“The point of the organization is to enhance the lives of the people who are part of it.”
--Ari Weinzweig
Highline is a bit different from traditional consulting companies in terms of, well, everything - how we’re structured, how we compensate, and what we believe. That’s not to say that we’re “right” and everyone else is “wrong” - it’s all about trade-offs. At Highline, we value choice, autonomy, and freedom, but that can come at the expense of some other “good” things - like predictability, consistency, and structure. Plotting Highline versus other “gigs”, it might look something like this:
As you read on, it’ll become more clear why we put Highline where it is on the line above. And again, neither left, right, or center is “best” - it’s all about a person's preferences, circumstances, and goals.
The Premise
To start, it’ll be helpful to begin with the basic premise of our company, which is this:
Reward the person doing the work
For good or bad, most consulting companies run off the “billable hour” - revenue is generated by clients who pay for hours worked by consultants. And since it is the company who handles the terms, contracts, and payments, it’s the company that gets to decide how to divvy things up. Typically, the split looks something like this:
For every hour billed, consultants take about 50% of their hourly rates in terms of salary, bonuses, and benefits, and the money remaining is used by the company for a variety of things, like supporting back office functions (sales, marketing, recruiting, accounting, etc.), providing tools and office space, and paying out bonuses to investors and executives. Note that this split can vary depending on a consultant’s seniority, the domain or size of the company, and other factors. And again, there is nothing inherently “bad” about this model. Our goal with Highline though is to show that while the traditional model does have a proven track record, it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way.
As an alternative, Highline’s endeavors to have the picture look more like this:
First, we aim for our consultants to make a much larger share of their bill rate (closer to 80%, plus or minus), and also for them to make a larger absolute value than they would make at a more traditional consulting company. This is based on our belief that if you’re the one out there on the front lines working with clients, then it’s you who should take home the majority of what the client is paying for your hour. Secondly, as a competitive advantage, we try to keep our hourly rates less than other companies in our space (by about 20%, plus or minus). Putting these two things together - paying a bit more (and therefore attracting and retaining great people) and charging a bit less - we hope it’ll make for a compelling case for clients to consider and continue to work with us. And this has been the case so far.
Of course, you probably realized that there’s an obvious consequence to this - there's less money left over for the company itself to run the business. This is real. And so we cut out the frills, eliminate the bureaucracy, and run as lean as we can. In practice, this means that many traditional business functions are completely absent at Highline (like sales or marketing), and other back-office functions are handled by consultants themselves (as "extracurricular roles", which are compensated).
This model - pay more, charge less, and run lean - as basic as it is (i.e. “duh”), so far has yielded some great results. Over the past few years, we’ve assembled an amazing group of individuals (over 20 at the moment), built a fun and healthy culture, and delivered quality software to our clients which in turn helps their businesses thrive. So we’re off to a good start in proving that our Premise is viable. But there’s more to what we’re doing than just this.
Values
“The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”
-– Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Building off our core premise, we’ve begun to put shape to a few core values. These are things that not only make us successful in what we do, but just as importantly help us achieve balance and meaning in our lives.
1. Focus on the Work
First and foremost, we are people who believe in the work. We are builders, and creators, and tamers of complexity. Our focus is not on winning deals, growing accounts, or increasing margins. Our goal is to build quality software. That’s it. We believe the rest will sort itself out.
In practice, this value manifests itself in a couple of ways. First, as mentioned above, our goal is to reward the person doing the work, and so we aim to give consultants a larger share of their bill rate than they would likely get at other companies. Going further, at a cultural level, we consider the “heroes” of our organization to be the consultants grinding it out in the trenches for our clients, and not the sales people signing contracts, the strategists crafting new elevator pitches, or the execs twiddling with spreadsheets. Our focus is building great software, whether that means writing robust code, designing delightful experiences, or managing teams to successful outcomes. This is the soul of what we do.
Second, Focusing on the Work means being pragmatic and solution-oriented. We know the process of building software is inherently complex, where constraints are few, expectations are high, and solution spaces are limitless and malleable. Given this, we expect frustration and even thrive in it (on our best days, at least). Rather than getting tangled in the problems, tensions, and the ever-present risks, we calmly and resolutely focus on the work, and find our way to a workable solution.
2. Keep it Simple, Streamlined, and Flat
As mentioned in the Premise, giving consultants the lion’s share of their billable hour means that there’s less leftover to run the business. For Highline to be successful then we must keep processes, organizational structures, and policies as simple as possible. We literally cannot afford bloat. (Also, we hate it).
In practical terms, this means that there are no back-office positions, and basically no hierarchy at Highline. Everyone is a Consultant. Some consultants have more experience than others, and can therefore command higher bill rates (and compensation) or more senior roles on a given project. And some consultants may even take on “extracurricular roles” which give them responsibilities (and compensation) for helping with operations. At the end of the day though, within Highline, we are all peers.
It’s important to note that to function effectively without hierarchy, we must rely on both less structured lines and forms of communication and collaboration, and also on the assertiveness of individuals to navigate our network to get what they need. This means that we drop 1-1 meetings on each others’ calendars, initiate impromptu working sessions at coffee shops (or breweries!), and send important and unimportant (memes!) information over Slack to keep eachother in the loop. Rather than a command-and-control organization, we are more like a decentralized bee colony, each individual focused on their task, heeding common rules and norms, minding others, and getting work done.
3. Listen and Be Humble
We are not the consultants who label themselves as “thought leaders”, who push the latest trendy processes or technologies, or who spend meetings talking about ourselves and our methods. Quite the opposite. We are listeners and learners. We have confidence in our experience and abilities, yes, but that confidence is accompanied by a humility in knowing that the best solutions are a composite of ideas, suggestions, and compromises from all stakeholders. In other words, there is wisdom in the crowd, and we stay open and attuned to it.
On projects, we start by asking questions. Lots of them. Our aim is to understand the context and contours of the problem space as much as possible before we break ground. What we know is that it’s not just about building software right, but about building the right software, and to do that requires listening. As we do inject our expertise and vision into our projects, we do so without being wedded to our own solutions. Software development is about trade-offs, and our goal is to present options with pros and cons, and help navigate and execute toward the best path.
4. Choose Quality, Lifestyle, and Balance
Finally, we are human beings. We love what we do, but we also have lives outside of work - family, friends, hobbies, and commitments. And so we strive to keep it all in balance for the sake of our happiness (and sanity). As a natural and fortuitous consequence, the balance and calm we carve out for ourselves also benefits us in our work. Rather than being frazzled and time-constrained, we have space to be thoughtful, creative, and productive for our clients.
Further, in support of balance, we try not to overextend. This goes for us as individuals and as well as for Highline as a company. As consultants, we take on only as much as they choose - whether that means 20, 30, or 40 hours a week - and step away for vacation and time off as much as we’d like. (This comes with a trade-off for earning potential, but it is our choice.) As an organization, we don’t take on projects for the sake of “growing the business”. If we believe we have the skills and capacity to succeed on a project, we will. If not, we’ll pass. We don’t chase growth for its own sake or for the sake of profit, but we do consider and accept it if it makes our collective group more sustainable or gives us more choice.
Conclusion
I am really proud of what we've built at Highline over the past 6 years. It's not perfect, but we try to take a growth mindset on our journey - accepting that we're not going to get it all right from the start, but learning from our mistakes and incrementally making things better.
Happy to hear your thoughts, or if you'd like to talk about software we could build for you, please reach out! We'd love to help if we can.
