Best Workplaces

Last night was the gala dinner for BC's Best Companies to work for.

It was our first year entering our company and we were excited to see where we stood against some of the

past winners like Nurse Next Door and HootSuite. The process actually starts in May with in depth executive interviews and surveys of the company employees and culture.

The entries are verified and graded for best practices and the highest scores are announced at the gala.

For a first try we did great I thought - Placing 4th overall in our category and 2nd specifically on culture.

Next year we'll shoot for #1.

Cheers,

Calvin

Filling an invisible bucket

Today when I asked my 6 year old boy how his day was, he told me he had filled 2 peoples "buckets."

I wasn't sure what he was talking about so I asked him to explain and he blew me away with his answer.

He said he thinks people have an invisible bucket filled with "good stuff" and sometimes when a persons bucket gets low he likes to help people fill theirs back up.

I had never head him talk about this before and it wasn't something we taught him. It was just the way he saw the world and other people and it made my heart melt.

I asked him how he filled other peoples buckets and he said with hugs or helping people pick up things they dropped. He is such an inspiration and our family will definitely use the "bucket" idea to make sure everyone we come in contact with is topped up.

Such a simple and yet impactful idea of how to spread a little happiness in the world. Sometimes letting ourselves think more like a child creates the best ideas.

Cheers

Calvin

Sailing Away

Shawn Nabil and I are flying home today after being on an executive team building retreat for the past 2 weeks in the British Virgin Islands. Although entirely my idea, the guys jumped at the chance to build on our strong management team camaraderie and exercise our core values of living a remarkable life.

I know it will be hard for people to believe we could actually do any work in this environment, but it really is an amazing experience to live in close quarters and manage all the duties and responsibilities of cooking, planning and sailing a large boat together. Tasks like anchoring or pulling the sails takes team work and we couldn't help but come out of the experience as a well oiled management machine, relaxed, in sync, and raring to blast off when we get back.

I would love to take other staff on similar team building adventures in the future. Nabil and I have contacts in Africa who drill water wells and build schools and are looking into December 2013 as a possible trip date for 4-6 staff or possibly customers too. Anyone interested in expanding their remarkable life experiences??

Cheers

Calvin

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween from the wacky staff at Costless.

Thanks to the Culture Club for the Costume Contest prizes and Pumpkin Carving.
 

Great job Bryan on the fun video too. Sorry I missed the party, as Shawn, Nabil, and I were on our Executive Retreat but here is my entry from the Halloween Party at Foxys Bar on Jost Van Dyke in the British Virgin Islands.

Cheers

Calvin

Let's Get Real

Real Time Inventory that is.

Today we quietly rolled out another feature to our website. The link of our inventory to display online. Now customers can see what we have in stock and make buying decisions based on this and avoid an out of stock on their order. It's pretty cool to see we have 1000 boxes of Oreos or 500 bags of pistachios or 8000 boxes of paper clips in real time. The idea is when a customer sees there is zero stock available, they can choose a suggested replacement built into the logic of the website and displayed below the out of stock item. We spend hundreds of hours designing the feature and we hope customers like it.

Shawn is the chief architect on the site and his team will continue to make improvements to the site and add new features. Most important to him is customer feedback so if you have a suggestion or pet peeve you would like him to know about please contact him at shawn@lykki.com and he would be happy to chat.

Cheers,

Calvin

Silicon Valley

Along with my EO Vancouver Chapter of 82 Entrepreneurs, we hit Silicon Valley for a whirlwind tour of some of the most exciting and influential companies in the Valley. As I write this, I'm thinking of you the reader who may not be so excited as I was in seeing these businesses, so I'll keep it short but please allow my enthusiasm to shine through. To me, Silicon Valley is the Disneyland of tech business entrepreneurs like me.

We had some very memorable visits to the Apple Campus, Google, Microsoft, ZenDesk, Kiva and SalesForce. Even during social time at the hotel we had fantastic speakers like the founder of California Closets and founder of Grasshopper.

My main takeaway from Silicon Valley was how they all approached business - it seemed fearless, ready to make mistakes fast, learn, adjust and then accelerate some more. Oh, and find really smart hard working people. Everything happened in Dog Years the COO of ZenDesk explained. (He already built MySQL to a $100mm business then sold it for $1b in under 5 years).

Second takeaway was although culture at the big companies like Google is legendary for all the cool stuff they offer employees, it's not that much different than what we already do at Costless, and in some ways I think we do it better, at least for us. So afterwards I was much less intimidated that these big legends of the valley had some sort of secret fairy dust we couldn't duplicate. It was like pulling back the curtain in the Wizard of Oz - ah ha, yup, OK... Now that I see how it all works and it's not magic, it's just persistence, vision and hard work - and we can do that in spades.

Cheers

Calvin

Working Happy

Our new additional of 4000 sq. ft. of office space sure has come in handy for doing brainstorming sessions. We have a large area dedicated to just that task. With white boards, flip chart paper and a projector we have a blast gathering people to toss out crazy ideas and see what sticks.

Today we were looking for tag line ideas. In the past we have used tag lines such as More Than Just Office Supplies, IT'S EASY BEING GREEN, and recently trademarked Work Happy. Although we love Work Happy, it is more of our Mantra than a tag line so we wanted something that had Office Supplies in the line. Our result out of hundreds of great ideas, and a few beers later was "Delivering Office Supply Happiness".

Yeah, I'm happy with that :-)

Cheers

Calvin