A Letter from John

John Strand //

Last week BHIS took a new direction as a company. (Warning, this blog is not technical. But it is important.)

In the past few years we’ve grown considerably. The vast majority of our work is received from previous satisfied customers, which is mainly because of the awesome job that our testers have done.

Every company likes to brag that their employees are their most important asset. I remember being at Accenture and one of the managing partners had the audacity to say something along these lines. How can this be true of a company with over 30,000 employees? It is just not possible. At some point a company has to start focusing on profits and unfortunately, the people in the company often become a distant priority.

Don’t believe me? Look at overtime. Many companies pay their employees a fixed salary and then basically force the them to work ridiculous overtime. To the upper level goes the spoils. The employees get to bask in the warm glow of knowing they have jobs.

Erica (my wife) and I didn’t want to create a company like this, we wanted something different. We’ve been spending a lot of time looking into B corp status and looking at how other companies like Patagonia run and we are learning ways to stay focused on our goal of keeping BHIS people (both employee and customer) instead of profit driven. Moving forward BHIS will be splitting profits equally with our employees who have been with us for a specified period of time.

What does that mean for our customers? First, it means your tester has a vested interest in doing a great job – far beyond just a simple paycheck. Second, in order for each tester to have space to do their best work, we try to limit them to one primary gig at a time. I talk with a lot of other testers for other firms and they are consistently working on two or three and sometimes four tests at the same time. This is a recipe for a really crummy pentest, regardless of the brilliant skills of the tester. We may not be the cheapest, but I am confident in the quality of our work, and confident in your entire customer experience with us.

So why a blog post about this? Well, happy employees do great work. We want to have the best employees and do the best work possible for our customers. When I say our people and the quality of work we do is our key differentiator, I want it to mean something. It has in the past, and we are taking steps to ensure that it will in the future.