Editor's note: Today we hear from Doug Bohaboy of Mimeo, a content distribution and digital printing company based in New York City. Learn how Google Apps helped Mimeo deliver at breakneck speed while keeping its employees connected.
When I first started at Mimeo, a content distribution and digital printing company, in 2005, we had fewer than 100 employees. I could stand up and talk to anyone in our New York office. I knew everyone.
Today, we have over 800 employees in six locations, including four international offices in the UK, Germany, India and China. Our New York office had ballooned to multiple floors. That’s why we turned to Google Apps to keep our distributed workforce productive, efficient and competitive in an evolving market. Google Hangouts, Google Docs and Google Calendar keep us organized and coordinated across multiple time zones.
To compete with other online suppliers, we need to move fast and fulfill orders quickly. Customers can place an order for a complex printed document on our website at 10 p.m. EST and expect it to be fulfilled and delivered the next day. This means people at our New York headquarters need to communicate rapidly with our global manufacturing facilities. With Hangouts, our teams can video or text chat instantly from any device, whether it’s a desktop computer or mobile phone, at any time of day or night.
We made the switch to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange in 2010 to give people tools to work more closely together — without wasting time on IT issues. Before 2010, our IT team had to deal with issues that didn’t add value to the company, like scheduled server maintenance and helping employees fix email problems. These minor issues added up to 1,000 hours each year. Now, our IT team spends 100-200 hours a year addressing minor issues — equating to huge financial and time savings.
Google Apps, and particularly Docs, increases our efficiency. Today we create about 90 percent of our documents using Docs. Employees often collaboratively edit documents together when they’re sitting across the room from each other. Docs also makes meetings more efficient by giving us the ability to take shared notes and assign owners. The whole team doesn’t need to be in every meeting — we can tag team members who need to share their input on one small section, and they can contribute on their own time.
With offices in the UK, Germany, China and India, we use Hangouts to collaborate more meaningfully with more face-to-face time. The ease of meeting person to person also helps us appreciate the cultural diversity of our team, which contributes to our open culture that embraces diverse ideas and paths to problem solving. Whether from Memphis or Berlin, any of us could easily hop on a video chat in Hangouts while also having access to intuitive tools, making training new employees from any location seamless.
As companies like ours grow increasingly global, Google Apps is helping to create more mobile, flexible work environments. Our biggest goal is to do more for our customers while keeping our employees in sync by making Mimeo a great place to work. We know that our customers depend on Mimeo for fast, reliable service that consistently exceeds their expectations. Google Apps helps our employees make the most of their time and creativity, ensuring we retain the competitive advantage that’s made us a globally recognized company.
