Talking Too Much

I know that when employees are brought in, they, of course, already agree with the vision. That's why they're working. But what about the broader public, investors, you're now a public company? Do you have a secret sauce for creating buy-in for this greater purpose?

Yes. You can never stop talking about it. Because really, for everyone in a company to become an armchair expert on what it is our vision is, and where are we in the process of achieving that? We've grown a lot since the last time you and I spoke. It wasn't easy. When we went public as a company in 2013, we actually only had one test on the market. That was not that many years ago. And so over the course of the last three to four years, we have really completely transformed the company. And as every one of those steps got executed on, it became more and more important that we tell stories to our employees on a regular basis through multiple forms of communication. We have regular town hall meetings that we update employees, starting with all the goals we set out to achieve for the year, how their piece falls into that goal. We have media where we'll go out and spotlight different functions.

This year, we kicked off a really cool project from a communication standpoint. We have just completed a couple of acquisitions. We're a global company now today. Two years ago, we did not have a team of 20 people across Europe and other countries. And so with nine-hour time differences and complexity of the business, it becomes more and more important. So we have decided this year to let the communication be from the ground up, as opposed to just top-down. We do a lot of top-down communication. But this year, we're challenging our teams at every level, twice a month a new team is going to spotlight something about their department. It could be a new hire. It could be a new product they've launched. It could be outcomes of a publication that just got accepted. It could be putting the spotlight on Breast Cancer Awareness Month, lung cancer awareness, whatever they want. But every other week, we're going to have a program initiated and communicated across the company that comes from the employees at the ground level up to the rest of us. And I think we're really looking forward to seeing how the whole year unfolds with this, because I know people will be very creative. And we're going to learn a lot about the company at every level. I'm sure I'll learn a lot about people as well.