THE FUTURE OF WORK
The goal was to design a company for entrepreneurs. A platform for individuals who were seeking to go out on their own and start their own company. Entrepreneurs who had a vision of a better way to work, and a better way to create value for their clients.
However, starting your own business is hard. Many smart people are swayed by the idea of tedious operational challenges or even business development. In addition, scaling a company to meet today’s challenges requires a full team of smart and talented people to solve them.
We knew that if we could pool these smart entrepreneurs into a collective, we could create a series of shared services around them to facilitate collaboration, subsidized by the entrepreneurs themselves and not the clients. A completely flat and decentralized organization, whose sole purpose is to help smart people find great clients to work with. All profits and savings get passed along to the clients and the people doing the work.
In the past six years, our little utopian idea has grown beyond our wildest expectations. Today Chameleon Collective has over 100 Chameleons with revenues of over $20M annually.
In the end, we discovered that by building the place we always wanted to work we attracted like-minded, smart, and driven people which is actually what our clients are always seeking.
We are a 100% virtual organization with no offices. This allows us to operate without borders. With no office distractions and greater autonomy, remote workers have the freedom to get more done. Despite the distance, remote workers make the best teammates. This is because distance demands more communication.
More than half of workers felt they could be more productive at home.
Remote workers feel more connected through the use of video conference.
2/3 of managers agreed that remote workers are overall more productive.
Remote workers feel more connected through the use of video conference.
Without managers and supervisors to “promote” them, our team staffs and bills themselves according to their experience and the clients willingness to see value. This keeps Chameleons growing at a pace commensurate with their actual market value and at the velocity they wish to commit to.
Chameleons opt-in to all projects and are never ”assigned” to something they don’t want to work on. Our goal is to make a genuine connection between talent and client to help produce excitement and motivation on both sides.
One would think that something like culture would suffer in a virtual organization. However Chameleon’s water-cooler is Slack and there is no shortage of banter. We maintain monthly video conferences and bi-annual in person town halls where we all get together to share, learn and optimize our company.
Without the layers of oversight Chameleons get to create genuine relationships with clients that last for years. This helps the overall quality and efficiency of the relationship, which only improves with time.
