Edmund Scanlan

Right now I’m listening to the laughter and banter that runs wild through Total Attorneys come Friday at 4 PM. People truly enjoying each other’s company and celebrating the weeks accomplishments.

From day one I have spent a great deal of time focusing on the culture of my company. At first it was just me and if I was smiling then all was good.

When I started hiring my first employees I focused on making sure that they were happy to come to work every day. This was done be keeping the work fast paced, challenging, innovative and fun. Often it was little things, like bring a case of beer in when we launched a project. Everyone could sense I was doing all I could to make our company better than every other place you could work.

As we have now grown to over 200 people we are now scaling the culture. People who start working here quickly identify that this is an amazing place. One that is so different than where they have worked before. People are happy. People enjoy being around each other. People are nice.

Everything will build off of your culture. Branding, client satisfaction, employee retention, vendor relations…the list could go on and on. Think of it as the heart of your company.

Yes, our success has come from an innovative approach to delivering services and software to lawyers. Yes, we are doing cutting edge stuff at an incredibly face pace. Yes, our revenue continues to grow while other business is slowing. But, if you ask me how all the above can happen and I will respond in one word without hesitation. Culture.

Do you feel that innovation and speed are important to your company’s growth? Then agile software development principles should be applied to running your entire business.

Creating detailed tactical plans for months (and sometimes years) worth of work and then handing them off to your group of ‘doer’s’ is a sure way to stagnate and crush the innovative opportunities of your company.

Spending time on the vision of where to take your organization and engaging your employees in the creation of it is a very good use of time. Planning every step of the way is a waste of time.

At Total Attorneys we have created small teams in every department of our organization; we task them with high-level business objectives (that they often help shape) and give them the ability self-organize the execution of the work. These teams break down work into short time frames–never longer than a few weeks–and focus on results through iteration. Teams evaluate and then plan out the next few weeks of work.

The saying goes, ‘How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time.” We now have agile principles applied to HR, Sales, Call Center, Product Development, Accounting, Finance, and IT.

By working in short bursts and being agile we are able to:

• Focus on what is important now

• Adapt new product deployment in real time with our customers

• Enable employees to be creative and innovate, which results in attracting and retaining top talent

• Never head in the wrong direction for more than a few weeks

• Frequently evaluate and re-evaluate everything we do

• Change directions without organizational resistance or confusion, because we do this all the time

• Not get overwhelmed with our aggressive product role out and growth plans

• Move faster and have more fun than everyone else : )

Traditionally you need multi-year planning to keep your organization in lock-toe step with one another. Now technology has enabled organizational agility through collaboration and transparency. We have recently launched Jive Software’s SBS, formerly called Clearspace, to allow us scale our agility. Check out a great Fast Company interview with Cisco’s John Chambers on how the multi-billion dollar company is doing the same.

If you want to move faster than your competition and engage your work force in innovation, go agile.

Listening is something we should all be working on. It is one of the most important things you can do in business.

Listening to you employees, customers, vendors and competitors (or anybody for that matter) makes you more effective.

When you are passionate about what you do it is very easy to get caught up in meetings and talk the whole time.

When you are really busy it is easy to not hear what your employees are telling you, through not only their words but also their actions and faces.

When you are focused on developing and delivering products or services for your customers it is way to easy not to take them time to listen to what they need.

What do you do to be an effective listener?

Save everyone time and operate your business by taking off all your clothes and encouraging your employees to do the same.

Current and potential customers can feel comfortable that your organization is hiding nothing. If you are providing services and/or software as a service (SaaS), transparency will speed up the timeline of trust. Today and even more so tomorrow trust will be critical to success.

Your ability to innovate is directly related to you attracting and retaining the very best people. Brands like Google and Cisco will always get top resumes. The way the rest of us do is by showing those leading job speakers what is really going on under the hood. Anyone that can help you get to the next level will do their homework. The more videos, blogs, and twitter’ers (etc.) they can find the better. If you are doing cool stuff they will be able to figure it out and will apply for your positions.

You ability to maximize relationships with partners, vendors, and investors, whether current or potential will substantially increase by showing them what is truly going on inside.

I would even argue that having your competition see this transparency is also to your benefit. You might find that by being so open with what you are doing your competitors are more comfortable in working with you. You both probably have something that you are better at than the other. Figure out how to leverage each other’s strengths so that you can both grow.

I’d love to hear what you think about being transparent. Benefits AND drawbacks.

Link to Total Attorneys Videos on Vimeo

In an all company meeting on snowy Dec. 19th, I announced that Infra-Strategy would be rebranded as Total Attorneys.

The Infra-Strategy name means a lot to those who work here. However, the culture we have created and the manner in which we serve our customers is what makes us appreciate coming to work everyday.

Having a consistent name internally and externally is required for us to continue our rapid growth in the legal space.