Throughout his career, Darrin Murriner has always had a passion for organizational management. He said he’s seen a lot of good and bad management, as well as high performing teams and low performing teams.
“I was always fascinated by the ingredients or the different things that had to come together to create high performance, whether that is organizational or individual team performance,” he said.
Murriner’s passion and curiosity about the science of building more effective teams led him to begin Cloverleaf with his co-founder Kirsten Moorefield. It's a tool that helps organizations create more engaged teams by collecting data on their employees.
“Our ultimate vision is that everybody is giving their best work in thriving teams."
With Cloverleaf, employee users can create their own account and take a host of assessments, such as the DISC Assessment, Myers-Briggs Indicator or the CliftonStrengths Assessment. Cloverleaf can also integrate data that companies already collect.
“From the output of those assessments, along with skills and competencies and review data, we can create a dashboard that gives you insights into how to be more effective in the context of those teams,” Murriner said.
Cloverleaf insights show organizations how to increase employee engagement in order to create high-performing teams. Employees who are highly engaged with their teams are more productive, produce better quality work, and have a lower turnover rate than non-engaged employees—all of which add up to major cost savings for an organization.
Murriner and Moorefield were led to the Cloverleaf solution through their work at the local video production company Epipheo. Working at Epipheo, Moorfield and Murriner oversaw as many as 40 video projects concurrently and witnessed wide variations in the outcomes of those projects.
“We started asking ourselves what creates high-performing teams, why there is such wide variation and what’s the combination of people that tend to influence the outcomes of these projects,” he said. “We were formulating different approaches to how we could manage that problem, but ultimately our goal was to give managers, leaders and individuals in organizations the ability to see hidden things below the surface that can impact the level of performance for teams.”
The co-founders of Cloverleaf know there is great need and a large potential market for their product across all types of businesses, from small companies to Fortune 500 companies. 87 percent of the business leaders Cloverleaf surveyed said that more than half of their work is done in teams.
“If you look at revenue dollars spent by businesses across the world, more than 50 percent is spent on people costs,” Murriner said. “If there’s that much money being spent on people, why wouldn’t you invest more in terms of helping your people be more effective and engaged and have a more satisfying career? All of these really complex things are wrapped up in the trillions of dollars we spend on people in organizations.”
Aside from the large potential market for Cloverleaf, the startup’s growth has also been fueled by their participation in Ocean Accelerator, which they began shortly after launching in January 2017.
It's resulted in consumer interest, and there isn't a typical user. Murriner said Cloverleaf customers are a pretty broad range of local companies, whose teams range from 6 to 15 people on average. So far, some of Cloverleaf’s customers include the YMCA of Greater Cincinnati, Crossroads and Messer Construction.
Cloverleaf is currently focused on their scaling sales and marketing process. In fact, Cloverleaf has rebuilt their platform and will launch their new, more scalable product at the end of September.
“Our ultimate vision is that everybody is giving their best work in thriving teams,” Murriner said. “We think that thriving teams is a big part of that equation, so people can’t do their best work if they don’t have a thriving team around them that can spur them on to higher impact outcomes. Our focus is how to create that experience for as many people as we can."
