With the company value “grow or die,” it’s fitting that Travelers Haven has been in growth mode since its 2008 inception.
“When you stop growing intellectually, creatively, professionally, spiritually, or in any other area of life, that area begins to die,” the furnished temporary accommodations provider’s website states.
As such, leaders at Travelers Haven have developed initiatives aimed to sustain growth that are meaningful and scalable for employees, like management training, key performance indicators (KPIs) and a “fail fast” mentality paired with experimentation.
One of those leaders is VP of Sales Margot Hart, who joined the team in September. In her role, Hart has taken over the direction of Travelers Haven’s sales organization, which includes entering new verticals and developing sales leadership programs.
This year, Hart said she’s focused on improving their onboarding process, aligning sales efforts to different customer needs and automating processes when applicable to drive scalability.
Built In Colorado connected with Hart to learn more.
What areas has leadership focused on to ensure Travelers Haven scales in a sustainable and repeatable way?
VP of Sales Margot Hart: The first relates to the training of our associates. We are a teaching company. Many of our front line associates come to us on their first or second job, and we have an opportunity to help them establish a strong foundation in their career. The second is onboarding, which is a big focus for this year. We are hiring a lot of new associates to support our growth and have challenged our leaders to develop more robust onboarding to help ramp associates quickly. When new positions ramp quickly, both the associate and the company win.
We also evaluate our benefits regularly so that we can offer our team the best total package available. This year we plan to introduce a 401(k) match and equity program for long-term associates. We do this to make sure we have the right benefits to keep our team happy and healthy. Additionally, we consistently look toward process improvement and challenge our teams to break old processes in order to make them better. For example, one of our core values is “never failed, only learned,” so this year, we’re asking the management team to share one thing they tried and failed at each month.
Lastly, to encourage internal growth and leadership development, we offer a management training series that’s open for any associate to participate in and includes sessions led by our executive team.
HART’S ADVICE ON SCALING
- Listen: Your team and your customers have great ideas on how to improve
- Act: Ensure you have a bias for action in your company culture
- Adjust: Don’t be afraid to fail. It’s an essential part of growth
What processes have you introduced since joining Travelers Haven to support the scaling efforts?
My team is working to align our efforts with the different needs of our customers. One team is focused on inbound sales, another on outbound sales, and one is working to deepen relationships with our current customers. This level of focus is letting us be more customer-centric and accelerate growth.
I should mention though that we are working to improve every process and automate as much as possible. Our associates regularly come up with ideas to make things better. I love watching these bottom-up ideas become a reality. We have made plenty of mistakes along the way, but with each new idea we test, our goal is to fail fast and iterate so that we can continue to get better.
For example, one of our core values is ‘never failed, only learned’ so this year we’re asking the management team to share one thing they tried and failed at each month.”
How do you go about adjusting these processes as the needs of the teams or customers evolve?
We listen to our team and our customers. They provide the best feedback and always tell us how to improve. Additionally, we monitor KPIs and iterate when we see we are missing an objective. Between data and people, we are able to move quickly when something needs to change.
