Josh Burch and Chris Langston are bound by more than an endearment for “Star Wars.”
“We know more about ‘Star Wars’ than we probably should,” Burch admits.
Together, they co-captain 40Digits LLC as friends, business partners and fellow geeks, though they prefer the term digits.
Origin of the speciesFounded in 2008 as a two-man operation, 40Digits began its evolution much earlier.
Burch and Langston first met each other in 2003 working at Wehrenberg Design Co. on a project that eventually morphed into its own service, known as Clear Blue Web. The project was developing a sales automation tool for the insurance industry, giving both employees and clients aggregated information and sales quotes.
Clear Blue Web opened under the ownership of four partners, but as clients began asking for the services of website development, the partnership split in half, with Langston and Burch ready for a new venture.
40Digits took its first breath in the world.
Today, Springfield-based 40Digits operates offices in Kansas City and St. Louis. Though the three offices are separated by hundreds of miles, technology takes down that barrier. Burch says no matter an employee’s physical location, everyone collaborates on the same projects.
“It is all virtual teams,” he says.
The co-captains view their business as its own species in the technology world, specializing in Web development and user experience. Targeting in-house marketing departments and creative firms, such as ad agencies, 40Digits serves between 20 to 30 clients at a time. It has fulfilled jobs for over 100 clients in total.
Working with organizations such as The Great Game of Business, Convoy of Hope and Enactus, the company creates brochures, marketing and e-commerce sites, and custom Web applications, for instance. Langston says projects can last three days up to a year – the length of 40Digits’ longest project to date for IWX freight company that required an online portal for truck drivers to access paychecks and information about the company while on the road.
“Every project is different, so it could be as low as $1,000 for some small maintenance or well into the six figures on major projects,” Burch says, noting they bid jobs by the hour.
It started with oneThe company’s first hire came two years into the venture.
Charlie Rosenbury, the technical director at 40Digits, has been a digit since 2010 and has the utmost respect for Superman, a fact evident through his cartoon selfie drawing at 40Digits.com, where he is nicknamed The Bearded Wonder by his co-digits.
Rosenbury was the first of what are now 21 employees.
“There have been growing pains, getting all this new business,” Rosenbury says. “We needed to rework how we did things.”
Early on, Rosenbury says he handled all the bidding, worked with the clients before they got to the development stage and acted as a personal mentor to the two newly hired developers at the time.
“As we grew, that just wasn’t possible,” he says. “So we shifted into sharing these responsibilities, training developers on how to estimate bids, and we had peer reviews instead of just me reviewing work.”
It is this collaborative push that has kept turnover to almost zero. “Except for that one guy who left after day three,” Langston says, “that’s the anomaly. We still don’t know why he left.”
With its full team, 40Digits posted $800,000 in 2013 revenue, and Burch says the firm already has surpassed its 2014 projection of $1.5 million.
With work for firms in San Francisco, Dallas and Omaha, Neb., Burch and Langston are considering office expansion outside of Missouri. “We support other agencies,” Burch says. “Where we have a large number of agencies to support a new location, it makes sense to have an office there. So as we continue to grow, we will look for other markets.”
‘Leap of faith’The company culture is partly knit together by the use of open-book management, which stems from the work of one of 40Digits’ clients and partners, The Great Game of Business.
By sharing income and cash flow statements with staff, employees think like business owners through the use of management transparency and financial literacy training, Burch says.
“The goal there is that everyone understands how the business makes money, and they understand how their role affects our ability to do that,” Burch says. “That has been a major shift for us.”
Great Game Vice President Steve Baker says the work with 40Digits started out as a give and take relationship.
“It was sort of a leap of faith,” Baker says, noting the Great Game couldn’t pay the creative team what they were worth then. In return, 40Digits pushed new business, such as EDCO Health Information Solutions, the Great Game’s way.
“They asked a lot about what we were all about, who we thought we were and how our clients thought of us,” Baker says of the early stages with 40Digits. “Everything we were doing on the Web was antiquated.”
Eventually, Great Game hired 40Digits to redesign GreatGame.com, design the 20th anniversary edition of Jack Stack’s book by the same name and create a digital resource guide. The book cover went through 26 versions before arriving at the final product.
“We want to be professional and world class,” Baker says.
“If we want to be world class, I need these guys on my team.”
