97th Floor was recently ranked on Entrepreneur's Top Company Cultures list, a comprehensive ranking of U.S.-based businesses exhibiting high-performance cultures created in partnership with culture management software and service provider CultureIQ®. The Top Company Cultures list has placed 97th Floor as the 26th in the Small Company category. 97th Floor is recognized for creating an exceptional culture that drives employee engagement, exceeds employee expectations and directly impacts company success.
CEO Chris Bennett says, “Company culture is our top priority and we find investing in our employees is the best application of our resources. Strong culture not only attracts the best candidates but encourages and entices the best work.”
"Great company cultures don’t happen on their own. They’re the result of great leadership, and a conscious effort to make everyone on a team feel engaged and important,” says Jason Feifer, editor in chief of Entrepreneur. “The honorees on our 2017 list are proof that strong cultures make even stronger companies. Entrepreneurs at all levels can draw inspiration from them.”
The full list, presenting a total of 153 companies categorized as small, medium-sized or large companies—with 25-49 employees, 50-99 employees and more than 100 employees respectively— is available on Entrepreneur.com. Core insights, behaviors and attributes that have helped to shape the high-performing cultures presented by the top companies are shared alongside practices to help other companies develop their own workplace environments.
"A high-performance culture leads not only to employee engagement but also to measurable business results," says Greg Besner, founder and CEO of CultureIQ. “These organizations show us that great companies start with great culture.”
The rankings for all companies were determined using CultureIQ's methodology for measuring high-performance cultures. Employees at each company received a survey of multiple-choice questions and the answers were used to assess a company's strength across 10 core components of culture–collaboration, innovation and communication to name a few. The companies with the highest scores became the Top Company Culture list in ranking order. To be considered for the ranking, a company must have at least 25 employees, have been founded before Jan. 1, 2015 and be headquartered in the U.S.
To view 97th Floor in the full ranking, visit entm.ag/TopCultures
97th Floor was announced in the 2016 fastest growing company in Utah by MountainWest Capital Network (MWCN) (www.mwcn.org) at the 22nd annual Utah 100 Awards Program Tuesday. The annual program recognizes the 100 fastest growing Utah companies, the Top Revenue Growth companies, and the “Emerging Elite” companies.
The 100 fastest growing companies in Utah are selected from thousands of eligible applicants throughout the state and represent a cross-section from all industries.
“It is clear Utah is one of the hottest places in the country to start or run a business,” said Paul Skeen, chairman of the MWCN Utah 100 committee. “As a strong indicator, we had a record number of Utah companies vying for the 100 fastest growing companies in Utah along with about a 400 percent increase in the number of Emerging Elite nominations. It is a pleasure to recognize this year’s Emerging Elite companies along with the Utah 100 fastest growing companies.”
The percentage of revenue increase of each company between 2011 and 2015 determines the Utah 100. Those companies with the largest dollar amount of revenue growth in 2015 make up the Revenue Growth winners. The Emerging Elite are selected from among companies with less than five, but more than two years of operation that show significant promise for future success.
About MountainWest Capital Network
MountainWest Capital Network is Utah’s first and largest business networking organization devoted to supporting entrepreneurial success, and dedicated to the flow of financial, entrepreneurial and intellectual capital. For more information, visit www.mwcn.org, LIKE us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @MWCN and LinkedIn.
From Quick Answers to the People Also Ask section, featured snippets have been at the top of numerous result pages and top of mind for many digital marketers and online businesses. First position in Google search is no longer adequate, especially when almost any competitor on the first page could qualify and leap multiple positions to snag the prime real estate above the first organic result. The result pages that have featured snippets tend to have two important elements, an entity and an attribute related to that entity. Here is a diagram Google used to explain the concept in their patent for Inferring attributes from search queries:
While these results are not new, there are still tons of opportunity to be had. For starters, they’re being rolled out to more international SERPs as time goes on. There are still plenty of US queries for which Google will eventually display a featured snippet. Below are the findings of three consecutive studies performed by Stone Temple Consulting whose data from 855k test queries support the assumption that there is still more growth to be had.
Is Optimizing for a Featured Snippet Worth the Time and Effort?
Before you go any further, and before I get into optimizations and prerequisites for showing up in a featured snippet, you should weigh the potential gains from your efforts. For some markets there aren’t currently any featured snippets present. Don’t forget that Google is still rolling this out to new areas and for more terms. So I would still encourage research and optimizing pages that rank high for potential featured positions. The payoff may not be immediate though.
In most cases where the opportunity currently exists, tests have shown an unexpected increase in click throughs. The assumption is that having a featured snippet on the result page for a query would reduce the clicks to the first position url and subsequent urls. Matthew Barby’s sample of Hubspot urls showed the opposite with an improved amount of click throughs to result #1 that followed the featured snippet. His analysis showed that the urls that displayed in a featured snippet saw a higher click-through-rate than ones that only displayed in regular first page results.
Where to Optimize
I would first start by digging through Google result pages where your site ranks #1. If there are featured snippets on any of those result pages that aren’t pulling from your site then there is great opportunity for some upgrades to your page. If your site ranks for a large amount of queries in position #1 then focus first on the higher volume terms. While it is very possible to grab a featured snippet position if you aren’t ranking #1, there are two separate studies showing that about 30% of featured snippets pull from the #1 result. The graph below was pulled from a study run by Moz on 10k keywords.
The second study was run by Stat with 1 million competitive keywords. While they found a similar result that about 30% of featured snippet results pulled from the #1 ranking page, they do call out that 70% of featured snippets came from results other than the first organic position. Even more interestingly, they found that a small percentage of queries sourced their featured snippet from positions beyond #10. I would recommend downloading their whitepaper that explains their findings from analyzing 1 million high-CPC terms.
Dr. Peter J. Meyers illustrates this nicely as he proved this to work for Moz and the question phrase “What is page authority?.” Another site lept over Moz’s #1 result for the term to capture the featured snippet position.
The Moz team noticed that Drumbeat Marketing did a great job of directly and promptly defining page authority and answering the question. Moz promptly upgraded their copy with the question in the header, and to read as follows:
Not long after, they captured the prized featured snippet display for that query while maintaining rank in the first position.
The next area of focus should be on any other keywords your site ranks for on the first page. You could waste a lot of time researching all the keywords you could potentially rank for but your time is most wisely spent on first page positions based on the data from industry tests.
How to Optimize
Now that you know which pages need your attention you can determine which type of featured snippet to rank for. Is it a list? Is it a paragraph answer? Is it a table with information? Google very plainly communicates in their explanation of featured snippets that page markup won’t be a factor in qualifying for these positions.
Where does the answer summary come from?
The summary is a snippet extracted programmatically from a webpage. What's different with a featured snippet is that it is enhanced to draw user attention on the results page. When we recognize that a query asks a question, we programmatically detect pages that answer the user's question, and display a snippet as a featured snippet in the search results.
How can I mark my page as a featured snippet?
You can't. Google programmatically determines that a page contains a likely answer to the user's question, and displays the result as a featured snippet.
So the best thing you can do is upgrade your content to fit the query's featured snippet. In Stat’s research they discovered that paragraph answers are the most common type of featured snippet and displayed that way for more than 80% of the million terms they tracked.
Optimize for Paragraphs
The paragraph featured snippet displays pages that have answer oriented copy as well as the question in a header. Google will only pull a few sentences, so make your answers brief but directed at the searcher. In most cases Google will pull the copy from text they deem most valuable to the user. As such, I have run into an interesting scenario where Google actually selected partial information from a list and displayed it in paragraph form. Below is the result page for “home protection plan”. You will notice that the answer is displayed in a paragraph form, but the page it pulls from actually has it listed out.
The same approach should be considered for the People Also Ask section. Once research is done on related questions, follow the same pattern of addressing the question and exclusively answering it below the header. In most cases you will be building out questions and answers on your landing page and not a designated FAQ page.
Optimize for Lists
The featured snippet that displays a list is one of the more recognizable types and usually occupies more real estate on a result page than paragraph answers. These types of answers tend to show up for how-to’s, cost breakdowns, as well as numbered and bulleted lists of all kinds. To rank for this type of featured snippet you may want to adjust some copy to introduce a list. Do your best to use the term or phrase in the heading of the list. It is important that it stays relevant and increases the value of the page. Another thing to keep in mind, especially if you win these positions, is that you leave the user wanting a little more. Give them a reason to go to your page. Recipes can be a great chance to do this as each step usually involves more details that can’t fit.
Stat’s research also found the use of <ol> tags on pages are 41.6% more common in featured snippets than in regular results. They saw the use of <table> tags nearly 22% more common in featured areas than in regular results. This brings me to the next type of featured snippet.
Optimizing for Tables
Optimizing for tables really comes down to displaying data or information that may already exist on your page a little differently. If you currently have a list on that page but there is an opportunity to grab a table snippet then find a way to compare the list to another list or just display multiple attributes at once. As mentioned above, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure that you are using <table> tags on your pages.
The most important area to focus on for optimizing your chances of being featured is your on page copy. Backlinks and other external factors for ranking become less important the closer your page is to the first position. Remember that before you optimize any pages you will need to research the Google result pages for keywords you rank for on the first page. The benefits of more clicks are definitely there, and you can always do more to direct the user to your page with enticing copy. This is definitely an area of optimization that you will want to return too often as Google expands to new markets and includes featured snippets in more result pages.
It’s been a good year for us at 97th Floor. Between being named to Inc. magazine “50 Best Placed to Work in 2016,”, a nod to our focus on employee engagement and culture, and today being announced on Inc. magazine’s 35th annual Inc. 5000, the most prestigious ranking of the nation's fastest-growing private companies, we’re feeling fine.
And why shouldn’t we be? After all, companies such as Microsoft, Dell, Domino’s Pizza, Pandora, Timberland, LinkedIn, Yelp, Zillow, and many other well-known names gained their first national exposure as honorees of the Inc. 5000.
The 2016 Inc. 5000—unveiled online at Inc.com and with the top 500 companies featured in the September issue of Inc. (available on newsstands August 23)—is the most competitive crop in the list’s history. The average company on the list achieved a mind-boggling three-year growth of 433%.
Our’s was 218% and we rank 1706 in the overall lineup of privately-held companies.
The Inc. 5000’s aggregate revenue is $200 billion, and the companies on the list collectively generated 640,000 jobs over the past three years, or about 8% of all jobs created in the entire economy during that period. Companies are ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2012 to 2015. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2012. They had to be US-based, privately held, for profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2015. The minimum revenue required for 2012 is $100,000; the minimum for 2015 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons.
"The Inc. 5000 list stands out where it really counts,” says Inc. President and Editor-In-Chief Eric Schurenberg. “It honors real achievement by a founder or a team of them. No one makes the Inc. 5000 without building something great—usually from scratch. That’s one of the hardest things to do in business, as every company founder knows. But without it, free enterprise fails.”View the complete Inc. 5000 list here.
"I always felt strongly that by building a company that focused on the work—both as it relates to the client and to team work—that the rest would take care of itself. Being recognized as an Inc. “50 Best Places to Work,” while making the Inc. 5,000 fastest growing list in the same year is great proof of that,” said Founder and CEO Chris Bennett.
97th Floor was certified as a great workplace by the independent analysts at Great Place to Work®. 97th Floor earned this credential based on extensive ratings provided by its employees in anonymous surveys. A summary of these ratings can be found at http://reviews.greatplacetowork.com/97th-floor.
Great Place to Work® is the global authority on high-trust, high-performance workplace cultures. Through proprietary assessment tools, advisory services, and certification programs, including Best Workplaces lists and workplace reviews, Great Place to Work® provides the benchmarks, framework, and expertise needed to create, sustain, and recognize outstanding workplace cultures. In the United States, Great Place to Work® produces the annual Fortune "100 Best Companies to Work For®" list and a series of Great Place to Work® Best Workplaces lists including lists for Millennials, Women, Diversity, Small and Medium Companies and over a half dozen different industry lists.
"We applaud 97th Floor for seeking certification and releasing its employees' feedback," said Kim Peters, Vice President of Great Place to Work's Recognition Program. "These ratings measure its capacity to earn its own employees' trust and create a great workplace - critical metrics that anyone considering working for or doing business with 97th Floor should take into account as an indicator of high performance."
“According to our study, 100 percent of 97th Floor employees say it is a great workplace,” says Sarah Lewis-Kulin, Great Place to Work's Senior Editor.
97th Floor employees completed 35 surveys, resulting in a 90 percent confidence level and a margin of error of ± 4.51.
Employees at 97th Floor had a fun afternoon trading in our spreadsheets and computer screens for parachutes and soccer games. With the help of United Way, 97th Floor was provided with the opportunity to volunteer at the South Franklin Community Center, just 20 minutes south of our Lehi location. JuliAnne Tanner, Major Gifts Specialist at United Way, says that “the SFCC serves an at-risk population. Each family in the area presents a unique set of challenges. Volunteers really are making a difference in these kids’ lives by establishing educational priorities, developing healthy habits, and building a stronger sense of community attachment, all of which lead to better life decisions.”
From the moment we walked into the South Franklin Community Center, the children were eager to play. We headed outside where we taught the kids a few new games. In return, the kids taught us a thing or two about how to properly launch plastic balls from a parachute, and how to quickly slide through a hula hoop. By the end of the afternoon we all left with a few new friends.
I love SFCC’s mission to serve both children and families in the area. This program gives the children in this at-risk population the chance to meet and interact with other community members. Paxton Gray, Director of Marketing Operations at 97th Floor, said of our time volunteering, “[It] is important not only because it helps others in our community, but also because it simultaneously connects us with people outside our normal circles. Connecting one-on-one with others is essential for a strong sense of belonging on both sides and is the backbone for a supportive and charitable community.” It supports the child, which supports the family, which then supports the whole community. 97th Floor came to mentor these kids, but we left equally served from the children’s reminder of the happiness and joy that can be found in life.
L-R: Josh Moody, Christopher Fosse, Joe Robledo, Samantha Brown, Maggie CallLead Enterprise Digital Marketer and Director of Research and Development Josh Moody recently received a "Marketer of the Year" Stevie from The American Business Awards. Additionally, his team won accolades in the category for "Marketing Team of the Year" at the NYC broadcast show. The award-winning team is comprised of marketers Joe Robledo, Kade Call, Samantha Brown, writer Christopher Fosse and designer Maggie Call.
"I really do think they're the best at what they do. One thing that I like is they’re always pushing forward, they’re always pushing to be innovative in every single sphere of work."
Earlier this month 97th Floor was also announced as Inc.’s The 50 Best Places to Work in 2016, where over 500 companies were judged in three categories, including how well companies look after their staff’s financial security (retirement, insurance, benefits, PTO), employee feedback and performance innovation.
Director of Marketing Operations Paxton Gray talks innovation and what it means to be named "Agency of the Year" by the American Business Awards.
"We work really hard to meet our client's goals, but we don't stop once we hit those goals. We keep going and we spend that extra time innovating and finding new ways and new tactics. Really what matters is helping our clients build their businesses."
97th Floor was announced as Inc.'s The 50 Best Places to Work in 2016. Over 500 companies were judged in three categories, including how well companies look after their staff's financial security (retirement, insurance, benefits, PTO), employee feedback and performance innovation.
COO Wayne Sleight talks about what makes 97th Floor great, from the employees, to the work to the partnership with clients.
"We've got a group of people that just truly have a passion for marketing," said Wayne.
In addition to being a Silver “Stevie” finalist for “Marketing Agency of the Year” from the American Business Awards, 97th Floor was recently named as Inc.’s The 50 Best Places to Work in 2016.
97th Floor was announced as Inc.'s The 50 Best Places to Work in 2016. Over 500 companies were judged in three categories, including how well companies look after their staff's financial security (retirement, insurance, benefits, PTO), employee feedback and performance innovation.
As a recent Silver "Stevie" finalist for "Marketing Agency of the Year" from the American Business Awards, CEO Chris Bennett shares his thoughts on cultivating an excellent culture, one that attracts and keeps the best people.
For the full list of The 50 Best Places to Work in 2016, visit the official website.
97th Floor recently met again for our monthly book club meeting. This month, we read and discussed The Happiness Advantage, by Shawn Achor. Achor is the founder of GoodThink, co-founder of The Institute for Applied Positive Research (with his wife Michelle Gielan), and advocate for the field of positive psychology.
After a meal of Greek kebabs and salad, we dove into the discussion. In his book, Achor lays out seven different principles of positive psychology:
While we would have loved to dive deeply into each one of these principles, we knew that time would be a constraint, and so those participating decided on a few specific points to focus in on:
The 20-Second Rule discusses the concept of making the things you want to accomplish easier to access, and making behaviors you want to avoid more difficult. Adding or removing as little as 20-seconds worth of effort has an impact on how likely or unlikely you are to engage in an activity.
The Tetris Effect cites a study in which people who played the popular puzzle game Tetris for prolonged periods of time would begin to see the world through that lens—imagining ways to rotate real-world objects in ways that they would fit together. The principle explores how people are able to train themselves into different mindsets. This includes viewing things in a positive light or a negative one. As you try to recognize positive circumstances, it becomes easier, and eventually, it becomes natural.
The Zorro Circle refers to a training method seen in the film The Mask of Zorro, wherein the student is placed within a series of concentric circles. The first circle is particularly small, but the student is instructed to consider his entire world to be contained within that circle, excluding everything outside of it. As the student masters that inner circle, he then progresses to larger and larger circles. As we master our own spheres of influence, not focusing on the things that we cannot change, then that sphere of influence grows. Rather than despairing of the things we cannot change, or the overwhelming amount of work ahead, we can take each step as it comes, and eventually reach our goals.
Social Investment was the last principle we were able to discuss before separating. Too often, when faced with trouble, people will isolate themselves from others. This principle discusses the detrimental nature of this tactic, as social investment often is what gives us the energy to follow through with our work. Genuine connection with other people fuels our work, while isolation taken to extremes often leads to loneliness and despair, both in our personal and professional lives.
Overall, there was a very positive response to the book, and we definitely recommend it. You can also view the author’s TED Talk.
Due to the holidays, we will be reading our next book over the course of December and January. This time, we will be reading Drive, by Daniel H. Pink. As always, you can follow the #97thbookclub hashtag on Twitter for updates.
Previous Book Club books:
Creativity, Inc., by Ed Catmull
REWORK, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
How many ways can “20” help? 20 isn’t a particularly large number, but in the right context, it can make a big difference in someone’s life.
Last year, 97th Floor sent holiday cards, along with a video, to clients, partners, and friends and encouraged them to set aside $20 to help someone around them. Each card included an additional $20 bill to help them jump start the giving. People could then use the #20helps hashtag to spread the message to others.
This year, in addition to the $20, we are taking it one step further. Instead of focusing specifically on money, we are encouraging everyone who sees this year’s card and video to look for any way in which “20 helps.”
Here are a few ideas, just to get you started:
There are countless possibilities. Remember, 20 may not seem like much… but 20 helps.
This year's card includes the same $20 as last year's, which recipients are asked to use to help someone else, plus two artisan chocolate bars from Taste in Provo, UT