Many companies talk about culture and community in the workplace. But in some cases, this means simply a talking point at the end of a presentation or a happy hour at the end of the month. It takes a daily commitment to make company culture a priority.
The Vested Group puts corporate community front and center. It can be seen not just in the way leaders talk about their employees, but also in the physical office space itself. And the strategy has been paying off as the company has moved into a second office and has been consistently growing in terms of clients and employees.
“Our people are what really makes us different… we go through great pains to make sure that we hire the right people, that we have the right people in the right seat,” said Cedric Carter, managing director of delivery at The Vested Group. “We believe that everyone here are A-players. I have no problem grabbing someone, sticking them in front of any one of our clients, and feel 100 percent confident that they are going to be successful.”
The Plano-based company was founded in 2011, after Founder Joel Patterson left his job, where Carter and some of the other leaders were working at the time, to found The Vested Group. As the company grew and expanded, he began to notice the family-like culture change with the influx of new hires. So when The Vested Group started, company culture immediately became a conscious priority.
The Vested Group is consulting, licensing, implementation and support firm focusing on NetSuite software – a cloud-based business management and planning software. John Mack, the managing director of the company's NetSuite support division said it was niche in an area that leaders saw as an opportunity to add something new to the market, in addition to being software that can be deployed in almost any size company that can also grow with the client’s needs.
“Our goal is that our customer should never have to leave us, they’re with us forever… so there’s a lot of advantages for our customers,” Mack said. “I think what’s cool with our company is we’re not satisfied with the status quo; we’re always trying to figure out… how can we do things better the next time.”
The company currently has about 65 employees and works with about 140 clients. Its offices look more like a new coworking space than the cubicle-filled work space that’s found at many companies. It has amenities like a kitchen, outdoor garden paths, open-floor plan, and a break room featuring a vintage arcade.
"We’re not trying to grow and be the biggest consulting firm, but to be the best consulting firm."
There are a set of core values at The Vested Group: commitment to the team, responsibility, a helpful and constructive environment, honesty, learning from failure, and positivity. Carter said all of this can be seen in the offices and in interactions between team members. The open-floor plan removes the physical separation of different levels of employees; the community spaces help foster collaboration and creativity; and the environment, as well as the family-oriented events that they host there make employees feel valued and welcome. In addition, The Vested Group unlimited PTO and a strong benefits package. Mack said that because of this, employees feel respected and valued, leading to only about 1 percent of the company’s employees leaving in recent years.
“It’s a little different. You don’t feel like you’re in an office, but we still get work done… I believe we’re much more productive,” Carter said. “It’s a collaborative space… where people can talk to one another, there’s mutual respect. We’ve got it to where just people want to come to work. Most people spend the majority of their waking hours on any given day at work, so we try to do some things to make sure that work is engaging.”
Mack said the industry is changing. Enterprise resource planning systems like NetSuite are moving away from offering every service on one platform to a more customized offering, based on the individual company’s needs. As the company looks to the future, he said it plans on focusing more energy into the product rather than growing out its employee base, in order to retain its culture and tight-knit team.
“We’ve come to the conclusion that we really don’t want to outgrow those two spaces; the end-goal of what we want is to have customers lined up out the door that want to work with us and employees out the door that want to work for us,” Mack said. “We’re not trying to grow and be the biggest consulting firm, but to be the best consulting firm… it will allow us to give our people some more growth and opportunities.”
