Connecting the Team, Finessing our Finance Model
People Ops Report July 2016
The Buffer team has changed a lot in the last few months, and our People Operations team is focusing on helping the team grow through creating new guidelines and recommendations and updating the ones we already have.
Our People Ops team covers many roles to foster the daily operations within the company. This includes finance, hiring, internal processes, benefits and more!
Important numbers to note:
- Net revenue: $875k
- MRR: $926k
- ARR: $11.1m
- Expenses: $814k
- Burn rate: $67k profit
Initiatives shipped in July
- Expenses – An updated guide to expenses at Buffer
- Discourse organization – Sorting and “fixing” Discourse (our internal forum) as we know it
- HR – Launching and maintaining OfficeVibe to help get team input (Read more about OfficeVibe here!)
- Providers – Ongoing chats with all providers (100+) to assess costs
Initiatives started in July
- Compliance – Working with our law firm to update our operations
- Stock options update – Crafting a new formula to grant new stock options
- Stock options management – Setting up eShares, a SaaS tool for options
- Role reflections program – Creating a more structured approach to one-on-ones
Initiatives being reviewed by our leadership team
- Vacation Policy – Adapting our “unlimited vacation” model to Buffer in 2016
- Volunteering Policy – Encouraging team members to volunteer, one day/quarter
- Family leave – Encouraging caregivers to disconnect to focus on family
We wish to give team member the best experience we can, and live up to our values throughout the process. We are also aware that most company who inspire us in terms of operations often are well-established and in a different financial situation than we are.
So, we’re often pondering how to give team members a great experience while being mindful of costs and expenses. This helps us to take a nimble, and lean approach to most topic. It’s also assisting us think through how those initiative would scale at Buffer, if we were to be 150 or 200 teammates.
Finance: Honing our T4M model
Finance has been on our minds a lot, as we recently had to make tough decisions related to our cash-flow crisis. We shared our most recent numbers on this blog post.
I’ve been focusing on honing our T4M Model, designed to help us with cash management. We’re currently setting up goals and ratios in terms of what a healthy bank balance looks like, and are reviewing it weekly with our cofounders, Joel and Leo.
This T4M Model is based on all costs we have at Buffer, our largest expenses being salaries, benefits and software subscriptions – we’ve been more diligent about tracking all three. To help with transparency, we’ve created a finance changelog documenting all changes we make to our models.
Also, we’ve been looking for our next finance director and have started conducting interviews.
Our team is also in charge of running international payroll, expenses and updating our salary formula.
Team: Hiring for 3 roles
- A new mobile developer will join us from Brighton, UK
- A new engineer will join us from Chicago, MI, USA
- We’re currently hiring for 3 positions
- We’re conducting interviews for Finance Director & Product Director positions
We’re excited for all that’s ahead for the Buffer team and ways we can help the team operate more easily!
Over to you
Does anything in this report jump out at you? Is there anything else we can cover here about our internal people operations? We’re eager to hear your thoughts!
Check out more of our July 2016 monthly reports: