Startup Style

Many of today’s entrepreneurs have a healthy aversion to the status quo when it comes to business, and, it turns out, corporate meetings. “FeedBurner has about 35 employees, and we all sit in a big open room for the purpose of not having to take a lot of meetings,” says Traci Hailpern, director of marketing for the Chicago-based tech firm, which helps bloggers and podcasters publish and manage content on the web. Apparently, this dearth of formal gatherings hasn’t hurt the company: FeedBurner was acquired in June by Mountain View, Calif.-based Google for a purchase price rumored to be $100 million.

Despite their best efforts, young, hip startups like FeedBurner can’t eliminate all meetings from their operations, while others say they simply don’t have the time or resources to get too creative with their meetings programs. But some new, fast-growing companies have discovered that meetings can create a sense of corporate identity, advance the evolving corporate culture and support the company’s growth in surprising ways.

Following is a glimpse at six forward-thinking firms that don’t go the traditional route -- in business or in meetings.

Symbiotic: Helio’s
Ocean is hip, like the
company’s meetings.

HELIO

he first thing new hires receive at Helio, a mobile phone company based in the Westwood section of Los Angeles, is a parking garage pass inscribed with the phrase, “Innovate or die.”

“That sets the tone for everything that goes on here,” says Courtney Carlisle, who works on a three-person team that handles all communications for Helio and plans its meetings.

Right now, the company is sizzling about as hot as the sun itself. Sky Dayton, director and CEO, whose resume includes founding EarthLink, Helio’s parent entity, in 1994 at age 23, launched the offshoot publicly in May 2006. Since then, Helio, which offers its own phone service and exclusive handsets, including the new Ocean, has grown from 70 employees to 500. The company’s mission is simple: to provide a young, tech-savvy demographic with snazzy devices and simply priced phone plans, with all text messages, photos and video included.

Helio is all about creating an image of cool. Its retail stores, for example, are half lounge, half art gallery; selling products in those spaces is almost an afterthought. Occasionally, the stores literally are transformed into nightclubs for special events.

That party spirit pervades the company’s meetings. “Whether it’s meetings or evening events, we try to keep it very similar,” Carlisle says.

When Helio attends trade shows, for instance, Carlisle’s team makes a point of not purchasing exhibit booth space. Instead, they set up an invitation-only lounge in a meeting room and hold closed-door appointments with key opinion leaders in additional breakouts. “By doing it this way, we built a lot of buzz,” Carlisle notes.

Helio generates positive internal hubbub by holding its quarterly meetings in an independent movie theater across the street from its corporate office. Employees grab popcorn and fountain drinks and settle in to watch short videos and public relations spots about the company and listen to presentations from various executives.

Twice now the company has ended its quarterly meetings with a cocktail party on the roof of the parking garage, the same one unlocked by the security pass that’s a directive to innovate.

Casual is king:
American Apparel
employees rely on
constant communication --
verbal and virtual --
and rarely hold meetings.

AMERICAN APPAREL

Much has been made of the progressive policies and environmental stewardship of casual fashion wholesaler-turned-retailer American Apparel, which defiantly has built its business model around a refusal to move any of its manufacturing offshore. But less is made of American Apparel’s meetings -- which could be because they really don’t exist.

“Everything we do is pretty informal,” says Alexandra Spunt, who is part of the company’s Los Angeles-based branding team that is responsible for marketing and graphic design. Her unit consists of 30 to 35 people and produces, among other things, roughly 200 ads per month, maintains the company’s website and publishes its electronic newsletter. Overall, American Apparel employs nearly 4,000 people in Los Angeles and a total of 5,000 nationwide -- but none specifically to organize meetings.

Spunt can’t recall any companywide meeting in the four years she’s worked there. When employees need to consult or strategize, they instant-message each other. “We’re all on iChat,” Spunt says. When that isn’t good enough, they’ll walk over in person and start a conversation. “It’s hard to articulate,” she continues. “Everything happens really organically here. Everyone has their own responsibilities and deadlines, and we communicate with each other because we’re sitting in the same room. There’s really no corporate culture.”

Spunt is wrong on this last point. The culture is pervasive: It’s youthful (like the company’s employees), rebellious (like the brand) and spontaneous (like American Apparel customers). The culture fosters constant communication and informality. Hence, meetings aren’t planned. They happen when they need to happen, on site or in cyberspace.

What other companies potentially could draw from the American Apparel model is not the culture itself -- if not already in place, such a culture is difficult to impose -- but a rethinking of the value of certain meetings and who needs to attend them, and which could be replaced effectively with a memo or an impromptu chat.

When pressed, Spunt does recall a branding meeting that she organized this past spring. It took place at her home, over drinks. “It was an open forum discussion about things we don’t usually take the time to talk about,” she says. “We took notes. We really made a meeting of it.”

INTELIUS

Starbucks country, coffee breaks are the meetings. The executive team of Intelius, a Bellevue, Wash.-based consulting firm and e-commerce company, takes twice-daily java runs to the local coffee shop together in lieu of setting up more formal meetings. Yes, conversation occasionally gets sidetracked with sports talk, but the caffeine breaks keep the Intelius leadership connected as well as stimulated.

Ed Petersen, executive vice president of sales and marketing, who co-founded Intelius in 2003, says because the coffee breaks allow the executives to stay in touch throughout the day, it’s rare that they’re not on the same page.

Petersen argues that time for coffee would get carved out of his day’s schedule anyway; adding a business purpose to the breaks makes the company more efficient. The company would not run as well if executives waited for a daily or weekly meeting to discuss issues facing his staff: “For us to be competitive, we really have to move fast,” Petersen notes. Intelius does hold more formal meetings on a regular schedule, but it’s the coffee runs that help keep the company nimble.

Intelius has two main operations: a consumer side, driven by Internet people searches and background checks; and an enterprise side, offering businesses information-based services such as employment screening, lead generation and data verification.

Petersen and the rest of the executive team want to foster an informal office environment, free from bureaucratic posturing and the traditional corporate-ladder structure, even as the company grows.

To reinforce the team mentality, increase participation and make sure diverse opinions are heard, Petersen asks his employees -- and not executives or department heads -- to speak or give product demonstrations at meetings.

“We try to have a Q&A focus, not a 45-minute PowerPoint,” Petersen says. “The goal is: Let’s have a dialogue.”

Intelius is weighing whether to hire a full-time meeting planner. With new offices in California, Illinois and Oregon, companywide meetings are getting more complicated to coordinate. All Petersen wants is to keep employees updated with company news and let them understand how their work fits into the company’s goals.

Virtual meetings:
Video games teach
groups valuable
interpersonal and
business lessons.

LIFELOCK

alk about an innovative business model: Tempe, Ariz.-based LifeLock is an identity-theft protection company that sells services to customers that they could perform themselves for free by placing a few phone calls. In the first five months of 2007, the 2-year-old company added 130,000 new clients and expects to have 400,000 by the end of the year.

For an executive retreat earlier this year, a team of 10 executives participated in a war games program that Scottsdale-based Predix developed to help businesses analyze their personnel and their strategic-planning skills and predict how their executives and employees will react in certain situations.

“It’s a mix of business, Aristotle and Patton,” explains Kevin Azar, developer of the “executive command” program for Predix.

When corporate groups are pitted against the Predix staff in military video games, how effectively a team plans and communicates and how individuals respond in high-pressure situations quickly becomes obvious. Battles from different historic eras illustrate different thematic or strategic lessons that can be applied to business, with the help of Predix’s consultants who debrief the group at the conclusion of each game.

Mike Prusinski, vice president of communications for LifeLock, says the company is now large enough to hire a full-time meeting planner.

On the record:
Infoscitex videotapes
meetings so employees
can review their
presentations and
learn to become better
public speakers.

INFOSCITEX

om its name to its mission, Infoscitex is almost a caricature of a small, innovative venture. One of greater Boston’s fastest-growing companies, Infoscitex is a research, development and engineering firm that develops new products and services for government and commercial clients in the defense, aerospace, life sciences and “green” energy industries. Among widely diverse projects in the pipeline: a prosthetic spinal disc, a waste-to-
energy conversion processing system, radiation-hardened solar cell windows and a micro-robotic prototype for neurosurgery.

Founded in 2000, the Waltham, Mass.-based company expects revenues to grow 70 percent this year, to $17 million, and the work force to increase by 30 or 40 percent, to 80 or 90 employees, according to David Montella, vice president of business development.

Innovation is just part of the job description for Infoscitex’s scientists and engineers. They also must brief clients on the technology and the status of projects. “Having strong presentation skills is very important to us,” Montella says.

Consequently, Infoscitex videotapes its internal meetings and presentations and uses the tapes as teaching tools to help employees improve as public speakers. The presentations are digitized and archived on the company’s computer network. Reviewing the tapes, while not mandatory, is encouraged.

“I can’t say we have measurable benchmarks, but personally, it helps me see what I do when I’m up there,” Montella says.

Not everyone is thrilled to relive awkward moments or count the number of “uhs” or “ums” that he or she mumbles. “In some cases it might create anxiety,” Montella concedes, “but for the most part, people like it.”

Infoscitex is grappling with how to conceive the rest of its corporate meetings -- a question many fast-growing companies are facing. Growth is a mixed blessing that, for meetings as with so many other aspects of running a business, means decreased flexibility and increased complexity.

Currently, the company doesn’t employ a dedicated meeting planner, and Montella says the position isn’t likely to be created, even as the staff expands, because there aren’t enough off-site meetings to plan. Administrative personnel currently take care of meeting logistics.

Infoscitex has quarterly, companywide meetings for its four offices on the East Coast. The most recent was held in New Orleans, and the company spent a day with Habitat for Humanity building new homes. But the days of such meetings are numbered; Montella says they might be reduced in frequency or eliminated altogether, because they’ve become too expensive and disruptive as the company grows.

SPOT RUNNER

As Angeles-based Spot Runner was founded in 2004 on the belief that local-market TV ads don’t have to look cheap and certainly don’t have be expensive to produce. The company sells high-quality, pre-produced ads that are easily customizable to run in local TV markets.

One ad for home security companies, for example, shows a barking dog, a man wielding a baseball bat, an archer, a swordsman and a young woman with a handgun -- all beautifully shot with rich colors and a variety of lenses. “There are a lot of ways to protect your family and your belongings,” a narrator says. “Some of them are better than others.”

Instead of taking weeks to conceive, shoot and edit a commercial, Spot Runner clients need only to re-record the voice- over to plug their company and can walk away with a finished ad in a matter of hours.

The tenets of the Spot Runner corporate culture, as with many startups, are taking risks and making connections that didn’t exist previously. Both of these principles are reflected in the company’s meetings.

New employees are put on the spot at monthly corporate gatherings, where they must describe embarrassing things about themselves. It’s a tradition initiated by the company co-founders, Nick Grouf and David Waxman, that persists, even though Spot Runner now employs more than 150 people.

“It’s about embracing risk, taking chances, and it’s good way to get to know each other,” says Rosabel Tao, vice president of communications, who oversees meetings. Tao says she would love to have a planner on staff, but the company can’t afford to hire one to plan just a handful of meetings. Human resources and administrative staff handle logistics.

One way Spot Runner maintains the feel of a small startup is by hosting a series of casual executive lunches for a random set of 10 employees and one executive. The company buys lunch, and the employees introduce themselves and discuss their work. The executive then pairs off the group and encourages the duos to continue the conversation over a subsequent lunch together, also paid for by the company. Tao says the lunches “open up communication and spur innovation” by laying the groundwork for stronger relationships across departments.

But there are larger gatherings, too. Spot Runner’s last two daylong, companywide meetings were held at a movie theater and at an automotive museum. “For us, risk and innovation are very central themes,” Tao notes, “and doing this at a hotel doesn’t seem in step with that kind of philosophy.”