52 Limited

Hands On Greater Portland, a non-profit organization that connects volunteers to appropriate causes, is seeking creative professionals at a brainstorming session May 7th.Participate in an initial brainstorming session to help Hands On Greater Portland better communicate their story and make their website more engaging. They are looking for copywriters, brand gurus, designers, photographers and video editors to volunteer some time to improve handsonportland.org. Pizza and beer provided.More information about signing up can be found by emailing Becky at becky@handsonportland.org or by going to http://tinyurl.com/67m8gl �

Giving back, and being a good steward in the community, has always been a part of 52 values. As our business has grown, our ability to give to the community has grown as well.

The following organizations were recipients of contributions by 52 in 2007.

Project Pooch - Project Pooch pairs youths incarcerated at the MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility with homeless shelter dogs for over a decade. With guidance youths learn to train the dogs, groom them, and find them homes. The dogs leave the program ready to be great pets, while their trainers re-enter the community with new job and personal skills and an increased compassion and respect for all life. 

Mercy Corps - Mercy Corps exists to alleviate suffering, poverty and oppression by helping people build secure, productive and just communities. In the last 29 years Mercy Corps has provided $1.3 billion to help people in over 100 nations. 

Audubon Society of Portland - The Audubon Society promotes the understanding, enjoyment, and protection of native birds, other wildlife, and their habitat with a focus on the Pacific Northwest. 

American Cancer Society - Cancer has touched too many families, including 52’s.  Begun in 1946, the ACS has been instrumental in the fight by funding research, education, patient services, and advocacy.

52 is committed to these causes and committed to supporting our community.  

52 has long struggled with the word staffing. When we first opened our doors in early 2005, we proclaimed ourselves a new hybrid business: a creative resource company. We shied away from the word staffing for fear of the historical negative connotations associated with the word. After all, we placed skilled, talented professionals, and staffing to us meant a less sophisticated and disciplined practice. A job shop if you will. But a lot of people asked us questions, like “if you don’t do staffing, what do you do?” And, of course, we’d answer, “well we do staffing, but we do it in a different way.”

When delivering a marketing message describing what you do as a business, confusion is not a good thing. So, we deciding to embrace staffing but continue to stress the difference to our brand of staffing.

So, there it is. I’ll say it. 52 Limited. Portland’s creative staffing leader.

Arrogance. Ego. Too much emphasis on profit. All of these can lead to the death of culture in a creative agency.

In two days this week I had meetings with three management level people that have seen the cultures of their employers, creative agencies in town, shift dramatically away from employees and toward the bottom line and/or a founder(s) arrogant vision.

This is an all too common mistake that companies make. With many local agencies being founder-based it can set up challenging dynamics when it comes to establishing and growing culture. It takes a healthy ego to start a company. As your company grows, at some point it becomes your employees that are growing and sustaining the company, not the founder(s). This is a realization that many either do not make, or do not believe. To successfully grow and maintain growth founders need to empower their staff and maintain a positive employee-driven culture.

Ego’s can often get in the way of this because, after all, the company grew around the founder(s) so they are always the key component. Not true once a level of growth has been obtained.

Too much emphasis on the bottom line can kill culture. Employees want and need to know that the company is making money and they will get paid, but it generally is not what motivates them daily. What motivates the typical person in the creative industry is whether they made a difference…through good work, good creative, good service to clients and co-workers, not that they brought a project in under budget and made the company some extra bucks. That’s for management to worry about….and for management to monitor and communicate in a strategic way. Staff communication should never focus on the bottom line. It has to be addressed of course, but cannot be the focus of every message. If it is, it is just a matter of time before employees begin to think of themselves as just another cog in the wheel, a step on the assembly line.

Once this occurs, your culture is gone. Employees will begin to look for other opportunities that will enrich them. Quality of work will begin to suffer….why put in that extra effort when you are just another cog? And once the quality begins to suffer….you run the risk of losing clients. If that happens, things start to spiral out of control quickly.

Building the company back up, changing perception in the recruiting landscape, and patching the culture are now the biggest challenges. When really, it would have been much easier and more sustainable to have paid more attention to the care and feeding of the culture to begin with. Because a funny thing happens when the culture is healthy…people perform better, feel empowered, and produce strong results. Which, not coincidentally improves the bottom line.