Joshua Fraser built Data Nerds from a handful of people to 25 by hiring and firing based on one rule: whether someone was a happy, healthy human. He created culture through ping-pong, foosball, late-night parties, and a gratitude box. When COVID forced remote work, he lost that connection and sold the company.
Chapters
Foreign. The core value of estated evolved over five years. I was running Data Nerds as a marketing agency. I had a handful of employees. We grew to 40 employees. We went down to 12 employees, we went back up to 30 some. And when we were acquired, I think we were around 25 employees. And our number one main value and how I hired and fired people was were they a happy, healthy human? It was so important for me to cultivate a culture that people were happy and healthy and they were coming to work and they were excited about it. If people were having tough times, we would give them endless amounts of support to get through those times. One of the hardest challenges for me and I go through this is we were a business and we went through Covid in Canada, full lockdown. We had to instantly like overnight go from in house working, which some of my memories at the office are the best memories of my life, to running a remote team. And I wouldn't have been able to keep a pulse on people. My pulse got a lot worse when we went to remote and it was one of the reasons I ended up selling the business. And something that I don't think is going to be a long term thing, you, you can be a remote digital nomad, but it is so much more productive to be in person in the office. I will never, never forget the memories that I had working with my employees. Playing ping pong, playing foosball, our late night parties. We had a gratitude box in our office. But the number one lesson that I want to share with you guys is that your business is going to need to have core values that you hire and fire people by. And ours was happy, healthy humans. So feel free to take that and use it however you want. But that's the first lesson that I would highly recommend you instantly install in your business along your entrepreneurial journey, no matter what stage you're at. So that's number one.
