James Archer

Why don't companies offer debt-related benefits for employees?

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 20:23:08 -0700

Larger companies typically offer a 401k or similar retirement benefits program, but (depending on the nature of the employee population), it seems to me that this might not always be the most useful benefit for an employee.

We’re all familiar with the “if you start saving X at age Y, you’ll be a millionaire by Z” formulas, but there’s something those formulas don’t address: debt.

Credit card debt. Auto debt. Student loan debt. All with minimum monthly payments, and most with high interest rates. For most of us, it doesn’t do much good to put $100 toward a retirement plan growing at 10% when we’ve got debts growing at 15%.

Instead of offering retirement plans, why don’t companies offer debt-related benefits to employees? Incentives, matching, etc., could give employees more significant financial benefits than a straight 401k, and addresses the major problem of productivity-sapping debt distraction.

Our culture, our human resources practices, our tax code, and our employee expectations are all set up around retirement planning. I don’t even know if it’s possible or feasible to offer debt benefits, but it’s a concept I’m very interested in exploring.

Saving the World through Business

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:37:21 -0700

Our tagline (“Forty is the marketing agency that’s going to save the world”) makes a bold claim, but it’s one that we’re serious about.

I genuinely admire the work that non-profit agencies do, but my experiences with them have often left me puzzled and disappointed. Too often, they’re slow, political, and inefficient, traits that get in the way of actually accomplishing their goals.

When you think about the organizations that have an impact on your daily life, the for-profits probably beat out the non-profits by a wide margin, both in quantity, quality, and depth of involvement. The high quality of life enjoyed in many countries around the world is typically driven by commerce rather than philanthropy.

That being the case, I’ve always felt that one could do more good in the world by building a successful and benevolent business than by trying to form a purely non-profit organization. The efficiency and self-sustaining nature of a business can make it a highly effective vehicle for doing good in the world.

My long-term goals for the business are audacious enough to be embarrassing to talk about, but here’s a peak at what we’re trying to do right now:

Make marketing noble again: Decades of sleazy ad agency antics have ruined what might otherwise be a grand pursuit: bringing great people and great companies together. We’ve been advised on several occasions that an idealistic company won’t cut it in this industry, but we’re going to continue to prove that myth wrong.

Be a company that people love to work for: People deserve the opportunity to love their careers, to be excited about work on Monday, and to be able to provide for their family while doing what they love. We want to build a company that provides those opportunities.

Turn Phoenix into a great city: We’re actively working on initiatives that will help transform Phoenix into a relevant, vibrant, and thriving metropolis. We’re not doing this ourselves, obviously, but we are certainly trying to be a significant contributor to the effort.

In addition to these efforts, we’re moving toward a point where we regularly participate in more traditional world-saving efforts such as sustainability, charitable donations, etc. In the meantime, we’re building a great business and putting real time and effort toward additional initiatives that we believe will make a difference in a lot of lives.

Pitch Perfect

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:33:15 -0700

The article Mad Men: Pitch Perfect on Design Observer struck me tonight, because it reflected something that I’ve been pondering for a while now:

Good designers are a dime a dozen, he said. Coming up with a great design solution is the easy part. The hard part, he said, is getting the client to accept the solution.

At Forty, we spend a lot of time analyzing our competition, and one of the quirky things we’ve noticed is that work quality is almost completely unrelated to success. That’s obviously frustrating to us (since we tend to be idealistic about our craft), but that’s the reality we’re up against.

So, we’re learning to move beyond merely doing great work to get to the point where we’re also selling the greatness of the work. It doesn’t do us any good to design a fantastic website or put together a brilliant branding strategy if the client doesn’t understand or appreciate what they’re getting.

It reminds me of the Wrecked Exotics phenomenon of naive rich guys horribly trashing beautiful vehicles them because they don’t understand the basic physics of the car they’ve just purchased. In the past, we’ve run into that same situation with our clients: build a great marketing solution and then wonder why they ignore half of it and wreck the other half.

In order for our clients to make the best use of the work we provide, they need to understand it. In order to help them understand it, we have to sell it to them. It’s a crazy, crowded, and chaotic world out there, and sometimes the good and noble truths need a little showmanship to help them get the attention they deserve.