Eleven

Meet the team and learn about their goals

Assets & resources

Goodies for your exercises and project plans.

Includes

  • Eleven Logos
  • Eleven team portraits and avatars

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Intro

Eleven is a boutique design and development studio based in Montreal. Founded in 2008, we’re a scrappy bunch focused on using our powers for good. We care about our future and are working hard to build a practice that is progressive and sustainable in our fast-changing future. We refuse to fall into the same growth-obsessed traps as our unsustainable industry peers. Our strength comes from our big-picture perspective and that perspective reveals technical and creative opportunities that others overlook.

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The team

Disclaimer: Any similarities between these characters and real-life people are completely coincidental.


Agency owner

Jess Owens

she/her

jess@elevenstudio.ca

10 years experience
Previously: Art Director at high-end agency

Qualities

  • Communication style: Director, Relator
  • Dry sense of humour; likeable
  • Sometimes skips the details during conversation
  • High standard of quality
  • Visionary: always chasing new ideas
  • Can be overly sensitive and critical at times
  • Quick decision maker
  • Values hard work and rewards it

Quirks

  • Likes to send texts outside of work hours
  • Emails and messages may seem harsh or brusque
  • Will surprise teammates with lavish thank yous (e.g., trip or new laptop)

Business Developer

Tyler Durgen

she/her

tyler@elevenstudio.ca

4 years experience
Previously: Business development for fast-paced marketing firm

Qualities

  • Communication style: Director, Socializer
  • Super funny and thoughtful
  • Competitive and action oriented
  • Tends to be a little aggressive and impatient
  • Suggests solutions before getting all the facts
  • Super reasonable and will back off when presented with a business case

Quirks

  • Often shows up unexpectedly and dumps info on the team
  • An open book: will tell you everything about personal life
  • Comes to work when sick

UX/Research

Drew Kusuma

she/her

drew@elevenstudio.ca

7 years experience
Previously: Policy researcher for federal government

Qualities

  • Communication style: Thinker
  • Analytical and detail oriented
  • Quiet and extremely kind
  • Tends to be a bit stubborn or argumentative when advocating for research
  • Perfectionist; extremely thorough
  • Needs people to focus on the details and wants to go through all the data with you
  • Can sometimes take a bit longer to finish tasks
  • A little long winded when explaining details

Quirks

  • Loves cats with monocles (seriously, any cat with an eyeglass means hysterical laughter)
  • Works late and puts extra effort in even when asked not to
  • Sometimes hijacks meetings with long explanations of latest findings

Code

  • Basic HTML/CSS

Product Designer

Avery Walsh

she/her

avery@elevenstudio.ca

4 years experience
Previously: Product Designer for a successful startup

Qualities

  • Communication style: Socializer, Relator
  • Gregarious and outgoing
  • Tries to make sure everyone is getting along
  • Great at getting people to focus on big picture
  • Not always great at prioritizing tasks
  • Sometimes doesn’t respond to email
  • May change mind about project decisions and forget to let others know

Quirks

  • Often shows up late to meetings
  • Hates when people come to work sick
  • Loves to teach the team new design concepts

Code

  • Basic HTML/CSS
  • Very rudimentary Javascript

Front End Designer & Developer

Bailey Cho

she/her

bailey@elevenstudio.ca

2 years experience
Previously: Front-end designer for another digital agency

Qualities

  • Communication style: Relator
  • Very shy and thoughtful; won’t always speak up
  • Avoids conflict and confrontation
  • Meticulous with code
  • Always on time with deliverables; very reliable
  • A bit abrupt or awkward in conversation

Quirks

  • Doesn’t like to be interrupted while working
  • Will shut down if perceiving criticism or threat
  • LOVES virtual reality games. Like a lot.

Code

  • HTML/CSS/Javascript
  • Basic PHP

Back End Developer

Harley

she/her

harley@elevenstudio.ca

4 years experience
Previously: Full stack developer at a financial technology startup

Qualities

  • Communication style: Thinker, Socializer
  • Very talkative about processes in social settings; loves to educate
  • Extremely detail oriented and methodical
  • May question the process if it doesn’t align with her vision
  • Dry sense of humour
  • Loves to solve functionality problems by working through them with the team
  • Won’t ask for help even when swamped with work

Quirks

  • Hates meetings and will avoid them as much as possible
  • Loves to go to punk rock shows
  • Sometimes forgets to wear deodorant to work

Code

  • Python
  • PHP
  • A little of HTML/CSS/Javascript
  • A touch of Ruby
  • A bit of Swift

Content Strategist

Cameron Okenla

she/her

cameron@elevenstudio.ca

4 years experience
Previously: Copywriter at social media platform company

Qualities

  • Communication style: Socializer, Relator
  • Warm and outgoing
  • Extremely fast, high-quality output
  • Likes to see all communication in writing
  • Prefers to be surrounded by people; works better in shared spaces
  • Can get distracted by surroundings occasionally
  • Talks excitedly and isn’t always aware that others want to speak up

Quirks

  • Likes to draw conversation out of less social peers at work
  • Devoted to helping others, leading her to forget about herself
  • Gets severe migraines that result in occassional sick days

Quality Assurance Tester

Erin Bettler

she/her

erin@elevenstudio.ca

2 years experience
Previously: Army medic overseas

Qualities

  • Communication style: Director, Thinker
  • Observant and opinionated
  • Detail focused
  • Can sometimes get lost in the details and forget the bigger picture
  • Tends to point out criticisms very openly
  • Strategic problem solver
  • Tests assumptions
  • Can come across as critical or superior

Quirks

  • Loves to talk about previous work stories (tales of war from time overseas)
  • Is colour blind
  • Often disappears during work hours (you find out because of anxiety)

Company goals


Clients

  1. No more incoming projects that only consist of a marketing site or brand
  2. Partner with a client in an advanced science like biotechnology or astrophysics
  3. Find long-term partnerships that can potentially span multiple projects and years

Sales/service

  1. Reduce the active client load from 21 to 10–15 (drop to 15 and work down from here)
  2. Only bring on one qualified client per quarter
  3. Stop taking clients and projects with budgets smaller than our current Revenue per Client need

Culture

  1. Make 1-on-1 meetings more frequent and consistent
  2. Implement mandatory vacation days
  3. Experiment with client-free Fridays

Operations

  1. Maintain the current team size, except…
  2. Add a project manager to the team
  3. Phase out hourly time tracking

Financial

  1. Increase the average level of engagement between the acceptable and target minimum level of engagement range ($96K-$180K/yr) for new clients (more below).
  2. Increase revenue without increasing team size past 1
  3. Increase team salaries

Expertise

  1. Implement machine learning or artificial intelligence in at least one project this year
  2. Design and implement a large-scale cross-platform design system from scratch for a client
  3. Get comfortable with developing React applications

Fun

  1. Go on at least two company retreats this year
  2. Build in bi-weekly learning sessions
  3. Host a community event around a creative topic (not directly work-related)

To top

The numbers

ValuesDescriptionActualGoal

Full-time employees (FTE)

The total number of full-time employees that work in your organization.

8

9

Full-time billable employees

Total number of employees that work for you whose time can be billed to clients. E.g., Non billable are often sales or accounting. Note: Keep PM billable when possible.

6

7

Average salary

The average annual salary of full-time employees in your organization. Tip: Ignore any unusually high or low outliers.

$60,000

$70,000

Active clients (NoC)

This is the number of active clients using up your team‘s capacity over a year.

21

10

Billable hours per week

The number of hours you can bill to a client over a week.

32

30

Client load

The ideal number of clients per teammate.

4

3

Time off

All paid holidays plus sick time and vacation in a year

3 weeks

4 weeks

Total annual revenue (TAR)

The total amount of income your organization receives within a fiscal year.

$880,000

$1,350,000

Total annual expenses (TAE)

The amount of expenses leaving your organization each year (including salaries, materials, equipment, professional development, taxes).

$860,000

$891,000

Profit

The amount of money leftover after all expenses, taxes, and salaries are deducted.

2%

TBD

Revenue per full-time employee (RpFTE)

The amount of revenue your organization generates per year divided by the number of full-time employees. Aka the amount of money a company should make to sustain a company of its size (not the amount of money each staff member needs to generate). TAR ÷ FTE = RpFTE

$110,000

$150,000

Revenue per client (RCl)

Revenue per client tells you how much revenue each client should generate your organization to meet your annual revenue goals combined with your ideal number of clients. (FTE × RpFTE) ÷ NoC = RCl

$41, 904

$135,000

Talk to us.

Learn more about our programs or just say hi.