It's fun to devote this week's blog to last week's retreat.  I had been looking forward to my session for a while because I knew it would be a part of changing the culture at Matchstic.

The main topic of my session was unveiling a profit sharing plan for all Matchstic employees.  Blake and I have been thinking about it for a year and working on this specific plan for six months.  The biggest influence came from my first and only boss, client, and business mentor, Andy Levine.  He came up with a great system that he instituted at Sixthman, and I took that and tweaked it a little bit for Matchstic.

Here was the main goal: To get all Matchstic team members thinking beyond the daily tasks and understanding how everything we do affects the bottom line.

Bonuses based on profits will be paid out quarterly.  Not every team member receives the same bonus: it is based on how effectively their job is done (we also rolled out Performance Reviews & Development Plans at the same time to measure this) as well as how long they have been at the company.  So we reward results as well as loyalty, but heavily weighted towards results.

Here is the catch: no bonuses are paid out if our clients don't receive a quality product and a great experience with Matchstic.  We interview each client after projects are complete and have them rate us on 3 main questions (a scale of 1-5):

1. Rate the quality of work you received from Matchstic.

2. Rate the experience of working with Matchstic.

3. How likely are you to recommend Matchstic to a friend?

If our overall scores are less than 4 in any given quarter, no one receives any bonus.  That's our check and balance to ensure they are good profits.  Bad profits would be making money when clients aren't happy, and we refuse to reward that.

I probably went into too much detail explaining all this, but it's something that, when coupled with Dustin's thoughts of ROWE, will radically change our culture and focus on Results.

This was our sixth retreat, and I could go back and look at each retreat and tell you how it changed Matchstic in some way forever in a positive way.  It's our time to "sharpen the saw."  Each time we go, I always say, "How could we ever afford NOT to do this?"

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