Sponsored By: Alert Rental
As women entrepreneurs, my business partner and I are thoughtfully leading our small business into the future. Mary Crosslin and I are the co-owners of Alert Rental Software, which we purchased through a management buyout in 2016. Over the past several years we’ve worked diligently and with purpose on our company culture and our most recent changes have been some of our most progressive.
When we were working together as co-workers prior to the buyout, Mary and I were meeting to discuss all the changes we wanted to make in the business. Remarkably, we each had the same items on our respective lists of changes we wanted to make. And all the changes were centered around our employees – we wanted to give them more, and we inherently understood that if our employees were happy that they would in turn treat our clients well and keep them happy. These conversations paved the way to change our company culture to have a very distinct woman-owned feeling.
One of the first things we did was to give everyone more time off. More vacation time, paid vacation for our part-time staff, birthdays off, and floating holidays. We eliminated profit-based performance pay and gave everyone a raise to make their pay consistent no matter how the business performed. No one should be at the mercy of our business decisions when figuring out how they’re going to put food on the table. All of the money that we’ve invested into the business (outside of our software development) has been to help our employees do their jobs better and more easily.
More recently, we’ve adopted a very progressive work schedule. We dubbed this “Project 32” and began a 32-hour 4-day workweek. Study after study throughout the world has shown not only is there no decline in productivity when a 32-hour workweek is implemented, but there is an increase! Since our clients are open every day of the week, we had to do some work to figure out who would have which days of the week as their ‘free days’, so we have full coverage on our Help Desk and access to developers. Our employees’ morale and satisfaction have increased, our client satisfaction ratings have remained excellent, and there has been no reduction in productivity. In fact, we’ve created a living document with departmental suggestions and workflows to achieve more in less time. Our results have been promising and this has been an extremely impactful recruiting and retention tool.
Remaining at the forefront of trends and being a thought leader in the woman-owned technology space is a challenging endeavor. Our next trail to blaze is taking our company from a brick & mortar headquarters building in Colorado Springs to a virtual company. Our employee-focused culture, which then leads to excellent relationship-building with our clients, is a culture that encourages flexibility. To that end, we made the decision not to renew our lease and will be going completely virtual! Over half of our staff is already working from home around the country. Of those who remain in our headquarters city, half of them now work from home as well. When we decided to relocate the corporate headquarters after we acquired the company, we designed our new space to enable 100% of our staff to be virtual and not rely on our office space to have power or internet. Living in Colorado, weather happens! When COVID hit, it paid off -- all we had to do was turn off the lights. Since then, some or all of us have been working remotely, and some of our staff have already been doing this for decades very effectively. So, with the end of our lease approaching, it seems like a great time to reinvest the money we would have spent on rent back into our employees.
Empowering our staff to have agency over their work surroundings, schedules, days off, and work-related decisions was a very distinct choice that we made as woman business owners. We embrace our emotional intelligence and understand that businesses don’t do business with businesses – we’re all people doing business with other people. If our employees are happy, we know that everything else will take care of itself. Over the last several years of being woman business owners, we’ve gone from asking ourselves “what would a man do” to leaning into our own leadership style. We’re proud to say that the way we run the business is very woman-centric. We are a relationship based company and consider ourselves business partners, not just vendors.
These cultural changes that we’ve implemented have served their purpose. Our employees ARE happy and productive. The only turnover we’ve experienced has been retirements! Our recruiting for new employees has been easy since people want to work for a business that offers so much flexibility. We may not be able to offer the same things a huge Fortune-500 company can offer, but what we can offer is important to the people who want to work with us. Our clients consistently rate us exceptionally well in our monthly satisfaction survey, and our user base is thoughtfully engaged with our business in a mutually beneficial partnership. Leading with a woman-centric ideology has certainly served us well, and we expect that it will continue to do so.
Alert Rental Software offers a full rental management software application. We’ve been working with general tool rental, construction and heavy equipment rental, and party and event rental operations since 1976. Leaders in the rental technology space, and consistently ranked as one of Colorado’s Top 100 Woman-Owned Businesses, you can find us at alertrental.com.
