Reclaim Hosting’s Lucky 7

I will have more to say about the fact that Reclaim Hosting turns seven years old later this month, but that will most likely be linked with the official launch of Reclaim Cloud—the existence of which testifies there’s no seven-year itch in this professional relationship. But rather than talking about the Cloud, which has taken up much of the oxygen on this blog for the last couple of months, I wanted to just take a moment and recognize how unbelievably grateful I am that this crazy idea born off the side of our desks in 2013 has developed into such a solid and rewarding way of life.

What’s more, this year has been the first time Tim and I have been able to pull our heads out of the day-to-day work of answering tickets, onboarding new clients, and managing the servers in the engine room : ) It’s a lot of balls to juggle for a small team of just seven full-time employees—all of whom regularly punch above their weight and repeatedly prove just how lucky we are to work with them. In fact, I was just reading a support ticket review for Meredith that said this:

Meredith was great about helping me out …. your company is fortunate to have such a dedicated employee, and I would hope you would make it a point to compliment her!

Well, consider this post a long overdue point to compliment Meredith, whose moved into the role of Customer Support Manager and has adeptly taken over the management of our world class  support team.

But why stop there? Lauren Brumfield has taken over our sales division and is running that as brilliantly as everything else she has done at Reclaim for the last 5 years. That’s right 5 YEARS!

We also brought on few new full-time employees on over the last year, Chris Blankenship started part-time over a year ago and not only has he proven a quick study on support, but in September he became the first full-time hire to work in our newly formed infrastructure division, and he has surpassed all our expectations as a sysadmin and has given Tim some long overdue relief.

We hired Gordon Hawley in late fall as a part-time support specialist, and we could not make him full-time fast enough. he is an absolute workhorse, and his years of experience in the field meant he could dive right in on just about anything that came his way when it comes to domain management or cPanel.

And in May, our intern Katie Hartraft became a newly minted UMW graduate that defied all COVID-19 odds and transitioned immediately into a full-time role splitting time between support specialist and account manager. Katie has been nothing short of brilliant in both support and sales, and I have been blown away at how quickly she has come up to speed on two distinct yet equally complex facets of Reclaim’s day-to-day: support and sales.

The evidence our team is really beginning to congeal and take shape in the most impressive of ways is everywhere apparent. And as this post suggests, we’re starting to naturally break into distinct divisions: support, infrastructure, and sales.*  With this shift the need for more intentional organizational frameworks to ensure the three divisions are communicating becomes essential, and luckily Lauren has been taking on that overarching role for us as Director of Operations for more than a year now. We are starting to build in processes to ensure each of these three areas have clear workflows, documentation, and redundancy internally and externally. In fact, operationalizing Reclaim has given us the confidence to take on entirely new projects like Reclaim Cloud, and that is a direct result of the amazing people who work with us.

I am proud to be a Reclaimer, and building this team has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my professional life and I really feel like it’s only just begun. Avanti!

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*Although that last one, “sales,” could be deceiving given we often do not sell in the traditional “there’s a virus, use our tech to disrupt higher ed even further” kinda way, but rather respond to interest and help institutional and individuals get up and running and quickly and painlessly as possible. Not to mention the policy and legal implications of running this service for a campus. Turns out we have a growing list of folks that we need to make sure are getting the services and support they need on the regular.

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One Response to Reclaim Hosting’s Lucky 7

  1. Pingback: 7 Years of Reclaim Hosting | bavatuesdays

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