Way, way back in the day, there was a company called Creditel. They had local branch offices, well, everywhere. Now this is the time of expensive long distance, walk-in payments, and remote work wasn’t even a gleam in the eye of Bill Gates as he pushed out his latest version of MS-DOS.
That company no longer exists. It was replaced by FCA, Equifax-CBC, ARC, and other luminaries of the late 90’s. They built open space offices, cubicle farms, and call centers, and their predictive dialers spun and the Western Union printers hummed. And there were still walk-ins, and PBX systems took up whole rooms, and phone bills were a stack of paper about eight inches thick.
Now in the 2000’s, specifically 2011, I started Kingston Data and Credit with Jason Kingston, and I had a vision – multiple branch offices. Not because of long distance, not because of walk-ins, but because I did not want to live in a cubicle farm – I wanted tight knit teams that would rally against the giants in our industry, respond quickly, and care about each other. The last thing I wanted was a dystopian work environment where a staff member might die in their cubicle, and no one noticed for a week.
I also wanted to draw on multiple hiring pools, have presences in other time zones, and the ability for clients in British Columbia and Quebec to feel they had a vendor partner with a local presence.
My friendly competitors said I was crazy. I was creating all this extra overhead cost with multiple offices for no gain. It would be hard to manage, and keep everyone on the same page. I disagreed, and opened my second, third and fourth branch offices.
And then Covid hit.
There were collection agencies, in high rise office complexes, forced to send their collection teams home, and couldn’t have them work effectively from home. Not just because their culture required constant supervision of their staff, but because they didn’t have internet bandwidth to have everyone connect remotely at the same time. Never mind people being contagious, having to sit 10 feet apart, or all the other precautionary measures that were going on.
Our company now has six branch offices, and we are contemplating a seventh. We hire from multiple manpower pools, we have physical room to expand with new staff, the in-office training is spread across multiple teams, and I do spend a lot of time travelling from branch to branch.
Totally worth it.
Yes, it’s more work to maintain culture and teamwork. Yes, there needs to be a lot more collaboration. Yes, you need Slack and the occasional Teams meeting. But a team in a branch office learns to be self-sufficient, rely on each other, and keep that scrappy start-up attitude of rallying against the collection agency giants.
And you know, when a February flu bug rips through a branch office, or a squirrel decides to eat a transformer wire down the street and take out power to a whole city block, or there’s an internet outage, it doesn’t take out the whole company – it takes out a small node and everything routes to another office. That’s continuity of business planning. That looks really good on a SOC-2 report. As well, someone is in our office from 7:30 am to 10:00 pm Eastern time across all our offices in the different time zones.
Of course, now living in the 2020’s, we do have a hybrid work environment – not everyone comes into the office every day. We aren’t planning to call everyone back in five days a week like other companies. But we do have decent office space, dedicated desks and work areas for our teams, and a place to come together. Our branches host small, effective teams, and the office is a hub for training, collaboration and culture – but all things in moderation.
There’s a great article on LinkedIn by Ben Hutt I’d like to share, that talks about keeping start-up culture, and the most important thing for me in his article is ‘staying close to your team’. Don’t let anyone die in cubicle #864 and not be discovered for a week.
(7) 6 tips to retain start-up culture in a growing business | LinkedIn
I still have friendly competitors telling me I’m crazy for
following the Creditel model and having multiple offices is crazy, but as we
grow and scale, I just smile and nod. Our
staff turnover is low, our fixed overhead costs for our offices is about 2-3%
of our expenses, we’ve got some deeply unified and loyal teams, and a fried
squirrel in a transformer is an inconvenience not the end of the world.
Got a question about building multiple locations? Happy to share what has worked and not worked
for me over the years. Drop me a note at
blair@receivableaccounts.com.
Thanks kindly,
Blair DeMarco-Wettlaufer
KINGSTON Data & Credit
226-946-1730
blair@receivableaccounts.com
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