Root-and-branch approach helps tech education start-up Treehouse to grow

When it comes to job perks, tech education start-up Treehouse is probably up there with the best. Staff at the US technology company all work four days a week but get paid for five.

Yes, you read that correctly. Treehouse employees get paid to take every Friday off work.

The 100-and-counting employees work a 32-hour week from Monday to Thursday, with the company offices closed on Fridays.

"The average person has 2,000 weekends left until they die. We give them 50 per cent more [time at] weekends. We give them something they can't buy: time," says Treehouse co-founder and chief executive Ryan Carson.

He says the thinking behind it is that most people can get five days of work done in four days, and that’s not by working longer days either. Treehouse staff work from 8am to 4pm each day.

“It gives us a competitive advantage. We are able to out-recruit people who can out-pay us,” he says.

It also seems to work, as the company has close to 100 per cent employee retention, though Carson does get the odd call from angry rival chief executives accusing him of stealing their people.

On June 20th, 2013, Carson decided the company’s four-day work week wasn’t insane enough, so he went further and removed all managers.

“It was a bold move and one that not everyone was convinced of,” he says.

He wanted to change the way Treehouse operated and give all employees 100 per cent control of their time, letting them decide what they work on each day.

Rumours, politics and complaints

“By 2013 we had grown to 60 people with seven managers and four executives. As we added more people to the team, we noticed something disconcerting: rumours, politics and complaints started appearing,” he said.

Initially Carson and his co-founder Alan Johnson considered removing the lowest layer of managers and asking them to go back into producing, which is what they were originally hired for. Then they went up the chain and asked hard questions about the value of the mid-tier managers, and executives at the top.

The two decided to have a company- wide vote to decide whether to remove managers or not, with 90 per cent of employees ultimately voting to do so.

With no managers, and no work on Fridays, how does Carson ensure a sustainable pace in four days, and that the employees get all their work done? Well he has effectively banned emails between employees for a start.

Treehouse uses Canopy, an internal web forum to avoid the flood of distracting, internal emails usually associated with workplaces. Wortkers can simply go to Convoy and pull their information instead of having it forcibly pushed on them through email.

“We actively discourage use of email because it silos information, discourages accountability and causes busywork,” Carson says.

“The default mode of communication at Treehouse is ‘public’. This is important because without managers, everyone needs to be able to drop into a Project and understand where it’s at,” he adds.

Founded in 2011, Treehouse offers hundreds of videos created by its own full-time teaching staff on subjects ranging from coding to web development, Web design and to iOS development.

While other education sites curate videos created by teachers from around the web, Treehouse videos are created by Treehouse’s full-time in-house teaching staff.

“We attach courses to jobs. We look at where the jobs are and build courses for that. If we see lots of demand for Android developers, we do a course on Android software development. That’s what separates us from traditional universities,” Carson says.

Treehouse isn’t Carson’s first start-up. He previously founded FlightDeck, a tool to send large files to clients for approval. He pulled in $12,000 a year in revenue, but the business ultimately fizzled out as he had priced it too high for a self-serve model. Carson then sold DropSend, a freemium tool for sending large files. The business had just two employees – Carson and a part-time developer – and was bringing in revenue of $300,000 a year.

He sold that business for $450,000 and set up Carsonified, an in-person training company for web designers and developers. That company produced events with themes such as "future of web apps" and "future of web design".

“I wanted to scale that business to the masses for an affordable price. My wife said we should record a teacher and put the video on the internet. That was a novel idea at the time.

“We already had an audience because of the training events. The videos were an instant success.”

He says there are currently half a million jobs in the US that are unfilled and they don’t require a computer science degree.

Job-ready

“We have no proper certification but people don’t mind. We get them job-ready. We have a career programme which is free for people. We are placing people in jobs with salaries of $50,000 and they have no degree.”

Carson says Treehouse courses are designed for people with a busy lifestyle.

“If you’re a working mother struggling to get by, there’s no way you can stop working and go back to school full-time. Our courses are designed for people like that.”

Right now one teacher has 10,000 students, which is why Treehouse can charge $25 per month.

“We have 135,000 students paying $25 per month.”

As for the future, he says Treehouse ultimately hopes to do courses in other languages, and place more people in jobs.

“In five years we want to be placing 100,000 people in jobs per year. We also want to have one million students by 2020.”