{"id":24413,"date":"2020-12-10T09:37:12","date_gmt":"2020-12-10T17:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comparably.com\/blog\/?p=24413"},"modified":"2022-02-28T12:03:20","modified_gmt":"2022-02-28T20:03:20","slug":"how-smartbugs-remote-culture-works-an-interview-with-smartbug-ceo-ryan-malone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comparably.com\/blog\/how-smartbugs-remote-culture-works-an-interview-with-smartbug-ceo-ryan-malone\/","title":{"rendered":"How SmartBug’s Remote Culture Works: An Interview with SmartBug\u00ae CEO Ryan Malone"},"content":{"rendered":"

For more than a decade, SmartBug Media\u00ae<\/sup><\/a> has made a name for itself as the Intelligent Inbound\u00ae<\/sup> marketing agency that assists businesses in growing revenue through digital marketing, revenue operations, PR, and web development, helping those businesses increase qualified leads, close customers, and enhance the reach and loyalty of their brands. Comparably spoke to SmartBug\u00ae<\/sup> Founder and CEO Ryan Malone about his vision for a remote workplace built on smart hiring<\/a> and innate trust.<\/p>\n

Malone says he is not the typical agency person because he came up through technology marketing. While working at Seagate and various early-stage tech companies, he says he realized that when a tech company hired an agency for a campaign and the campaign did poorly, the tech company was often blamed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we realized\u2014and I think this is a significant problem in the agency space\u2014is that the partner would sell the contract, and the people doing the work had never done marketing strategy before,\u201d Malone says. \u201cSo in order to keep costs down, the people doing the work were interns, graphic designers, and copywriters. To be clear these are critical people for any agency, but they are not the folks you think of having the deep marketing strategy you hired the agency for.\u201d<\/p>\n

With that industry-wise pain point in mind, Malone was inspired to start SmartBug.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn speaking to my friends in similar roles, I found they all had the same problem and were looking for an agency that was \u2018by marketers for marketers,\u2019 [because we knew that] you want to work with an agency that had launched products, managed P&Ls, and had the scars on their back of explaining what happened to a campaign that didn’t work,\u201d he says. \u201cBecause if you [have had to] go into an executive meeting and \u2026 explain what happened to a half a million dollars, it changes you, and it impacts every future marketing decision you make.\u201d<\/p>\n

Malone\u2019s personal desire to live a well-rounded life was an inalienable factor of his drive to start a company. A still-aching loss inspired Malone to build an element of work-life harmony into SmartBug so employees would always have time to attend to the things that matter most: memories with the people they care about.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was 17, my dad passed away, and I still miss him quite a bit,\u201d Malone says. \u201cWhen I started this company, I didn’t want to be the CEO who was never in the office, because nobody wants to work for that person. I also didn’t want to be the dad who was never at home, because I wanted to see my kids as much as possible. I felt like I didn\u2019t have to sacrifice either.\u201d<\/p>\n

The only way to solve the problem, he says, was to go fully remote. So that\u2019s what Malone and SmartBug did: \u201cThat was ten years ago, when nobody thought remote was possible. And now we’ve got 102 people in more than 40 states and a couple of countries. So here we are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of Malone\u2019s initial mission was to perfect a remote workplace where the most inspired, talented employee could deliver their best work.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the challenge is that so many companies make you choose between a challenging career and making memories that are important to you,\u201d Malone says. \u201cWe had a hypothesis that if we created this environment where [people have] a challenging career with people [they have] this intellectual respect for, but at the same time, they have the flexibility to create memories for their life, then we would attract better people faster, and they would stay longer and they would do better work for our clients.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus was born an early model of success based on the ability to do fully remote work\u2014a skill set that, in 2020, seems like an enviable superpower.<\/p>\n

CULTURE<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a misconception that culture creates itself, and I don’t think that it’s true,\u201d Malone says. \u201cI think that you have to be very deliberate about it at the same time that you allow certain organic elements to take hold.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we finally figured out,\u201d Malone goes on, \u201cis that if you’re in the marketing department at a company with an office, it\u2019s very typical that the thing that holds your group of work friends together is the fact that you’re all in marketing. So people in marketing go to lunch with people in marketing, and people in marketing go to happy hour with people in marketing. Rarely do you see marketers, for example, grabbing people from accounting and engineering and going to grab a beer. It just doesn’t happen because of the way that offices are laid out.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This stratification didn\u2019t sit right with Malone. \u201cWhat we do differently,\u201d he says, \u201cis we have [each new employee] host a get to know you call with everybody at the company. And the whole point of that is that you don’t talk about anything related to work; it’s just a chance for you to get to know your peers. And so what happens is you have people across the company from all of these different departments held together by common interests rather than just by their department. [SmartBug employees] end up being friends with a broader group of people, and they end up having a broader set of interests. Better yet, because new SmartBugs have found a number of smaller affinity groups, they have a built-in support network which accelerates their onboarding.\u201d<\/p>\n

When asked to describe SmartBug\u2019s culture in a handful of adjectives, Malone offered the following:<\/p>\n