The Sartell Group has been doing software development since 1998, experiencing year over year growth. Growth has been driven by a long term partnership in the Government and Corporate sectors with a Fortune 500 company.
For years, we’ve discussed the need to diversify our customer portfolio. This year, we made BUSINESS DIVERSIFICATION a primary focus by implementing a Creativity Lab for employees.
How the Creativity Lab works:
- We set up a few guidelines to make sure efforts are in commercially viable categories.
- Each week all of employees, including developers, project managers, testers and the help desk, spend 10% of their week dedicated to a new idea or project.
- Each employee considers new products and services they’re genuinely interested in and have growth potential.
- With full liberty to explore, they flesh-out their ideas from concept-to-design.
- Employees meet with the Director of Sales & Marketing every other week to discuss progress and goal setting.
- We then hold quarterly strategy meetings to discuss new ideas and company direction.
To date, four very solid ideas have been explored and are considered highly probable new products for the company. Several other ideas have been vetted and are in the queue.
One goal we accomplished was to infuse excitement and creativity in our employees while developing a sense of ownership. We’ve all discovered that we employ many entrepreneurs who want to contribute to our long term success.
Not only has this motivated employees, we’ve benefited with new and exciting products in different industries. As a result, we’re finalizing our expansion into the Healthcare industry.
Mary Jacobs
Director of Sales
The Sartell Group
A certified Women’s Business Enterprise (WBE)
www.sartellgroup.com
Phone: 612 548-3112
Fax: 612 548-3119
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