With startups leading the way in Canadian innovation every day, BetaKit does its part to help fill the talent gap with our BetaKit Job Board.
To highlight some of the great places prospective employees can work at across Canada, we’ll put one startup in the spotlight each week to find out what makes their company tick.
Right now, Tab is hiring a marketing manager in Toronto. We talked to Tab co-founder and CEO Adam Epstein — now acting as the Canada country manager for Velocity, the company that acquired Tab — about the best parts of working there.
If someone were to come in to work for Tab on their first day, what’s the first thing you tell them to get them excited to working there?
We were recently acquired by Velocity, and after Velocity acquired us, Cover, and Uncover, the company has become the fastest growing mobile software for hospitality company in the world. It’s an incredible proclamation, but we’ve really only just begun. There’s a tremendous amount of work to be done in each local market for us to achieve our goals and reach our potential.
Specifically, it’s super exciting for the prospective marketing manager because in Q1 2016 the Tab brand will be transitioning over to Velocity, so this person will have the privilege of completely owning the demand side of our marketplace for the Velocity product and brand from the outset. Invariably, the Velocity Toronto brand will be almost entirely dependent on the work of our marketing manager. It’s a massive and daunting undertaking but also an incredible opportunity for the right person.
What are some additional opportunities for Tab employees now joining Velocity?
Velocity is a company that’s growing exponentially on a global scale. Our goal is for Toronto to be the best performing city, aside from London, in the company. The marketing manager will have a massive impact in achieving that goal. If we’re able to achieve it, everyone on the Toronto team will have opportunities to grow into leadership roles within the company as Velocity continues to expand.
What are some company perks that people can expect when working at Tab?
Naturally, we have full health benefits. Members of the team are also given new hardware as well as a subsidized gym membership. In my opinion, the most exciting perk is several hundred Tab credits a month to spend at Toronto’s top tier restaurants. We also have awesome snacks and wine in the office.
More than perks though, I think that our culture is what should excite anyone about working with us. We’re extremely passionate about the problems we’re solving and run a transparent organization with a focus on teamwork. Each member of the team is afforded a great deal of autonomy to excel in their role as we grow the Toronto market.
When working as part of the marketing team, what kind of problems could a marketing manager expect to tackle? What makes the team so dynamic?
The marketing manager’s goal will ultimately to acquire more users, and continually ensure that those users become more engaged with our product. It sounds simple, but is obviously quite complicated. If you unbundle that goal, it consists of assisting the global marketing team (in London) with online marketing campaigns, creating rich content for the product and blog, executing offline marketing campaigns throughout the city, and fostering business development partnerships with other brands. In our view, few other marketing positions have such a nuanced approach to user acquisition.
Additionally, this role will have an interesting mix of work between the local team as well as the global marketing team and, on account of that, there will be opportunities to grow within the company both locally and globally depending on the person’s skills and desires.
In what ways do you help to foster personal and/or professional growth in your team?
Professionally, we place a heavy onus on skill development. We don’t believe in quarterly performance reports. We care about improving everyday and constantly working together to ensure that each member of the team is learning from their mistakes and developing individually so that we can win collectively.
Obviously, we expect every candidate to be very smart and have the requisite level of experience prior to being hired, but since our short term goals change so quickly we hope that every member of the team has sharp enough skills specific for the role so that they can apply their expertise to whatever challenge is in front of them.
On a personal level, we think its vital for every member of the team to have things that they’re passionate about asides from their work (food and dining doesn’t count). We make a concerted effort to ensure that these passions are continually cultivated while working with us. Hopefully, you’ll learn a lot about wine and types of cheese as well.
What’s your favourite part about working at Tab?
Nothing gives me greater joy than working with the incredible restaurants in our ecosystem. Whether it be right or wrong, since so much time is spent trying to solve these problems for our partner restaurants, I find that my best friends are slowly becoming restaurant managers and owners. Not only is that fun and exciting, but it’s incredibly rewarding to realize that you can have a positive affect on helping these local businesses.