By Meryl Natchez | Senior Member
Like many of my colleagues, I am a former English major who came to technical writing by accident. I spent a few years as a corporate employee before striking out on my own as a contractor in 1980. By 1982, I had more work than I could do myself. Because I was anxious about having enough work, and I never wanted to turn work down, I started engaging talented consultants to help me.
Soon, with no business background, I had a business. TechProse grew by a series of lucky accidents. In the 1980s, the need for good manuals and instruction grew along with Silicon Valley. From the beginning, I had focused on trying to understand and include the user in the design of materials, and this user-centric focus led to usable deliverables and positive feedback. The fact that I only worked with colleagues who shared my commitment to quality helped and we had a great client base.
But much of the success of TechProse came from a desire to break out of the constraints I had seen as a corporate employee and to create a workplace that was more in harmony with my personal ideas about how a business should run. I had the luxury of testing every utopian ideal I ever had about work and finding out what was viable and what wasn't.
Things that didn't work had to do with consensus and equality. In any organization, someone has to have the ultimate decision-making authority, or all your time is spent in discussion and nothing resolves. Also, different functions have different value to the company and need to be acknowledged.
I learned that a company is bigger than any of its parts, that no matter how great your ideas and the quality of your service, if you aren't profitable, you will fail. Profitability has to be a consideration in every decision. For example, I wanted TechProse to offer excellent benefits, but until we reached a certain size and scale, we didn't have the money to offer them.
All this might seem pretty basic, and it would have been basic if I came from a business background. But I didn't. I came from a very different set of values and assumptions and had to learn what was possible. What was possible and valuable was to treat everyone with respect. Whether you are a colleague, client, competitor, or the cleaning staff, I believe every individual deserves basic courtesy.
I also felt it was important to have a “no blame” corporate culture in which mistakes were valued, not punished. After all, I was learning by trial and error myself. I wanted everyone's experience to add to the mix. If we make a mistake, and that's inevitable, we simply acknowledge it, fix it, and hopefully learn from it. A third winning strategy was to value productivity above face time. As a working mother, I knew that I could be much more productive with a flexible schedule. I've always believed that we can be most effective if our work fits into the demands of our lives. I made telecommuting a common practice at TechProse before it was commonplace in the corporate world. Finally, quality work has to be everyone's top priority. Nothing should ever go to a client that hasn't been reviewed by at least two sets of eyes.
I have enjoyed coming to work every day for almost 30 years because of these principles: user-centric process for development, respect, no blame, flexible work hours, and a commitment to quality. Our office hums with activity and collaboration. We have a good time, and we get a lot done.
TechProse grew over this period from a one-woman operation to a company with annual revenues of more than $15 million. We've added change management, e-learning, communications, and project management to our technical writing and instructional design capabilities. TechProse is a pioneer in single source development. We have a department that specializes in documentation and training for transit, and a very rich portfolio of online training. While in the beginning I did everything, others have led and developed these areas.
This year, I completed a five-year process of selling the company to the employees. TechProse is now 100 percent employee-owned. I've had the satisfaction of building a business that reflects my ideas of how a company should run, and I've seen it grow beyond me and be taken over by others with similar values. I don't think you can ask for more than that from a career.
