Eisenberg: Taking a great company and making it better

March 12, 2019

This paid piece is sponsored by Click Rain.

When Natalie Eisenberg took the helm at Click Rain, a digital marketing company frequently recognized for its company culture, she saw a great company with even greater potential. ​Now more than a year into her tenure as CEO, the company has made many strides. Here, Eisenberg shares about the experience with SiouxFalls.Business:

Have you made any major shifts in your first year as CEO?

In many ways, we have shifted from being a startup operation to owning our role as a more established shop. We have been around 11 years and are working with more sophisticated clients all the time, so we’ve found it necessary to build up more structure through clear definition of processes, systems and roles.

Companies with structure and systemization can get painted with a brush of being rigid, not allowing for innovation. I see these approaches as critically important to allow for innovation. Instead of spending time figuring out the steps to get something done, we know the drill. We can spend more time and energy meeting our clients’ business goals, identifying emerging techniques and tools to solve their problems and visioning five and 10 years out for Click Rain.

Your company has been known to have an innovative culture. Has adding more structure changed that?

Click Rain has been culture-focused since its start in 2008. From the beginning, the company was built to be a place that nurtured people personally and professionally. We repeatedly hear — even from team members who move on — that they are better people from having worked here.

So while we’ve been focusing on running a tighter ship, we have also put more emphasis on people. We changed our company purpose to ​Putting People First​. This applies inside and outside of our company. We now talk about ourselves as a people-first digital agency and hope it serves as a great conversation starter about what that means for our staff, our clients and our community.

What are some examples of Putting People First?

Simply put, we go out of our way to care for our team, strive to improve the lives of our clients and actively extend a helping hand to those in need throughout our community.

One of the keys to taking care of our team of people is actively listening to them. We survey our staff regularly to get their input and gauge morale. We also notice when someone is working longer hours and take steps to relieve them. Balance is a core value at Click Rain, and as leadership, we work hard to live up to this every day with our team. We believe in working smarter, not harder.

We’ve added some nice benefits as well, many based on employee feedback. Paid maternity and paternity leave, volunteer time off, birthday day off and a remote-work policy are all new. We are very mindful of the overall health of our team, including their mental well-being. We offer and strongly promote the use of our Employee Assistance Program and our Corporate Care partnership, which is a chaplaincy program we make available to our staff.

What do you see for the future of Click Rain?

We have realized that our clients have become more and more digitally savvy and sophisticated. So it’s our job not to teach them digital fundamentals in most cases but to help them level up their digital game.

We are always advancing our abilities in our core service offerings of digital marketing, web design and development, and creative, and we’ve done significant work to expand our offerings in the areas of data and marketing technology. This will only continue as the demand in these categories grows.

I am thrilled by the progress we’ve made, both for our people and in our craft in the last year. We have some strong new footings in place. At the same time, our innovation lab has been active, and we have some exciting growth plans on the horizon.

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Eisenberg: Taking a great company and making it better

When Natalie Eisenberg took the helm at Click Rain, a digital marketing company frequently recognized for its company culture, she saw a great company with even greater potential. One year later, the CEO shares the shifts that have been made and what’s coming next.

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