Interview with Jeljer & Lukas from Reloadify
Jeljer te Wies and Lukas Hietkamp are the founders and managing directors of Reloadify, based in Groningen. They cultivate a remarkable corporate culture. Read about their company, its foundation, working conditions and motivation in this interview with Michaela Rau from Hellmund. Die Personalberater.
“We want to be a company that people will still want to work for in the next 30 years”
Hello Jeljer and Lukas! Who is Reloadify and what are the roots of your company?
Lukas: I was a freelance online marketing consultant when I met Jeljer in Groningen in 2015. He was working as a freelance developer at the time and I presented him with my idea for a simple search engine optimisation software. We started working on it and it very quickly became a hit for e-commerce shops worldwide. Two or three years later, around 1,000 shops were already using our product. However, the product was far too cheap. In those three years, we gained a lot of experience in the e-commerce world and therefore saw an opportunity for a new e-commerce software. With our software, we provide e-commerce providers and agencies with extensive data about their customers. We launched in May 2019. Today, 15 people (12 internal, 3 external) work for us, twice as many as at the start. We are profitable right from the start. That’s quite an achievement for a start-up that has developed under its own steam and with its own capital. We are very proud of that.
What do companies need your services for?
Lukas: 95% of companies don’t realise the wealth of customer data they have at their fingertips. With our software solution, we make it easy for companies to utilise the available data, e.g. for customer contact. For example, if the average order value per customer is low, our software can help generate more sales along the customer journey. Our software has a lot to offer: reaching customers at the right contact points, maintaining your own fanbase, increasing sales with the right features and automating customer communication in a meaningful way. Companies and marketing agencies are still in the early stages of utilising this data. We are therefore far ahead with our product. And we realise that the knowledge of online agencies is mediocre at best. There is a great need for advice here. We have developed masterclass videos and an academy for this purpose.
Who works in your company?
Lukas: We started investing in experienced people with extensive knowledge of email marketing very early on. They are experts. They can answer customers’ questions immediately and provide comprehensive advice. We get very good feedback for this, because our customers talk to experts who understand their problem. It is also not easy for us to find experienced and well-trained people. We have therefore decided to train more people. Our employees build up extensive knowledge during their induction training.
Jeljer: I would say that we are very selective when choosing our employees.
Lukas: We are not a consulting company that gets paid per hour. We rent our software to customers. That’s why we keep our organisation as lean as possible. We’d rather invest in one really good customer support expert than two mediocre employees. We don’t take the decision to hire lightly. I would say that we are actually quite strict because we have high quality standards. But anyone who joins us will find good working conditions in which to develop.
So good staff development is the secret of your success?
Lukas: We try to minimise stress as much as possible for our employees. We can decide for ourselves at what pace our company grows. The company belongs to us. There is no investor setting targets and pace. That’s why we can grow healthily, take our time to hire people and train them with us. If we grew faster, we would need more staff, which would create more stress for everyone and more mistakes would happen. This does not have a positive impact on customer satisfaction. Our aim is to create a company that we all want to still be working for in the next 30 years. That is our philosophy. We have introduced working days from 9am to 5pm. Our employees do not work overtime. There is an unlimited number of paid holidays and a good pension scheme. We pay competitive salaries and offer other benefits.
What does unlimited holiday mean?
Lukas: We don’t want our employees to burn out at some point. I’d rather see someone take another week’s holiday and recover, even if they’ve already been on holiday. Imagine you’ve had a difficult year, there has been a death in your family or something else requires you to take time off. Or if you want to go backpacking for six months. We have to talk about things like that, because it simply has to be possible.
Jeljer: Our employees are very interested in moving the company forward. They are very committed. So there are times when we have to say: You need to take a break now.
Lukas: It’s a matter of trust. Can we trust people to make their own decisions and take responsibility for their work?
Jeljer: And we can. We are also not typical “bosses”. We don’t hold many meetings, we don’t set deadlines. We rely on everyone taking responsibility, which is why we take such a close look at who we hire.
We are not typical “bosses”. We believe that everyone should take responsibility, which is why we take such a close look at who we hire.
Jeljer te Wies, CTO
What do you look for in particular when hiring?
Lukas: If we can have a beer with someone after work. (laughs) What we’re not looking for are people who want to make a career at any cost.
Jeljer: It depends. Developers need different social skills than someone in marketing. We need team players, not alpha males.
Lukas: And work-life balance is important. We’re not good as a company if everyone is stressed.
Lukas says goodbye at this point in the interview, saying he has to go, he has “Daddy Day” today.
How do you work together and how do you organise yourselves at Reloadify?
Jeljer: Our offices have an open-plan layout. There is one large room where we all work. So if everyone walked around the room and talked to each other, a lot of people would be disturbed in their work flow. That’s why we have discussion times and non-discussion times. Between 9 and 10 o’clock you can talk about the day or the weekend. But between 10 a.m. and noon is quiet time, from noon to 1 p.m. we eat together and from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. is quiet time again. It’s not that talking is forbidden during this time. But you should be considerate of other colleagues. The most important thing is to concentrate, i.e. to be able to think for a few hours and get your work done. Many employees work from home. Personally, I like being in the office, but e.g. one of our colleagues lives in The Hague. We pay for the hotel when he comes to the office every two weeks for a day. If you want, you can say in the morning: I’m going to work from home today. And then that’s fine.
How do you get the team back together?
Jeljer: We have found that this happens automatically. We have a development team that meets once a week for about 10-15 minutes. That’s the only meeting we have during the week. There are no others. We use asynchronous communication: anyone who has a question asks it via Slack.
So the developers work in a self-organised way?
Jeljer: They have a six-week cycle and no deadlines. Our requirement is that it has to be done well, not quickly. If the developers finish their work earlier, they can do what they want. And very often they find things that need to be done anyway.
What would you say to companies that have doubts about this form of flexible working and open culture?
Jeljer: As a manager, you quickly start to doubt people. Are they really working? This is often based on feelings, but not on facts. So managers do check ups to make themselves feel good: daily meetings, meeting deadlines and so on. But if you give your employees the freedom, they will find their way. It’s not easy to allow that. If you don’t see your employees for 3 to 4 days, you start to worry. You start asking them via chat: “Hey, how are you?” That doesn’t help and it’s not necessary. My advice? Relax!
How is the feedback from your team?
Jeljer: We have quarterly 1:1 meetings with a structured list of questions and receive very positive feedback. We want everyone to be happy. If they are happy, they enjoy their work. And if they like their work, they’ll stay with us.
The interview with Lukas and Jeljer was conducted by Michaela Rau.
07.02.2024 / Michaela Rau
More about Hellmund. The personnel consultants
Hellmund. Die Personalberater. is an owner-managed recruitment consultancy based in Potsdam. We specialise in placing qualified personnel for testing service providers (TIC sector) as well as for quality and sustainability functions in companies.
