I’ve been building communities for years but I didn’t realize it.
Lizbeth recently asked me about the Coyote origin. I told her the usual stuff about events and connecting, and she pushed back and said, "go deeper."
I respect that.
It made me realize that much of my career was actually about building communities.
At Handy, I onboarded home cleaners. We didn’t hire anyone; they were all independent. If the experience was terrible, they would log off forever and all my bookings would go unfilled. Bummer.
I needed to be helpful, solve problems, and be open.
The same was true with Postmates. This time it was a bit more interesting. Jobs were not booked days or weeks in advance like cleaning; they were booked 30 minutes in advance. An active fleet of drivers was critical to fulfilling orders.
Again, they chose to accept jobs; I couldn’t assign anything.
We had more tools here: Facebook groups, open office hours, and sometimes gatherings.
We'd use these groups to encourage action. During a rainstorm, we'd post duck boat memes to get people to log on and pick up orders. You know how SD gets in the rain. Every ramen shop is slammed.
Lime was a bit more complex. We had 100+ full time staff in San Diego. They were all critical pieces of our business. We needed scooters: repaired, qc’ed, charged, deployed and then collected.
Wait, community? This is just a company. Well, not so fast. There were two important pieces here: I hired everyone, and I needed the best warehouse culture in the company.
We had a hard challenge. Our roles paid market rate, and there were a number of other companies we competed with for staff: Bird, Uber, Jump, Razor, Ofo… (I'll stop here, there are many more).
I pulled the HQ lever, “It’s tough out here! Can we pay more to get better applications?” You guessed right, “No”.
But, if we had the best work culture, we would retain happy people and they would refer their friends and coworkers.
A favorite example was a father and son duo, both motorcycle mechanics, both could fix anything in their sleep, and both had very outgoing friendly personalities. Culture gold.
These experiences helped me understand how to think about communities and they've helped to shape the Social Coyote into what it is. Even if I didn't realize it.
I see real value in being part of something cool, and I don’t mean the Pack. I mean the groups that the Coyote shares every week.
Each one is a microcosm of something cool, someone putting themselves out there, collecting like-minded or adventurous people together in one place.
These things matter.
The Social Coyote is just a curated collection of the hard work our organizers put in for our city. This is more clear to me now.
So, 2 quick things to wrap it up:
1. Liz, thanks for pushing me to go deeper. It’s helped me uncover a line I didn’t know was there.
2. Consider leaving your cave and checking out a new community, and if it resonates, maybe thank the organizer.
Howl yeah!
Licensed Vocational Nurse at TouchMark McKinney, Texas
2wTouchmark is an exceptional company to work and grow! I am proud to be apart of this team🩺