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.  

If you build it they will come. When trying to hire staff for your company, this is the mantra to have. If you build a positive work culture, and focus your efforts in maintaining a healthy environment for people to grow and develop their careers you will have an easier time hiring top talent. It also helps to do good work and serve your clients. Paying people well is part of what makes a positive work culture, but it’s not the only thing. Resist the temptation to throw money at people to get them to join your firm. Don’t make it about money. If you have other positive factors in place, paying competitively will get people over the hump and wanting to work for you. Securing the top talent is more about your overall package, which includes your company’s culture and environment.

When searching for a new opportunity, a vice-president of marketing states,

“As a job seeker I pay close attention to a company’s culture and how it’s sustained. This is key to how well I’ll be able to thrive in the company and how my contributions will be received. A significant amount of my waking hours will be spent in a workplace; a good culture will provide me a healthy, challenging and enjoyable experience. While a good salary is an important consideration it’s not my first priority or even second. If the culture is right, I know the salary negotiation process will be a positive one.”

When salary becomes the focus of an employment equation it is generally a bad sign. Of course, people want to be paid what they are worth, but job offers should be approached by looking at the big picture. If the focus is more on salary, chances are employees will leave again when someone else throws more money at them.

According to Rich Connor, senior vice president at Portland marketing firm, PMSI, “we encourage new candidates to think long term. What type of company do you want to be working for in five years? If someone is interested in stopping to build their resume or to get their salary increased, we are clearly the wrong fit and we have a pretty good nose for that. We like to see where candidates take the conversation…. Money, Culture, Responsibilities, Future Goals. We want to know their motivations for wanting to join our team. For existing employees, we find this issue to be a red warning light. When a valued team member wants more money to stay happy or leverages another offer, that it is a bad sign for us. We hate to lose any employee for any reason but, if their base level of satisfaction has fallen to money, the important parts have fallen away.”

Salary discussions are often an employer/candidate game of cat and mouse. What are your salary requirements? How much are you looking for? What does the position pay? Questions like these are used to strategize the employment offers being extended (and those accepted or declined). I advise employers and candidates to discuss salary history but to also factor in other criteria (culture, opportunity for growth, doing good work) when determining a fair salary. Removing the cat and mouse dialogue and opening an honest discussion for both employer and candidate is the best way to start a rewarding and healthy employer/employee relationship.

Hiring top talent should be more about attraction than about enticement. You can entice someone with more money, but you want to attract them with competitive pay and back it up with the larger package of what your firm has to offer. If you consistently hire in this manner you attract talent that is looking to further their career and make an impact in a positive environment, rather than the job shoppers who are looking for the next great offer to come along. You will also build loyalty and make it more difficult for others to entice your talent away.

Build the culture. Provide opportunity for growth. Support and mentor your employees. Provide competitive compensation and benefits. Do good work. Respect your staff and clients. And you will attract and retain talent. If it’s built, they will come.

Wasting time. It’s something we all do pretty well, but invariably feel pretty guilty about, especially when bills are piling up, work’s bearing down, and-frankly-we’re not getting any younger. What’s your diversion? Craigslist? Cupcakes? Yacht Rock? Fantasy football? Pinot Noir? Roller derby?  There’s always something we’d rather be doing than sitting in a cubicle, staring at a screen.

As a freelance music writer in LA a few years ago, I scored a job interviewing bands for a living. For a lifelong music fanatic, this seemed like a dream scenario, but my enthusiasm eventually sagged when I realized was just another Hollywood hack, writing fluff copy to sell widgets in the form of MP3s.  One day in particular sums up my experience: I was sitting at a desk (after sitting in traffic for hours), being reprimanded over the phone by Liz Phair for not writing good interview questions. It broke my heart, because I loved Liz Phair, but at the same time, I thought she’d become a complete sellout. The problem was, I couldn’t ask her why she’d sold out, because I would have gotten fired. But wait-They couldn’t really fire me, because I was never even “hired” in the first place… But I’d been sitting at the same desk for two years!

So I finally split town, moved to Portland, and took up the most unlikely hobby I could imagine: surfing. It was a head-clearing, mind-opening, finger-numbing, humbling, exhausting, thrilling waste of time that was the exact opposite of work. After my first ride, in a smelly wetsuit on a lopsided old board, I was completely hooked.

At home I read everything I could about surfing. I discovered a surf blog based out of California http://novicesurf.blogspot.com/ (the only one I could find) and devoured it religiously with coffee. Then, I decided to start a weblog of my own called Sissyfish, as a way to record my weekly adventures through journal entries, sketches, photographs and even some half-assed poetry.

The blog became an obsession and a distraction, giving structure to my scattered creativity. As a frustrated illustrator, I now had an endless amount of exciting subject matter to draw from. Miraculously, Sissyfish also reenergized my writing, giving me a bullshit-free zone to express myself in. It loosened me up.  And people started visiting. The readership grew from my mom and a few friends to ten strangers, to hundreds of visitors a day. The other night I was at a restaurant and the waiter asked me if I was “that guy with the surf blog.”

Around that time, I met with the guys at 52 Ltd. and showed them a portfolio that was the result of a newfound awareness of my creative potential. It was a box crammed full of writing samples, illustrations and photographs. Brooks rubbed his chin and wondered out loud where I’d fit in. Then, we spent the rest of our meeting chatting about our shared love of surfing.

A week later, Brooks called and told me about a new Portland outdoor apparel startup called Nau. It turned out that the first web presence that the company wanted was a blog.  Called The Thought Kitchen, it would cater to the brand’s emerging community of artists, athletes and activists. I showed the creative director-who also happened to be a surfer-my own blog and offered a few insights I’d learned in my two-year experience as a blogger: Always use good images. Keep entries short and sweet. Invite dialogue from readers. I was hired.

My current gig as curator of Nau’s blog is the best thing I’ve ever been paid to do.  My responsibilities include facilitating online conversations about the outdoors, art, sustainability, design and sports like surfing. I’m encouraged to include drawings and photos and to write like I do on my own blog-honestly and with personality.

Call it “micro-marketing,” “niche branding,” the actualization of Web 2.0 in e-commerce, or whatever. I think my mom described it best when she’d insist, “Do what you love.” Those sentiments are echoed in a campaign by New Belgium Brewery: “Follow Your Folly.” Theirs is beer. For some, it’s porn. Mine is surfing. It was a waste of time that unlocked my creative spirit and made me a more complete and satisfied professional.

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.

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.

What is does is point to the power of networking in a job search. I advise that people do 3 main things when looking for a job. 1. Following job posting boards is a necessary evil of the job search. You may find a job here, but you are just one of thousands of people looking at the same posting. 2. A placement agency like 52 can open doors and provide opportunities that never show up on job boards. A placement agency is also a function of the next and critical step. 3. Network. Often networking is the most important missing piece. It’s also of course, the hardest one and the one that requires the most work.

So, getting back to the “who you know”. It’s not really who you know as much as it is what you know and who you know. If you don’t have marketable employment skills, it really doesn’t matter who you know, chances are you still are not going to be hired to run your mom’s friend’s marketing department. The key is to know as many people in your chosen profession and specialization as you can. If you are good at what you do, you should have a network of people that know it. When looking for a new job, you tap into that network and let it work for you.

If you need to build a network, it takes time, effort and focus. When you make a contact make sure you also ask that contact for a referral. That way one contact becomes two. And always follow up. Keep track of your contacts and the activity you have had with them. When trying to build a network on a job search you need to ask yourself…who would hire me? As in, what is the position or job title of the person who would hire me? If you are a graphic designer, it might be a creative director or marketing manager. Those are the people then that you target for your networking. You also target people who would be doing the same work as you, but they are more able to refer you to opportunities, the higher level people may be the ones doing the hiring. Either way, it’s still networking and building your sphere of contacts.

It’s good to get this skill down early because it is a recurring theme. A job search through proactive networking is very similar to the business development cycle that companies pursue. And it’s hard work. But, it is worth it because you never know the opportunities that will present themselves, either in the short term or years down the road.

Because, it’s all about who you know.

1) How does a communicator know what move might be right and how do they make it?

The right move is to always be informed and educated on new strategies, directions in business. Technology wise you have to make sure you don’t just jump at the next “big thing” too hard, because the next “big thing” may be obsolete in a month. Keeping current of business news, market trends, technology, local movers and shakers is key.

2)What are three smart career moves you would recommend to someone who feels their progress is stuck?

Always keep an eye out for emerging trends and businesses. Look for opportunities that will allow you to grow personally and professionally. Conduct an informed job search.

If looking/finding a new job is not an option or not something you are looking to undertake right now, then the other option is to look for opportunities to grow within your current organization. Do they know your are stuck? Are they willing to put together a plan? If not, start considering the exit strategy.

3)What are three not-so-smart career moves you would suggest avoiding?

Don’t quit a job before you have a new one, UNLESS your current job is causing emotional or physical pain. If you can hang in there, do it. But if not, do as much as you can to prepare for the leap and then make it.
Don’t burn bridges. Don’t stay at a job that makes you miserable for two long. Don’t let your career stagnate….don’t become a dinosaur.

4)What criteria should a communicator use in evaluating a job opportunity?
Opportunity. Opportunity to grow and enhance your career. Gain new challenges, skills, experience and insight. Resist taking a job just to leave a painful job. Unless it’s your only chance to leave. If you want to grow professionally, resist a safe job.
Company values and culture are huge. As is past performance and future opportunities for growth. Do they seem to be forward thinkers? Do they want you to interview them too?

5)What do companies consider “star” job applicants?

Attitude. Flexibility. Initiative. Teamwork (overused but true). Do you have traits that will make the organization successful or continue to be successful? The skills and experience get you the interview, the intangibles get you the job.

6)Real world experience vs. college degrees: which do most companies look for?
Most want to see the degree, but many will look beyond it for the right fit. However, some companies require a degree for upper management roles.