CallRail Bullets to Boomtown by Rallying Culture

CallRail Company Culture

It’s a challenge to strike the right balance between fun and productivity, when it comes to company culture. Nerf guns are often thought as the symbol that a company is fun, but for CallRail, a call tracking software company, it goes beyond that. Ranked Top 5 Best Place to Work in 2015, CallRail wants to optimize employees’ lives as well as the companies it serves.

In just a few months, the company has added nearly 40 employees to their roster and receive about 2,000 leads a month — a 300% increase from last year. Even with this impressive growth, CallRail continues to host quarterly field trips, weekly meetups and happy hour on Thursdays for the employees to mingle and get to know each other. It’s all based on a results-only culture and this is their reward.

“They know each other socially, and I do think that it helps them work together better,” says Lance Weatherby, VP of Sales and Marketing at CallRail.

Founded in 2011, the concept was inspired by co-founder Andy Powell‘s BMW repair shop directory and the need to show his customers that his directory drove the call to them. Now, CallRail is helping marketers in more than 35,000 businesses  understand what campaigns make their phones ring, and what of those phone callers convert into customers.

Weatherby talks to Hypepotamus about what makes CallRail successful, maintaining company values, and what’s next for them.

Meeting and Mario-11

Where are you in terms of funding?

We raised 1.9 million in series A funding in early winter of 2015 and we haven’t raised any money since. We have more money in the bank now than when we raised the money, so we’re cash-flow positive.

What’s your pitch? 

What CallRail does is help you to understand which marketing campaigns are driving phone calls, and how those calls convert. This is going to allow you to do one or two things. First, it will allow you to understand which campaigns are driving calls, so you can invest more into those campaigns. Second, it will help you understand which campaigns aren’t resulting in phone calls, so you can save time, money, and be more efficient, and cut that campaign out of your budget.

CallRail has the most intuitive software on the market in comparison to our competitors. It’s super easy to use. We have the largest amount of installs of our software out of any company in our space. This is all backed by our really great customer service– that’s why we’re the leader in call analytics customer satisfaction.

CallRail is a self-service application. You go to our website, sign up for a free trial, and can try it for free for two weeks without inputting your credit card to actually see how it works for you.

CallRail is growing like crazy. How is the company staying true to the values that it started with?

It’s challenging. Just to give you an idea of our growth, we doubled in 2013, we doubled in 2014, we doubled in 2015, and our plan is to double again in 2016… That’s revenue. We’re growing like crazy. I was the 17th employee, and I started in April of 2015. There are 55 employees now, and we keep growing. We’re going to have 100 people here before too long. CallRail is very values-based, and we really try to stay close to that. We’re going to have to keep our eye on the ball.

What would say are those values that you guys want to stay close to?

I think it can be summed up in a single sentence: We try to optimize for happiness. We’re a results-only work environment. You’re able to work from wherever you want to work, whenever you want to work, as long as you do thing things you’re supposed to be doing to get your job done. The office is full of people, but only half of them are here today. The other half are working some place else. We really value honesty and openness, and we try to be that way with our customers.

It’s easy to keep values in place when it’s 20 people, because your 20 people are sitting in a room together. It’s a lot more challenging when there’s 100 people. It’s harder to get everybody together, so we’re going to have to do a couple of things.We’re going to have to say the same things over and over again so that people remember them. There are certain things we’re required to do as we grow. For example, when we passed 50 employees, we had to create a company handbook. It’s all a matter of doing the things you need to do within your growth while still keeping the CallRail flavor.

CallRail-space2How does Atlanta weave into your story?

I think CallRail’s another example that you can build a successful technology company here in Atlanta. There are smart, talented people, and if you find a product that people want — you can build a good company here.

Atlanta has a lot of really smart people, and a lot of universities that graduated a lot of people. There’s a pretty good base of technology companies here in Atlanta, too, where people can go, increase their skillset, and then join a small company where they can put their new skills to use.

Headshot-125What’s next for CallRail this year?

We have a goal to double our revenue, and I do believe we’re going to achieve that. We also want to get much better at letting people know about CallRail. We have really great inbound marketing, but we think we can make it even better. We’re focusing on growing our engineering team without breaking it. I also think that what growth does for a lot of employees is create opportunities for them. If we’re going from 55 to 100 people, that’s 45 more employees, and we only have 8 managers here. We’re going to see more promotions across the board.