Your Side Hustle Could Be Your Next Big Thing With Amy Spurling

Check Out Amy Spurling Online!

• Website - Compt

• Facebook - Compt Page

• LinkedIn - Amy Spurling

• Instagram - @Compthq

• Twitter - @ComptHQ

Full Transcript:

Note: This is an original transcript–edited for sense, length, and clarity.  If you have any questions or concerns, please email our host, Doria Lavagnino, at doria@sheventurespodcast.com.

Your Side Hustle Could Be Your Next Big Thing with Amy Spurling

00:01.23

Doria Lavagnino:

This woman knows about business exits. She held C-suite financial or operational positions in a few companies that were acquired. In 2018, she pivoted to entrepreneurship with her startup Compt, an award-winning HR technology company focused on retaining talent through additional benefits and perks. In the midst of a pandemic, she raised $1.5 million through Harlem Partners, and as I mention in every podcast, though not often in my intro, women tech founders who have successfully raised capital are 2.2 percent and women of color are 0.05 percent, so very few women are able to do what Amy has done. She is here to speak to us about her pivot, and we’re going to also ask her some questions about acquisitions and her past life. Amy Spurling, welcome to SheVentures.

01:08.37

Amy Spurling:

Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me.

01:13.22

Doria:

I’m excited because it’s not often that I speak to someone with such a deep foundational knowledge of M&A (mergers and acquisitions), acquiring companies. You’ve spent more than 20 years in leadership roles at venture backed companies, and they ranged from early startup phase through high-growth phase and then ultimately some of them were exits. What I was curious about, being that you have that vantage point, is what stage of a business do you enjoy the most and why?

01:55.22

Amy:

It was interesting, a lot of my companies ranged in size. So some of them were as small as 10 people when I joined them. I think the biggest one I joined was 100 but that one grew over the course of six years to be 3,500 people. What I found was that, one, I loved transactions. I loved going through as a CFO and doing funding rounds, I liked doing M&A; there’s something very satisfying about doing transactions. But, the day-to-day when you’re actually working in a business to me stops being fun when you get over a couple hundred people because you don’t actually know even the names of everyone at that point. I think the statistic is you can know up to 250 and that’s about it, and that’s when it stopped being fun for me because it is so much about the people that I’m working with so I prefer the smaller earlier stage. I think that you get to know people a lot better and figure out what makes them tick and it is part of the enjoyable day-to-day. So I really enjoyed the early side.

03:06.65

Doria:

Would you say that there’s an agility that people have when they’re in an earlier stage company versus –– the largest company that I work for in media was Hearst or Condé Nast –– thousands of people. I call it the velvet coffin because I felt like I was very well paid but I I wasn’t learning anything anymore and I just felt kind of like a cog in the wheel.

03:33.91

Amy:

I think I’ve been fortunate where I wouldn’t say at any of my companies I felt like a cog because they were all still on their growth trajectory and I’ve specifically avoided –– you can see in my background I haven’t spent any time having a job in a big, stable, ongoing, brand name company. They’ve all been growth companies, they’ve all been tech companies, so they were all pretty agile and very dynamic internally because they were still figuring stuff out. So that is part of what I like personally because I don’t think I could do the cog thing either; that’s just not my personality.

04:10.74

Doria:

So that’s your sweet spot, I get it. Another thing that I read about you is that you closed 12 rounds of debt equity financing. So for our listeners, if you could just explain what that exactly means because it was more than $200 million that you essentially were, not responsible for, but were transacting. Can you, on a very high level, walk us through how these deals are structured and what you find to be so exhilarating about the process?

04:52.50

Amy:

Sure. A lot of it was venture funding that was closed, so working closely with the CEO and those prior companies and then doing it myself and my own company now. It’s figuring out which investors are going to be the right investors for your company who get your vision and believe in what you’re doing and want to back you. So it’s very much a sales process from that perspective but finding that right partner because the right partners make all the difference for a company’s ability to scale and grow. It’s not just about the cash; it’s making sure you’ve got the right people around the table. So it’s very much an interview process both ways and then finding those right folks to be part of your vision and your team going forward. The transaction part is once you find the right partner. It’s diligence, checklists, and there’s reams and reams and reams of virtual paper that need to go back and forth as they’re vetting and looking at the business and all of that. That stuff I actually find to be very fun, which I know is a little sick. It’s a little sick. But I like my good checklist so I take incredible pride in my diligence rooms, even now where I’m like “You know what? I know this is gonna look really, really good.” So that part is fun for me. But ultimately it’s the end goal of making sure that you’re supporting the business and making sure that it can grow in the way that it needs to. Sometimes it was debt, sometimes it was equity, sometimes it was strategic partnerships, but figuring out how to make sure that this business keeps growing, and that was part of the fun as well.

06:35.56

Doria:

I didn’t think about that but I would imagine that would be challenging. Back to what you were saying earlier about finding the right investor for your business, that is incredibly difficult when –– or maybe I’m making it so, I don’t know –– but I’m just thinking about most of the women that I’ve spoken to who may not have the background that you do in finance and so selling their vision is challenging and I wondered how you perceive yourself as a woman in a very male-dominated industry. How has that gone for you?

07:21.53

Amy:

I kind of shifted over to be CEO of my own company, I mean I do have a background in this so I figured I have a leg up, this will be a lot easier for me. Obviously I know the stats, I know how hard it is for women to raise, and honestly sometimes you just gotta take the check, that’s the reality. A female founder doesn’t necessarily have the luxury of saying, “I would like to speak to these 10 investors and figure out which one is the most amazing partner for me.” That’s a dream world and that’s not always possible. But where you do have a choice, it’s making sure that you vet as much as you can or at least understand where you can or can’t, if you’re pulling in money from somebody that is maybe not your first choice understanding the parameters and the risk that you’re taking there so that you can manage it. So it may not be like your ideal partner but understanding how to work with them because everybody’s bringing something to the table. 

What I found for myself, though, was that it really didn’t matter that I knew the industry. It was hard, early on. It was very, very hard, very hard. It wasn’t easier for me, I don’t think, especially in the early stages, than any of the other female founders I talked to. I’m like, “All right, it literally doesn’t matter how much I know, that’s almost irrelevant. It is what it is out there.” Now, I have been able to raise, most of the female founders I know have been able to raise, and so we’re part of that anomaly because it’s 2 percent of female founders are able to raise — and I know a lot of female founders who have raised — so we’re clearly sitting in some cross section that is getting some of that money. So obviously I have had some help in that area and some privilege in that area but it was still a little bit of a shock to me early on where I was like, “Oh okay.” Some of the investors I was speaking to, I had literally been in the room with them a year or two prior with a different founder because I was working with a CEO. And I saw the questions they asked those founders and it was entirely different from what they were asking me and these were people I know. I know what they were asking those founders and I was like, “Interesting.” I wasn’t taking it personally, it was more of a social experiment where I’m like, “All right, I have much to learn here.” That was interesting.

09:49.46

Doria:

That reminds me a lot –– I’m sure that you are familiar with Dana Kanze’s work where she looked at a TechCrunch conference with male and female venture capitalists and male and female people who pitched and found that women were more often asked questions that would require a more defensive answer, and I don’t remember the exact terminology. 

10:22.20

Amy:

It’s around the risks. They ask us about our risk rather than about the vision.

10:24.97

Doria:

Yes and the rewards right? Exactly. So 2018, let’s fast forward to there. How did you come up with the idea for Compt?

10:35.81

Amy:

So it was something that I’d been chewing on for a few years in two or three of my prior companies. I’ve been part of six companies prior to this over the course of my career and some of them are very short, go and do a transaction, some of them were a little bit longer. But I saw, sitting in that front-row seat where you’re managing finance, or managing HR, you’re seeing what candidates and employees are expecting around compensation and all of the scale within a company is around employees. If you don’t have employees, you’re not going to scale, end of story — no matter how amazing your software is there has to be people who are running it and making sure it works. I saw how this was changing: Employee perks became a very big thing during the course of my career. They became a massive mess for the finance and HR team. 

So I wasn’t actually planning on starting a company. I was sitting there going, “All right somebody please build this thing. Here’s the software I want.” I talked to lots of different engineers and other companies. I even was an advisor to a company that was kind of approaching that from an angle and I was like “Do this,” and then they ended up pivoting and doing something different. I was like, “I just need somebody to build this piece of software, come on.” Then I turned 40 and was like, “What the heck am I waiting for?” All of my prior founders had been first-time founders, most of them, actually I think maybe all of them, were under the age of 40. I was like, “I know what I’m doing, I’ve got a lot of experience here, what am I waiting for?” This is something that I don’t know how I’m going to build another company for someone else or myself without this software existing. So I’m going to go do it. So I decided because I could see how much of a pain point this was in the market. I had talked to lots of other CFOs and other HR leaders and I was obviously speaking to employees. This just needs to be solved, I have to do this. So I know how to build a company, I know how to raise money, I know how to do this, let’s go and do this because I need this piece of software to exist, so I decided to start it.

12:47.18

Doria:

That is incredible. Tell listeners what Compt is.

12:50.99

Amy:

Compt is employee perk management software that helps companies build, manage, design employee perk stipends. The goal here is really to get to that employee engagement factor. If you’re going to have employee perks and your compensation stack, you need people using them, otherwise it’s not good for attracting or retaining talent. The problem is that traditional employee perks –– even the really good stuff, the student loan repayment, or the child care, the fertility benefits –– if you’re lucky, less than 5 percent of the team is using it. That’s a high watermark is 5 percent; nobody uses that stuff. 

13:26.54

Doria:

That’s incredible. Why do you think that is? 

13:28.25

Amy: 

Think fertility benefits. Not only do you need to be in that stage of life, you need to be having fertility issues and you need to be wanting to use that specific platform. That is a very small number within a company. Student loan repayment, you have to have student loans in your name, be willing to refinance with the bank that is being offered, and it’s a lot of hoops to jump through. Most people are just like, “To heck with it, I don’t care.” So then you distribute everybody across the country and the globe and now you’ve got vendors that aren’t even relevant in some markets because nobody has access to them. Every person wants to do something different but you can’t do that with a vendor marketplace. It’s just not possible. So I was like, “There’s got to be a way to get every employee to do something different.” But to do that in a way where companies can build a sandbox say, “Hey we want to support wellness, or family, or professional development,” or whatever the thing is. So they have a little bit of a guardrail and do this in a tax-compliant way because none of the stuff out there was being taxed correctly and that is a nightmare for CFOs. So it’s like, “All right we’re either manually tracking this or we’re not offering it,” and neither of those are good options.

14:40.94

Doria:

That is interesting and what I’m wondering is more from the employee standpoint, or actually small business standpoint, if I am a very small business, say two or three people, am I able to use Compt or is it more for larger companies? 

14:56.22

Amy:

You can. What I would say, though, is that there’s a way to jerry-rig this. I wouldn’t want you to pay for software if you have two or three people, it’s easier to just do it for free on a spreadsheet; you don’t need to pay for software. When you start hitting 20 to 25 people, as we’re administratively trying to track stipends, it’s worth it to spend money on that. Before that, to just be financially responsible, you don’t want to spend several hundred dollars a month for a piece of software to manage it for a couple people because it’s small enough that you can manage that.

15:27.80

Doria:

The novelty is not necessarily in the fact that you’re offering perks, it’s the added benefit for CFOs that you, having been a CFO yourself and seeing this as a pain point, know exactly how they need to see this appear on their spreadsheets or whatnot.

15:52.64

Amy:

It’s both because you have to solve the HR and finance piece of the puzzle. Otherwise nobody’s going to buy your software because they don’t want their lives to be more painful. The two least staffed teams in an entire company are finance and HR. They just don’t get the headcount that engineering or sales gets. So you can’t make their lives more miserable. That’s part of it but the other piece is you have to show that employees will use this. So to give you an example, if normal employee perks, maybe 5 percent of the team is using them, on Compt, we see that 90 plus percent of employees are using their stipends. So very high utilization. That’s important. You need employees using this because otherwise it’s not relevant for the organization. If I saw one of our customers where nobody was using it, I would approach and be like, “Why bother paying for this software? You just shouldn’t because it’s not the right strategy for your company.” We don’t see that. We do see the lowest utilization on our platform is like 75 percent but average is 90. 

16:54.82

Doria:

Why do you think that is?

17:00.28

Amy:

It’s the personalization. As an employee, you’re given a stipend that’s say $100 a quarter to spend on wellness. You can spend that wherever you want. You can spend that in your normal daily life. You could do it for a gym if you wanted but if you’re not a gym person, you want a mental health app, or you want healthy groceries, or you want running shoes, or you want a personal trainer. Do what matters to you. It’s your life, your journey, your health. The company’s just going to support it. So what’s fascinating, we went and looked at 8,700 of our employee users on the platform last year and said, “All right, 8,700 people, 12 months, how many different unique vendors could they possibly use?” Because that’s what personalization looks like when you’re getting 90-plus percent utilization. Guess how many different vendors they use during that time period?

17:49.28

Doria:

I’m going to guess it’s a large number or you wouldn’t be asking me. I don’t know, let me think. 500? 

17:50.43

Amy:

27,000. So on average every single person was using three unique vendors. That’s what personalization looks like. Everyone wants to do something different and you can enable that without crushing a finance and HR team by simply moving to stipends. So you can make everybody happy.

18:19.13

Doria:

That’s really interesting and I don’t think I completely actually understood that the freedom was with the employee. I thought that the company, maybe you guys surveyed the employees in the company, but it’s actually just that the end user, the employee, will receive a certain amount of money and can use it for various benefits that make sense in his or her life.

18:42.38

Amy: 

Exactly. So there’s no gym button, there’s no yoga button by design. There’s health and wellness, which a lot of companies will offer to their team. But the employee gets to determine what that means. The company builds the sandbox and then the employee determines what happens in that sandbox. There’s still some guardrails and some controls and companies can align this with their culture but at the same time, it’s giving a lot of flexibility to the individual employees.

19:14.92

Doria:

I was curious, is there a most popular benefit that people have on your platform?

19:22.29

Amy:

From a category perspective, health and wellness is definitely the most popular from a company’s perspective because they want to support whether it’s physical, mental, emotional, financial wellness for their team. Wellness is definitely the top one but within a stipend you can have multiple categories, which is the beauty of it. So you can create this little kind of bundle for teams. So we do see a lot of remote work stipends now. That may have a cell phone category, an internet category, a remote work setup so you can get a desk chair, whatever. It may also have health and wellness in it because people who are working from home are more likely to just stay in their house, stay at their desk and so they actually need to be moving even more than the folks who were commuting to an office because at least you were getting a little movement there. So we’ll see things like that. So that’s a pretty common stipend. Then wellness is definitely common as well, and a wellness stipend may have the health and wellness category but it may also have the family category. If your family’s not healthy and happy, neither are you. It may have student loan repayment because your financial wellness is part of your wellness. It may have pets because maybe you have pets as an emotional support animal and that’s part of your mental health. So there’s all kinds of things that companies, as they think broadly about what wellness means, may include and that just means that employees can follow their own journey. Maybe one month you buy running shoes, but the next month you get pet insurance or you adopt a kitten, and then the next month you want to get a babysitter so you can have a night out away from your children. It just allows you to follow your own path.

21:09.83

Doria:

Absolutely and have that flexibility. I can see why that’s very attractive. How has attraction been since you started and you got funded in 2020 from then until now, being also that there was a pandemic in all of that?

21:25.38

Amy:

From a customer perspective or an employee perspective? 

21:29.27

Doria:

From a customer perspective.

21:45.60

Amy:

We grew almost 500 percent last year, almost 400 percent the year before. The move for companies to fully remote was already a problem before the pandemic. Employees were demanding it. The most common thing I heard as a CFO was, “I don’t want that. Why can’t I have something else?” Because it’s the individual employee’s compensation and they weren’t getting access to it. COVID and the pandemic really laid bare the fact that individual employee perks are a very broken approach and so a lot of companies started moving toward stipends, which is where we have grown incredibly over the last couple of years. So it’s been a tailwind for us.

22:10.97

Doria:

That’s so exciting and to be clear you offer perks but it is not that you offer healthcare and all of that? 

22:22.27

Amy:

Correct. There’s no health insurance, no dental, no life insurance, none of that stuff. It’s more of everything else. So it’s the family, pets, wellness, student loan repayment, professional development, charitable giving, all that type of stuff.

22:37.35

Yeah, the stuff that matters, the stuff that makes us human. How does Compt make money?

22:39.34

Amy:

It’s a SaaS subscription software service. So companies pay an annual fee for the platform and then they go on their merry way. We do it in a way that they have guaranteed pricing so we want to support our customers in their growth. Instead of charging them for every single person they keep adding to the platform, they basically have guaranteed pricing for their contract.

23:11.14

Doria:

Oh that’s interesting. So it’s whether you have 500 or 2,000 it would be the same pricing for the term of your contract?

23:21.30

Amy:

Correct. So it’s based on how many employees when you start the contract but as you grow during the contract we’re not coming back to you for more money.

23:29.79

Doria:

But then, presumably, when a contract is renegotiated that’s going to come into play. That would make sense. Now you had mentioned before, pitching as a female founder was difficult. Can you talk to listeners a little bit about how many times you had to pitch. What was difficult about it for you? You already spoke a little bit about the kinds of questions that you were getting. Is there anything else that you want to share or tips that you want to give women who may be considering?

24:04.43

Amy:

I have a feeling this is one of those “You block it out when you’re done” kind of situations. There were definitely a lot of pitches but to be fair in my prior companies there were a lot of pitches as well, so I don’t think that was really any different, the volume. The questions were definitely different. But when you find the right partners, it gets a lot easier. So I was really fortunate to be able to work with Harlem Capital Partners in our seed round. They understood the business; they have been tremendous partners for the past couple of years. Slack Ventures as well came in on our seed round and so working with them because they really understood the remote space obviously, that’s Slack’s entire ethos is understanding the remote world. So we’ve been fortunate to have the right partners around the table. As soon as you get those right partners, that makes a huge difference. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to an absolutely incredible angel who has been like my biggest cheerleader and champion for the past few years and so it’s finding those people that really believe in what you do. It can be very, very difficult. I think every round gets a little easier so I will say that. The angel round was the hardest round of my entire career, not just because I was female, just because it’s hard. There’s no website. Angels don’t have websites the way VCs do that say, “This is what I’m interested in, these are my criteria,” because then you know “Do I measure up or do I not?” Angels are people with money and you need to go and get them to give you that money, and that is very, very difficult to do. That was definitely a harder round but to do that I approached it a little differently. I wanted to have a balanced cap table so I wanted to have it be a mix of men and women making sure that there was at a minimum gender balance on my cap table, but also pulling in other perspectives as well. To do that, I needed to allow folks to write smaller checks. So I leveraged AngelList to basically be the platform where I could put folks with smaller checks because you don’t want to have little checks on your cap table; it makes a big fat mess. But being able to put them all in that one syndicate was amazing, which means that I could get folks to write $2,500 or $5,000 checks and start learning how to angel. I approached a lot of female business women who had never angel invested, and I was like, “Look I know your purse, I know that purse cost $7,000, put off your fall purse and write a check. Start learning how to angel invest because this is how we change the environment.” That worked very well and hopefully I helped make them some money so that they keep angel investing because I think until we change who is investing, we’re not going to change the environment of who’s getting funded.

27:18.36

Doria:

I agree that seems to be a big part of it and also because I think there’s a bit of –– I didn’t want to say they’re all white men because they’re not necessarily –– but if it’s a white man who’s listening to your pitch, he’s bringing his own experience to that pitch and this has been I think an issue with femtech in particular, the femtech founders that I’ve spoken to anyway, have found that oftentimes they’re just not understood. Their product, their vision is not understood. How do you take that as an entrepreneur? I guess part of it is the challenge of, “Okay, well even if your experience is totally different I need to figure out a way to get you to understand why this is a big issue.” I don’t know, it’s tricky.

28:08.80

Amy:

I feel like it is changing. I do feel like there’s starting to be more and more female founded unicorns, and I think that is changing the dynamic in the industry. I think also the investor slate is changing and there’s more of a recognition of that. We’re a long way from getting 50 percent of the funding that’s out there, but I think that there is a lot of money out there period and so there’s places to get some of it. We’re still gonna get, as female founders, less funding than our male counterparts. But more funding doesn’t necessarily mean your business does better is the other piece here. Just because you’ve raised $100 million does not mean your company is going to succeed. We had competitors early on that outraised us by two to three times and they went out of business during COVID because they didn’t have the right idea, they didn’t have the right approach. So it’s believing in what you’re building and understanding your market intrinsically and then just by being female founders, people of color, we tend to build more efficient businesses because we have less capital to play with so we figure stuff out. I think the tide is turning –– slowly –– but it is turning and that will change the environment as well.

29:31.64

Doria:

I’m watching right now, I think it’s on Netflix or Apple TV, I can’t remember. No not The Dropout. I’m watching WeWork. 

29:45.96

Amy:

Oh okay, yep.

29:51.38

Doria:

The way that they portray Adam Neumann is really, if it’s accurate, kind of shocking. The inequity of how some people with the gift of gab and charm were able to pull off these –– I guess in the end, although he did end up with a lot of money. 

30:09.10

Amy: 

Yeah, he made a lot of money, no one else did. That’s one of the dirty secrets of tech, we’re working to change that within this company. In most exits, the founder and the investors make money, if it’s a decent exit. Nobody else makes money. The early days of Facebook where the janitor became a millionaire, that doesn’t happen anymore; it just doesn’t. It’s much more likely to be the Mailchimp scenario where the founders make billions and everybody else is like “What just happened here?” That’s far more common. I personally don’t think that’s fair. I couldn’t build this company without my team. I’m not writing code. I’m not the marketing genius who is making sure that we’ve got leads coming in. And so we’re doing it in a way where I want everybody to have a significant exit across the team. That’s really important to me. We’ve got a really diverse team. We’re 67 percent people of color, 50 percent female. If these folks all have significant exits at some point, then they’re going to be able to turn around and build companies themselves. They’re going to turn around and angel invest in companies, and that starts changing the environment. That is really important to me.

31:17.42

Doria:

I love that, that made my day. You have raised a seed round. Are you going back to the market for a series A, B? What are you up to?

31:36.47

Amy:

TBD, the date cannot be announced yet. Yes, a series A, but TBD on the announcement, coming soon. Yes, announcement is coming soon.

31:45.11

Doria:

All right, very exciting. I just wanted to also ask you because churn is such a cost for businesses, and I would imagine that really what went into the thinking also behind employee perks is that you want to reduce churn. I was looking at a survey from the Society for Human Resource Management that was looking at how the need for benefits have changed due to COVID, and at that point they were saying that these were the top five: it was employee options for telework that was 78 percent, telemedicine services 43 percent, leave to care for children 40 percent, elder care 27 percent, and mental health services 25 percent. So with that in mind, how do you see in 2022 the landscape of benefits evolving?

32:51.75

Amy:

I think it just continues. The beauty of stipends is you can do all of those things with the exception you need to have a company that understands the concept of flexibility, that’s not a monetary thing. If you’re gonna force everyone back to the office, flexibility is out the window. So I think there’s that piece that I put in its own bucket. The rest of it is employees require choice. Even if you are offering elder-care services, one not every employee needs that, two no matter what you offer it’s not going to apply even to all the employees who want that, and if your team is really distributed it’s nearly impossible to reach everyone. So it goes back to that personalization piece, that is what I see being the driver for so many employees. Every single person’s life is different and their needs are different and that’s where flexibility is huge. To be able to recognize that employees all have different things going on in their lives and have different needs at different times. There was a story on LinkedIn recently, a blog post where this woman was saying she’s working from home,there was a snowstorm that hit, she had to go get her kid from daycare because daycare was going to close early. She shut down her computer, she went to the daycare, picked him up, came back, was back online within half hour, 45 minutes. If she had been required to work in an office and wasn’t able to work from home, she would have been shutting down for the day, driving an hour to go pick up her kid at daycare, driving them home, she would have been out for multiple hours. Just the ability to be more productive in a way that also works for your life; it just doesn’t make sense not to allow that. We’ve proven for more than two years now that remote work can work. The companies that are putting the stake in the ground and are requiring people to go back full time, they’re gonna really struggle to hire and there’s gonna be a lot of turnover, and I think they are ultimately going to see a significant exodus from people who are caring for children. Regardless of which parent, it’s just too hard when there’s so many other options of ways to do this and companies who are willing to be flexible.

35:17.32

Doria:

Exactly and you are, right? Compt is 100 percent remote?

35:23.72

Amy:

We’re fully remote. We talked about it. I actually never planned on being fully remote, I was dead set against it when I started the company. The woman that had started it with me, we had this conversation very specifically and she’s like, “Well I might want to move to Austin,” and I was like, “Look, maybe after a year but when we’re founding this we got to be in the same room, it’s too hard.” She ended up staying, which was amazing for a period of time and then she ultimately moved to Florida, which was perfectly fine at the time. But I didn’t want to do that because you have to design for how you communicate, you have to design for how the team interacts, and you build a culture, and all of that. COVID forced it to happen, and it was the best thing that could have happened honestly because I can hire across the country and get the best people for the job regardless of where they’re located, which makes it a lot easier to build. The best people for the job come from all kinds of places and that’s hugely beneficial. It’s also just looking at what we did before now we kind of look at each other like “What were we even thinking?” We’d commute, whether I was walking in the city or somebody was taking a train in, 45 minutes each way each day to go into an office where we’d sit shoulder to shoulder, be breathing on each other –– gross –– the place that we had didn’t have great heat, and then you put on headphones so that it can be quiet and so you can get work done, how ridiculous is that? What a waste of time when you can just work from home and not have any of that.

36:59.65

Doria:

It’s so true and I’ve also heard the argument with founders, especially at an early stage, were like “No we have to have a whiteboard and be in the same room.” But really even that can be done.

37:11.96

Amy:

I mean that’s all digital. There are so many digital whiteboards, you do not need a whiteboard. I will say it is nice that we are able to get together occasionally now. We actually have a team offsite in D.C. in a couple of weeks and that’s going to be really nice to get everyone together because I do think it’s really hard to read people, even over Zoom. You need to get the body language and the cues from them, and there’s just something about being in person where you can get a vibe off of somebody in a way that you can’t in Zoom. So I do think that’s important but I also don’t think you need to be in an office every day to do that. I think it can be a fun once or twice a year thing where everybody gets together.

37:58.39

Doria:

A lot of the women who listen to this podcast are solopreneurs or have one or two probably contractors or maybe employees working for them. What tips would you give to measure productivity because it can be very difficult if you’re not with someone to know exactly what they’re doing, and how many hours they’re logging, and if they even understood. There could be miscommunications that are unintentional.

38:28.31

Amy:

That’s a great question, and it’s something that I think also changed with COVID. A lot of times for a lot of companies productivity was measured in exactly what you mentioned: how many hours someone was working or were they at the office period. I think that’s the wrong measure and I think that’s something that’s changed now. One of the things that we do is we work an OKR system at Compt. So you define goals, and they’re very measurable, numerical as much as possible, and it’s basically giving people the freedom to go and accomplish them. You’re setting it with them so you’re not just kind of picking a number out of thin air but instead of managing if someone is online, or are they not, or what they are doing, you may have different check-in points and whatever. But instead of doing the micromanagement and needing to see them to know that work’s getting done, it’s much more about “Are you accomplishing your objectives? If you are, cool. Let me let you do it the way that works for you.” So it’s measuring an outcome instead of measuring a number of hours worked.

39:41.74

Doria:

It’s really interesting because I’ve heard so many different answers to this. I didn’t even know that there’s apparently a software that exists that can tell someone how often you’re actually active on your computer.

39:58.15

Amy:

It’s awful. A curse be put on the person who invented that. I don’t know who that is but honestly I think it is one of the nastiest pieces of software out there. That is spyware on your employees; that is horrible. That actually upsets me that somebody built that where it’s either measuring keystrokes or the cameras that are just watching you.

40:21.80

Doria:

The way the woman described it to me, and she was a big advocate for it, she said that if the computer is not used for a certain amount of time –– I’m thinking, “Well what if you go to walk your dog or something?” I don’t know. 

40:34.99

Amy:

I am not an advocate for that at all. If you have to measure keystrokes by an employee to understand that they’re doing anything –– I could be typing an email to my mother, you don’t know what I’m actually doing. If that’s how you’re measuring productivity, you’re measuring the wrong thing. You’ve got the wrong people and you don’t trust them. You have to build trust with your team and trust that they know what they’re doing, and if they don’t know what they’re doing that’s on you as a leader. You need to set clear goals and expectations, that’s on you.

41:10.70

Doria:

Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. Would you say that that’s something that you do monthly, quarterly from a remote perspective?

41:23.30

Amy:

The goal setting happens quarterly, but every Monday one person from each team, whether it’s engineering or product or sales or whatever, sends an email to the whole team. We’re a small team so we can still send an email to everyone where it’s like: “This is what my goal is for the quarter; this is what was accomplished last week for this team; this is what’s on deck this week.” So that we know that things are progressing but we don’t need to sit in an hour- long meeting where we all update each other. You can scan that in a couple minutes. Once a month, we do an hour-long retro where we go a little bit deeper and kind of walk through like, “All right we’re a third of the way through the quarter, how is this progressing? What are the blockers that we’re seeing? What do we need to change? Are there things that we need to adjust from what our goals were because something else big has come up?” So we have that conversation but it takes about an hour. Then once a quarter, it’s two hours because it’s a look back and then a look forward to the next goals. So trying to manage how much time we spend together and not having it be updating each other on things that we could really learn through a quick email, but also making sure that the whole team is aligned and aware of what’s going on across the company, too.

42:36.52

Doria:

I love that and I think there’s so much time that’s wasted in meetings. But at the same time, to your point, you don’t want the information to be siloed and so it sounds like your solution is perfect, that everyone can be updated as needed.

42:53.11

Amy:

Well and it’s perfect for this size and stage. That process has changed probably 10 times in four years and will continue to change and evolve. So as we grow, maybe the email to everyone doesn’t work but maybe that email needs to go just to the leadership team, and then you do the retro, and companies do all hands at different cadences. So it’ll continue to evolve. That’s working for us right now, but we’ll break at some point and we’ll have to do something different.

43:23.10

Doria:

I think what you are doing is amazing and I would love it if you could tell listeners where they can learn more about Compt.

43:31.52

Amy:

They can learn about us on our website, www.compt.io, or at Compt HQ on Twitter.

43:43.13

Doria:

It sounds like there’s going to be some sort of big news coming in the next couple of months so we’ll be looking out for that, and we’ll share it with our listeners because we always like to do that with people who have appeared on our show. So thank you so much for your time today.

43:58.42

Amy:

Thank you. I appreciate it.