Hello there, as we begin yet another exciting year at Criclabs, I’d like to share some key wins and challenges we faced in 2023.

Five things we crushed

1. We tripled our team size

From just 5 members in 2022, we ended up with a team of 15 Cricsters less than a year later. It’s been an absolute blast growing our team in the past year, and expanding our in-house capabilities to include UX/UI design, graphic design, web development, mobile app development, SEO, Google Ads, and content writing.

We intend to remain boutique throughout 2024, focusing less on headcount growth and more on consolidating our existing talent, nurturing them to become star performers through and through.

2. We completely revamped our website & branding

Our identity is always evolving and we wanted our branding to reflect that. So in 2023, we gave our branding a new face, including a brand new website, company showreel, and slide deck.

Our website now better showcases our services with a cleaner design language.

A showreel that speaks to who are are, and what we aspire to be.

And finally, we ditched Google Slides to create the majority of our proposals and decks in Figma. Here's a sneak peak of our first few slides.

3. Rethinking work-life against conventional wisdom

I view Cric as being part of a cohort of companies that were born out of the pandemic. This meant we carried a specific set of core values that we strongly believe many in our targeted talent pool share:

Remote, but together

We view ourselves as a remote-first company with no compulsory office attendances for our employees whatsoever. Having the freedom to work from anywhere you want is something we valued greatly during the pandemic. Our remote-first policy embodies our core values of trust, ownership and autonomy.

We do recognize that remote working doesn’t come without costs. But we believe that with the right systems, ceremonies and culture in place, we can have our cake and eat it too when it comes to remote-working and teamwork/productivity.

At Cric, we dedicate each Friday afternoon for non-compulsory face-to-face time at our co-working space, followed by a team dinner. We always reiterate to all employees that there is absolutely no pressure to attend our Friday face-to-face catchups. Despite that, we have a 95% attendance rate every single week.

Instead of a working environment where employees feel they need to come into the office to do work they could’ve done at home, we’re very proud to have created an environment where our employees feel excited come in.

With only one afternoon to spend face-to-face each week, each hour is fully utilized and cherished by the team, fostering the team-work spark, the synergy-magic that regular office attendances were intended to create but often falls short.

I realize there’s a lot more to unpack here; what systems are in place? How will this work as the team grows? How do we mitigate employee disengagement? How do we enforce accountability? Will be dedicating another post for this 🙂

Trust over tracking

And, hey, we don’t track leaves. We believe that our team members should be able to take leaves when necessary, and we trust you to be responsible towards your own tasks and team members before doing so. As long as you follow the procedures below, feel free to take as many leaves as you need!

This is the message our employees receive when reviewing our company perks and benefits. And we mean it!

It starts with having confidence in our hiring process and the baseline assumption that our employees are responsible, productive individuals who take full ownership of all their tasks. In other words, we 100% believe our team members are people who (and pardon my French) will just get sht done.

Instead of having some employees worrying that they are running out of paid leaves for the year, while others agonize over how they will use their remaining leaves before they expire, we let our employees take leaves whenever they need to.

The result? Our annual average number of leave days per employee remains lower that of most other companies.

In fact, we go the opposite way, requiring all employees to take at least 2 paid leaves every single quarter.

Why? We believe that at Cric, our talent is our biggest asset. And so our team’s wellbeing and freedom needs to be prioritized for us to deliver quality work for our clients. It’s just that simple.

4. Revamping our ceremonies

As our headcount started to grow, we experimented with a wide range of team ceremonies that were the right fit for our size. Here were a few we’re keeping as we go into 2024.

Automated daily stand-ups

We’ve replaced the conventional daily stand-up meetings with automated stand-up reports that are done individually at asynchronous times.

What problems does this solve?

1. Disengagement: We were eager to step away from a work culture where stand-up meetings felt ‘forced’. Where employees felt they were being forced to come online to attend a 15 - 30 minute meeting where only 5 minutes of that time was relevant to them.
2. Management centric: We admitted that often times, daily stand-ups weren’t for the benefit of our team. Instead, it was to feed management team’s insecurity and it became a tool to ‘keep tabs’ on our team. If we needed to do that in the first place, we’ve failed in building a healthy, productive, self-motivated team.
3. Time-wasting: With the automated standup, each team member spends less than 3 minutes reporting their stand-up agendas with Geekbot, where they bullet-point down their tasks from the day before, what they’re planning to do today, and any challenges they’re facing.

This automated method doesn’t come without it’s drawbacks. We do lose that interaction at the start of each day and the potential brainstorming to solve problems that stand-ups were meant to foster. But in our experience, rarely do traditional stand-up meetings foster the kind of ‘teamwork spirit’ it’s founders promised.

So instead, we’ve got other ceremonies and protocols in place for that.

Weekly team syncs

Weekly team syncs serve as a main face-to-face interaction across our entire teams that happens once per week, usually on a Friday afternoon during our in-office session.

We break out into small teams of 4-5 members (no more), based on shared projects. Here, each team member takes turn updating project statuses, reviewing client sentiment, and performance highlights to one another.

A tried and tested ceremony that we added as our team grew in 2023, and 100% keeping in 2024.

Selective 1-on-1 agendas

1-on-1 meetings having become common-place coming out of the pandemic. A simple catch-up between a line manager and their direct report. At Cric, we’ve developed our own 1-on-1 guidelines, with the main purpose of taking ‘status reports’ outside the session, and focusing instead on employee wellbeing and career growth.

Here’s a section of our guideline, highlighting what direct reports can expect, as well as what is expected from their team leads.

5. Coaching and role-playing

We introduced bi-weekly coaching sessions to all team members, involving a roadmap of personalized scenarios designed give our team members exposure to situations that challenges their problem-solving, crisis management, and negotiation skills.

I now spend up to 40% of my time each week running and preparing these coaching sessions. After introducing them for only a quarter, we’ve seen significant improvements in our team’s resilience and problem-solving skills.

Within each scenario, we aim to produce a framework that team members can follow when these situations arise in real-life. Some of these scenarios include:

• Running project kick-off meetings with difficult clients (both extremely technical and non-technical personas)
• Extracting actionable steps from a client’s critical feedback
• Dealing with performance drops (in an SEO context), and setting up the right communication protocols with a client
• Addressing challenging questions during monthly reports and product demos
• Crisis management → what happens when a project goes wrong, and it’s our fault

Here’s a framework we developed to improve client communications:

Three key challenges we faced

1. Beyond Ads and Referrals

So far, our lead acquisition pipeline has been heavily dependent on client referrals and the ads we run. Our goal in 2024 is to start attracting our leads organically. We’re still currently brainstorming ways we can do this, such as working on our own site’s SEO, optimizing our agency listings or producing content to increase our reach.

2. Breaking into international markets

More than half of our clients are currently based in Thailand. Our goal is to reach a 50/50 split between Thai and international clients, with key target markets being Singapore and Australia.

3. The value conversation

We’ve come along way to compete based on value instead of price. In 2023, our average basket size per client has more than doubled, but we’ve still got a long way to go. Fortunately for us, our client churn rate is low, so we’re able to upsell our services regularly. More precisely, 23 of the 25 clients we’ve won in 2023 have decided to extend their engagements with us into 2024. This allows us to nurture stronger relationships, and start charging based on value instead of price.

It’s tricky still though, when it comes to billing for our project managers and content writers against a crowded freelance market, but we’re committed to getting there.

Thanks for tuning in!

I’ll be diving deeper into these changes and sharing frameworks or templates mentioned in future blog posts.

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