Whistler, British Columbia: The Best Place For A Startup

Posted on May 28, 2013 by

As a technology startup on the west coast of Canada, most people would expect that we’re based in Vancouver. Which isn’t a bad guess really considering that Vancouver has incubated some amazing startups, including Hootsuite and 7Geese. But, as awesome as Vancouver is, we decided to buck the trend and move 90 minutes north to a resort town called Whistler – and here’s 3 reasons why:

1. Adventure Engineering

We’re looking for Adventure Engineers who are as comfortable in the bike park as they are leading an orchestra of disruption with RoR, JS or another weapon of choice from your vast array of code bases.
Never seen Whistler Bike Park? Watch this video.

http://youtu.be/f7uxWh8l_lI

– Ad-ven-ture En-gin-neer-ing Noun: An unusual and exciting experience or activity built around a flexible work schedule

Adventure Engineering is just as much a lifestyle choice as it is a set of personality traits a person must have to be successful in a startup. Adventure Engineers have a thirst for learning, for experiencing new things and they actively seek discomfort over predictable situations – these are the very foundations that PayrollHero was built on. After living in Whistler for many years I realized that the town’s transient, travelling, adrenaline junkie (and extremely well educated) community was naturally breeding the Adventure Engineers I needed. I just had to convince them to stop travelling (for a short-time), not to go back to their existing jobs and to stay in Whistler with PayrollHero.

To attract and retain the best software engineers we started offering full time and flexi-time working hours, with great success. We then added our Adventure Engineers in Residence (EIR) program with the purpose of:

1.Cultivating our thirst for learning by bringing different methods to the table and new ways of thinking from across the globe

2. Enabling engineers from different cultural backgrounds and experiences to join us at PayrollHero, without the pressure of making a permanent move to Canada

Our first Adventure EIR, who is currently making a very big impression, is Dane Natoli from Australia – you can read more about his story, here.

Sound like something you’re interested in? Get in touch, and if we think you’re the right fit we can help you move to Whistler. We have excellent relationships with local immigration lawyers who are experts in working holiday visas, permanent residency and citizenship.

2. Jam with Incredibly Smart, Entrepreneurial People from all over the World

Most people who travel to Whistler have one thing in common – they’re all pretty damn smart! And I’m not talking about university smart, I’m talking about entrepreneurial smart. They have masters and doctorates; want to run or currently do run their own business; and are usually here on some kind of sabbatical or a career break. Whistler is a fruitful intersection of international disciplines and skills that is ripe for the picking.

We feed off this at PayrollHero. France, Australia, Poland, India, England and Canada are just some of the countries representing the team in our Whistler office; and each person brings their own unique brand of knowledge, experience and wisdom from their respective corner of the globe. In an environment that promotes high levels of developer collaboration and has constant focus on improvement it’s easy for creativity and innovation to spread through our products like wildfire.

3. Happy People make Happy Employees

Whistler in the full bloom. Taken from the top of Flank Trail on Sproatt Mountain

Vancouver is constantly listed as one of the top 10 most ‘liveable’ cities in the world, and one of the reasons is its proximity to the mountains and to world class ski resorts such as Whistler. So we skipped Vancouver and came right to the source.

Biking, golf, lake swimming, hiking, skiing frisbee golf, bear watching and more, whistler has it all. Watch this video and experience a small fraction of summer in Whistler

With endless activities and flexi-time at work, we encourage everyone at PayrollHero to exercise their brains outdoors, as well as at the office. Here’s just a few examples of what we have to play with:

Our home mountains are Whistler Blackcomb – home to the 2010 Winter Olympic Games
We have 8,171 acres of terrain, 16 alpine bowls, three glaciers, 5 snowparks, 1 super pipe, 1 snow cross track and the worlds best summer, alpine bike park on our doorstep
We get an average of 39.1 feet of snowfall a year
There’s 4 championship golf courses in town
Whistler has some of the worlds best cross country skiing and mountain bike trails
Not to mention the 4 lakes, 3 beach volleyball courts, 2 frisbee golf courses and indoor acrobatic academy, BOUNCE!
Every year Whistler host global festivals like Crankworx and World Ski and Snowboard Festival
Oh, and Vancouver is just 90 minutes away

Even Einstein rode bikes to help fuel his creative thinking!

I like to think we’re running PayrollHero in the spirit of the book, Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard. To get a better idea of how easy going life is at our office, read my other blog post: Do You Work to Live or Live to Work?

Having said that, don’t be fooled into thinking that every day is a holiday, here. We play hard and we work hard. If this sounds like the kind of environment your talents could thrive in, get in touch!

Inaugural “Better Business Brunch” in Manila

Posted on May 27, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

I was invited to speak at the inaugural “Better Business Brunch” that New Leaf Ventures was holding at the new Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Fort Bonifacio, Philippines. The New Leaf Ventures team expected about 40 attendees but that number was far exceeded when over 80 people packed into CBTL to take part.

The idea for the Better Business Brunch is to bring in a speaker a month to share details about new technologies and how you can run a better business. I was pleased to be asked to speak at the first event.

My talk was a similar one that I have done for many EO Chapters around the world, except it was condensed to fit the time slot for this event. In my presentation I ran through many of the tools that we use within PayrollHero as well as how PayrollHero itself works for the Philippines. I talked about SlimTimer.com, 15Five, Wikis, Google Docs, Zendesk, Google Hangouts, Facebook, Twitter, Adroll and much more. Overall it was a fantastic event. I think next time they will have to book out the whole place!

PayrollHero Angel Investor And Venture Capitalist Comes To Whistler

Posted on May 17, 2013 by

It’s May, it’s 27°C outside and there’s wall-to-wall sunshine – we couldn’t have asked for a better week to welcome our good friend and angel investor, Nic Lim, to Whistler.

To give you a little introduction, Nic is a venture capital investor from Malaysia, who was born and raised in Kuala Lumpur. In 1999, Nic and his partners started their first dot com international investment company, Catcha, whose long line of success is down to their simple and effective strategy “take proven new media ideas from Western markets and execute them in Asia”. Now, as a shareholder of Catcha, Nic and his business partner Brian Wee built a new venture capital investing company, 8Capita whose portfolio includes mobile customer loyalty app, Perx; mobile game studio, Frenzoo; and e27, a media company focused on growing Asia’s tech startup ecosystem.

Whistler Crash Course: Poutine, Ziptrek and Mountain Biking

“I’m in Whistler for work…but when you’re in somewhere so beautiful it’s not so hard to squeeze some fun in every now-and-then”. – Nic, Partner at 8Capita

This was Nic’s first time to Canada and he admits to being taken in by the spectacular beauty of Vancouver. However, when asked what he thought of Whistler, before commenting on Whistler’s breathtaking mountain-scapes, the Sea-To-Sky Highway or even the wildlife, Nic said:

“I really like the food here in Canada!” and proudly followed up with “and I’ve even had poutine…but I had to get a doggy bag. I don’t understand how you eat all of it.” – Nic

We agree that the food in Whistler is great, but felt we needed to show him more of the outdoor lifestyle and what better way than biking to the office through the rainforest. The next morning Nic joined Mike (PayrollHero CEO and President) and Adam (Product Development & Co-Founder) for the 9.9km cycle from Nesters to the Payroll Hero office in Function Junction. “Not only did I ride 10km to work this morning, I also had to walk the 2km to Mike’s house before we set off” said Nic. But even after admitting that it had been over ten years since he had last pedalled a bicycle, Nic said:

“This is such beautiful place, why would anyone drive!”. – Nic

Like the rest of us here in Whistler, Nic is not stranger to adventure and loves nothing more than a burst of adrenaline in his veins. Nic is a seasoned bungee jumper and seeking a similar thrill he sought out the high speed, high-wire fun of ZipTrek. We offered the possibility of a company bungee jump, but in his words, “at 38 I need to slow down, I’ve had enough of vertical free-fall for now”. We didn’t mention that at in Whistler we regularly see downhill mountain bikers in their late 50’s.

How did PayrollHero Meet Someone Like Nic?

Nic says his path first crossed with PayrollHero when he and Mike were sat next to each other at the Echelon awards in June 2012. “We got chatting and it turned out we had mutual friends” said Nic, “then I saw their their pitch, and it was their intensity and preparedness that really attracted me to Steve, Mike and PayrollHero”.

Now as angel investor in PayrollHero, Nic is an integral part of helping us achieve our goal of ‘Optimizing Work Productivity with Happiness’. After nine months with PayrollHero, Nic now calls himself the ‘Payroll Hero Cheerleader’ – interesting for a guy who thinks he’s now too old to bungee jump.

It has been exciting having Nic here in Whistler with us, he really is a good guy, a good laugh, a good friend and an excellent business man!

Whistler’s Vast, Untapped, Potential is…You

Posted on May 17, 2013 by

In this blog post we’re going to meet Vicky, who flocked to Whistler looking for a better work-life-balance and is now working with us here at PayrollHero. We’re going to share with you some of her tips and advice on moving to Canada and the truth about finding a career in a resort town – and hopefully inspire you to get in touch and make the move too.

* In a future post, coming soon, we’ll be chatting with local immigration lawyers to provide you with practical guide to the process of moving to British Columbia.

Meet Victoria, Curator of Digital Communities and Happiness

Name: Victoria Farrand

Age: 27

Home: Huddersfield, England

Previous Industry Job: Digital Content Manager and Creative Strategy at Brass Agency, UK

Reason for moving to Canada: I came for a career-break and never left, Whistler just pulled me in and I knew this was where I had to put my roots

How do people choose Whistler?

Ask most long-term locals how they ended up living in Whistler, and you’ll probably get the same answer over and over: “I came for a holiday and never left”. And like the thousands before her, Vicky didn’t plan on living in Whistler permanently either, it just happened.

“My partner, Tom, and I were setting off for a round-the-world trip… three years later, we never left Whistler and now we almost have permanent residency.” – Vicky

For every person who does stay, there are unfortunately many who don’t. Many who think that making a permanent life in a resort town is just too tough. So at PayrollHero we asked ‘what can we do to help more people realise their dream of living in Whistler?’

PayrollHero has a local immigration expert on our side

We have a great relationship with a local immigration lawyer here in Whistler. If we decide that you are the right blend of adventurous, dedicated and talented, and we offer you a position with us, they will guide you through the visa process for foreign workers.

We can help you live permanently in Canada

As well as finding talent from overseas, we also especially like to employ locals; and in a resort town ‘local’ can be someone who has been here 6 months or 6 years. We’re looking for the locals who are starting to think that they might have to move to Vancouver to get the job and they pay they want. Well don’t move, we want you! And if you’re not from Canada, Rudy will help you stay.

“We originally came to Canada on a working holiday visa, but a year later we decided we wanted to be permanent residents. Having lawyer took away all the stresses of this big life-decision. They helped us get Provincial Nomination with the BC Government, walked us through the implied status process and helped us get new working visas until or residency came through. This was very important to us because we were at the limit of how many visas we could get being from the UK. Now we’ve had our medicals and we’re just waiting for confirmation.” – Vicky

Move to Whistler for a career break…at first

As Vicky mentioned, you can come to Canada on working holiday visa. We recommend looking into it for your respective Country of origin, as each has different age restrictions and limits on the number of visas you can have.

Once you have been approved for a working holiday visa you can move to Whistler, British Columbia or anywhere else in Canada (but why would you want to go anywhere else).

“I moved from the UK to get away from the lifestyle associated with working for a big a marketing and advertising agency, I needed to escape the constant feeling that I was working working for the weekend and re-evaluate what It actually was that I loved about my job. As a result I’ve had many jobs in Whistler, I’ve been a snowboard instructor, a ski technician, a bootfitter and a zip-line guide to name a few, but doing these jobs has brought me full circle to realise that this is what I want to do, I just want to do it for the right company” – Vicky

Not everyone who comes to Whistler on a working holiday visa wants to only stay 6 months. A lot of people use it as a career break, a good way to escape the daily grind, and others use it as a way to bridge the gap while they apply for residency. But however you end up in Whistler one thing is sure, it’s hard to leave.

If you’ve ever been to ‘Super, Natural British Columbia you’ll understand why this west coast province continually attracts like-minded, creative people. Like like bees to honey, creatives flock from all over the world to find the right work-play balance. Each one bringing with them their culture, knowledge and skills; and here at PayrollHero we are very happy to welcome Whistler’s vast, mostly-untapped, potential – you.

Whistler sounding good to you? Drop us and email right here at support[at]payrollhero.com.

Mini Web Design Conference & Meetup Recap

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

Last night we hosted the Mini Web Design Conference and Meetup at the PayrollHero offices in the Philippines. We had over 50 attendees come to learn and network with other designers in the area.

MiniFFC is short for Mini Form Function & Class. It is the smaller, more informal version of our annual web design conference where folks from the industry can gather, share experiences, and mingle with fellow colleagues. These meetups are held every 3rd Wednesday of the month and are organized by the Philippine Web Designers Organization (PWDO). (details)

PayrollHero’s Tin Sanchez was asked to be one of the speakers. Tin spoke about PayrollHero’s Philippine payroll platform, the interface and some hints at to what was coming next. Also speaking was Christian Besler of Kickstart and a couple others.

If you have an event in Manila or Whistler and are looking for a location, be sure to reach out and see if it is a fit for our offices. We love having guests!

Salesforce Infographic: How To Ensure The Survival Of Your Startup

Posted on May 9, 2013 by

Are you a new, small business owner? Maybe you’re starting to think about a startup business loan? Or you’re perhaps you’re just in the early stages of your startup ideas…wherever you are on your journey, we’d like to help prepare you for success.

Below is an infographic from Salesforce, highlighting some of the rather sobering problems facing a new startup. But don’t throw in the towel just yet, it’s not all doom and gloom – by making you aware of the potential pit-falls now, we’re actually helping prepare you and your business ahead of time.

Having this kind of knowledge is a big responsibility

So we say share it. Print it off and stick it to your wall, save it on Pinterest, share it on Facebook and Twitter – whatever method you choose, live happy in the knowledge that you’re helping give all startups the greatest chance of success.

Salesforce Infographic: how to grow a start-up

Running a startup requires not just a great idea, but the ability to adapt and scale quickly

Share responsibly and remember, the success of a startup is in your hands!

PayrollHero At RailsConf 2013 – Our Favorite Talks And Resources

Posted on May 7, 2013 by

Last week we were in Portland for the 8th annual RailsConf, the largest gathering of Ruby on Rails developers in the world. For some of us it was a return visit to RailsConf and to Portland, but for most it was the first time and the general consensus was the same; that RailsConf is a very unique mix of social, educational and hands-on learning events.

“I’ve mostly been to single vendor conferences before, but RailsConf was a nice change, it’s much more community driven,” – Piotr Banasik, Engineering (Co-Founder).

RailsConf 2013 was not the only reason we were stoked to be south of the border in Portland, Oregon. The City of Roses is also the only place you can get Voodoo Doughnuts, it has over 30 microbreweries and as a result hundreds of specialist ales, it boasts an impressive lineage of tech history and has been nicknamed the ‘Silicon Forest’ because of it’s inspiring landscape – all in all, we felt right at home. And the home we stayed in was pretty awesome, too.

The Best Bits of RailsConf 2013

With more than 20 talks a day, the conference was a real immersion into what the Ruby on Rails community had been doing, thinking and achieving for the last year. It was tough to slim it down to these eight favourites, as chosen by our very own Payroll Hero Adventure Engineers.

1. Volatiles and Stables – Michael Lopp

“It was great hearing about the need for volatiles and stables in a company, it certainly gives you a fresh perspective on the skills of your colleagues and yourself.” – Dane Natoli, Engineer.

In this talk, Michael proposed that a business needs two kinds of engineers, Volatiles and Stables, and that both play a major role in productivity and innovation. He outlined that ‘stables’ play nice with others, are careful and work to mitigate failure; whereas, ‘volatiles’ define strategy rather than follow it, do not see failure as an option and see risk as a thrill. It certainly got each of us thinking about which box we fall into.

Recommended Reading: head over to Michael’s blog post on the topic here at RandsinRepose.com to find out if you are a volatile or stable; or even just to learn how to juggle the two personalities efficiently in the workplace.

2. Describing Your World with Seahorse – Trevor Rowe

“Seahorse looks like a very promising cross platform API framework, we’re curious how it will evolve over time. With Amazon Web Services behind it it should at least maintain momentum for their own APIs.” – Piotr Banasik, Engineering (Co-Founder).

Trevor Rowe is a software developer at Amazon Web Services, he authored the Seahorse tool, worked on integrating Paperclip with the aws-sdk gem, and has contributed to a variety of other open source projects. Trevor’s talk introduced us to the Seahorse language, a DSL for describing API operations for just about any web service. He introduced us to what Seahorse does and showed us that once you have your API described using Seahorse, you can essentially create an entire API client library with one line of code.

Recommended Reading: Sadly we can’t find any slides for this presentation right now, but if we come across any we will update this post as well as posting it to our Facebook page.

3. Incremental Design: A conversation with a designer and a developer – Rebecca Miller-Webster and Savannah Wolf

“It was interesting for me to see how design and Engineering interact at another company. I hope to apply some of the learning in PayrollHero’s product development process.” – Adam Baechler, Product Development (Co-Founder)

Rebecca and Savannah addressed two problems that everyone in this industry has faced from time-to-time and asked “developers, how many times have you had to completely rip out your hard earned code for a totally new site design?” and to designers “how many times has a re-design taken four times as long as the developer said it would and not looked good in the end?” The resolution, they proposed, was to change to using an incremental approach to design.

This designer/developer talk walked us through an introduction to incremental design, how to design with incremental changes in mind and how to develop for incremental design, including utilizing SASS, structuring your mark-up and CSS, and structuring your Rails views and partials.

Recommended Reading: Rebecca and Savannah’s slide show on incremental design from RailsConf 2013 is available to read, right here at Speaker Deck. You should dive in today, it will change how you work tomorrow.

4. No Traffic, No Users, No Problem – Jim Jones

“Jim showed us some cool tools for using Mechanical Turk for Usability testing and definitely gave us some food for thought” – Adam Baechler, Product Development (Co-Founder)

Another talk highly recommended by Adam was ‘No Traffic, No Users, No Problem!” by Jim Jones. “Should the signup button be red or blue? Does my site’s sales pitch sound awkward? What will the user think about my site the first five seconds they visit?”, asked Jim. His talk then walked us through Using Rails and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, how to perform usability tests, A/B testing and how to gain valuable feedback on your site before launching to a single real user.

Recommended Reading: If you’ve never heard of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, or you’re struggling to get valuable usability information with your current methods, you should certainly watch Jim’s slideshow, here on Slideshare.

5. How Shopify Scales Rails – John Duff

“Seeing how Shopify scale having so many request at the same time was very interesting, they had a problem that startups usually don’t have, they just had so much traffic!” – Florent Lamoureux, Front-end Engineer

The first line of code was written for Shopify nearly 10 years ago to power an online Snowboard shop. Now the years have passed and today Shopify powers over 40 thousand online stores, processes up to half a million product sales per day and has over 30 people actively working on Shopify – making it the longest developed and probably the largest Rails code base out there. As a start-up, we really found value in hearing their story of how Shopify has had to evolve to meet its immense growth and the needs of its customers, layer by layer.

Recommended Reading: If you need a quick boost of entrepreneurial inspiration we recommend watching Shopify’s talk on YouTube.

6. Morning Keynote Talk – Yehuda Kats

Yehuda’s talk was a big hit with Suman Mukherjee, one of our Adventure Engineers. Unfortunately, because the talk was morning keynote we have not been able to find any slides to share with you but Suman offers this great, personal evaluation.

“Yehuda’s talk mainly concentrated on how not to write adhoc JavaScript and provide a good structure to it. He pointed out how turbolinks and JavaScript, bound to data attributes, makes the JavaScript clumsy and hard to maintain.” – Suman Mukherjee

Recommended Reading: Yehuda Katz is a member of the Ember.js, Ruby on Rails and jQuery Core Teams and co-author of best-selling jQuery in Action and Rails 3 in Action. He is a very influancial member of our community and we recommend following him at his http://yehudakatz.com/ or on Twitter @wycats

7. From Rails To The Webserver To The Browser – David Padilla

“From Rails to the Browser to the Web Server was very interesting. David taught us about Rails internals and it was great to hear from him how it all works under the hood.” – Florent Lamoureux, Front-end Engineer

David asked a room full of developers “do you know exactly how those HTML documents end up in a browser?” and his talk showed us all of the components that make the magic happen. We dissected the relevant code within Rails, Rack and the thin web server to discover exactly how the web server starts and listens to a TCP port, communicates with Rails and returns the HTML document that your browser parses.

Recommended Reading: If you’d like a bit of practical reading for your lunchbreak or morning commute, David’s slideshow is available to read here, on SpeakerDeck.

8. The Magic Tricks of Testing – Sandi Metz

“Sandi talked about how to write tests that you don’t hate. She focused on what parts of the code should be tested and how certain tests do not provide any value but add maintenance overhead. However she did only talked about unit testing” – Engineering (Founding Team)

Sandi, winner of the Ruby Hero Award, said exactly what we were all thinking “Tests are supposed to save us money, right. How is it, then, that many times they become millstones around our necks, gradually morphing into fragile, breakable things that raise the cost of change?” Sandi’s answer was that we could be writing too many tests and testing the wrong kinds of things. This talk striped away the veil and offered simple, practical guidelines for choosing what to test and how to test it.

Recommended Reading: Finding the right testing balance isn’t magic, but if you still feel as though you’re having the wool pulled over your eyes you should definitely watch Sandi’s slides on ‘The Magic Tricks of Testing’, here on SpeakerDeck.

Well that is the end of our RailsConf 2013 review, we hope you find some of our recommendations useful and valuable in your own work.

But You Didn’t Mention The Talk By…

There was a lot for us to cover, and we picked out only a few of the gems. If there’s a particular talk you’re looking for, most of the presentations can be found here, on GitHub.

Move to Whistler For A Career In Software Engineering With PayrollHero

Posted on May 7, 2013 by

If you were to ask most people in town why they moved to Whistler, British Columbia they would reel off answers like skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking and summer nights by the lake; the rest would say they were on a gap-year and most on a career break, but very few (if any) would say they moved for the perfect job.

With such a transient community Whistler has a bit of bad reputation for employment, but it’s PayrollHero’s goal to change that…one well-paid happy, adventurous employee at a time.

Just in case you still have doubts, later on we’ll introduce you to our most recent success story – Florent Lamoureux, all the way from historic Bordeaux, France.

Keep on reading this post for why more and more career-focused people are moving to Whistler and how, together, we could make it happen for you.

Work to live and live to play

CEB uncovered that one of the top 5 reasons an employee would quit his/her job in 2012 would be to pursue a better ‘work-life balance’. So if you’re already feeling underwhelmed with your current work-life situation, the only way is up when you move to somewhere as recreation-focussed as Whistler, British Columbia.

Swap your stressful highway commute for a walk or a bike ride through acres of lush green coastal temperate rainforest; and on the way home you could even stop for a game of beach volleyball or an evening BBQ at one of four lake-side beaches.

* Does this look like the life you’d like? You should get in touch and tell us a little about yourself. Maybe we could work together.

But isn’t moving stressful?

Psychiatrists Holmes and Rahe listed changing working conditions and moving house in their top 43 most stressful life events for adults. We know moving is never going to be easy, but there are a few things PayrollHero can do to help ease the ‘typical’ stresses of relocation.

#1 Stress: Finding a house

PayrollHero has staff housing for our new-into-town employees. On arrival Florent and his girlfriend moved into their own apartment right in Whistler village to help them get orientated as quickly as possible.

#2 Stress: That awkward gap between pay checks

In our PayrollHero staff housing, Florent received his first month rent free, second month at 70% off and third month at 50% off! We also have an office meals program to help keep everyone happy and healthy. Our commitment to happy employees doesn’t just stop there, our aim to also to have the highest average wage in Whistler. All added up, that should give you a few months of financial ease to help you settle in.

#3 Stress: Settling in and making friends

Making friends is easy in Whistler because everyone is here for the same reason – to have fun in the outdoors while striking a sustainable work-life balance in the mountains. Our employees enjoy regular activities paid for by PayrollHero, annual staff retreats and access to some of the world’s best biking and hiking trails right outside of our office.

My Move to Whistler: Florent Lamoureux

Name: Florent Lamoureux,

Social: @Flrent, Florent on LinkedIn, GitHub

Age: 22

Home: Bordeaux, France

Education: Masters Degree in Computer Sciences

School: SUPINFO International University

Reason for moving to Canada: To spend more time in the great outdoors and perfect his English.

What Florent thinks about his move to Whistler and PayrollHero:

“The slogan of Payroll Hero is ‘optimizing work with happiness’ and that’s something I felt with the company and Mike, right away. They made my move (with my girlfriend) very easy – they even came to pick us up from the airport. Since then I have enjoyed a great work environment, free food at the office and company activities in the summer. From the point of view of my work, I can use my JavaScript, web and mobile knowledge, while learning new skills like Ruby, and attending educational conferences with my co- workers, too.”

Do you feel the pull of the mountains, too? Are you our next PayrollHero Adventure Engineer? We’re always open to meeting new happy creatives from all over the world.

What to do now? Drop us and email right here at support[at]payrollhero.com. Be sure to include all the best bits about yourself and why you think you’d be a good fit at PayrollHero.

Post by Payroll Hero.

Entrepreneurs’ Organization Global Leadership Conference Manila

Posted on May 5, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

I had the honor of speaking at the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) Global Leadership Conference (GLC) in Manila this past week. The GLC is a 3 day event that takes place twice a year. It is an event that brings together the leaders of every chapter of EO from all over the world, this year, Panama City and Manila were the chosen locations.

The topic I spoke on was “Online Tools To Cut Costs And Grow Your Business“. The 90 minute presentation is a quick run through of many tools that we use within our business to not only operate the company but grow the business. My business partner and PayrollHero’s CEO Michael Stephenson is the driving force behind many of these tools we use to operate the business. His constant focus on kaizen (read: improvement) drives our team to continue moving forward. The second portion of the presentation is about promotion and includes parts from my book Sociable ! as well as some of the tools that we use within the company to grow the business. Many of these tools we have been using for quite some time and some we are testing in Southeast Asia.

I have spoken to quite a few EO Chapters all over the world as well as the 2009 GLCs in Hong Kong and New Orleans and EO always does it right. The events are top notch, designed to “wow” the EO members and show them the local area. This one in Manila was no exception.

The first night there was an opening cocktail party in the Makati Shangri-la Hotel followed by the choice of 3 dinners put on by EO Philippine members. I choose the “Taste of Bordeaux” dinner. It was a fantastic dinner put on by EO Philippine member Edouard Miailhe who splits his time between Manila and Bordeaux where his family owns Chateau Siran Margaux winery. The dinner was at the ‘Old Manila’ restaurant in The Peninsula Hotel which was kindly opened up for the event. Edouard had paired 6 of his wineries wines with a fantastic dinner and explained how they came to be. It was a truly once in a life time event.

The next day, after the sessions for the leaders of each chapter were complete, EO organized a dinner at the Shangri-la Hotel. It was quite a spectacle They presented dinner in a way I had never seen before. About 6 roasted pigs were dressed in clothes and carried into the ballroom with quite a fanfare, followed by a talk from the creator of the very successful “Its More Fun In The Philippines” worldwide marketing campaign.

The last night was a big surprise as no one knew what was in store. Everyone (over 400 people) was told to be in the lobby of the Shangri-la to meet our transportation to dinner. EO had organized a whole bunch of air-conditioned jeepneys to take us to the National Museum of the Philippines. It was a great ride as all of the jeepneys had karaoke in them. Upon arrival to the museum, waiting to welcome us outside was a great band, multiple spot lights shooting into the air and the whole outside of the building lit up. One foot in the door and there were many servers standing by with wine. It was a great way to arrive at dinner. After dinner we were transported by bus to a new nightclub called Hyve that has not officially opened yet. Overall it was another amazing EO event and the EO Philippine team as well as EO Global should be very proud.