sentence job descriptions and there's a few of them, you know, As a human resources manager, I recruit, I train and I retain high performing employees, or as a leader of public relations, you know, I strategize and leverage relationships and opportunities for visibility in the media and the general public. So whatever that might look like, I think you can get from like, 20 bullets into a single sentence where people really understand the scope of what they're responsible for, once that job description is in place, then there's kind of like the role. Yes, the responsibilities, we identify, I'm gonna say two to three objectives. And, you know, really, what that means is, it's a metric of some kind, it's often it, you know, can be done in terms of deliverables, it could be a score, like a customer satisfaction score, or a retention rate for employees, if you're in human resources, you know, there's this, there's going to be some type of quantitative element to that role. Because failing that, again, it's not about you know, as a manager saying, you didn't do your job because you didn't hit the metric, it's actually I think it's we try to set it up as more of a challenge to say, here's the objective, here's how your success is going to be measured. And then if we can chart it, that's fantastic. You see changes over time, it spurs on other questions. So you know, agreeing on how that's going to be measured. And then actually, what we do is we create a number of real time dashboards, they could be, you know, depending on kind of what the system is. But there's real time dashboards that are updated daily, or, frankly, in real time. And then we go through monthly reporting sessions as well, too. So there's a real strong if you can hear between the words here a real strong emphasis on performance that is more than just this kind of wishy washy, I feel like I'm doing well, it's like, you know, it's again, it's the proof points with data that really show that performance is happening.
Eric Janssen
And do you or does a manager write that one word job description? Or does that employee develop it with the manager?
David Ciccarelli
We try to have the employee develop it on their own, there's a greater sense of ownership over that, if they need some help there can ask around like to others if there's people in similar role, but yeah, it's the one you know, it goes both ways. But usually people try to write it on their own.
Eric Janssen
Yeah, cool. All right. So they you've you've hired the right person, you set them up in the right way with the one page and then the one word job description, and tied to a specific metric, or a few metrics that are going to let them know that they are either successful or not successful in that role. Next piece that I wanted to move to was how do you see whether so I guess the metric could be one way to see whether they're doing well or not. But I'm thinking, I guess I have a lot of experience with sales roles right, or salespeople. And the number might be, you know, if you had an annual quota of a million dollars and break it down by quarter, it's, you know, quarter million dollars in Q1, well, if you've hired someone, january one, it's gonna take them a certain ramp time to actually get up to speed to be able to hit their number. So you may have some grace period there. So how do you figure out whether someone is on track to deliver on ultimately what they're at the company to do?
David Ciccarelli
I love that you use this term ramp time, because I'd actually likewise, I heard that so much, and I go, okay, well, fine. We're gonna give somebody, let's call it what do we give them six months, ramp time. And then you hear like, oh, it takes a year for somebody to get up to speed on like, am I just kind of holding my breath for a year to see and like, I felt I needed something more concrete. So I realize, you know, here's, another one of my kind of rules, three frameworks, which they haven't failed me yet. So I'll keep rolling with them. And this one is really, in those first 30 days, I mean, my goodness, somebody applied to join your company, you've interviewed them, they fought tooth and nail to get this job, they've probably negotiated hard, you've determined that they're so far the right fit in those first 30 days, we actually have everybody write their own 30, 60, 90 day plan in those first 30 days. And usually, in the first 30 days, what an employee is most likely saying they want to do is just to learn, right? And kind of absorb all this information, absorb the culture, understand, you know, who the customers are about the company, like, what's competition, like out there, they're trying to absorb information. And through that period, what I'm looking for, is a great attitude. So I go first 30 days, you need to have that, like, I mean, talk about first impressions, this is gonna be the time where you're gonna really see that new employee on their absolute best behavior. It's also in the middle of a probationary period. So like, you really better see them on their best behavior. So after that kind of attitude, that willingness, they're just getting the confidence to be able to take that next 30 days. So at the 60 day mark, now I'm looking for effort, and really kind of applying that knowledge that they've learned in the first 30 days into something, again, something to reuse the term, something tangible. It could be a deliverable, it could be a presentation, it could be their first 25 sales calls, how are the initial situations where the creating value and adding value to the company. So I look for the effort, and usually in the next 30 days, so at the 90 day mark, there's early results. And so we go from attitude to effort that leads to results. If at any point that an employee is slipping behind getting frustrated, then we just try to reset that. And this isn't just about the first 30 days of employment at a company, you know, there might need to be that tough love conversation of performance improvement plan type thing, and our performance improvement plans follow that same 90 day window where it's like, hey, we've missed targets. Again, this isn't just about sales. This is about you know, you've missed deliverables or deadlines in a consistent manner. The attitude seems to be kind of degrading, because of that I understand you're frustrated, do we want to work this through together? I'm, you know, giving you an opportunity here, you let me know, do we want to work on this together? Yes, great, we got to start off by resetting the attitude. And then through that period, you know, let's put in the effort. And then finally, I know those results are going to come because they've came with everybody else who seems to kind of follow that pattern. And it's completely what I love about that is the first two are completely in the control of an employee, whether they're new to the company, or they're struggling, showing up every day, in person or virtually, with the right attitude, and then putting in the hard work, which is the effort and the results will be there. I'm way more lenient and willing to kind of extend the grace, as you said, on the 90 days plus, if those first, you know, if there's evidence of that attitude and effort, that results. And that can go longer than 30 days, you know, that 90 plus, if needed, but the prerequisites are have shown up with a great attitude and putting in the effort.
Eric Janssen
I love that framework, I remember you shared it with me before. And it's something that really stood out. And I feel like sometimes I'm on a little bit of a condensed timeframe with it, you know, like their employees. For example, in the summer, you bring on a summer student when they're only there with you for four weeks or so. So how do you figure out, take the same framework, but maybe condense it in timeframe, but I love the idea of you know, make sure that they've got the right attitude, and then screen and make sure that they're putting in the right effort. And ultimately, if you do those things, right, then the results, you start measuring the results after those first two. So I love that framework, how do you then make sure that they get ongoing feedback? So I want to, and you could do it more generally, like what's the framework that you use to make sure that employees are course adjusting as required. And then I'd love to dig into if and how that's changed, given that we were, you know, managing primarily remote workforce.
David Ciccarelli
So I try to break this into two, two streams. One is in let's call it group settings, and the other one is one on one, and there are certain messages that need to be delivered in a group where you're either, you know, recognizing and rewarding a great achievement or celebrating together. There's other times where the message just needs to be given one on one. So actually, you know, to answer the question, we've intentionally tried to add voices tried to keep up a lot of the same cultural norms and practices around giving feedback. And so we have, for instance, a weekly leadership team meeting. And virtually every kind of group or departments functional area has their own team meetings as well. So that's kind of the direct team. Once a week, we do a company wide all hands huddle, which is 15 minutes. And that goes over, you know, good news and numbers and celebrates wins for the whole company. And then also a quarterly rally, which is the longer kind of typical townhall reviewing results and seeing and learning what the department's had been working on them with the previous quarter. And then what's up for the next quarter. Those are the bigger group ones. But we complement that with making one on one meetings routine. And I actually hold mine all on fridays, I batch process them together, and it's half an hour. And I actually open it up by saying this is your time. We have a shared documents. We've evolved this over the years, but it's gone from a shared Google Doc, which is just adding the talking points that you want to cover that week. And it's just one long living document that's moved to Google Keep, which is more of like a task checklist type thing and we just cross off. It's not meant to manage projects. This is just where we want to keep the talking points. And now we're on to Asana, which is more of a project management system. But we literally just call it for discussion, and it's just talking points. So the key there is that instead of the interruptions throughout the week of like important but not necessarily urgent, if you know what I'm saying. We just try to add them to the talking points list for the upcoming one on ones but I'm very disciplined about holding those. I always say this is your time. If you don't want to cover anything that's on there, then that's fine. And sometimes, to be honest, the conversations just go in unexpected areas that someone's really challenging working from home and their kids, all over them throughout the day, both parents are trying to work at the same time, homeschooling is not effective. These are the kind of challenges that are real qnd we're hearing. And so we might come up with a flexible work schedule of like, ,ook, you don't need to be in front of your computer for nine to five, if really, your kids are young, and they're all asleep by eight o'clock, maybe we shift a couple hours into the evening. So we try to come up with solutions like that. But that's the kind of thing that's going to happen in a one on one, you know, we will cover I usually just try to cover like a highlight and lowlight over the last week, and kind of what are you looking forward to next week? It's the kind of environment where you're gonna have that safe conversation, I'll even say in the safety of this conversation, or in the privacy of this conversation, you know, is there any, can I share something with you or you know, is there anything you want to share, you sometimes have to explicitly say that just to give the other party comfort, but whether the one on ones are happening weekly, or some people kind of by weekly, the frequency can change, that's important, that flexible, I just think that they need to be consistent, that there's a time and a place and some type of predictability that the employee that you're working with or managing knows when they can bring something up the next time. And so those are the one on ones. And then the more formal feedback would be a quarterly performance review. We're reviewing the quarterly objectives, you know, if the targets have been met or not, you know, what's what's working? Why didn't that happen? I've actually got these five questions that I landed on. But the first one is, you know, is really what's your target? And or what's your gap to target? And how are we going to close that? So these are the type of questions that I've tried to share that I find myself asking, it can seem somewhat repetitive, of, hey, we already know your targets, I see that we're trailing, like, what's your gap to target? And what are the mitigating actions in factors? What actions can we take to overcome that? It's surprising that now like, sometimes team members, like volunteers, like I know, I'm trailing a bit, I made really good progress here on this other area and trailing and here's what I've already taken the initiative to take some steps for that. So that when it comes time to that formal quarterly performance review, no one should be surprised and how they ended the quarter. I mean, you probably tracking that all the way through. And we actually use a really simple system, which is meets expectations, exceeds expectations, or does not meet expectations, which is really did you complete the objectives that you had that you set out for the quarter, and I'm talking like three to five at most, we try to make them as numerical as possible, you know, smart goals, if you will, just so it's super clear that it's that there's a finish line. And if it's really, you know, you mentioned the million dollar annual quota, well, then just set the quarterly, you know, understand how are you pacing this quarter, and it's probably going to be a similar goal for the next quarter, another 250,000 in sales, well, then great. If your your meeting this quarter, just repeat that goal again, for the next one. But overall, I've actually tried to make a point that these are very constructive, and I guess encouraging conversations, you know, there's nothing to be feared here. I actually give the headline at the beginning, I say, you had a great quarter as I have you down on is an exceeds I say that right off the bat. So there's not like this anxiety for you know, 29 minutes before you drop it at the end. I've also gone the other way to say, look, this was a really tough one. I unfortunately, I think we both would agree that it's fair to say this that we didn't meet expectations this quarter. And here's why I think was the case you let me know if I misunderstood the situation. Happy to revisit if you think that but here's what I saw, and have that conversation. But the consistency through all of these, the team meetings, the one on one, you know, weekly, by weekly, and then the quarterly, it's getting that frequency right in the different environments, I think is what creates a robust performance management and feedback system.
Eric Janssen
Yeah, you've been really good about keeping at least you share with me really good about religious almost about keeping those one on ones I found when I had a larger team, I'd scheduled them back to back and then I'd you know, you get traveling or client meeting would come up or other priorities. And I would end up you know, you skip a one on one or you bump a one on one for one week. And then you're two weeks behind. And I'd always felt like I was trying to play catch up when I did them with mind you I had too many direct reports. But how many, how many people do you do that for on a friday?
David Ciccarelli
On friday, it's eight. And so it's a pretty full day for sure. It's been as high as like 12. And you're right at a certain point, it just gets to be and it's not just you, it could be the other person that's taking a week off or vacation or you know, has to has to run an errand during that time or doctor's appointment, what have you so life happens for sure. And frankly, that's why I like this talking points approach because if anything, event that neither of us can meet, then it can be as simple as like, hey, I checked Google Keep or I checked Asana or I checked our documents. And I see that the most important thing it looked like that you wanted to cover was X, let me just give you a quick couple one lines about that, or let me send you a resource, or let me intro you to somebody else, I try to just keep some of that stuff moving. And it's okay, if you don't get to everything on that list, it's a list, it's gonna stay there. Sometimes reprioritize, we have a section called deferred indefinitely, which is just like we talked about it, we don't want to cross it off like it's done. But like we don't need to keep seeing it there every single week. So there's, there's different ways that you'll find I think it's a real personal approach to how you're going to run these. But the consistency is the big one.
Eric Janssen
Do you find are a lot of the actions on you? Or most of the actions out of those one on ones on the people that you're doing the one on ones with? Or is it really just a brain dump, like a discussion?
David Ciccarelli
Yeah, I love that term. Because I use that all the time, I use it as a brain dump. It's actually often in the moment, rather than sending an email midweek and going, like, hey, please research this thing, you know, or like, I think this is a big opportunity. And then there's this flurry, like, it's like, literally, that's a distraction mid week, I tend to put it on there, because I like that it serves as a holding pattern to let both of us just gel on it for, you know, a couple days to the moment. And you'd actually be surprised, like a lot of entrepreneurs have so many ideas that they just need somewhere to put them. And that's kind of what it served as, is the brain dump granted, like who would I need to talk to you from our company that I think could take this further. And I'll just take a guess sometimes it even switches from like one person's list to somebody else's more often than not, honestly, we're like, yeah, you know, you brought that up three weeks ago. And I'm like I did? And they're like, yeah, you've already talked about that, oh right, or we just go we determine in the moment go to indefinite because we're just not, we don't see it, or just cross it off and just cut it out entirely. And at least that way, it's almost, it's an outlet. And for as many as those ideas, there's actually ideas that come up from, you know, your direct report, which can be hey, do you think that this is a good idea? Do you think there's an opportunity here? Have we done something this with this before? I jokingly refer to myself as the company historian, so I'm often like, yeah, we actually did try that three years ago, here's what worked and what didn't, if you're gonna try it again, I'm super supportive. But you might want to consider this angle, the next go around. And I tend to be answering a lot of those questions of like, what has happened in the past? So it's, as you said, it's just it's, it's to prompt a discussion and there nothing there's this in a paragraph is like one line, like, you know, pricing strategies, you know, for subscription service or something like that. And it's like, how would you think about this? Or like, do you have a framework? Do you have some, like mental rules or some mental model? I'm like, oh, yeah, there's this thing that I've come across. And it's just to prop the conversation back and forth.
Eric Janssen
Yeah, I love that idea. Almost like a parking lot. So I'm guilty of midweek, I used to be guilty of midweek messaging people on the team and sort of unaware, right? The I don't want to say burden. But when a senior executive messages team member, even if it's just a question in passing, you think, wow, that's a priority for them, I better get on it. So I'm going to drop what I'm doing and do this other thing, when maybe it was just, it was often for me, you know, an idea in passing that I just wanted to get out of my brain and put somewhere else, but then you send people working in 10, different 20 different directions. So I as part of the onboarding, I found it super effective to say, here's a parking lot, I'm gonna put, you know, my weekly brain dump in the parking lot. Let's read, I actually need three or four days to let that sit, and let's revisit it and often you'd come back to it three or four days later and go, well, that's a bad idea. Like, I'm glad you didn't get running on it. Because that's like, it sounded like a good idea. But it's actually not a good idea. So I'm glad we didn't do anything about it over the last two days.
David Ciccarelli
For sure. And it's the words of the CEO weigh 800 pounds. And I think you're right. It's this burden of like, wow, I better do something with this now, because by the time if I've never asked about this again, I want to be able to say like, well, yeah, I looked into it. And it's like next, you know, somebody spent an hour two maybe started a document. Oh, was that really necessary? I mean, I usually want to scope out like how big of a problem is this? Because that's what really ideas or solutions to problems. So before, you know, I'm careful to like actually try to articulate these as problems to be solved, as opposed to just jumping to the solution, because often it's like, oh, we're actually solving that similar problem somewhere else. And so let's try to pull these two problems together. Maybe there's one solution that can cover both. Yeah, that's exactly it. It's a parking lot in most recently, actually. I've been loving and we use Gmail and they have this scheduled sense feature. So I can write emails in the evening and schedule them to be, you know, sent out at 8am. The next morning. And same thing with the weekend, people are already working approximately 20 to 30% more hours than they were when they were going into the office because everyone's working from home. And it's like, well, what else am I going to do? So there's this, you know, the time when someone's not working, and they're just trying to spend some time with their kids, with their family or go now, fresh air, via summer winter, you need some mental break time. And so to honor that, I use this scheduled send, and it just sends first thing monday morning, and everyone knows that meal, I might have been thinking over the weekend, or just wanting to again, get something out whether it's in the parking lot, or it's the scheduled session shows up at monday at 8am. It's just boom, there's a big list of emails all from me, I think that's a good kind of speaks to this batch processing idea, again.
Eric Janssen
Along the lines of remote. So I've been to your office in London, beautiful office, big office. And you I mean, invested with the intention of having sort of a home base for everybody. So the move to remote are you what are the plans? Are you going to stay primarily remote? Or is the plan to get people back in the office when you can? How are you thinking through this?
David Ciccarelli
The way we're thinking about this is what has once been a approach to work that I found maybe borderline distasteful of like, oh, we couldn't possibly have a remote workforce. Mostly that was because we had never done it. And you know, there was a degree of ignorance there. We were very early, in fact, at least within the community here to move to a mandatory work from home and that there was a couple keys that we initiated. First off, everybody, we had a work from home readiness assessment on the monday, where everyone met with their team determined, Do you even have the technology at home, chair, office computer camera for video calls, and then by the end of the week, it was mandatory work from home starting the next monday. So we were pretty quick to move. And since then we've run surveys, do people like it? Do they not? A lot of people do enjoy working from home that said, I'm not sure everyone prefers it. So to go entirely work from home and like rip up the lease. I think that's again, an extreme. So there's somewhere between 40 to 50 hours in the office and 40 to 50 hours at home, it's some mix between that right, and whether that's a day in the office and 40s at home or the inverse of that, or some combination thereof, we're going to try to create a flexible work plan for people that that kind of suits their role that suits their needs. But you know, companies I think at this point, you know, again, regardless of size, this is going to be a competitive advantage for those organizations that are willing to embrace a remote work option for employees, not that it has to be everyone because a lot of people really enjoy, trust me really enjoy coming together, their colleagues are actually their closest friends. So we want to obviously still facilitate that. And there's times I mentioned, like big team meetings or training or quarterly kickoffs, you need to bring people together but to expect that everyone's going to be in all the time, I think that's unlikely. And by actually opening up the idea of being able to recruit an employee top performers from around the country, around, you know, across North America, maybe even around the world, I think suddenly there's a new cohort of people that are graduating every year that are maybe looking for the next change in their career that we just didn't have access to before. So we're seeing this as an opportunity, currently rethinking of how we're going to work. But I would say the theme is a flexible working environment. And it's not just you get to move your what desk you sit in, it's a what is best suitable for you. Because I think that's going to go a long way to actually driving the performance and retaining employees over the long run.
Eric Janssen
Last one before we wrap up, has it has the move to remote changed your approach to any of those three areas of feedback. So hiring have the right people, the setting them up for success in the right way and sort of the ongoing sync process is as the remote I want to say remote first, but the remote mentality change any of that for you?
David Ciccarelli
It hasn't changed. And in fact, I would say it's actually underscored the importance of having structure because what you hear that is most challenging for people who are working remote is that there can be a bit of a lack of structure of I don't know if I'm doing the right thing, it's now even harder to get a hold of my manager. And you know, I've read lots of art. So I think we've gone maybe on the other side, which is being intentional about upholding the cultural norms and practices that we've always had and in the first couple weeks honestly, it almost felt like there was just too many meetings like everything was a video call, you probably lived through this yourself. And then now we're realizing, hey, why do a video call if you can do a quick audio call? Why do an audio call if you can send an email? And why send an email if you can just do a status update on a project management ticket? So we've tried to find the right balance of like, what needs a meeting and what doesn't, but the the critical meetings around feedback, and we've hired people, you know, remotely, and we've run our first kind of round of performance reviews, we were halfway through a quarter. So we did the you know, half halfway mark reminder of the quarter and revisiting the goals. And we're just entering in kind of performance quarterly performance review season. So these have been good practices that have actually created a sense of normalcy and predictability in an environment of uncertainty.
Eric Janssen
What a great thing to have, if you're someone who needs or craves structure, and you're suddenly not going into the office every day, having your one line job description, like this is the one thing that I'm responsible for. And here's exactly how I'm going to be measured for it. It's like you can have up to a million things at home and not have anybody around. But it's almost like I would just tape it up on my office wall somewhere like reminder, this is the one thing, you know, this is the one most important thing, think that clarity must be really helpful for people on your team.
David Ciccarelli
And last thing on this one thing, we actually did start up since coming, you know, kind of in a work from home situation was we actually run more daily stand ups with the teams where it used to be kind of once a week, hour and a half long meeting, we actually felt that the repetition of meeting daily for 15 minutes was more effective. And it's everybody on video. And we actually call it our top one. And so while there's the one line job description we go through around the world in 15 minutes, everyone has basically 60 seconds to say, what was my top one accomplishment from yesterday? And what is the one thing I'm working on today. And that just creates intense focus for the next 24 hour period. It's too easy to go, well, here's all the things I'm going to do over the next month. It's like we're just trying to break things down into understanding what my goals are for the quarter, but then what am I doing today to take one more step towards that? So you can see the theme and all of this of like breaking feedback and kind of this sometimes seemingly, like, when do I do and how do I do and just try to break it into like really simple, like bite sized pieces that can be given, often daily or weekly. And that is I find tremendously powerful and effective to actually getting the results that you want. There's a lot of accountability that goes with it. There's a lot of comfort that goes with it, feeling of accomplishment every day talking about yeah, yesterday, I launched an email campaign or a newsletter, whatever it is, but there's a lot of a great sense of accomplishment with you know, moving the whole company forward playing your part moving the company forward.
Eric Janssen
Yeah, that's great. So for people that are curious Voices.com, heck of a domain, so I guess they can find you at Voices.com that's easiest way you can get in touch.
David Ciccarelli
Sure can, we're on Twitter just at Voices and on Facebook there as well or on LinkedIn. So those are the kind of usual social websites you can find us on or follow a company, or reach out to me available on all those platforms as well.
Eric Janssen
And is there anything that the community can do for you? So you know, good handful, a couple 1000 regular active listeners? Is there anything that we can be helpful to you with right now?
David Ciccarelli
Oh, goodness, I wasn't expecting that. Well, I'm a huge fan of podcasts, and I've always wanted to start my own. And so I actually just launched a podcast called The Voices Experience, which is about me telling about my experience in starting the company, how I run it, the challenges some of it relates to our industry, but mostly it's the kind of the business startup story and experience. So that's available to everyone, wherever you're listening to podcasts, wherever you're listening now, go check that out. At least the first couple episodes I think are great from an entrepreneur founder story.
Eric Janssen
Cool, The Voices Experience. Alright, to hear a little bit more about the founding story. Well appreciate your time you've been super generous. I think the topic of feedback is not one that we often cover in detail for especially for early stage founders or companies and something that in my own entrepreneurial experiences, I wish I would have had at least a simple framework to approach the right way early on. So thank you for sharing the super tactical bits that I think have really set voices up for success here for the next chapter.
David Ciccarelli
Oh, pleasures mine. I learned it the hard way and I'm glad to be able to pass that on to others and hopefully you find it valuable and put it to use.
Eric Janssen
Perfect. Thanks, David. Appreciate it.
Introduction/Outro
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