Startup Monday

Editor’s Note: Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders, plus other local technology happenings. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

When Arlington real estate agent Kari Klaus decided to renovate her home to make it more energy efficient, she stumbled upon a problem.

Klaus, whose background is in sustainable development, realized that the traditional real estate property listing system doesn’t showcase or market environmentally friendly features for homes, making her house appear similar to others that aren’t energy efficient.

From working in the real estate business, she knew that home buyers care about how eco-friendly their future home will be.

“Wouldn’t you want to know if the home you are thinking of buying has superior systems, a tight building envelope (sealed to prevent air leaks) with solar panels and will save you potentially hundreds of dollars each and every month?” Klaus said.

But there was no understandable and reliable way to rank, search and view energy efficient homes, Klaus said.

That’s where VivaGreenHomes.com comes in.

“VivaGreenHomes.com shows you that these options exist and explains their importance to you as a home buyer,” Klaus said. “If a home’s environmental or health value has not won you over, then the potential to save you a lot of money will.”

She said her company changes the game because other real estate listing services aggregate home listings without any verification procedures. VivaGreenHomes.com uses claim verification methods, including a “Home Energy Rating System” score, an industry standard for eco-friendly homes.

A beta version of the site launched in October 2014. Feedback received from industry leaders helped to shape the website before its full launch in May. Just two months after launching the full version, the website has nearly 4,500 active listings, Klaus said.

In the next six months, VivaGreenHomes.com plans to add more user tools, consumer information and other features. Amid those changes, Klaus hopes the number of listings on the site will reach 20,000 in the next year.

Arlington provides all the resources the company needs to continue to grow, she said.

“It’s been incredible to be around so many professionals that work in the sustainability and eco-homes industry,” Klaus said. “It has been a great resource for the company’s growth, including the recruitment of some of our newest team members who live in the D.C. area.”

VivaGreenHomes.com is currently affiliated with 1776 Crystal City, Mentor Capital Network’s Bethesda Green Cohort and Cleantech Open Southeast.

Editor’s Note: Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders, plus other local technology happenings. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

Many companies across the U.S. have issues with worker morale and productivity. Clarendon-based E3 Solutions employs neuroscience to help companies solve those problems.

E3 CEO Don Rheem said he started his business six years ago to give human resources departments tools they can use through empirically validated science. While many companies have cutting-edge computers and software, few of them have HR processes that aren’t stuck in the 1990s, he said.

“Very little that’s done in the HR field is actually based on empirically validated research related to human behavior,” Rheem said.

The idea for E3 — which gets its name from the three E’s of envision, empower and engage — came when Rheem worked as a communications consultant. After 20 years in the communications industry, Rheem realized that while he was helping find better ways to communicate, the messages he conveyed remained ineffective.

He then took it upon himself to figure out ways to make workplace culture better and improve communication on a greater scale. Using science, Rheem was able to discover some of the main issues that affect workers.

Rheem learned that humans by nature are hard-wired to work as a group, creating a tribe. The workplace has evolved into a tribe, where adults spend most of their time with other adults, he said. As a result, the brain has specific requirements that lead to the optimal performance of the group.

“The brain expects to find certain conditions when it gets into the group and we now know what those conditions are,” Rheem said. “That’s what we help our clients see and understand, and then we help them to do the tactical things, the logistical things that they need to do in their company so that the brain feels those conditions that it wanted.”

For new clients, E3 begins with a 26-question online assessment that companies send out to all of their employees. After collecting the data, E3 can figure out how engaged the employees are, creating a profile that helps businesses determine what the issues are.

In the case of an electric company that had a morale issue, for example, E3 found that about a third of its employees were disengaged. After a year of working with the company, almost half of the disconnected workers became engaged.

“That’s the beauty of using science,” Rheem said. “Unlike these typical leadership approaches that are literally made up by the company or proprietor that’s doing it, we use science, and when you use science, it works every time.”

E3 also makes sure to apply what it sells to its own business.

Rheem said he chose to base his company in a MakeOffices location due to the social aspects that come with working in a shared office space. Unlike traditional workplaces with long hallways and individual offices where interaction might be limited, MakeOffices allows people to mingle with employees from other businesses, building connections and a sense of community in the workplace.

“We know we’re herd animals,” he said. “We know we’re hardwired to have safe and secure connections with others. What we’re essentially helping our clients do is creating those safe and secure connections inside the workplace. When you do that, people thrive by design. When you create those conditions, you don’t have to tell employees to become engaged, they become engaged organically.”

Editor’s Note: Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders, plus other local technology happenings. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

Grant Leonard’s path to his own firm began after his boss fired him from a marketing associate job at a defense contractor.

Poor performance wasn’t his problem. Rather, ATA president Scott Berg thought Leonard had the talent to run his own business.

In 2015, his former boss and current mentor helped Leonard start The Grant Leonard Group, an Arlington-based startup that provides social media and marketing support to businesses in the D.C. area.

After joining his mentor at several business meetings with entrepreneurs and investors, Leonard realized startups were in need of an affordable way to maintain their social media presence.

“We saw these two pretty familiar and consistent concerns about social media,” Leonard said. “There were a lot of startups that wanted to do social media, but they didn’t have the time or resources to do it themselves. You think of a startup founder, he’s busy building his business. He’s working 80-100 hours a week and the last thing on his mind usually is what he’s posting on Facebook.”

The other issue he found was that the price it would take for a startup to have a full-time social media presence would be difficult to include in the budget.

“These folks that wanted to do it, but couldn’t do it themselves, didn’t have the budget or the need to hire a full-time employee or an established marketing agency, where it can run a company in overhead anywhere from $3-5,000 a month and up from there,” he said. “So we said, ‘OK, there’s a need for a social media startup for startups.'”

The Grant Leonard Group charges a standard fee of $995 per month, providing customizable social media based on the needs of the each of its clients. The firm primarily focuses on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. But it also can help companies with other social media platforms such as Instagram and YouTube, along with blogs and newsletters.

Leonard directly works with the businesses to develop a social media strategy, planning a month-by-month implementation strategy to ensure the effectiveness of their social media.

“At this point, an investment in the Grant Leonard Group is an investment in Grant Leonard where I’m doing 100 percent of the strategic execution, and then I execute it on a day-to-day basis,” Leonard said. “We always say, ‘If you want to go off to the Caribbean and just cut off completely from the world, rest assured that you know your social media platforms are taken care of and secure with us.'”

The Grant Leonard Group currently works with 17 businesses including MakeOffices, which provides co-working space in Clarendon to the firm.

“We’re not reinventing the social media wheel,” Leonard said. “The wheel’s there, it works. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel but what we need to reinvent and innovate is how people access that wheel, how people leverage that wheel. We’re offering a level of service that’s few and far between from what we’ve seen.”

Editor’s Note: Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders, plus other local technology happenings. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

A growing company in Arlington is set to get even bigger with a recent acquisition.

Snagajob, an Arlington-based tech company that helps employers find hourly workers and vice versa, announced last week it acquired PeopleMatter, an HR software business that aids employers in hiring, screening and managing employees.

The joint company now has “tools for candidate sourcing, screening, tracking, hiring, onboarding, training, scheduling and performance management,” according to a press release.

Peter Harrison, CEO of Snagajob, said the acquisition makes for a “very nice synergy” between the
two companies.

“We [ensure] workers get the kind of jobs they want and employers get the kind of candidates they want, and then PeopleMatter has this platform for managing everything beyond that,” Harrison said. “There’s a great overlap.”

Harrison added that although Snagajob has about 200,000 and PeopleMatter has about 50,000 employer clients in the retail, hotel and restaurant segment, only a small number of the two company’s clients actually use both products. Thus, the acquisition presents a “great opportunity” for collaboration.

The company’s next project — and where it sees much potential for growth — is a new mobile scheduling app called Snagashift.

With Snagashift, Harrison said he envisions a future where hourly workers can not only find jobs with large employers but also manage and swap their shifts there.

“I think this is the really interesting opportunity that PeopleMatter will enable,” Harrison said. “In the near future we’re going to have the ability to, having gathered enough information about your work history, let you pick up shifts… even if it’s a completely different franchisee.”

And that seamless approach to scheduling could lead to big growth, Harrison said. “Think of it as sort of Snapchat for shifts,” he explained.

“We got 3 million people hired last year. If only 10 percent of those people managed the sharing across employers, our business would be ten times its current size,” he added. “That on its own is a giant avenue for growth for us.”

To accommodate its growth, the company recently filled a number of offices in the new MakeOffices Clarendon co-working space. As the company grows, Harrison said he expects to  add even more workers to the company’s offices in Arlington.

“We’re already up to about 80 people and I expect we’ll be well north of 100 by the end of the year,” Harrison said. “We’re taking new space that will scale to 250 or 300 people. This is going to be our hub.”

Editor’s Note: Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders, plus other local technology happenings. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

Like many college students, Andrew DeZarn became frustrated with the process of applying for internships that would be important to launching his career. But instead of continuing to send out hundreds of resumes, DeZarn took a different approach.

“It motivated me to create a technology-based compatibility platform that focused on connecting college students to internship positions based on characteristics and metrics that were much more relevant than university/program selection or even GPA,” DeZarn said. “Ultimately, this platform allowed companies to connect to students who they may not have considered otherwise.”

Little did DeZarn know, he had just taken his first step on the path to becoming a career head hunter.

In January, DeZarn co-founded Vooru, a Rosslyn-based professional recruitment and consulting services agency with a special focus on the finance and accounting domains.

“With technology platforms at our core, we specifically provide direct hire or ‘permanent’ staffing solutions to our growing portfolio,” DeZarn said.

With a network of more than 23,000 professionals, Vooru records and matches individuals’ skills, desired contract terms, cultural sensitivities, and other metrics to its clients’ open positions. Those include positions in business services, technology, not-for-profit, real estate and marketing organizations.

Vooru also offers career consultation to its network of professionals, including resume development and strategy, interview preparation, and career advisement.

“We ensure that the professionals we work with are in a position to put their best foot forward,” DeZarn said, adding that he and his business partner have “a combined 20 years of experience, so we definitely know how to help guide people to land that dream job.”

Unlike other staffing agencies, DeZarn said Vooru “relies on proprietary technology and data collection that results in instant connections between the professionals and companies we work with.” That process allows the firm to fill positions in a more timely and cost effective manner.

The name Vooru is derived from the Dutch word “vooruit,” which means forward or forward thinking. “My business partner and I are passionate about improving the way professionals can connect with some of the best companies out there and we ultimately hope to ignite advancement in the staffing industry, which has seen very little innovation in the past decade or so,” DeZarn said. “We are confident that our technology and forward thinking are the way do this.”

He said basing the business in Arlington also made sense with the firm’s forward-thinking character.

“Not only is Arlington easily accessible from almost all parts of the DC metro, but the highest concentration of companies and professionals we work with are within a 30 or so mile radius of our office,” DeZarn said. “Additionally, there is an exciting energy and buzz that can be felt in Arlington with all the commercial and residential development that is going on. Walking out of our office, you can walk in any direction and find a new restaurant, bar or entertainment attraction.”

He added, “It doesn’t hurt that Arlington is continually ranked atop multiple publication lists of ‘Best Places for Young Professionals’ in the entire country … we see so many of our peers and previous colleagues moving to the area as well, and it’s the perfect environment for any small business to incubate.”