At the beginning of 2018, we added three more folks to the Moraware team. And, we’re planning to grow the company more this year.
“Moraware is great because my time is spent doing impactful work. I speak with business owners about their companies and get to learn about the real issues they face daily. Our products directly improve their businesses and make their lives better. Plus, I love working with super smart, motivated and interesting people.”
Eric, Sales
As one of the owners of Moraware, this is incredibly emotionally satisfying. When Ted and I started the company in 2003, we never imagined the level of growth and success that’s come to pass. I’m also humbled by the responsibility to our customers and our team.
It feels like it’s worth a series of blogs posts to reflect on what we do well and the kind of people that are thriving here. One of those things is making sure everyone at Moraware understands our “guiding principles”.
The Guiding Principles
Moraware is entirely self-funded through organic growth without any investors or debt. What that means is that we get to choose our destiny. Because nobody else gets to tell us what to do, we use guiding principles to make sure we’re on the right track.
We want to balance increasing revenue, increasing profit, and increasing quality of life for everyone at Moraware.
Increasing revenue and profit are pretty obvious and easy to measure. Those are the economic engines that let us stay in business and have a buffer in case the economy gets worse or we want to invest more heavily in expanding our business.
The reason we look at both revenue and profit is that we don’t plan on growing at all costs. We’ve been running this business since 2003, and we’re in it for the long haul. At this point, we don’t want to “risk it all” in order to pursue our next big opportunity. That means that although we keep growing at a nice pace, from the inside the changes look pretty small in any given month.
Quality of Life
But… quality of life is a little tougher to pin down. Quality of life means different things to different people. It might be getting paid more, and that’s a huge part of why we all work. But, that’s not the only factor that’s important.
Depending on who you are, you might be motivated by having more autonomy over a project, doing more meaningful work, having fun coworkers, and a million other things. Quality of life in all of those ways is as important as the money stuff, and we have to keep a close eye on it.
Because quality of life is so core to our company, it’s everyone’s responsibility to make sure we’re thinking about how to keep improving it in a systematic way. Recently, that’s been trying to reduce some of the administrative work for our team (boring stuff like billing) through automation. We’ve also worked on making our roles and jobs more clear so that you know that you’re working on the right thing.
Plus, as a company we have a generous profit-sharing plan. We want everyone to think about this company as if they’re an owner, and sharing in the profits helps confirm that philosophy.
Keep improving the guiding principles
When revenue, profit, and quality of life are improving, then we know we’re succeeding. If one of them goes down, we should try to trace it to a reason (for example, hiring a new employee will reduce profit, economic downturn might reduce revenue, crisis might reduce quality of life temporarily, etc.)
Sometimes one of those might less than perfect, but long-term we want balance.
Sound interesting? Check out our careers page to learn more about the culture, goals, and open positions at Moraware.
