Freedom Makers' Strive for Excellence

In 2019, I was accepted into the Global Good Fund’s veteran fellowship program. During a call with my executive coach, I started comparing us to a typical temp agency. Brenda stopped me right there. She said, “you can’t compare yourself to others because everyone’s level of excellence is different. You can only strive to improve your own level.” She went on to explain that one can never achieve excellence because once you reach that level, it is now your standard. Once can only ever STRIVE FOR EXCELLENCE.

And from that conversation, a journey began at Freedom Makers.

Shortly after this call with Brenda, I spent two weeks in Costa Rica. My talk with Brenda ​spawned some serious brainstorming during a morning spent with amazing Costa Rican coffee while overlooking beautiful Playa Hermosa.

And so it began...

During our quarterly vision call upon my return from Costa Rica, I presented my thoughts to the team. What started as a pencil diagram on a napkin Costa Rica turned into so much more once I revealed it to the team. It inspired even bigger ideas in Jenny, our Marketing Director,  that I could not yet see and she ran with it.

When Jenny turned my vision into the foundations for Strive for Excellence within Freedom Makers. These were going to be so much more than words to us; they were going to become who we were, how we did things and why we did things. We split the vision into the three pillars of our company: the Freedom Makers, clients, and the core team. 

We then outlined where we were with each pillar and what were the immediate next steps for improvement. It was so neat to see where we came from, where we were and where we wanted to go.

How it’s going

For our clients, we reviewed the onboarding process and focused on communication and timing. We also beefed up the Client Success Manager role. We made plans for a client portal, eventually to be named Twinbee. During COVID-19, we offered webinars on how to manage a remote workforce. 

For our Freedom Makers, we shared expectations (something we had never done before!) and held people accountable. We also made their accomplishments more public through badges on their profiles. We rolled out a mentoring program, a time tracking portal called Twinbee, and updated our guidebook. We began communicating more through a newsletter (which was also helpful during COVID) and offering training.

Our latest (and biggest improvement) is that we created a new role: Freedom Maker Success Manager whose focus will be on recruiting, screening, and nurturing Freedom Makers. 

For the core team, we focused a lot on how we operate: streamlining operations and communication. We set up a weekly call for sharing and updating. We moved to Asana so we make sure never to miss a step. Most importantly, in my opinion, we adopted Strive for Excellence as part of our culture (and now a guiding principle) and still consistently seek to improve. 

Indeed, one day Erin, our Operations Director, quipped, “you never know, we might have a whole new software and completely up-end how we do it by then.” Sure enough, within a few weeks, we started doing exactly that--upending a process and finding a software tool to help us make it better!

Our journey with Strive for Excellence will never end. We will always seek to improve from where we are. I am excited to see where it takes us. It is our ever present guide. So that when trouble arises and you know it always does, we have a beacon to guide us on next steps.​