They say money can’t buy love, but it comes pretty close at Irvine’s Trace3 Inc.
Trace3 pays salespeople twice the going rate, inspires generosity among workers by allowing them to give bonuses to each other and spreads the wealth via profit sharing.
“Our focus is to be very generous with our employees so they can have the time to do things that they love,” said founder and Chief Executive Hayes Drumwright. “When they can do that they make better decisions at work.”
All of it adds up to a fast-growing business and some extremely dedicated employees.
Trace3 ranked No. 1 in the medium company category—50 to 249 employees—in the Business Journal’s second annual Best Places to Work list.
The company is what’s known in the information technology industry as a value-added reseller. It resells storage, networking and telecommunication gear from big companies and helps install, monitor and troubleshoot for customers.
From 2006 to 2008, Trace3’s sales grew nearly five-fold to $100 million. It managed to eke out a 10% sales gain during the downturn in 2009 to $110 million.
This year it’s on track to see 50% revenue growth to about $165 million.
Trace3 offers compensation at what it says is the upper end of the scale.
Drumwright plucks high-performing salespeople from big storage gear makers, such as EMC Corp., and offers them one-better than their current employers.
“We would find massive overachievers who had capped their compensation plans and we would hire them,” he said.
Drumwright does the same for Trace3’s engineers, who do the “in-the-trenches” work for customers.
“We hire our engineers mostly from the IT departments of Fortune 500 companies,” he said.
Customers include Mercury Insurance, part of Mercury General Corp., MGM Resorts International’s MGM Grand Hotel, Mazda Motor Corp. and Sony Corp., among others.
Bonuses
Employees feel invested through a company perk called “spiffing,” where any worker can give a slice of their pay to any other coworker.
“It encourages everyone to do the right thing,” Drumwright said. “I think that’s why people really like working here. They really feel vested in what’s going on.”
Some employees will spiff a co-worker to say thank you for working extra hard on a deal. Others prefer to give anonymously.
“A lot of the sales reps will spiff their inside salespeople or the operations department, just to say thank you’ for what they do” said Becky Helton, purchasing manager. “It doesn’t just happen once or twice a year—it happens often.”
Helton, who’s worked her way up at Trace3 during the past five years from office manager to purchasing coordinator for Southern California, said spiffing inspires loyalty.
When word got out that she was looking to buy her first home, several employees spiffed her thousands of dollars to help her get a down payment.
“I was astounded,” Helton said. “They genuinely care about you and your family.”
Trace3 also is big on giving to charities. It’s given more than $100,000 to Chino’s Hillview Acres Children’s Home, autism nonprofits Talk About Curing Autism and Hope 4 Hanna and Santa Ana’s Orange-wood Children’s Foundation, among others.
Trace3 matches em-ployee donations to charities and has sponsored trips to do relief work.
Drumwright, 38, started Trace3 with co-founders Dave Linder and Bret MacInnes in 2002.
“When you have this kind of business, your only intrinsic value is our people,” Drum-wright said. “That’s because in a lot of ways we are considered middlemen.”
His theories were tested in 2009, when technology spending by corporations fell off a cliff.
In early 2009, Drumwright asked each employee to take a 20% pay cut.
“It wasn’t because we were in a desperate situation,” he said. “I wanted to be safe, because, in my opinion, their jobs are my responsibility. We want to keep good people, period.”
Every worker took the cut—and some volunteered to take 30% or 35% cuts, Drumwright said.
He restored full pay in September.
“Not a single person left,” Drumwright said. “The morale of this company, at this point, after making it through that really difficult period, is through the roof. It is a total joy to come in to work here.”
