a) The employee decided to quit and go to work for another company or start his own (usually freelancing) business.

In such a case, our internal decision-making process is simple:

If an employee generates income (or services) for our company which exceeds employee associated costs (e.g. salary, taxes, etc) and we see the possibility to make our bid in an attempt for the employee to stay in our company, we make such bid. 

However, in most cases, we will probably not make a bid, because we try to raise salaries automatically, when employee jump from one long term project to another, on the higher rate (this is usually correlated with engineer level increase).

Till today we lost very few employees because of that, and we did not make any bids on them because it does not make any sense - they asked to make a bid without "a jump" in revenue (or worse after failing in some projects)

For those of you who want one simple rule to grow your salary, it's this:

Make yourself irreplaceable.

The more you irreplaceable for the company, the more company will pay you, if you decide to ask more or because of goodwill (yes, this is our preferred way!).

P.S. in order to become irreplaceable one probably need to work a LOT and HARD and SMART. You get an idea, but I will probably write some blog post about this in the future :) 

P.P.S. Stalin said that there are no irreplaceable people. And it's true. However, in some rare cases, for business, it does not make sense to replace employees because it's easier to keep current, even if expenses on salary increase. After all, if employees generate profits, good business will not want to lose that. That's exactly the best-case scenario to ask for a salary increase in my opinion.

b) Some employees might be forced to exit our company because they did not follow the “process” well (e.g. running timers our customers require, work much fewer hours than was agreed in the contract, etc) or not being honest (or worse lie), etc. This is the most common reason why we ask employees to left our company till today.

I would go that far that say that ability to follow the (development/engineering/team/SCRUM/any_other) process with a focus on detail matter more than any “coding” skills or framework knowledge. 

c) Some employees might be forced to exit our company because they do NOT want to work on something which is important for the company. You will be surprised, but that's a pretty frequent reason that's why I put it into a separate topic. Employees do NOT want to work with Software Stack A, employees do NOT want to work with client Y, etc. We can understand that if it's crap technology experienced employees may not want that. We can understand that if it's toxic client employees absolutely reject it (and we too!). However, it actually never happens for us this way. Opposite: Employees may found own reasons which usually go down to the fact that she/he did not want to learn new things (even if they are very modern things, like the latest frameworks or languages). We are not going to keep such employees.

The moment we understand that it's the personality (culture) of employee which prevents “continues learning” - firing decision is made.

d) Some employees might be forced to exit our company because they just can't work on our or customers’ tasks efficiently enough, even after we spend too much time on that (honestly happens only 1 time over the few years we have in our company).

When we make a hire of Junior for the first work in her/his life, I honestly tell:

Your code quality most probably will not be a reason why you will be asked to left the company. It's how you write it (and more frequently how / why you NOT write it) will probably be the reason.

There are probably other cases I forgot or some "mixed" cases. Generally, we are thinking not in terms of quantity, but in terms of quality and culture fit. 

Our culture is simple:

Learn more, work hard, and smart and you will eventually get paid more (much more).

The more we work in the market, the more we have people who share our core values and people who don't leave us for one reason or another.

We are interested to hear reasons why employees leave (quit/fired from) your company too!

Yes, there are a lot of books that research on “failed” companies/startups (wasted billions of $). Still, I have a hard time to find anything like that for operating service agencies/studios or startups after they got some funding, etc. They all keep silent, with only a few rare exceptions.

Think, there are multiple reasons for such “conspiracy”. We will try to explore in another post, but I want to terminate that “constant success” circle and show how the real IT service company is failing on something, what lessons it tries to get from that, what issues exist, and how we try to overcome, etc. Of course, I will also share the good: how we are growing, how we found amazing employees and contractors, how we are finding projects, and so on.

I hope it could be useful advice for other entrepreneurs/founders and agency owners who sick like me from hearing 100% positive things from all sides 24/7. At the same time, they all know that people (and so companies) make huge mistakes all the time, just it’s very uncommon to discuss such errors in public before it’s too late…

Let’s consider this simple “story":

Our agency has a rate of close to 100% of successfully completed projects all the time.

Sometimes we get to 95%, sometimes 98%, usually 100%, etc. You can see it yourself here: https://www.upwork.com/ag/ever.

So it’s easy to say that we succeed in almost all projects. Is that true? Yep.

However, what if you are the one whos project failed with us? You don’t care about that others whos projects succeed! So, it all depends on how we tell our “story” and what we want to highlight (same as with any statistics btw!)

Today, I got this message in one of the sales pitches (done by another agency to us… It’s surprising how many agencies send offers to do projects to other agencies haha):

Results speak - **6 of the 10 MVPs we created received funding** globally !

I doubt they will ever tell how many MVPs failed before get funding and after, and especially I suspect we are not going to see any analyses on that ;)

Another example (from my own LinkedIn profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/evereq) of how the same story can be seen, depending on the angle you view at it:

I founded my first legal private Company, hire dozens of friends to work with me at 25 and, finally, sold it at 28.

Sounds impressive, right? ;)

Well, yep, it’s incredible, except that I sold it for the sum of goods we have in our stock :)
I.e., yeah, I paid salaries to lots of friends, we worked together few years, and it was a fantastic time, we build 1000s of computers in the Ukraine where people were needed them to be cheaper than in large stores (and possibly some people still use them).

However, people need to understand: the story could be a true story, but it just did not tell ALL the facts! It describes only the facts that show person or company from the right side and may hide the circumstances, which might indicate some negative side of the story… It is how almost every story told today, and I hate that!

We try to build a transparent business.

By transparent, I mean that we will present ALL facts to our customers/partners/employees and ourselves, both positive and negative.

Yes, transparency should be archived carefully. We need to make sure we protect our company, our employees, and partners, so we can’t (yet) tell everything we may want to say.

Our goal is simple: when we do tell the story, we will try to put all facts, not only “good”, but also “bad”! Yes, it is still going to be just one side in most cases (unless the other party agrees to comment in public, of course), but the focus will be on highlighting all facts and attempt to draw some conclusions from them.

So with all that above, let’s begin…

Failed Project

One of our recent customers decided to stop the project, somewhere very close to the end, or so we thought. I am sure in customer view today it’s all failed, and we were not close even to the middle, and he could be very well right with that too, all depends on how to view it, of course!

When something succeeds, there is one great “story” about that (reprinted multiple times by each side, saying how great it all went, how they happy with each other, etc.), but when something fails, there are always opposite views on how it failed and what is the result for each side.

I am running an agency for a few years as an owner, project manager (when it’s needed only), and software architect, but this is one of the infrequent days when I am not sure how we could have done it better… I.e., all those mistakes we (including me) make on this project are not unique, and in many other projects, they did not cause any big troubles for us.

Could be it’s a combination of multiple mistakes. Could be it’s just something related to the customer himself (e.g., he might get a better offer or decided to do it all himself better), which we may never know (we are still awaiting final feedback)…

Besides, while I know many mistakes we did, it feels like we did not have other “good” choices to make, which is again weird because there is almost always a better choice to make!

Stay tuned for the next post to get more detailed information about that specific project and let us know your opinions in the comments or DMs (ever@ever.co)

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