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Alice Moore, founder of Christchurch-based marketing agency Mint Design, shares how her company retains staff and why Christchurch businesses were more prepared than others for lockdowns and remote working.
What does the company do?
Mint Design is a digital marketing agency. We help companies with their online presence and look good. People may come to us if they want to build a website, and they also work with us to grow their business online; so we help drive traffic to their website using platforms like google and facebook. We have about 500 clients working with us across the country as well as some contracts in the South Pacific. We have an office here in Christchurch where we have our headquarters, and we also have an office in Auckland which we launched last year just in time for the shutdown.
The company has been in growth mode since we started – it’s just been one big growth phase. We’ve been participating in the Deloitte Fast 500 for the technology sector for several years in a row and we increased our revenue by 56 percent last year and we’re definitely still growing.
What was the motivation to start it?
My husband is the CEO and we started Mint together. When we started in 2010, we saw that many Kiwi companies were not yet using the internet properly to grow their business and be found online by new customers and new markets. We found that many Kiwi business owners were hesitant to invest online because there were many fly-by-night businesses operating in the web space that weren’t necessarily doing it right and were charging a lot of money. That’s not the case now, thankfully the industry has corrected itself and is regulated by its own market, but that was why we started: to make it a lot more transparent and a lot more accessible to typical Kiwi companies, and to to demystify that might have seen very unknown.
We started the business just before the 2011 earthquake, so there were many lessons for us very early in the business.
How big is your team?
Today we have just over 30 employees and are growing.
How was the company financed?
The company is all privately funded. We are quite proud of the fact that we have no lines of credit or overdrafts. A very generous family member loved our business idea and saw a lot of potential in us and loaned us $30,000 and somehow we turned it into a $3.5 million business so that was a pretty good investment for them.
What is your current focus?
As we mature as a company, we are internally focused on boring things like standard procedures, but we always want to grow as an employer. We’re in the top 4 percent of our engagement surveys, so we’re one of the best places to work in New Zealand; of those investigations. We want to go from 4 percent to 2 percent, which is very hard to do; to go into that 2 percent space, but it’s something that we’re really passionate about. One of the next things we’ll be tackling is inclusivity and making sure everyone at Mint knows they’re safe to come as they are and be who they are. We also have a pretty strong focus on mental health, and I think a lot of employers would agree that the lines of an employer’s responsibility with their team’s mental health have shifted and that’s something we like to put a lot of resources into .
We are in a fortunate position that our digital marketing industry in general is booming and we are in a position to invest in things like mental health. We notice that investing in our team always pays off. We operate in a rather temporary sector in terms of staffing as many digital marketers are in a younger age group and they tend to move a lot, so we find that we have to work hard to retain them and provide a great place to work.
What is the key to good employee retention?
We have noticed that the investment we have put into our employer brand in recent years has paid off, especially this year. We did some recruiting and I’ve never seen such conditions. We’ve found that we’ve been able to pick up truly exceptional and senior talent because of the work and investment we’ve put into our employment brand over the years – it’s now paying off.
Where do you see the company in three to five years?
In three to five years, we aim to achieve $5 million in revenue. We believe that the bigger you get, the more average you can get, so we really want to fight that and not become your average company.
How has working from home changed office dynamics?
We offer our team a hybrid model where they work both in the office and at home. We would like people to come two days a week so that we can maintain the culture. But I think it also invites a broader conversation about culture, not just now in the office; culture is actually every interaction and every project assignment. I know it can be a big struggle for some entrepreneurs. For us, the benefit to us as a company is the benefit to the team member. Some of our team really enjoy having time to stay at home and focus and not have those interruptions – it can be really helpful.
Here in Christchurch we have been working from home since 2011. We all took our desktop computers home when we were booted from offices that were not protected by the earthquake, so from that perspective alone, being able to hybrid and just work from home protects businesses from disruptions. Businesses that can work from home should use this to their advantage in case there are changes in ways like Covid to keep the business going. There is definitely a real resilient spirit here in Christchurch.
What advice do you give to others who are thinking about starting their own business?
One of the things we were told is that everything would take twice as long and cost twice as much, so be ready for that.
