Darrin Murriner has always been interested in helping people work at their highest potential.
“Personally, I’ve always been fascinated with teams and how people work together, and management styles and how to get the most out of people inside the organizational context," Murriner said.
This interest led him to cofound Cloverleaf, a software company that uses personality assessment tools, such as Myers-Briggs personality types and other employee data, to help hire and develop talent to increase productivity.
It’s Murriner’s unique experience in building and managing teams that helped inspired Cloverleaf. His resume includes 15 years in the corporate world before transitioning into life as an entrepreneur.
The topic of managing and building teams fascinated Murriner enough that he wrote a book about transforming corporate cultures, “Corporate Bravery: Eliminate Fear-Based Decision Making,” which focuses on inspiring businesses to have a “brave culture.”
"[Culture and productivity] is not a top-down activity. It really starts with these work teams at the lowest level of the organization.”
It was these combined perspectives that spurred his work at Cincinnati-based video production company called Epipheo. There, it was a marriage of his ideas, a great corporate environment and the input and influence of colleagues Kirsten Moorefield, Levi Bethune and Ford Knowlton that eventually inspired what would become Cloverleaf.
“We noticed how unique the culture at Epipheo was and really started to kind of try to identify what are some of the unique aspects — how can you measure it, how can you identify it — for other people,” Murriner said.
As they considered these elements, the team realized it would be great for job applicants and employers alike to have information and transparency when finding a job or hiring a new employee. Their first thought was that they should develop a recruiting platform, and they did. Two factors ultimately drove them in a different direction.
The first factor was when they put the platform in front of managers and HR leaders, who were interested in another version of their recruiting platform that focused on the team building aspect of the software.
Then, other investors told the team that the recruiting business was already crowded.
With this advice handy, they leaned into the team-builidng elements of their platform, deciding that they wanted to build a resource to help people be more productive, build better relationships and improve communications from the ground up.
"[Culture and productivity] is not a top-down activity,” Murriner said. “It really starts with these work teams at the lowest level of the organization.”
Additionally, Murriner said Cloverleaf can help teams be more productive by recognizing potential in other employees. With Cloverleaf, managers and company leaders can ask, "where do we have talent that can be redeployed in to one of those other work teams, to take those other teams to a new level?" Murriner said.
The final product combines these elements into a dashboard that "cross-maps your team's personality, skills, and culture and reveals insights that can help you make better decisions about your teams," its website states. "Because when your team thrives, your people feel fulfilled, and you get more done." The software has a free version and a "Pro" and "Enterprise" versions, which companies and individuals can pay for more extensive features.
In May of 2017, Cloverleaf graduated from OCEAN accelerator in Cincinnati. “The biggest thing they were able to do is allow us to tap into a network,” Murriner said of the experience. “Not just in Cincinnati, but beyond Cincinnati."
The accelerator invested $50,000 in the company, which had bootstrapped an estimated $10,000 to get itself off the ground.
