By Jamie McGee
The Tennessean, October 22, 2015
... The stakes were high. As a single mom, she was raising a daughter and a granddaughter, and she had just left a well-paying sales job to prove a business could be run better by valuing employees. ...
For the past nine years, LetterLogic has been on Inc. 5000’s list of fastest-growing private companies. The company employs 53 people, generates an annual revenue of $36 million and is regularly courted by interested buyers.
Deutschmann, meanwhile, has emerged as a leading business owner locally and nationally. She is a regular speaker on company culture, namely for her emphasis on employees over clients. The U.S. labor secretary visited LetterLogic this year as he pushed for a higher minimum wage. In September, Deutschmann was named to the National Women’s Business Council, advising the White House, U.S. Congress and the U.S. Small Business Administration on economic issues. ...
The problem Deutschmann recognized was that workers didn’t care about the results. “Nobody there had a vested interest in the end quality of the product or the service,” she said. “I wanted to make sure that from the first day I opened the door at LetterLogic that every single employee had a vested interest in the end quality and that they would care as much as I did.”
Ten percent of LetterLogic profits are divided among employees. It’s an equal distribution and ignores rank and seniority so that everyone knows each job is critical to operations.
"When we screw something up, we all feel the effects,” she said. “When everything goes right and we do things perfectly, we all feel the effects of that, too.”
Starting wage is $16 an hour, more than double the federal minimum wage.
LetterLogic also pays health insurance premiums for workers, a choice that is increasingly rare among businesses. ...
Other company perks include:
- LetterLogic employees can bring their pets or kids to work.
- If employees need help with tuition, the company will provide reimbursements.
- If they have been with LetterLogic for more than six months, the company will provide $1,000 for a down payment on a home.
- If workers bike or walk to work, they are paid by the mile.
- If they take the bus, LetterLogic funds their pass.
- If an employee wants to start a business that LetterLogic leaders believe in, the company will help fund it. ...
The value of these company policies, Deutschmann says, is LetterLogic’s growing revenues and customer satisfaction — its retention rate is 97 percent. ...
She also supports increasing the minimum wage. She points to the research on minimum wage workers, which shows that the majority are women, many of them single parents.
“It’s really damaging to the businesses,” Deutschmann said of low wages. “You’ve got a single mom who works all day long at a minimum wage job, comes home only to change her clothes to go to her second minimum wage job of the day" ...
If workers were paid a living wage, the single mom could focus on doing one job well and be there for her family, leaving the second job available for another worker. It’s a philosophy that Deutschmann said has benefited her company and she wants other business owners to know it can be done.
“We’re successful because of it, not in spite of it,” she said. ...
Copyright 2015 The Tennessean