Looking Back On 2015 With Justworks' Will Young

2015 has been a big year for Justworks (see CEO Isaac Oates’ recap here). We’ve grown our revenue sevenfold and our customer base by nearly the same. The Justworks team has grown from about 20 to 75+.

Our Customer Experience and Operations Team

The Justworks COPS team, or Customer Experience and Operations team, has played a big part in that success.

So we connected with Will Young, the head of that team through 2015, to look back on the year. 

What was the COPS team focused on at the beginning of 2015?

Personally, I was focused on surviving my last semester of grad school while working at Justworks part time. Alex Cyriac was hard at work as the one-man operations team. Marc Rosenberg was hard at work as the one-man CX team.

At the beginning of any year, operationally we're mostly focused on closing out the prior year. That means getting out 1099s, W-2s, etc.

Mallory Prahalis, our office manager, and Alex had just finished our move to our office on 19th St. in November. That office felt huge at the time. At 20ish employees, we had been bursting at the seams at our 17th St. office.

At 2015 closes, what is the COPS team focused on now?

At this point in the year, some things feel very similar while others are quite different. We've launched a new master policy with Aetna.

We have moved offices again because, at 65+, we were bursting at the seams of our 19th St. office. This new office feels huge.

We are still gearing up to send out 1099s and W-2s going into the new year.

The biggest difference now is scale. Instead of one-person teams, we're now split into groups with more specialization. Our new office can fit 150+ people. Our master health partnership is nationwide.

Our 2015 Achievements

What are three 2015 team achievements you're most proud of?

I'm going to do four. I couldn't narrow it down.

1. Getting a national master policy through our partnership with Aetna is a huge accomplishment. It was a combination of our board pushing us to think bigger, our product and sales team creating a really compelling growth story, and David Feinberg (our VP of Partnerships) relentlessly getting the deal over the finish line. Operationally, getting our sales team armed with the right materials and building an underwriting process for new customers was huge. And the team made a heroic effort to transition existing customers over. It was just a massive achievement for our company and part of the bedrock of our growth in 2016 and beyond.

2. Hiring. We have an amazing team, and 75% of folks weren't here at the start of the year. They are creative, dependable, and persistent. It's fun to come into work every day.

3. The new office. I knew it would be a lot of work to execute a move to a big space. But I didn't anticipate how big of a job it would be, how many hurdles there would be along the way. But now we have a beautiful, light-filled space with room to grow. It's really satisfying.

4. Customer retention. We take pride in our high NPS (Net Promoter Score) and our customers' positive experience with Justworks. We deal with really complicated things, but we work our hardest to deliver an experience that customers don't want to give up. And while there are exogenous factors around retention we can't control, so retention isn't 100%, it feels pretty darn close. We have an incredible product and our CX team does a really great job building relationships with our customers. People generally love us and that feels great.

What was something the team tested that had surprising results?

I've been pleasantly surprised at how successful our hiring referral program has been. We offered to throw a company party of the referrer's choosing every time a referral got hired. It's been hugely successful; referring employees have started pooling their party budgets in really creative ways. The company recently attended Sleep No More together, for instance.

Finding good people is hard (and can get expensive!). This program was good for the company in a lot of ways. I learned that good people know good people. Finding clever ways to access our team's professional networks can be an incredibly powerful recruiting tool.

Going into 2016, what is COPS focused on?

The bedrock of the team's work is in place. The bigger focus this year is scaling. Our teams will have to grow a lot. This will mean building better communication processes, keeping a keen eye on resource allocation, developing an effective and repeatable new hire onboarding program, and investing a lot of time in interviewing. We have a great base to work from.

What are your hiring goals for the team in 2016?

Hiring everywhere! CX reps, account managers, new account coordinators, benefits specialists, recruiting coordinators, operations analysts with specialties in payroll, HR, compliance and benefits offerings, and several more positions. All in we hope to add a couple dozen folks to the COPS team over 2016.