“This past year has been anything but ordinary. Along with navigating the pandemic and all that came with it, we also welcomed our baby Margie, celebrated our B Corp certification, expanded our little team and even managed to grow our impact! When we started Harvey just two years ago, I would never have imagined that we’d have made the impact we have. We’re so excited to be sharing it with you!” – Becky Smallchua, Founder
“When we started Harvey just two years ago, I would never have imagined that we’d have made the impact we have. We’re so excited to be sharing it with you!”
– Becky Smallchua, Founder
#2 Governance and team
‘Good’ is baked into our constitution (yum!)
A ‘constitution’ isn’t exactly the most glamorous thing to talk about, but setting ours up right means setting ourselves up for a business future we can be proud of. A constitution is a legal document that defines your company’s structure, purpose, ownership and governance. In 2019, we decided to add our mission statement to ours, as well as our commitment to upholding the B Corp standards, such as conducting bi-annual reviews of our B Impact Assessment. It means our mission literally forms the foundation of everything we do. Which is pretty important to us.
Teamwork makes the (purpose-driven) dream work
When you start a business, you often have all these ideas about what you will and won’t do.
One thing we didn’t want to do was build a team. One of the core reasons was that we wanted to spend our time doing the work, working directly with our clients, and helping them solve their problems – not managing people. But then maternity leave rolled around, and our workload meant that we simply had no choice but to call in some help. And we’re so glad we did.
This year, we brought on Sarah O’Terra to help us with content and creative, and Rachel Lai to assist our digital marketing efforts. Both working relationships grew organically, and we’ve all been working so well together that we’ve totally reconsidered our position on the whole ‘team’ thing. Sarah and Rachel have helped Harvey scale and have a bigger impact, and they’ve brought so much to the table. Sarah has been pivotal in overseeing many of our clients (managing all of their marketing), supporting new client onboarding and ensuring they all stay on track and hit their goals. Rachel’s skills with data and tech has enabled us to manage and optimise digital marketing while teaching our clients how to leverage things like paid advertising and email automation. We’re lucky to have them.
Equality and wellness
Of course, establishing a team and supporting their physical and emotional wellbeing is a huge responsibility, and one we take seriously. Our team is mostly female (besides Simon and Harvey), with Becky operating as our sole Director. We’re proud members of the One Roof community and we offer flexible working arrangements and, of course, flexible maternity leave.
When it comes to how we operate as a team, we try to be as egalitarian as we can by voting on our work priorities and impact areas. We also hold:
- Fortnightly personal development coaching sessions, including a detailed development plan.
- Technical and relationship skills coaching. We do this every day, and give frameworks, tips and feedback.
- Weekly meditation sessions with Tali Brash.
- Weekly wraps and reflection sessions, in which we share what we're grateful for, a personal achievement, acknowledge someone for anything, and other highlights.
- Daily virtual stand-ups where we check in on one another, and go through our challenges, priorities and focuses for the week.
“Every day at Harvey is rewarding, and knowing that we're helping good businesses expand their impact makes it that much better.”
- Rachel Lai
“Working at Harvey, I get to spend each day surrounded by clients, thinkers and businesses I always hoped existed – businesses for good.”
- Sarah O'Terra
The six areas of this report
Let’s take a look back at the year that was (before wrapping up with some of our goals and intention-setting for 2021).
This is a pretty long article, so we've created an executive summary version here, including a summary of each section.
To keep things simple, we’ve broken this report up into six parts, that speak to six areas that were particularly important to us this past year:
