6mo
Thank you for your contributions to Affinity. Also, thank you for sharing your feedback through Glassdoor.
Affinity has changed over the past year. Those changes have enabled us to deliver greater value to our customers, growth for our teammates and financial performance for Affinity. As you know from your time here, we seek to separate “facts” from “stories” (i.e., interpretation of facts). Here are a few facts that apply to your comments and to the goals we set for ourselves.
Customers: Customer delight has increased. Customer NPS is up more than 20 points over the last 6-mo. Qualitative feedback from customers is similarly improved citing faster product velocity, compelling product vision (as shared at our annual customer conference, “Campfire”) and quality engagement from our CSMs.
Team: Employee NPS has increased across all teams. Commonly cited drivers for that improvement include rolling out and practicing our updated values (eNPs = 47), excitement regarding the current product vision/roadmap and Affinity’s financial success (see below).
Average compensation has been recently benchmarked by an external consultancy well above the 50th percentile. We will be sharing the results of the benchmarking and our updated compensation philosophy with the entire company.
With respect to Affinity’s “time off” policies, teammates have substantial flexibility in the PTO that they take. That said, we have asked managers to have conversations with team members taking significantly more than our 15-20 day annual guideline to ensure that their teammates are still supported (i.e.coverage) – no hard caps, just ensuring requests are reasonable for the team. We will recommunicate this policy to the company. Thanks for your comment on that topic.
In sum, our team is our most important asset. Our Exec team invests a disproportionate amount of its time focused on building, retaining and enabling high-performing teammates. Any performance management is engaged with that intent. When someone does leave the company, I meet with that person personally to thank them for their contributions, offer support in their transition and ask for any feedback that can help me to help Affinity. Great leaders balance accountability with empathy. We seek to demonstrate both.
Financial performance: Revenue growth has increased while doing so with greater efficiency. Affinity is now a cash flow positive company.
The effective balance of high-growth, profitability, customer delight and teammate investment is, indeed, a challenging one to maintain. Our intent is to do so while creating a career-defining environment for our teammates. In fact, despite our commitment to being a cash producing, profitable business, we are opening offices (“hubs”) in multiple locations through the US and Europe while also funding in-person events for teammates to build relationships and trust.
Thank you again for your contributions to Affinity.
Respectfully,
Ken Fine, CEO
