I’ve been using Treehouse over the 2-3 years to broaden my skills and quench my interest in other areas of web and application development that I don’t get the opportunity to be hands-on with in my working week (a victim of becoming management).
For those of you that aren’t familiar with Treehouse it is a self-paced, online learning environment for web and mobile technologies. aka nerd-school (I’m a proud nerd). Treehouse’s aim is to provide affordable education to the web and mobile development sector.
Treehouse – Courses
Over the last year or so I have noticed a massive increase in the number of new courses available on Treehouse, an increasingly improved interface and a lot more social engagement from the founders of the Treehouse (Ryan Carson and Alan Johnson).
Here’s an example of a recent email I received from Ryan @ Treehouse highlighting a whole bunch of new products and people, in a causal and personable style:
Treehouse Email Part 1
Treehouse Email Part 2
Being curious in nature I wanted to understand how this increase in productivity and quality could be generated over a relatively small time-frame.
So I set about researching Treehouse’s strategies, employee numbers, recent investment and revenue figures from what I could find published on the internet (like only a good nerd can) and here’s what I found: In the last 2 years, Treehouse have gone from $3M revenue and 34 employees to $10M revenue and 70 employees!
It turns out Treehouse are leveraging enterprise 2.0 tools internally and externally to work smarter, work less and make more money.
So what enterprise 2.0 tools and methodologies have Treehouse introduced and made better use of to get the job done?
- Social Innovation and Project Management – Flow (internally developed)
- Communication – live chat, HipChat.
- Blogging – internally and publicly.
- Forums – for internal use to replace email, Convoy (Reddit clone).
- Communicating with customers – via email and social media in a humanistic manner.
- Monthly video chats – to provide guidance and longer term vision.
- Collaborative Documents – Google Docs.
Some key benefits Treehouse have realised:
- 4 day working week – employees are rewarded for quality output, not hours.
- increased productivity – a result of a self-motivated team working smarter on things they want to work on.
- less failed projects – projects only start if they win over peers, less useful ideas don’t get traction.
- manager-less work environment (less wages) – Treehouse made the bold decision to remove all managers and executives.
- less email -information is stored in blogs and project tools where it is accessible and available to all.
- employee retention – who doesn’t want to work a 4 day week on full wages with no boss!?
Without reliable figures on expenditure and it’s difficult to determine an exact Return On Investment (ROI) for Treehouse over the course of the last year when the bulk of these changes took place and managers were removed. But let’s have a go and make some conservative assumptions:
Costs ($40k) – these are really rough…
- $10k – time to develop, implement and maintain Convoy annually
- $10k – time to develop Flow, implement and maintain Flow annually
- $20k – social technology, licensing and hosting cost annually
Gains ($1,836k)
*executive salaries updated, thanks to my colleague Nino!
- $1,100k = 4 executives and 7 managers @ ~$100K / year average
- $736k = employee time: (312 less hours per year / 1800 hours per year) x (50 x average software developers in Orlando @ $85K)
(4 hours less email / week , 2 hours less meetings)
So…
ROI = (gain – cost) / cost * 100 = 4490%
Wow, that’s an estimated 4490% ROI from enterprise social technologies over 2013-2014, impressive!
If you’d like to read in more detail on how Treehouse executed this and some of the practical day to day questions (like who does the budget?) head over to Ryan Carson’s blog, it’s a very interesting read.
Let me know your thoughts on this weeks blog, and if my assumptions can be improved or if you’re Ryan Carson and can share Treehouse’s true enterprise collaboration ROI!
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