Tenfold founder Rachel Friedman has created a nationwide branding company
Rachel Friedman has constantly been intrigued in room.
A fine arts major at the University of Michigan, Friedman commenced her vocation as a designer and, just after graduation, went to do the job at Continental Business in Columbus. There, she developed small business areas meant to inspire creativity and improve productiveness.
But she also learned a ton about the companies by themselves.
“One of the really beneficial, fun aspects of staying a designer was that I experienced the possibility to get introduced to companies across a great deal of unique industries,” Friedman states. “To be a successful designer, you want to dig into a improved comprehending of individuals enterprise designs and organization cultures.”
That practical experience influenced her concept of the place of work as a strategic company instrument.
In 1998, she still left Continental for a task at Herman Miller, a layout and furnishings corporation headquartered in Michigan. As world accounts manager, she managed a portfolio of some of the company’s greatest Fortune 500 shoppers, working to align their office and enterprise tactics.
“Seeing all of these sorts of providers and corporations awakened a curiosity that I had close to organization,” she suggests. “Throughout my roles, my mindset was incredibly entrepreneurial: I desired to greater realize how I could produce a benefit proposition that was powerful for these corporations.”
A different advantage at Herman Miller: total coverage of employees’ education and learning. “When I read about that, my ears perked up,” she claims. When utilized whole time, she utilized to Ohio State University’s Fisher College or university of Business, the place she enrolled in 1999.
“I had a toddler I was pregnant with my next and I was doing work comprehensive time,” she says. “It was absolutely demanding.”
Jay Barney, chair of Fisher College’s strategy section at the time, who’s now at the University of Utah, had a long lasting effect. “The moment he began to lecture about enterprise approach, I thought, This is me. This is the way my brain works,” Friedman says. “That’s when I realized, at my main, that I assumed I was a designer, but I was a strategist.”
A business diploma under her belt, she at some point still left Herman Miller and took a career as the vice president of advertising and marketing and profits with her former enterprise, Continental. “Part of my position there was to think about how we differentiate in a really aggressive field,” she claims.
Though there, in 2006, she came up with the thought for Tenfold. “That’s in which I bought the total plan of what that suite of companies could be: leveraging house as a medium to converse the brand and tradition story,” she says.
She assumed about launching her possess organization, but felt torn with the needs and responsibilities at her task.
Barney, who continued to mentor Friedman, challenged her to commit much more time on her possess venture. “He explained, ‘I can listen to the enthusiasm in your voice. You want to be executing this full time,’” Friedman says.
“So a lot of entrepreneurs roll out of their school dorm place as business people,” she claims. “My path was pretty diverse.”
Tenfold is born
In 2014, 22 a long time into her career, Friedman released Tenfold, a system and imaginative agency that researches and unveils brands’ society and reflects that society through their house. Clients have ranged from ESPN and NBCUniversal to Huge A lot and Huntington Countrywide Financial institution, among a lot of other people.
“When I would sit down with leaders to assist model their house, they would say, ‘Our culture is our secret sauce,’” Friedman suggests. “I would say, ‘That’s remarkable, explain to me extra, so I can use it for inspiration.’”
Most leaders could not say accurately how or why. “They just experienced a feeling,” she states.
Friedman took these inner thoughts and, via a blend of qualitative and quantitative research, dug deeply into what created the brand tick. “If we just can’t name it and articulate it, then how can we shield and reinforce what helps make you great?” she suggests.
Her team, which now contains 21 persons, performs with customers on language, to 1st be ready to create a concept and then locate the best strategies to drive it ahead. “Then we generate experiential activation aligned with the entire manufacturer and lifestyle tale,” she claims.
Tenfold also works with clients on succession preparing and strategic or generational leadership modifications, giving leaders with a blueprint of the important elements of their company culture.
A person early tradition observe shopper was Hot Hen Takeover. Owner Joe DeLoss was a peer advisor and friend whom Friedman satisfied as section of a team referred to as Vistage, a coaching and peer advisory corporation for smaller- and midsize small business leaders.
“Rachel has an potential to pay attention to a enterprise like no a person I’ve at any time achieved and place a pulse on what’s occurring,” says DeLoss. “It’s really outstanding.”
At the time, his restaurant experienced grown from its first spot to 3 in a 9-thirty day period span. “Everything was broken,” he states. “We place ourselves under a spectacular total of strain and tension affiliated with what we were being creating, and our workforce and tradition substantially shifted.”
He engaged Friedman and the Tenfold workforce. “We preferred to greater articulate and comprehend what type of magic was going on at Hot Rooster Takeover from a lifestyle standpoint,” DeLoss suggests.
Friedman stepped in and started off to recognize and proper damaged or nonexistent units.
“She held stakeholder conferences with everyone on our team—people with varying stages of responsibility—and synthesized [the data] down into crucial developments and takeaways,” he claims. “They have been instantly actionable, and in the months that followed, we were ready to recalibrate and invest in systems we wanted.”
Today the well known chicken chain can be located in seven places in the course of Columbus and Cleveland. “A whole lot of that foundational work, Rachel helped tell,” DeLoss says. “It was the very first time, in a sophisticated way, that we looked at what we ended up developing. Prior to that, it was about instinct.”
Massive Heaps when was a breakthrough brand, and a person of the major headquarters assignments in the metropolis. “We went up against some large nationwide corporations,” Friedman states. “I appear back again, and still simply cannot believe that that they employed us as a crew of four—that genuinely propelled us in the course we wished to go.”
In early September, Friedman took the rules she discovered in branding into retail with the launch of Tenspace.
Tenspace is an ever-changing, brick-and-mortar keep in the Quick North that will share tales of rising on the internet makes with the community in an interactive, experiential structure. Each individual two months, the space is remodeled to immerse prospects with new brand names.
World-wide-web Smith, founder of 2PM, a membership-driven media and e-commerce business, was integral in the Tenspace launch.
Smith satisfied Friedman at a discussion board through Entrepreneurs’ Firm, a international network for business people.
“I’ve long believed that individuals need to know who she is and what she does,” Smith states.
“She has completed a excellent work helping big companies detect their cultural touchpoints, and she expresses these by inside style and design.”
With Tenspace, Friedman has produced a space for online corporations to execute pop-up approaches. “Oftentimes, those people spaces aren’t pretty nicely developed, and they’re not incredibly exciting or intriguing to the purchaser,” claims Smith. “Either they lean as well heavily on the art side or way too seriously on the retail aspect. What Rachel is making is a combination of equally.”
When Friedman was wanting for manufacturers that would healthy the Tenspace mildew, she looked to Smith. “I experienced the chance to work with her in figuring out the brand name and convincing the brand to get the job done with her,” he states.
Her 1st client was Rudis, a prolonged-established wrestling attire and equipment brand name based mostly in Marysville founded by three Ohio State wrestlers.
“The splendor of Rudis is that it is steeped in storytelling, which helps make Rachel’s career a whole lot a lot easier,” states Smith. “There’s a good deal you can do with the story, equally in the title and the record. It is likely to be a fairly abundant screen, and I’m truly psyched to see it.”
Inside of, prospects will be equipped to check out issues, experience and order items.
“It also drives far more attraction to the precise web-site so the entire keep is essentially likely to be an Instagram-ready encounter that will deliver a ton of user-created content material for these vendors,” states Smith. “There is not one more platform that can definitely do that. Not for particular person models.”
Whether in branding or management adjustments or cultural shifts, one particular factor Friedman states is a widespread thread with her clients: “The forms of clients that retain the services of us are really fantastic leaders they consider manufacturer and society incredibly significantly.”
Q&A with Rachel Friedman on office place
With the upcoming of the office in flux—how considerably space will we have to have? How will people today use it?—Rachel Friedman wrote a 17-website page white paper referred to as “Culture in the Flexible Place of work.”
What does your paper say about how workplace house will be made use of likely ahead? It goes through a quite in depth point of perspective all around what intent the make environment wants to serve. Relocating to a submit-pandemic period, especially considering that now people today are offered a whole lot a lot more preference and overall flexibility about exactly where they want to perform, if individuals want to be isolated and be engaged in heads-down get the job done, then they need to have to function from residence.
And so why, then, should they want to arrive into the place of work? It’s all about connection and how we reimagine and repurpose areas to generate the styles of interactions you miss out on when you are functioning from home.
You say tiny interactions at the workplace have great cultural importance. Can you elaborate? I spent a large amount of time talking about people micro-interactions that you have at the office—spontaneous interactions that actually have an influence on truly significant dimensions of corporation tradition: coaching and mentoring, studying and schooling, innovation, constructing have faith in and genuine interactions feeling linked to the mission and eyesight of the organization. So devoid of a bodily put to be, you seriously battle to hit on those essential proportions of nutritious corporation lifestyle.
What about digital interactions? So what we’re encouraging firms to do is to be pretty strategic and intentional and actually imagine about the expertise they’re attempting to build for their staff members, but also not disregarding the electronic channel. In excess of this period of time all through COVID, exactly where we had been disconnecting physically … the hits you are taking on company tradition aren’t traumatic items … they’re the tiny, tiny chipping away [parts] of your tradition that you do not see. It’s like watching your kids mature: You do not observe the changes day to day, but six months from now, (you see the adjust). Which is what I feel is going on with corporations. They are not going to see what is going on until finally it’s way too late.
What’s the reaction been from men and women who read the white paper? The kinds of businesses that get what we do see how significant the constructed surroundings is. They’re not expressing that the physical office is heading to be what it was right before COVID, but they are declaring that they recognize how critical the physical surroundings is, and that [they] will need to make certain [they] leverage their financial investment in real estate to help establish, maintain, and generate company tradition.
Virginia Brown is a freelance author.
Rachel Friedman
Founder and CEO, Tenfold and Tenspace
Age: 51
In situation considering the fact that: 2014
Previous: Government vice president, branding and internet marketing, 3d branding, Continental Business Environments world wide accounts manager, Herman Miller designer, Continental Office
Training: Bachelor’s in fantastic arts-style and design, College of Michigan master’s in organization tactic, Ohio Condition College
Local community involvement: Columbus Chamber, Lifesports, Ohio Point out College
Personal: Friedman and her husband reside in New Albany two children in college (at the University of Rochester and College of Michigan) and a single in substantial university. They have a dachshund-border collie named Summer season.
