Here’s a hot take: for remote workers, gone are the days of watercooler talk and after-hours drinks at the dive down the street. And the world is a better place for it.

I’ll tell you why. It’s straight up lazy to call unstructured, distracting, and impromptu conversation or after-hours drinks “connection.” Beyond that, it simply doesn’t account for the wide spectrum of personality types that make up your team. Dreaming up an array of ways to connect—and making nearly all of them optional and/or low-commitment—can make a huge difference when it comes to building better, more grounded relationships among your team while also honoring the introverts, the people who don’t like booze, the people who like to keep work and life separated, and everyone in between. 

As a remote-from-day-one growth marketing agency, it took us a long time to figure out a baseline mix of things that help us connect in ways that feel “Tuff.” I’d highly recommend that your takeaway from this is less “let me go install HeyTaco” and more “who on our team might have a good idea to contribute to a conversation about ways to connect?”

And, ultimately, this is NEVER just a box to check. As your team evolves, so should your culture and ways to connect. We make sure to always keep up the zest and excitement for things to update, introduce, and even ditch as time goes on.

But, for now, here’s our (not exhaustive) lineup! 

Full Team Annual Retreats

THIS. This is the thing we constantly find ourselves talking about all year round. Once a year, a small group of volunteers get together to plan our all-company retreat. Although this year it will look much different with 30+ attendees vs. the 12 we had last year, all of the same fun things will be baked in.

First, we always leave space for a full company IRL meeting. In it, we’ll hear from each service team lead about things they’re excited about, areas of opportunity, and goals for the quarter ahead. We’ll hear from Ellen, the founder and CEO of Tuff about Tuff’s quarterly performance and strategy for our growth into the future. We also always do superlatives! Who will win “Best Hair” this year? Time will tell!

A few considerations we maintain for this retreat is doing our best to accommodate the multitide of people on the team. For example, partners are always welcome and we’ll do a full dinner together with the entire crew. We’ll also have several different optional events so that the people that want extra social time can show up and connect, and the people that might have a drained social tank after a big dinner can recoup the way they need.

donut! #virtual-coffee

The donut app Slack integration is one of our newest and most successful ways to connect at Tuff! Shout out to Rebecca for the idea! Our team (mostly Raj and Megan) were noticing that as our team started to grow, there was less opportunity for organically “bumping into” friends throughout the workday. To combat this, Raj started sending out invites to “tea time” to members on the team he didn’t see as frequently. 

Ultimately, we all caught on to how much we enjoyed meeting with Raj and decided to implement “Tea Time” on a larger scale. That’s where donut became our perfect solution. Every other Tuesday—for anyone that opted into the Slack channel, #virtual-coffee—donut randomly pairs you with someone else in the channel and invites you to connect. It even scrapes your calendars and recommends times to meet. Easy!

HeyTaco

On the flip side, the HeyTaco Slack integration is one of our oldest and most loved ways to keep communication pathways open. Admittedly, at first, the loud recognition/public praise aspects of HeyTaco felt a bit contrived. This was especially for team members coming from toxic workplaces wherein praise was few and far between. 

But, we’ll happily report that it’s a staple of our everyday and a great way to encourage we each shout about our teammates’ accomplishments and wins throughout the day. It’s a tiny addition to our Slack process that’s done so much for our positive outlook and culture of feedback. We’d highly recommend.

Book Club

Before we shopped around the idea of a Tuff book club, we had NO idea Tuff was so full of bookworms! We’re currently reading our second book together and meet twice a month to discuss agreed-upon chapters or sections. 

About a quarter of the team participates and shows up with their book and sometimes a cold beverage to talk about ideas, big and small. It’s been a great way to get face time with people around the organization that share interests and want to talk about big ideas. 

Dedicated Weekly Time with Your Manager

As our team continues to grow, investing time and resources into setting our people managers up for success is at the absolute tippy top of our to-do list. But beyond simply making sure they’ve got the training they need, it’s consistency that really makes a significant difference.

Cultivating real relationships in consistent weekly 1:1s with all managers and direct reports is oftentimes one of the most anchoring connections within our company. Having an advocate, a confidante, and someone to nudge you in the right direction is to feel seen, supported, and connected. We’ll never stop investing heavily into our management.

Show & Tell

Back to Slack! Show & Tell is a highly anticipated, always fun, always casual weekly occurrence in Slack pioneered by Richard. Each week, Richard will drop a fun prompt into the #general channel and it always has the ability to fire up conversations. Here are some of our recent favorites!

• If you weren’t working in advertising, what would you be doing? What’s your alter ego’s career?
• What is one artist / musician / band that you consider to be a “guilty pleasure”, and aren’t afraid of people judging you for it?
• What is one piece of memorabilia (from sports, music, movies, culture, etc.) that you own that you treasure?
• What’s your lock screen wallpaper and does it have a good story?
• What’s your all-time favorite “classic” Youtube video? Links required.

Tuff Times

What started as a fun idea soon careened into a full-blown weekly internal newsletter replete with (some) pertinent company information but most frequently hotly contested surveys on the best popsicle flavors, weird TikTok trends, book recommendations, employee spotlights, and so, so much more. 

Virtual Happy Hours

And, of course, the ol’ reliable. We do continue to hold monthly all-company happy hours. Because our team has grown significantly since we first started them, we’ll typically devise a game or activity that splits us up randomly into breakout rooms of 4-6 people so that actual conversations can happen.

Although it took a little legwork, one of our all-time favorite happy hours was when we collected two random facts from each team member and had the opposing team pair each random fact with the human it belonged to. The weirder the facts, the better the game. Here were some standouts:

• I once had to have my dad come to pay for a bar tab I ran up underage drinking in Mexico because the bar refused to take my credit card (while on family vacation)
• I’ve been in a commercial before (lol)
• One time when I was camping, someone dared me to catch, cook, and eat a lizard. I did it. It was gross.
• When I was young I crashed a golf cart into a rock and then ran away

Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide what’s right for your team! The caveat is that if you work to create a work environment where people feel called to contribute and get excited about developing company culture, it will naturally evolve and take on a life of its own. 

And, if you’re still calling watercooler talk and boozy happy hours “culture,” here’s your sign that your team wants more.

The post 8 Ways We’re Helping Our Remote Team Feel More Connected appeared first on Tuff.

Meet Kristin, a Social Ads Strategist at Tuff. Kristin partners with Tuff clients and social media platforms to build measurable, data-driven, bottom line growth.  

Below she shares about her love for numbers, her first-place grade school science fair projects, and advice for people getting started with running ads on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and more. 

Can you tell me a bit about your 3-5 years before Tuff? What were you working on? 

My whole career has been at different advertising agencies. 

I started out at a small agency where I dove in as the first full-time hire. I loved it. That’s where I got my start in organic social media, making content calendars, scheduling posts and all that fun stuff. I learned SO much. We worked with a handful of really large clients who were spending upwards of  $85K a month on Facebook ads, so I was able to learn a ton really quickly through that experience. 

Much of my agency experience had revolved around organic social media marketing and creating content with consumption on social media in mind. But I found myself looking for freelance work and opportunities to help other teams run paid social ads. I’m a numbers and spreadsheets sort of gal, so this focus on content creation early on in my career really pushed me out of my comfort zone.

I learned so much about creating content, but ultimately I wanted to get back into a role focused on paid acquisition – like what I’m now doing at Tuff! I love working in a startup environment on a smaller team where you get to wear a ton of hats, learn daily from your peers, and do what it takes to get a project done. 

Why did you decide to join Tuff? What was it that made you say ‘yes’?

Many years down the road (if I could ever get the guts to do it!), I would love to own my own business. That’s a big dream of mine, so mentorship was a big factor when I decided to join Tuff. When I met Ellen in my first interview, I knew I’d be able to learn so much from her on how she’s grown her business.

I also want to grow my skill set in other digital marketing areas. I have a strong background in social, but I was hoping to find an opportunity to work closely alongside other marketing disciplines. At Tuff, I get to work closely with other channel specialists like Chris and Derek to learn more about what they are so great at. I’ve already picked up so many little nuggets, just from being in meetings with them. 

What have you been working on since you joined Tuff? 

I have been building a LOT of Facebook ads! I currently work with nine clients, so onboarding included learning about their businesses, learning the processes at Tuff, and then implementing social ad campaigns to help achieve their goals. 

Another big project that I tackled was building out a paid social training course! It’s about five hours long, and will help us teach future and current employees how we run social ads here at Tuff. 

What is it about paid social that gets you fired up? 

I really like A/B testing. 

I always have. When I was in elementary school, I would go all out for science fair projects. (I’m a little competitive… and by a little, I mean A LOT.)  For one science fair project, I made everyone I knew take a test to see which side of their body – right or left – was dominate. It was like 25 different exercises, and I meticulously recorded all of the data in a little notebook. I took home the blue first place ribbon that year. 

I like to treat paid social campaigns kinda like my elementary school science fair project (but without all the exercises). You can tell quickly what’s working and what’s not. I find testing audiences and creative to be super interesting – especially when what I assume won’t work is among the top performers. 

What has your experience been like working for a fully remote team?

I love it. I feel more in control of my workday when I work from home, and I love not having to commute to an office. My legging collection has increased tenfold, but who needs real pants anyways? 

What do you like doing outside of work? 

In the summers, we spend a ton of time at the lake on our boat! I have a one-year-old son, Liam, who keeps me busy. When I’m not chasing him, I’m usually throwing a frisbee to our two dogs. 

I also love to cook, bake, and entertain! With COVID and quarantining, we really haven’t gotten to entertain as much this year, but I’ve had a lot of time to try new recipes. One of our pandemic purchases has been an electric smoker, and I can make some mean smoked chicken wings. 

What is something about you that typically surprises people? 

I poke fun at people (lovingly) and pranks are my thing. I grew up in Tennessee and that’s just part of how my family has always expressed ourselves. That’s been one of the more interesting parts of working remotely – learning how to implement my communication style via Slack and through Zoom calls without a ton of body language. GIFs are emojis help me out though! 

What is your best advice for people looking to get into social ads? 

Read, read, read as much as you can! Social ads are constantly changing – from creative best practices and trends to tiny nuances in Facebook Ads Manager. A few of my favorite social ads gurus are John Loomer and Neil Patel – they’re both transparent with their data and constantly post content about the latest updates. 

When you work in social media, it’s easy to be glued to your phone. I know I constantly feel the need to keep up with all the latest trends. Recently, I read a stat that on average, Americans have 8 social networking apps downloaded on their phone and spend upwards of 3 hours a day on them. WHAT.

You have to find a happy medium so you stay up to date without burning out or missing time with your friends and family. I like to devote time each week for researching trends, and I have screen time limits set up on my phone. 

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post Tuff’s Social Ads Strategist, Kristin, on A/B Testing Ads and Smoked Chicken Recipes appeared first on Tuff.

Meet John, a Growth Marketer at Tuff. John partners with Tuff clients to experiment, test, and drive growth across multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email, and others. When he’s not optimizing website conversion rates or launching influencer marketing campaigns, you will most likely find him on a bike or in his kitchen.

Below, he shares clever puns, what he’s learned from Buddhism and music, and common ecommerce pitfalls when transitioning from crowdfunding to setting up shop.

Can you tell me a bit about your 3-5 years before Tuff? What were you working on? 

I’ve worked primarily with early stage ecommerce startups. 

I worked with a parent company in Boulder called Eco Brands Group, which has a few consumer brands. They all use upcycled materials like old bicycle tubes or an old advertising banner to make their products. We were a small team so I was running all marketing channels and working with founders. This structure was not entirely different from an agency model, I think that’s kind of what drew me to Tuff.

Right before Tuff, I was with a company called Bullbird. They make travel accessories. That’s actually where I first learned about Tuff and met Ellen. Ellen pitched Tuff to be an acquisition agency and partner for Bullbird. I was working as Director of Marketing at the time. I was brought on to lead ecommerce marketing and get them off the ground and transition from their crowdfunding roots into a full on ecommerce brand. I was running paid acquisition, email marketing, customer service and pretty much anything that needed to be done for the brand. 

When the pandemic hit Bullbird’s products, for lack of better words, fell out of the sky. At the same time, I saw Tuff was hiring for a Growth Marketer and I reached out the same day. I remembered being impressed by the meeting I had with Tuff at Bullbird and how they talked to clients. I thought the interview process felt really genuine and natural as well. I feel happy to be at Tuff. 

What has the experience been like to go from in-house to Tuff, where you work with multiple clients?

Yeah, it’s definitely been different. I wear a lot of hats at Tuff but not all the hats. I am able to direct my energy more fully into paid acquisition and growth. I enjoy talking with founders and working with them, I’ve been doing this in some way for most of my career. I like learning about what they’re struggling with or where they’re stuck on growth and help them understand marketing on a deeper level. 

It’s been interesting shifting to building trust while remote, just over a video call. I’ve had to learn to bring a new comfort level and intentional focus on relationship building. I want the complicated pieces of growth marketing and metrics to feel accessible. And, I focus a lot on bringing the trust level up.

How do you build that trust?

Setting up a good foundation is really important, that’s something I’ve learned while at Tuff. The team stresses this a lot. I work to be able to quickly explain who we are, where we’re strong, and how that applies to their company. We try not to be jargon heavy, just really clear on the strategy we’re presenting. When we work internally as a team, we can slip into some jargon or just get excited and passionate about this work. With founders, I try to understand the depth of information they want. Founders are often thinking about a million things and formula for cost per sale is probably not top of mind all the time. So, I pay a lot of attention to how much information they want. 

I’ve always had a community oriented mindset. And, think about how my work impacts my immediate community. I think this has helped me learn how to talk to certain people and be a good partner for them, no matter where we’re coming from.

You’ve worked in ecommerce for a number of years now. What do you think first time ecommerce teams typically get wrong?

I think there can sometimes be an expectation of flipping on a switch and making everything sell as fast as possible. That’s often why people started their company in the first place. I think it’s great to have ambitious goals but you also have to answer the question of ‘how are we going to get there?’. How do we make our sales goals work over time? 

Would you ever start an ecommerce business? 

No, not at all. 

I don’t think I would want to run my own business of any kind. I like working on people’s projects with them which is why I think the agency world is so amazing. I’ve worked really close with a number of founders and we’re working day and night to get it to work and there’s a lot of risk involved. And that’s just not for me. 

How has it been working on a fully remote team for the first time?

My personality is on the more introverted side. At work, when I do talk to people it’s for smaller increments of time over video. Like 30-minutes to an hour. And, the calls are planned. So, my energy doesn’t feel as drained. Whereas in an office, you are more likely to have anyone pop into your office for small talk. Having a remote set up, there is more structure and I can plan my week for days with no meetings. 

What is it about your work that gets you fired up? 

Every day at Tuff, I’m blown away by how quickly the day goes. It’ll be two o’clock in the afternoon and I’m shocked. 

I really like client management, talking with clients, and understanding what’s important to them week to week. I also like with Tuff that even though I’m a Growth Marketer, I also handle a channel or two for each account. So I can get into the weeds, plan days where I don’t have any calls, and just focus on working on my accounts. I also like contributing to our blog. I started out my career in a content marketer role, running a blog for a company. Getting back to contributing to a blog has been fun, especially to be writing about stuff that I’m interested in. 

Being able to focus on growth marketing while having a bunch of different ways to play into Tuff’s success is really exciting for me. 

What do you like doing outside of work?

I spend a lot of time seeing films, listening to music, checking out libraries, and exploring Denver. I also like to get out a lot, I go mountain biking and camping pretty frequently.  

Do you ever find inspiration for work in these non-work activities?

I do! Recently, I was watching an NPR series where they talk to musicians about their process. 

They were talking to a hip hop producer named 9th Wonder and he was sharing that he does something called 30 by Thursday. Every week, he tries to make 30 new beats by Thursday and that’s his way to keep himself geared into his profession. He said it can be easy to just be like doodling with different sounds, get lost and not actually make music. 

I thought that was really interesting and starting thinking about how that could work for Tuff. What could that look like from a content production perspective? I shared this with the team in a meeting and it stuck. We created a content strategy into a 30 by Thursday type sprint. Our sprint is over a few months but we’re focused on writing a lot right now.

I enjoy figuring out where your outside life fits into your work life, I think that is pretty interesting. At Tuff, we make it a point to talk about what’s going on in our lives outside of when we’re sitting by the computer. And I think that makes the relationships a lot healthier. We learn a lot more about each other. 

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post Tuff’s Growth Marketer, John, on Having a Community-Oriented Mindset appeared first on Tuff.

This was last updated on November 8, 2023 with new links, information, and data on our current career framework and approach to career development. 

Tuff is committed to building a high-performing team focused on balancing individual and company growth. We have always believed it is important for the individuals at Tuff to grow alongside each other and our business. 

To support these behaviors, we created a career framework with 7 Levels, 2 Paths, and 3 Steps. By offering a clear vision of what the future holds for each individual within our framework, we ensure that no one is left uncertain about their path and how to contribute effectively. This transparency not only helps reduce pay disparities but also boosts employee retention, which is a pivotal aspect of our effort to establish an equitable compensation program and creating a place where people are inspired to do their best work. 

In this post, we’ll dive into the career framework and the steps we’ve taken to build ours at Tuff. 

Creating a Career Framework

Here are the steps we took to build ours:

1. Define our compensation philosophy 
2. List out your Company Roles
3. Create your Career Framework matrix
4. Define the Levels for each role and the Steps for your company

Okay, now for the nitty-gritty. Here’s how to apply each step and what it looks like at Tuff:

1. Outline your compensation philosophy

A Compensation Philosophy is an explicit overview of a company’s views and decisions about total compensation. In job descriptions, you may have seen statements like “we pay 50th percentile” or “we don’t adjust pay based on location”. These are compensation decisions in action that are based on that company’s philosophy on pay.

The type of company and culture we’re building is a reflection of each individual that works at Tuff. As we grow and our team evolves, so will our practices and policies. Our Compensation Philosophy is a reflection of where we are today but it is living and breathing and we may make updates in the future. We strongly encourage team members to ask questions about our approach to compensation.

Having our Compensation Philosophy principles explicitly outlined and agreed upon keeps our Career Framework consistent and systematic while also giving the team a shared understanding of how compensation decisions are made. Our Compensation Philosophy is intended to ensure our compensation decisions are:

• Equitable among employees, positions, and locations
• Supportive of our core business objectives
• Competitive with our market
• Easily understood by every team member

There are two sets of clients at Tuff: the companies that we partner with and the employees of Tuff. For both of these groups, our goal is healthy and sustainable growth. In our approach to compensation, we borrow a lot of the same principles that have lead to growth with our clients.

We’re transparent

Since day 1, we’ve prioritized internal financial transparency. We give team members access to base salary data for every role at Tuff because it is important for everyone to understand their compensation options. 

We’re consistent

We have a standard Career Framework so each team has the same number of Levels and paths for growth. Using our Career Framework, every possible Level for every possible role at Tuff has a standardized base salary. This means we don’t adjust pay based on who negotiates and who doesn’t. We also don’t adjust salary based on location because team members provide equal value to Tuff no matter where they log in from.

We’re data-informed

Pay transparency reduces pay gaps and improves employee retention. We will always look to data to understand the practices for creating an equitable compensation program.

We balance company and individual growth 

We aim to collectively balance ownership for individual growth alongside company growth. We encourage individual growth through our Career Framework and its ties to base salary and 401k matching. We also offer compensation pinned to profit and revenue to empower everyone at Tuff to make decisions as if they are spending their own money—because they are.

2. List out your Company Roles

At Tuff there are two core roles on the team. At the highest level, they are:

Growth Marketer: Looks holistically at a client’s existing condition, finds the bottlenecks preventing them from achieving their goals, and corrects them with innovative improvements

Channel Specialist: Focuses exclusively on one platform or channel (i.e. PPC Specialist, SEO Strategist). They have a strong marketing foundation and specialize in one or two areas.

3. Create your Career Framework matrix

Once you have your company roles listed out, we have 11 at Tuff, the next step is to create a company-wide career progression chart. While we customize  the description for each of these roles, we always start from the same set of Levels and Steps for each role. 

Here’s the template we use for each role at Tuff:

7 Levels: There are 7 Levels in the Tuff Career Framework: L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, L6, L7. Using this Framework, every team at Tuff will have role specific definitions for each Level.

2 Paths: We offer 2 Career Paths: People Manager and Individual Contributor. This splits off at L4. We do this to offer flexibility on how you can grow at Tuff and to account for the mix of skillsets that make a strong team.

3 Steps: Within each Level there are three Steps: A,B,C. Steps are marked by the progression ring in your Level in Pando.

4. Define the Levels for each role and the Steps for your company

This is where we put the Company Roles and Career Framework matrix together, it’s where the magic happens! 

These are our org-wide Level definitions at Tuff. We have these to provide objective standards and calibration among Levels. 

Each role at Tuff then has its own set of competencies that further defines each Level. Those can be found in our career progression tool, Pando. 

We’ll share our competencies for a Senior Growth Marketer so you can see what that looks like in practice: 

How this connects to our compensation model

The types of compensation we offer are informed by our Compensation Philosophy and growth goals. At Tuff, we offer a matrix of compensation to balance short-term and long-term payouts as well as payouts based on individual growth and company growth.

Base salary is short-term, guaranteed pay based on individual growth. We offer standardized base salaries at Tuff. Using our Career Framework, every possible Level for every possible role at Tuff has a set base salary. As a team member grows and progresses through Levels, base salary increases.

Continue Reading

We’ve worked closely as a team to develop our Career Frameworks. It’s always a work in progress so please reach out if you have any feedback or questions.

While building our own version that works for Tuff, we’ve also leaned on some great existing resources. If you’re interested in learning more about Career Frameworks, here are some of our favorite reads:

• A career progression framework which works for everyone: how we fixed career progression at CharlieHR
• Continuing to Improve on Pay: Our Latest Changes to the Salary Formula and How Much it Costs
• How We Approach Employee Compensation

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post How We Created a Career Framework For Growth on a Performance-Based Marketing Team [Updated] appeared first on Tuff.

Comp.

Whether you finish the rest of that word with -ensation or -licated, compensation is an important piece of running a business and hiring a great team. 

We are dedicated to creating a great place to work where team members understand how they can grow and develop at Tuff. Also, as a bootstrapped team, it is important for each of us to understand how our spend impacts our overall profit and ability to help our clients grow. 

To support these behaviors, we compensate our team in two ways: Base Salary tied to a Career Framework and Profit Sharing

Base Salary through a Compensation Formula

We wanted to create a compensation formula that was flexible enough to adjust for factors like experience and location but broad enough that it didn’t require in depth calculations and research every time we bring on a new team member. 

It was also important to us to use a data source and apply structure to our salaries to reduce bias and hold us accountable to paying people fairly. 

We wanted simplicity and objectivity. Enter: a compensation formula.

We share this with the whole team:

We’ll break it all down below.

Role Salary: How do Levels & Steps work?

We’ve created a Career Framework with a system of Levels and Steps for each role to make sure teammates have the opportunity to grow in flexible ways. 

Levels: Levels make up the vertical axis of the career framework. At Tuff, there are 5 levels for individual contributors: Entry, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert, and Principal. Levels are defined for each role at Tuff and mark distinct jumps in terms of area knowledge, role complexity, and scope. 

Steps: Steps make up the horizontal axis of the career framework. At Tuff, there are 5 steps housed within each Level and are meant to mark smaller milestones of growth. Steps are defined at a company level, not specific to your role. Rather, they are defined by increasing amounts of Ownership and Initiative. 

Using this Career Framework, we’ve entered early-stage company salary data at each level of experience for every role at Tuff. 

Here it is in action for our Growth Marketer role:

Cost of Living Multiplier: How do we adjust for remote?

We have been remote from the start and a big piece of that decision was wanting to access talent from anywhere in the world. We chose a high cost of living city as our benchmark so we can keep our salaries competitive. 

We start by understanding the difference in cost of living in the team member’s city compared to San Francisco. Using Numbeo, we calculate the Adjusted Cost of Living + Rent Index to compare two cities. Then, using this number the city falls into a defined Cost of Living Band. 

Adjusted Cost of Living + Rent Index

This compares the Cost of Living + Rent Index between two cities. By starting with a base of $1,000 in San Francisco, we look up how much money we would need to have the same standard of living as the city we’re comparing. 

Cost of Living Bands

By finding the Adjusted Cost of Living + Rent Index, each city falls into one of the following bands:

The Cost of Living Multipliers

These calculations help us get to the final number needed for the compensation formula. Once we know what Cost of Living Band a city falls in, we can use the Cost of Living Multiplier to reach our final base salary. 

Putting it all together

As a reminder, here is our compensation formula:

Let’s pretend we’re about to make an offer to a new Growth Marketer on the team who is based out of Portland. We were looking to hire someone who fell into our Level 4 definition of a Growth Marketer and we found someone great! 

We decided to make them an offer at Level 4, Step 2 and pull that Role Salary from our Career Framework.

To dive deeper into our compensation formula, you can view our spreadsheet here →.

Profit Sharing

The other piece to how we compensate Tuff employees is through Profit Sharing. 

Because we’re a small team, everyone works directly with clients and shares responsibility in driving their growth. The more our client’s grow, the more we grow and we wanted that to reflect in our compensation. We don’t offer the traditional stock options that some startups and public companies do but Tuff’s team members are critical to our success on every level.

We distribute profit sharing on a quarterly basis so once you’ve been at Tuff for a quarter, you are eligible. We look at Tuff’s profit balance, your time at Tuff, and your performance to calculate each team member’s share. 

At this point in Tuff’s growth, the amount we offer in profit sharing is quite low. It’s not going to give someone the ability to retire anytime soon! But, it’s important to us to offer profit sharing so early because each team member truly is an owner in our Tuff’s growth. 

Continue Reading

We’ve worked closely as a team to develop our compensation formula and to make the decision to offer profit sharing. 

While building our own version that works for Tuff, we’ve also leaned on some great existing resources. If you’re interested in learning more about compensation formulas and profit sharing, here are some of our favorite reads:

• Continuing to Improve on Pay: Our Latest Changes to the Salary Formula and How Much it Costs
• Remote Employees Shouldn’t Be Paid Less Based on Geography
• A Counterintuitive System for Startup Compensation
• How We Approach Employee Compensation
• How We Created a Career Framework For Growth on a Small Team

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post How We’ve Connected Salary to Both Personal and Company Growth appeared first on Tuff.

Editor’s Note: We decided to work with a Talent & People Ops consultant, Mary, to help us make these hires. As a relevant consideration when deciding to hire, we felt we could make these hires without external support. But we wanted to move fast without sacrificing time on sales or Tuff’s client growth and decided to lean on someone who has led this process time and time again.

This post is also written by Mary so you’ll notice she speaks about ‘Tuff’ in a different way than we typically do on our blog.

Because of the nature of Tuff’s work, they spend a lot of time thinking about numbers. What is the conversion rate? What are our strongest sources? What can we do better next time?

When it comes to hiring, you can apply a similar lense. For example, you can also think about candidates being at the top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel.

In February, we opened up two roles on the Tuff team:

• SEO Strategist
• Growth Marketer

For the SEO Strategist role, we were looking for a channel specialist who could help Tuff’s clients increase their organic reach. They work with a diverse set of clients and corresponding business models so they needed someone who has broad SEO experience (rather than specializing in local SEO) and who is comfortable adapting quickly.

For the Growth Marketer role, we were looking for more of a marketing generalist. At Tuff, a Growth Marketer partners closely with their clients to understand the core of their business, their goals outside of marketing, and then get really specific on how Tuff can help drive growth. They needed someone comfortable working closely with clients but in a more generalist role there is flexibility in how they achieve the goals depending on their background.

Here’s what we learned

• Specialist vs. Generalist: There is a difference between hiring for a Specialist (SEO Strategist) vs. a Generalist (Growth Marketer). The SEO Strategist role took 47 days to fill from job posted to offer letter signed. We had a more tailored skill set we were looking for. The Growth Marketer role took 29 days to fill from job posted to offer letter signed. We had clear outcomes we wanted this person to achieve and competencies we were evaluating for but there was room for more diversity in their background (i.e. content, paid search, paid social, etc.).
• Process: Before these hires, Tuff had 3 full time team members. Now, they are at 5. We learned a few lessons about the process, specifically how much to involve team members who also had a lot on their plate in terms of client work. It was important for us to create a Scorecard (more below) at the start of the process to have clear and explicit alignment on the outcomes they needed these team members to be responsible for.
• Sources: We spent $553.34 on LinkedIn. In the end, the two hires came from alternate sources. We break it down more below. We would still spend the money on LinkedIn as it accounted for 80% of the applications and 50% of the interviews. Just not eventual hires.
• Employer Branding: In Tuff’s client work, they are very transparent and open. It’s a value I came to recognize in their work and it opened up doors when it came to employer branding and helping qualify candidates. We ramped up these efforts on LinkedIn when we opened up the two roles, posting about their company retreat that happened while we were interviewing and tagging the Tuff team in hiring posts so people could check out their profiles before applying. The person we hired for the Growth Marketer role was a connection of the Founder of Tuff on LinkedIn.

Specialist vs. Generalist

We posted the role for SEO Strategist using Workable, on February 6.

Tuff’s new SEO Strategist, Derek, signed his offer letter on March 24. This hire took us 48 days from posting to offer letter signed.

We break down the interview process in more detail below (i.e. what is a topgrade interview?) but here’s a breakdown of our funnel metrics:

Here are a few of our conversion rates we found interesting:

• Applications to phone screen: 5.45%
• Phone Screen to Topgrade Interview: 18.75%
• Applications to Hire: 0.17%

Growth Marketer

We posted the Growth Marketer role on February 19th.

Tuff’s newest Growth Marketer, John, signed his offer letter March 18. This hire took us 29 days from posting to offer letter signed.

Here’s a breakdown of our funnel metrics:

And, here are a few of our conversion rates we found interesting:

• Applications to phone screen: 3.01%
• Phone Screen to Topgrade Interview: 30.76%
• Applications to Hire: 0.23%

Let’s compare some of these metrics for the two roles:

As you can see, the biggest difference is in the ‘Phone Screen to Topgrade Interview’ conversion rate.

People interviewing for the SEO Strategist role had a lower chance of moving on from the Phone Screen to the next step of the interview process. We did considerably more phone screens for SEO Strategist (32 phone screens) than for the Growth Marketer role (13 phone screens).

In hindsight, this makes sense based on our experience hiring for a Specialist. There are so many areas of expertise when it comes to SEO. We had a fairly specific skill set we were looking for so as we learned more about the candidate’s background and the type of work they were looking to do, disqualifying a candidate or moving them forward felt clear.

Tuff’s interview process:

Step 1: Create a Scorecard

The Scorecard is the foundation of the interview process we held. It is what we used to evaluate candidates at every step of the funnel. By spending an extra 15-20 minutes upfront at the beginning of the interview process, the Scorecard helps lead to a speedier process, better alignment on the team which leads to better hires, and helps mitigate bias by keeping us evaluating on the objective outcomes and skills we needed these hires to achieve and come in with.

The Scorecards we used for both roles had the same four parts:

• Mission – Why does this role exist?
• Outcomes – What will this person be responsible for?
• Hierarchy of needs – What is need to have vs. nice to have?
• Competencies – What characteristics are most important?

Step 2: Post the job!

While this might seem like the first step, it is so important to have clear alignment from the team that it comes after creating the Scorecard. We used Workable as our Applicant Tracking System for a few reasons. As a small (but mighty!) team, Workable was at a good price point for Tuff and offers a 14-day trial that we used to make sure Workable was the right system for us. Workable also posts your job for free on a number of other job boards like remote.co, where our SEO Strategist hire initially spotted the role.

Step 3: Create Interview Plan

Once we had the Scorecards filled in and the job posted, we moved ahead to clarify the interview process and each team member’s role in evaluating candidates.

Step 4: Phone Screens

Goal: Understand motivations and ability to contribute to Tuff client’s + culture. I held the resume and phone screens to help save the Tuff team time by qualifying candidates at the early stage.

Here are the questions we asked for the SEO Strategist phone screens:

1. What are your career goals? What would your ideal role look like in the next 2-3 years?
2. What are you really good at when it comes to SEO?
3. What are 1-2 areas you think you could improve?
4. Tell me about the most structured and then least structured workplace you’ve been a part of. How did you feel about them?
5. Think of someone you have worked really well with in the past. What characteristics, values, or skills did you learn from them and try to replicate?

Step 5: Topgrade Interviews

Goal: Uncover the patterns of somebody’s career history to match with the scorecard.

For candidates who made it through the Phone Screen, we had them speak with the Founder of Tuff, Ellen, next. We asked the following five questions for each job on the candidates resume, beginning with the earliest and working your way forward to the present day. Follow up questions and curiosity are key to keeping this interview conversational.

1. What were you hired to do?
2. What 2-3 accomplishments are you most proud of?
3. What were some low points during that job?
4. Who were the people you worked with? Specifically:
   1. Your manager. What was it like working with them? What would they tell me were your biggest strengths and areas for improvement?
   2. Your team. What did it look like? What worked well? What was challenging?
5. Why did you leave?

Step 6: Focus Interviews

Goal: Assess the competencies we’ve agreed are important for success in the role.

As you may have noticed on our funnel metric breakdowns above, we skipped the Focus Interview at times to prioritize speed. These interviews were assigned to Chris and Nate, the other two existing team members at Tuff. These interviews were focused on competencies and attributes the team had identified were important for the roles and culture they’re building at Tuff.

Step 7: Project

Goal: Get a more in-depth understanding of the candidate’s skills.

Here’s the project we shared with our Growth Marketer candidates:

We didn’t want the project to be too time consuming so set the expectation to spend no more than 3 hours on the project. P.S. Snacks is also not a client of Tuff. We wanted to make sure we weren’t asking someone to do work that a Tuff team member would be paid for. So, this is an example of work they’d be doing if they joined the team but it isn’t work Tuff would gain monetary value from.

Step 8: Hire 🎉

We did it! Through this process, we were able to find and get to know two great candidates who have now joined the Tuff team.

Sources

Tuff’s new team members came from these two sources:

The person we hired for the Growth Marketer role was a LinkedIn connection of the Founder of Tuff. He reached out to Ellen after spotting the role and we entered him into the interview process, uploading his resume into our Applicant Tracking System.

The person we hired for the SEO Strategist role applied through remote.co.

For more context on what sources were stronger for us, here are two charts below. The first shows Applications by source – you can see LinkedIn brought in the majority of our applications.

This chart shows Interviews by source. These are the people who after we screened their resume, we decided to talk to. Again, LinkedIn is at the top of the list.

Conclusion

I learned so much from the Tuff team while helping them hire for these roles. As a growth marketing agency, the team has a natural inclination for numbers and conversion rates that made our collaboration stronger and more successful.

If you have any questions or would like context on how to apply this process to your team and hiring, you can find me at Intention Consulting. Thank you team Tuff for welcoming me aboard for these hires, and John and Derek, best of luck!

Mary Jantsch

Mary is a growth marketer at Tuff. She specializes in Customer Experience, Email Strategy, Copywriting and Chat. She also runs on coffee and peanut butter pretzels.

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