One Year at BookFool.com
Hold on to your hats … It’s another self-indulgent post about how great we are! But seriously, today is my 1-year anniversary with BookFool.com and I’m feeling introspective.
When I joined, we quickly went from 4 buyback locations to 10; then Lou came on board and we served 20 schools. This semester, who knows? It’s a great-looking growth curve when you plot it on a graph, but we’re more interested in being Great than Big.
Culturally, this is a unique place to work, which is why we’re working hard to ensure the culture remains Foolish as we grow. One way to reinforce a company’s culture is through smart hiring. HR experts speak of the importance of hiring those who fit your organization’s culture. I think this is especially important for us.
We’re a relatively flat company without much bureaucracy. We have the kind of culture that rewards individualism and initiative, which makes BookFool.com the kind of place where you can write your own story. It also means we want creative innovators in every position. An innovative culture that includes every employee is rare in business — despite the incessant droning about Innovation in the business blogosphere — but we’re committed to finding ways to use each employee’s hidden talents to make us great.
Mission
We do a lot of fun stuff like taking off work to hike, writing on the bathroom walls, and buying gigantic trucks and painting them bright blue, but my favorite thing about working at BookFool.com — the reason I wake up and check my work email even before I eat breakfast — is our sense of mission.
We were all students once and got ripped off during buyback. We want to change this dynamic, shifting the balance of power from the big corporations to the individual students, and the buybacks are just one way we’re doing so. This mission is what drives us to innovate and work really, really hard.
I guess that’s enough bloviating for one post. Bottom line: This has been a fantastic first year for me, but I’m really looking forward to year two. We’re continuing to build out the team and perfect the systems, all while keeping it Foolish. Thanks for a great year!
