When hiring new employees, what do you look for? Over here at Alter Endeavors, it’s no secret that we seek out future team members with hobbies or side jobs they pursue about as diligently as they do their work with us. Common sense might dictate that an employee with diverted attention and a split focus would not be fully dedicated to Alter Endeavors. However, our experience with employees pursuing outside passions shows, for us, a greater company culture, a stronger work ethic and higher-quality results. The question is, why?
The Pareto principle also known as the 80-20 rule dictates that 80% of the output from a given situation or system is determined by 20% of the input. The principle was named for the Italian Vilfredo Pareto, who in 1906 observed that 20% of the population owned 80% of the land in Italy. This pattern of distribution can be applied to other disciplines like business, science or economics, to identify the valuable few (the 20%) and the inconsequential or less effective 80%. For example, from a business or managerial point of view, one could say 80% of a company’s sales are made by 20% of its sales staff or 80% of a company’s profits come from 20% of its customer. Isolating or focusing on the 20% that matters most can result in increased productivity and better outcomes.
We believe that the people who are often the busiest, doing the most, are among that valuable 20% who are producing 80% of the work. Hiring an employee with an outside passion aligns with our company values because we want to work with motivated individuals.
There are many different types of motivation: in an academic setting, a person may strive for an ‘A’, the highest grade, in an entrepreneurial setting, an individual may have the goal of making the most money, in a social setting someone may seek the approval of others or want to be seen as a “good person”. When looking to add someone to our team at Alter Endeavors, we want to distinguish what makes him tick, what is her motivation? We relate to and identify best with people who hold the same motivations as ourselves. We want to learn because we are curious. We want to know how to do something so we can repeat those actions later on our own and experience our own personal success. We are ambitious because we want a challenge and to enjoy the fruits of our hard work, because it is our own.
A person with an outside passion or side project most likely has individual goals they want to meet and isn’t shying away from the challenge of working for a company like Alter Endeavors while also pursuing their own path. Alter Endeavors is not a place where we want you to drink the company kool-aid and be solely dedicated to our projects and clients. We feel that team members with outside passions enrich our company and provide more value to our clients by bringing more perspectives, and diverse skill sets and experiences to the table. It’s important to us that we also enable our team members to be able to pursue these passions. We could hire only marketing majors, but the ability to find commonalities between disparate disciplines allows us to expand our perspectives and add more tools to our problem-solving capabilities.
Christopher Jennings, our Director of Operations, is also known as C.S. Jennings in the publishing and illustration worlds. Besides keeping Alter Endeavors running smoothly and efficiently, Christopher works as a prolific artist – having illustrated over a dozen published children’s books and even written a couple.
Aubrey Berkowtiz, the VP of Business Development at Alter Endeavors, operates as the Head Coach for the University of Texas Longhorns Hockey Team. During hockey season he gets up the crack of dawn to coach before heading to work at AE.
One of our newest hires, Teylor Schiefelbein, a Content Strategist for Alter Endeavors, has her own travel and fitness blog.
The experiences our employees bring with them from their outside passions to work and their motivation to apply newly learned skills or success at work to their own projects helps make Alter Endeavors an effective company while helping team members foster their own individual paths. Clients greatly benefit from a team that consists of individuals with outside passions because they are motivated for all the right reasons and bring so much value to every project because they are self-disciplined, trained to look at a problem from various viewpoints and don’t have time to waste. We are extremely grateful to work with such a talented team!
– Nick & Jamie Alter