GuildQuality

Over the last few weeks, many conversations with our Guildmembers have started with a question: “How will your year wrap up?”

I’ve responded by sharing some highlights: 2011′s revenue and net income are both record highs; Guildmember satisfaction is strong and, as a result, our membership churn remains very low; and we added a full 33% more members in 2011 than we did in 2010. Despite the turmoil that’s plagued our market since late 2006, we seem to be firing on all cylinders. It feels good!

People generally react to this answer with something like, “That’s wonderful to hear. There are so many tough stories out there that it’s always encouraging to encounter businesses that are doing well.” And virtually everyone adds, “To what do you attribute it?” There’s no way to give a short answer to that question, so here’s my attempt at a long one.

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Yesterday, Fox News published a short story highlighting some of the unique aspects of building a software company in the South. The article featured comments from Pardot CEO David Cummings, bigWebApps CEO Patrick Clements, and me. I thought I’d take a moment to elaborate on a subtle point from the article, and what that means for our Guildmembers.

There’s a prevailing sense among Atlanta’s tech entrepreneurs that our businesses should earn a profit by creating value for clients. I suspect that this whacky notion is, at least in part, a product of the lack of a robust venture capital community in the South. By necessity, we have been forced to reject the notion that venture capital will play a roll in the early success of our business.

Around here, there are only a few ways to get your software company off the ground, and all of them require achieving positive net income as soon as possible. For software-as-a-service businesses like ours, net income requires recurring revenue. Recurring revenue requires an excellent offering and happy customers. And those require great people who are focused on creating something special. This chain creates a virtuous cycle that benefits everyone involved.

An interesting (and often unhealthy) dynamic emerges when one attempts to finance the growth of his or her business by some means other than profit. From whence comes the cash, goes the attention. This is the Silicon Valley paradigm, and under it, any person who might facilitate or profit from an investment or acquisition becomes the de facto customer. This is good news for lawyers, bankers, and pretty much anyone who makes a living by seeing businesses bought or sold. Unfortunately, this distraction draws the business’ attention away from the actual customers: you.

When a business focuses on something other than delivering value to actual customers, there are consequences. We’ve experienced what happens in our world of real estate and construction when, instead of focusing on creating livable homes and communities, we focused on facilitating the flip. Remember what happened when all the real estate brokers, appraisers, lenders, legislators, architects, remodelers, builders, and buyers all started thinking that homes were no longer something that you lived in, but instead they became something from which you could earn a fee for facilitating a transaction?

Because that pain is very fresh in our minds, we’re going to stay focused on generating profit by creating value for you — our Guildmembers. Y’all are the good folks who keep our lights on, and we’re grateful for your business!

This past year at GuildQuality has been fast paced and full of exciting changes. We introduced new product features, launched new partnerships, welcomed a fresh batch of wonderful employees…oh, and we moved to Midtown!

Whether you’ve been a member of GuildQuality for years, or you’ve just recently joined our community of quality, you will want to take a moment to familiarize yourself with our recently developed components built to make your life easier.

In November, GuildQuality optimized our reporting app for iPhones, Androids and Blackberries! Mobile devices make real-time delivery of our survey feedback even more useful to you. Login, Survey Response, and our Dashboard are easy to view via mobile. We’ve even optimized the actual survey form that your customers use to complete online surveys. Not only does this enable you to view feedback quicker, but it allows your customers to provide information more efficiently.

Speaking of feedback, have you opted in to GuildQuality reviews? GuildQuality reviews provide a wonderful opportunity to empower your customers to share more information about their experience with your company. Most of our Guildmembers leverage the customer feedback they receive through our new reviews feature to strengthen their brand. With the addition of GuildQuality Reviews, more robust, useful, informative commentary is also increasingly finding its way into search results. Prior to launching GuildQuality Reviews, we piloted the feature with a number of our early adopter members. Their most popular request was for us to allow them to add their own responses to reviews they receive, and now you can!

If you’ve been with GuildQuality since before September of this year, you can appreciate our GuildQuality dashboard redesign. Our goal with the new design was to enable you to do and see as much as possible from one location, minimizing your need to dive deeper into the account in order to see trends in performance. For your convenience we’ve added a Scorecard right on the dash, Recent Responses are now vertically oriented, and you are able to directly publish comments.

In addition to new product features, 2011 brought about a partnership with Kohler. GuildQuality is now the preferred provider of customer satisfaction surveying for members of Kohler’s Leading Edge Program.

We welcome a new partner and four more talented folks to the GuildQuality team this year, three sales associates, Andy Cesario, Mike Sveda and Rebekah Taylor, along with our new Marketing Communications Manager, Erica England.

This is just a glimpse of all that we’ve accomplished this year at GuildQuality. We were extremely fortunate to have experienced another successful year working with top building and remodeling professionals who value customer satisfaction as much as we do. Thank you to all of our fantastic members!

P.S. If you haven’t visited our new office, pop over to the big city in 2012 and come see us in the heart of Midtown Atlanta.

Mark Newman of Remodeling just published an excellent piece describing some best practices from nine winners of Remodeling and Replacement’s Service Excellence Award (powered by GuildQuality).

A few weeks ago, we hosted a luncheon for our Atlanta-area Guildmembers. More than two dozen members turned out. Our entire team was there (including my wife, but not including Luna), and every one of us had the opportunity to have at least a few meaningful discussions with every person that came.

What fun it was to have so many Guildmembers in one place! And what a useful reminder about how much more you can learn from someone when you’re face-to-face versus over the phone or email (or even Twitter). Thank you to all that came — for your business and your generous insights.

While we completely forgot to take some pictures, we did have the presence of mind to record some video. After being plied with iced-tea and some fine southern cooking, five of our members were feeling good enough to subject themselves to Friendly Human‘s camera. Here’s what our members had to say in response to the question, “Why did you join GuildQuality.”

David Sturm of Attention to Detail Home Remodeling in Roswell, GA shares why his company is a GuildQuality member.

Wright Marshall of Revival Construction shares what it’s like to work with GuildQuality. His favorite thing: He can count on GuildQuality and never has to worry about it.

John Gwaltney of Nehemiah ReConstruction shares why he’s a member of our community of quality, the affordability of our service, and reasons why business owners should focus on continuous improvement.

Dale Contant of Atlanta Design Build shares the value of getting his customer feedback from an objective third party.

“Always question the status quo of your business.” Archie Deese of The Paint Doctor

Have you ever wondered how GuildQuality got started? Here is a brief version of the story:

We have a couple tiny tweaks to make to our new GuildQuality overview video, but I couldn’t wait any longer and had to get it out there in the wild. Many thanks to Daniel at Friendly Human for the excellent production!

Another video from our team, this time from Laura Summerlin, our director of member services. People join GuildQuality expecting to receive real-time customer feedback and powerful performance reporting. But what surprises new members the most about GuildQuality? It’s all the additional things they can do with their membership.

Last week, the excellent folks at Friendly Human visited GQHQ and filmed our team sharing their thoughts about GuildQuality. We’ll soon have a great new video that helps Guildmembers understand what we’re all about and who we are. Last night, they forwarded me one of the snippets that’s going into the final product.

Herein, Jerrod shares the major reasons why companies that care about their clients and the quality of service they provide sign up for GuildQuality’s trial.

Late this evening, we’ll update our member profile pages with a new design. A significant part of this redesign involves the introduction of GuildQuality Reviews. Once our redesign goes live, your customers will be able to provide a public review of your company along with their survey response.

We’ve been piloting GuildQuality reviews with our own member surveying since late November, and in the last couple weeks we expanded our pilot program to include about 50 Guildmembers. From the surveying we’ve done with our Guildmembers during this pilot period, we’ve found that, when asked, roughly a third of survey respondents provide a review along with their survey response.

Why are we introducing GuildQuality Reviews? There are a number of reasons we’re introducing reviews. The main reason is that, for the members who want to leverage their customer feedback to strengthen their brand, our survey process presents a great opportunity to let customers share more (and more useful information) than they’re presently able to. Their published comments are already finding their way into consumer rating services like Google Places, and with the addition of GuildQuality Reviews, more robust, useful, informative commentary will make its way throughout the web.

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