"Why not us?" is a catch phrase of sorts at Merkle, Inc., a 36-year-old database marketing agency based in Maryland with offices in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia, Seattle and San Francisco. Senior managers repeat it and the company's 800-plus employees embrace it as they work to deliver top-shelf solutions for big-name clients, including Dell, DIRECTV and Capital One.

The phrase is the embodiment of President and CEO David Williams' desire to build a big company, which he's had since he acquired it in 1988 at the age of 25. Back then, David was the twenty-fourth employee of the company; his brother, Lance, joined the firm two years later (then age 28), becoming its twenty-fifth employee.

"I wanted to work for a very small company," Lance says of his addition to the Merkle team. "I had worked for some very large companies and I found the roles to be too limiting. I wanted to be able to play a sales role and an operations role." Luckily, after Lance gained some post-college sales experience in the machinery and insurance industries, David was gracious enough to let him come on board. (It was a fortuitous pairing, the brothers having worked together before in a landscaping business.)

Now, after many years of compounding growth at an annual rate of 25 percent, Merkle is a midsize company. However, Lance doesn't wince at the business's current size. After all, the organization has practices in place designed to combat the "limiting" experience that Lance describes of his pre-Merkle career – an experience that many believe continues to hurt the morale of employees of large companies to this day.

One of these is the way in which job candidates are hired. David and the leadership team are deeply concerned with making sure people will fit into Merkle's existing culture and that they understand their roles. To this end, potential hires for positions at all levels have multiple interviews with employees corresponding to those various levels. At the conclusion of candidate interviews, they are expected to deliver a presentation, which helps managers assess, among other things, their comfort level participating in and leading meetings.

This kind of thorough, people-centric recruiting blends perfectly into one of the company's key cultural facets for those candidates who are invited to join the team: lots of meetings. Merkle's account teams huddle for 15 minutes each morning. Executives meet weekly for four hours starting at lunchtime. Senior management also holds monthly financial review meetings and two-day strategic planning meetings each quarter.

"We spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about the things that we haven't mastered yet, and that we need to master to allow our company to get to the next level," David says. The CEO says this focus stems from his observances of other small businesses, which he argues haven't taken the time necessary to step back and reflect on what they need to do to clear the hurdles in their way. "People are afraid to dream. They're afraid to compare themselves at those levels because they don't like the answers," he says. "Sometimes we don't like the answers, either, but it helps to motivate us and allows us to work more effectively."

Starting in the 1990s, this brand of unabashed deep reflection helped create another practice that sets Merkle apart today. When the company was a lot smaller, says Director of Workforce Development Martha Spivey, it had an informal brown bag lunch program. Spivey – who initially joined the company in 2000, left for another opportunity at a larger firm and returned in 2002 as a consultant before more fully defining her current workforce development role with leadership – helped shape this now commonplace practice into a full-fledged "university"-style workforce training program known as the Merkle Institute of Technology, or MIT.

The program, which operates at all locations through a company intranet, comes complete with its own schools and curricula. In fact, the continuing education credits that employees earn by attending and presenting MIT courses are tied into performance goals and compensation. Everyone from David Williams to front-line staff attend and present topics, which range from highly technical, industry-specific sessions to general personal and professional development tracks, such as public speaking and business writing.

As teachers in a variety of work settings can attest, learning goes both ways. So it is with MIT's attendees and the company's leadership. The day that we spoke with Spivey, the "Merkle Life" school of MIT had just given a course in partnership with the American Heart Association on healthy living and eating habits. She says that the school's post-attendance feedback form for that course solicited employees' views on everything from the effectiveness of the subject-specific content to the overarching issue of training areas that MIT should devote funding and resources toward in the future.

The learning focus continues outside of Merkle's workplaces through an annual client summit, which is an opportunity for them to network with employees. For the past three years, this summit has been held near Merkle's headquarters in Maryland or the District of Columbia area. This year's fourth annual summit, however, which will be held later this month, will take place in Denver, where the company's Colorado office is located. Bill Stoughton, group leader of that office for a little over two years, is exciting to bring some of his team members along.

With everything Merkle has going for it, including more and more MIT courses as the firm continues to grow at annual double-digit rates, perhaps David Williams won't be asking "Why not us?" for much longer. Then again, growth and refinement – of people, practices and technical infrastructure – is never a bad thing. And it can only help when it comes time for succession planning. "If you look at the core of who we are, we're a growth company," David says. "As long as I'm CEO, we'll never be anything other than that."
                                                                                                                

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