Considering 20% of companies fail within one year, and 65% fail within 10 years, it’s a pivotal milestone and we’re jazzed about the future, as uncertain as it looks for humans right now. But this ain’t some typical birthday greeting. We want to show you how, over the last decade, project management training has transformed into a vehicle for democracy at work. Tall order? You bet. Drink up and read.
Fun facts
We launched the business as a scrappy digital design and development studio back in 2009 run by a husband and wife team who share the same birthday and same affinity for rewatching The Big Lebowski for the hundredth time.
Back then, we focused on content and design systems for small to medium sized-businesses—project management was a fundamental part of that. The reason? Everywhere we looked, web shops posted things like:
“We design beautiful experiences.”
And we’d smile and think: What about the experience of working with you? What’s that like? Clients and employees don’t stay if they have a bad experience no matter how beautiful your designs or clean your code. They don’t stay for the happy hours or fooseball either. That stuff falls away when employees suffer misery on your projects. But if your approach is good, you care a helluva lot, and your PM is flawless? Now that’s something to smile about.
2009–2014
Over the years, we partnered with several digital firms and clients doing project management, design, and dev work and learned first hand the magic of great PM and equitable leadership—sometimes by seeing it, and sometimes by filling the gaping hole left by its absence.
In 2014, we pivoted to our first love and current focus: digital project management and operations training.
2017–2019
In March, 2017 we completed our last client project to fully transition into a project management operations training company.
In April 2017, we launched our one year apprenticeship for folks who want a jet pack launch into project management operations. It’s packed with over 1000 pages of curriculum. This was paired with a thousand hours of being locked in a dark room writing the content. Kidding, I had a reading lamp and some Ritz crackers.
2019–2020
We became profitable two years after pivoting and incurring $150K in debt in the form of business loans and pocket change. We’ve paid off over 50% of that, are on track to be debt-free before 2023, and have doubled our revenue each year.
In 2019, we launched a short course: Digital PM Foundations for current or new Digital PMs who want to hone or refine their craft. We also partnered with SuperHi to launch a self-directed 8-week project management course. It’s a great toe-dip into Digital Project Management if you’re new to it.
The Future
Over the next year, we are converting Louder Than Ten into a worker-owned cooperative. We want to build a truly equitable company that supports and elevates our staff and our close-knit community, and that starts with distributing power and ownership.
We’re also launching a new course in a few months and developing resources to help Digital Project Managers and their organizations throughout the entire project lifecycle: from setting up a healthy PM environment to coaching PMs on career moves, to supporting project leads with online facilitation techniques.
I can’t tell you how damn proud I am of what we’ve built here. My eye twitches when I think about it. I won’t forget those early days— the nights I’d spend drumming numbers across the balance sheet my brain had etched on the ceiling. The stressful dry days in January wondering if this model would work, wondering when the learning wouldn’t lead to so many brain bruises, wondering if I’d lose my sanity or my husband/business partner first. You will not understand these gut punching feelings unless you have sat here through the terror and paranoia of starting your own business. But if you have, you will wear your worry lines like a badge of honour. And I do—gratefully.
By the numbers
100 | Digital agencies |
6 | Internal design teams |
3 | Product startups |
10 | Countries |
5 | Core team members |
7 | Trusted digital PM freelancers |
28 | Current apprentices |
41 | Active alumni |
8 | Grads promoted to director roles within two years |
60+ | Workshops taught by apprentices to their teams |
10–15% | Average growth of companies in training over the year |
Things we learned
You want to talk about learning? Running a business toys with your mental stability on a good day, but running one with your childhood sweetheart during a pandemic and global upheaval is a promise for a pair of stressed out stomach ulcers. Still, this is the only thing we dream of doing. And we’re even more fired up about it than back in 2014.
Here’s the rub, both good and bad, in case you were curious:
The ups
It works!
We didn’t know if the Apprenticeship model would work. It was a new, remote-first live training model that involved a deep commitment and practice—during a time when everyone else was selling 50 hr/week bootcamps or fifteen minute video courses. People gave us quizzical looks. But we stuck it out, and while the cohorts are small, we’ve seen that folks who graduate through our apprenticeship program are moving quickly into roles like Senior PM, Delivery Manager, and COO. We mapped out training method comparisons to share our findings and data is clear. Apprenticeship is democratic, results-focused, and helps learners deeply internalize and apply new concepts.
Revenue is up
We’ve doubled our revenue each year since we launched the original apprenticeship in 2017. We’re pretty proud of our sustainable growth and our ruthless prioritization (we have a huge backlog but as a small team, we know we can bring about 3–5 big ideas to life per year, so we make them count).
The changes are big
Our apprentices are transforming their organizations and building alignment to make permanent change in the form of new processes, stronger teams, and smarter strategies.
People like shorter commitments
When we launched our short 3 month Digital PM Foundations course last year, it was a hit. Our sales cycle went from six months to one month. It’s a deep dive into the core concepts you need to run healthy projects within a healthy org, but it’s a toe-dip in terms of commitment compared the full apprenticeship. We’re excited to apply a modular approach to future courses that will allow us to expand into new verticals like technical project management, communication strategies, managing a team, managing up, managing sideways, and all the other ways to lead people and projects.
Democracy over dictatorships
We’ve adapted a recipe for what democracy at work looks like, and how project management weaves it through our organizations. We think it’s the future and we’ve bet our curriculum on it. More on this below.
I hired a Digital Project Manager and immediately signed her up for the 1‑year Apprenticeship program. Within a couple months, the value was clearly visible to everyone on the team. A year later, our DPM is a graduate of LT10 and has reshaped the way we work for the better. She was a star before LT10 and now she’s a superstar. If you’re an owner, invest in your PM by giving them this community to learn from.
The downs
You can’t ‘fix a PM.’
We regularly get owners reaching out to us asking us if we can ‘fix’ their project managers. PMs are usually not the ones who are broken. More often, it’s the org itself and how it perceives the discipline of PM. Over and over we see ego-driven companies, a massive breakdown in alignment, a lack of clarity about roles, or unhealthy systemic workflows put a lot of pressure on teams to push unhealthy projects through the pipeline too quickly. We meet sad PMs who are beat down and resigned to being task jockeys because their companies don’t understand, respect, or appreciate project management. We can’t fix your PMs, but we can teach you how to set them up for success, which includes professional development so they can handle stress, tough convos, and risk with confidence. These are the things that help an unhealthy org develop anchors that deepen into pillars that guide them for a lifetime. Then again, sometimes it is the PM who won’t cut it—folks who aren’t curious, don’t know how to take safe risks, and have no sense of humour typically don’t follow the PM path for long.
You can’t do it all at once.
We find that at the three-month mark, apprentices hit a wall because they’re frustrated and want change to happen faster. The reality is that while you can implement change steadily, you have to be ready for the whiplash this can cause without careful steps to create an organizational change management strategy. Now, we’re spending more time coaching apprentices and their companies how to buy into and embed change at a systems level. We’re calling out barriers to those changes by helping teams build an operational roadmap before they start. We’ve built this into custom coaching to support our partners.
Rigid companies focused on output over outcomes can hit the road
We’ve worked with a few companies who spent so much time arguing over accountability and clicking time tracking buttons they forget that the role of project management should be to elevate a team instead of kick it down. We won’t waste our time with those companies. We’ll tell you upfront: if you solely measure billable utilization as your employee performance metric or measure how many widgets your team produces as a method of compensation, we’ll remind you that these practices were developed by plantation owners to dehumanize people they enslaved and we refuse to support that.
This whole thing started out as a way for us to help companies treat their employees better, but we’ve since tapped into deeper waters.
I cannot recommend LT10 highly enough. The quality and practicality of the insights and learnings, combined with high quality, engaging, caring instruction made every Thursday for 3 months invaluable. I feel confident and better equipped to navigate the many facets of managing a healthy project. A last word of praise for Rachel and the team, and the community they’ve built with LT10. Incredibly kind, thoughtful, sharp, and insightful people. If you are wondering whether LT10’s offerings are worth your money, I guarantee that by the end of the course, you’ll think you underpaid.
Why we do this
We chose digital project management as our focus because it is an equalizer and a natural super glue. Project leads sit at the center of their teams and impact every part of the people, projects, and processes they interact with. They don’t necessarily hold power over their peers, but they hold the power to create more ethical practices, to move industries in a more responsible direction, and to question a status quo that lazily embraces the narrow views of what ‘success’ looks like.
Since then we’ve learned a lot about how power operates inside of organizations, and more broadly in society. Buckle up, because you’re about to get a lesson in economics, philosophy, and intersectional justice.
When change changes systems
In the face of a global pandemic, rising inequality, systemic oppression, and a collapsing climate, there’s a lot of talk about systemic change, but little that actually changes systems.
Change to a system does not come from a public diversity statement, updating a naming convention, or even painting a powerful slogan on the street. These are symbolic gestures. Symbolism can be important and has its place, but it does not replace action. Without a coordinated effort to change power dynamics, behaviour, and real-world material circumstances, they become empty gestures that allow oppressors off the hook without having to implement any actual change.
If we’re serious about saving the environment, fighting racial oppression, and reducing the wealth gap, we need to examine the places where we have the most influence, which also happen to be the places that have the most influence on our lives… our workplaces.
For us, this means modifying the operating structures of our companies. As Marjory Kelly puts it in Owning Our Future, “The real structure is found in the rules of the game by which the system operates.”
In almost all companies, there are two fundamental rules. Rules that are reinforced by nearly every business professor, accountant, and lawyer. Rules that are the underlying bedrock to nearly every business book, conference talk, and management consultant, whether they know it or not. Rules that are responsible for the devastation of our climate, the growing wealth gap, and the oppression of society’s most vulnerable people. Those rules are:
- Maximize financial gain
- Minimize financial risk
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these two rules. Your organization probably needs to make more money than it spends and reduce risk. The problem is what they ignore and who they benefit.
In most corporations, there are a small number of owners who have unilateral power to change every aspect of the company freely and with impunity as long as they (mostly) stay within the law. But even with the most benevolent leadership, when the aforementioned rules remain unexamined and aren’t accompanied by others to balance them, the default inertia will always be to preserve the position, wealth, and power of the owners at the expense of everything else. Productivity is treated as a cult-like virtue that shareholders reinforce to squeeze every last drop of value out of their workers. Initiatives that advance the business ignore the impact on their surrounding communities.
These rules are based on deeper values, including individualism, the notion that the only relevant unit of concern is the individual self. What the rules say is to maximize gains for the self and avoid responsibility if others are harmed in the process. Harm to others is not something the system intends. It’s something the system ignores. What the rules say is, take care of yourself; forget everybody else.
Making systemic change means actively addressing and changing the operating rules of our workplaces to benefit all those who contribute their time and labour into the organization as well as the surrounding community. Creating new outcomes requires not only changing the rules but changing who writes them.
What we’ve found time and time again in our most successful case studies is that making processes and company structures more democratic increases margins, improves team happiness and communication, builds healthier relationships with clients, and makes teams more resilient in times of adversity.
And we’re not alone. In a 20-year study, worker-owned cooperatives, the most democratic form of organization, are more financially stable, last longer, more productive, have less income disparity, and report higher levels of employee satisfaction and quality of life than standard corporations.
We all support democracy in our governments, and will fight tooth and nail to preserve it (or at least our perception of it), so why do we design our companies like dictatorships? Nothing affects a person’s quality of life and access to basic needs as much as their job, yet they rarely have a say in the decisions that affect them most.
Democracy needs to be built into the world of work intentionally, or the daily grind begins to look and feel a lot like authoritarianism. Look at the daily experience of the average project manager, delivery driver, or Amazon factory worker being spied on by Pinkerton operatives and you realize that many private companies expect you to labour your life away for them inside a highly controlled environment that puts profit over people—and they’ll pay you garbage wages to oppress you without complaint.
Isn’t it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing absurdity.
Here’s what we’ve learned and we believe: the best projects and organizations are run democratically and they elevate the people within them. And this is where project management comes in. We’re here to upend the traditional principles and values of project management that treat people like economic units, many of which are based on oppressive tactics used during slavery and the Industrial Revolution to dehumanize and increase production. We know that democratic project management has a powerful role to play in making sure we’re running projects in an ethical, sustainable way. Democratic project management also opens up leadership positions for misrepresented people who can harness and hold more economic and company power and return that power to their communities which creates a sustainable loop. Finally, a more democratically run organization means you embody your mission statement and your outcomes support a happy, well-paid workforce who gets a say in its direction. That’s the type of future we are committed to.
Our mission is to train as many creative and digital departments, agencies, and studios we can on how to run ethical projects in a democratic system where workers have a voice and power is distributed fairly. And we want to do that for as long as possible. Louder Than Ten will live on long after we are dead.
Your project leaders are the nucleus of many of these conversations, so you can empower them within their environments because they do the daily work of transformation. On the surface, this looks like project management, but underneath it all we’re staging a quiet revolution. A revolution for how power gets distributed and shared within work environments and as Louder Than Ten partners, you choose to be an active part of that revolution.
Let’s invent a fair future
Yes, the future looks like a shark with a face full of rusty daggers. It’s unsettling thinking we’re marching headlong into the abysmal dystopia our high school textbooks warned us about back when climate crisis was still called global warming and our fears about dictatorships were mostly isolated to terrible 80s movie plots with fake Russian accents. But this is happening and we’re living on the cusp of a do or die civilization. There’s no way to sugar coat it.
But we’re also hopeful. Scratch that, we’re excited: we’re inventing the future here and, even if the odds are stacked against the human species, we aren’t giving up on it. So we dedicate ourselves to that vision. Collectively, we are resilient.
This is our birthday wish
Six years ago we dreamt that the people who run projects would find their people and know their worth. Six years from now, we dream these same people and droves more who go through our training and will be the challengers of corporate tyranny—this company is not simply about project outputs or managing risk. Louder Than Ten is about changing industry standards, taking a stand against unethical business and economic practices that reinforce oppressive social practices, and showing up for the beautiful souls who take your projects to the finish line.
This year we are older and wiser and this year we’re donning a new birthday suit. We’re Louder Than Ten and we’re here to shake up your world at work. Project management.
Bet you didn’t see that coming.
