Jonathan Treble, WithMe CEO, recently sat down with renowned author, speaker and recruiting executive Jeff Hyman to discuss how his strategy for building the WithMe team has evolved with exponential growth.
This is Treble’s second appearance on Hyman’s “Recruit Rockstars” podcast, and in the year that elapsed between his visits, WithMe underwent significant changes. Amidst those changes, Treble learned many valuable lessons. “The past 12 months have been a rollercoaster,” says Treble. “That’s startup or scale-up life. That’s just business. It’s going to happen.”
One of the most significant changes at WithMe was the introduction of SipWithMe, an innovative multifamily coffee amenity offering premium drinks made from fresh, locally sourced beans.
The inspiration for SipWithMe originated with a conversation between Treble and a PrintWithMe client. At one point, the client casually mentioned the coffee amenity space was in dire need of transformation. Armed with that information, Treble began intensely researching coffee. He notes he discovered that “coffee is a very important perk. According to Multifamily Design+Construction, it’s the #3 requested amenity, after community lounges and in-unit washers and dryers. Many U.S. markets have coffee as a standard amenity in their buildings.” After six months of tireless work, SipWithMe beta was launched in Chicago.
The introduction of SipWithMe prompted another significant change to PrintWithMe - a full refresh of the company’s image. Treble ultimately dropped the nod to the company’s printing roots and rebranded as WithMe, intending to add service line names to the moniker as the company continues to innovate and expand. “The industry really resonated with the branding change. They liked it,” says Treble.
In addition to requiring a rebrand, the rollout of a new product also brought with it the need to hire additional team members. In the podcast, Treble hones in on how his mindset for sales recruiting and interviewing has shifted as the company has grown. He chronicles his current non-negotiable values and personality traits, as well as his thoughts on the need for reps to have industry experience.
Treble also touches on how building a distributed team has supported one of the company’s core values - diversity. “I’m a big remote-first person. I love that we’re fully remote. That gave us the muscle to be able to look overseas for certain roles, and now we have four people working for us outside of the country.”
Committed to hiring the very best candidates at every level, Treble has come to recognize the paramount importance of hiring exceptional CSRs. Over the past year, the company has promoted seven team members, and three of those promotions were within the customer service team. “If we didn’t have such talented CSRs with high potential, we would have been floundering to replace people who had left.”
If you think PrintWithMe or SipWithMe would be a good fit for your business, shoot us an email at sales@withme.com.
