"We're not fancy, but it’s a really special place.”
As Visible Measures VP of Product and Marketing Tawney Bains spoke these words, something told me she wasn’t referring to the fact that the media marketing measurement company had managed to partner with the top 50 brands in the United States. Nor was she alluding to the five-year-old company’s revenue, which hovers around HubSpot’s $52.5 million. She probably wasn’t even taking into account that the company’s growth has been on a vertical ramp, increasing 2,500 percent in revenue over the past 24 months.
Such characteristics are quantifiable, already weighted according to a pre-existing measure. Rather, Bains was trying to put words to the often nebulous entity that is company culture – in other words, the invisible measures – the essence of a workplace underlying its artifacts and furnishing them with meaning.
Close to the entrance of the Visible Measures world headquarters in Boston’s Leather District stands a wall boasting a white banner with the words “Visible People.” Cards bearing nearly every employee’s name, photo, title and a handful of personal facts, ranging from silly to serious, tile the red brick, floor to ceiling. There are, of course, a few Post-Its haphazardly mixed in with the white, printed ones – a symptom perhaps of both the company’s rapid growth as well as the Visible Measures’ Minister of Cultural Affairs Meng Mao's preoccupation helping employees facilitate other community-building events, like company-wide ping pong tournaments and Segway races. So numerous are the cards that they’ve already overflowed the designated space, requiring someone to carefully line the extras up along the top edge of a series of different sized rooms, one of them being the office of Visible Measures CEO and Founder Brian Shin.
In the last year, Visible Measures’ team has grown from 80 to 160 employees — a scale that necessitated some additional space in which to grow. When Visible Measures moved from Downtown Crossing to its current spot at 143 South Street, Shin wanted each employee to have a say in the space’s design. As a result, the company created a Conference Room Contest, in which people would not only think up themes, but also take charge of the decoration process. Employees split themselves off into groups aligned with the creative concepts they wanted to theme various conference rooms around.
“We had the individual room budget given out to [the teams], and they could do whatever they wanted with it. People got really into it,” explained the company's CMO Paul Krasinski, with a broad smile. “Everyone voted, and we all did a tour with a mega phone and hard hats. Then we announced the winners, had a party and everyone felt good.”
In fact, Krasinski told me, the party destination – a small, divey spot on around the block on Lincoln Street dubbed "The Corner Pub" – ended up being one of the winning concepts. Like the bar itself, the Visible Measures' version hosts a black, red and yellow color scheme, a few kitschy beer decorations hung on the walls. Among the other approved, and now realized, themes are the Waterfall Room, a light blue meeting space in which a real waterfall was engineered by employees on their own time; the Cardboard Room, where at one point all the furniture was fashioned from the brown box material (much of which broke, Krasinski told me, save for a 12-point buck bust still mounted on the wall); a criminal-themed conference room, inspired by an old safe that the team couldn’t budge, and decorated with pictures of famous jailbirds along with a tied sheet rope.
“[The employees] did all of it, all the decorating and painting, on their own time," Krasinski said. "What really emanates from all the different conference rooms is all of our different backgrounds, and not only that, but also the respect and interest in what each other are doing."
While the company gives its employees a wide berth during the workday, the one tradition that Visible Measures insists each new team member keeps is the intro email.
“Basically, when you say 'intro email' to people, you think of, ‘Okay, well I’ll just write a quick email to people,’ and that’s kind of not cool,” shared Krasinski.
Instead of the typical dry, two-sentence blurb, an intro email at this company is an expression, be it over video montages, Instagram albums or graphs of important life milestones (yes, it’s been done before), of how said employee found his or her way to Visible Measures.
“It all came from this one idea that’s at the heart of the company, and that’s ... 'Should we tell them? No, we should go show them,’” explained Krasinski. "They typically spark a flurry of emails; each person will get 30 to 40 messages back. If you say you’re into perogies in your intro email, you’ll get tons of responses saying, 'Oh my gosh, I also love pierogies,’ and ‘I just made perogies this weekend.’ And you’ll say, ‘You’re a bad ass, bring ‘em in."...Or it’s, 'Hey, what you like and do may be different than what I like, but that’s totally cool and I love it.'"
As light-hearted and playful as Visible Measures’ culture is, rest assured that the company’s cross-functional teams are working hard. But, as with each element of the company, there is a more deeply seated element at work, as Krasinski put best:
We just assume that if you come here, you’re smart. It’s, ‘Are you nice, are you curious and can you work on a team? You could have gotten 1600 on your SATs, straight As through college, crushed it and sold your company, but if you can’t work with people, and people of all different backgrounds, and you can’t communicate, you just won’t fit in here ... You could literally be the smartest person in the room, but you’ll fail fast. And we think that’s an amazingly positive thing.
Krasinski went on: "On our teams, we grow to expect the utmost trustworthiness and integrity, so that when I come in and work on a project, and she criticizes my suggestion, I know she’s not attacking me, she’s attacking the idea. You have to build that personal foundation of trust.”
Visible Measures is, simply put, a people-pleasing company. Externally, the media marketing measurements company strives to deliver their customers the best possible, most comprehensive service.
“Brands choose us to run their stuff, users choose to watch our stuff and publishers choose us to select which content elements to run on what platforms and who watches it,” explained Krasinski. “We try to be the good guys of advertising, we’re always trying to promote brands with the customer’s preferences in sight.”
Internally, the company endeavors to inspire its employees through a hyper-creative and free-flowing environment. Along with biannual company-wide ski and beach offsites, Visible Measures holds hack days that allow people to toss around ideas and develop novel, non-work projects and regular open sessions to, as Krasinski puts it, “keep it real.” In addition to free lunch, employees have the opportunity to check in and ask leadership any questions they want.
“And I think that was kind of intended, right?” Krasinski noted. “It’s like, ‘Hey, let’s invest in our technology, our clients, our culture and be able to do cool events,' but our office space doesn’t have to be amazing ... we’ve made it pretty amazing.”
