Today we’d like to introduce you to David Cherrie.
David, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I grew up in Melbourne, Australia where I attended university while working part-time in retail. Initially, I really enjoyed the work – it was fresh and challenging, keeping me engaged and highly productive. After a few months passed, however, the job started to feel like ‘ground-hog day.’ It was the same tasks day-in, day-out and ultimately, I started to feel demotivated to keep putting my best foot forward. Eventually, my poor attitude reflected in my underwhelming sales performance, which didn’t go unnoticed by my store manager.
He pulled me aside one day and asked, ‘What happened? What happened to the enthusiasm and energy you brought to your work when you first started here?’. I shared with him how I felt about the repetitive and unrewarding nature of the job and why it was leading me to disengage. The outcome of the meeting was to collectively work towards making work more fun, rewarding and fulfilling for the team. This resulted in us creating mini-games each day to challenge, reward and recognize the team as we worked towards goals set by our store manager. Everyone got involved in a common pursuit of winning the day with success defined by the business. This lighthearted and fulfilling way of approaching the tasks of the day empowered each of us, workers, to galvanize our team mindset and serve our customers with a positive and proactive attitude.
In a matter of months, our store rose from the bottom 10% to the highest performing location in the company (a national retailer). All that had changed was our engagement as a team. This leads me to start Arcade, a solution to help companies scale employee performance engagement making it a win/win for happier employees and more successful businesses.
My co-founder and I had no idea where to start, so we just took it one step at a time. This leads us to get a prototype built and live in a handful of retail stores. Through this period, we were able to validate that our approach to performance engagement was viable. We were gamifying the daily tasks and goals for employees within the retail store just as we had done in our own workplace. We were able to help these trial locations lift their sales by 17%, leading to our first angel investors, giving us a small amount of capital to take the idea to the United States.
In May 2016, I bought a ticket to San Francisco with the dream of starting Arcade in the US, on a mission to help more than a million employees feel happier and fulfilled at work. We were able to raise our pre-seed round to develop and deploy our first version or Arcade in a pilot with GameStop. Over 12 months, we were able to complete V1 of the platform and prove a substantial increase in ROI for GameStop (lifting same-store sales by 8.4%).
Eighteen months later, we raised a venture-backed seed round with ATX Ventures and launched Arcade to market (in mid-2018). Since then, we’ve been able to substantially grow our customer base, serving businesses across retail, restaurant, automotive, insurance, call centers and inside sales teams.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Not at all. You expect struggles as a startup, but I think it really slaps you in the face when you actually go ‘all in’ on an idea. Some examples that come to mind in my own journey are relocating to a new country/city (twice) in order to be close to talent, customers and capital that would help us grow the company. It’s never easy to pack your bags and move to an entirely new country with no networks or friends and to start over.
In the early days, we worked for months on end without a paycheck and even had to leverage credit-lines to ensure employees got paid on time. We’ve also got countless experiences of customer contracts and investment that’s fallen through right at the last second for reasons out of our control. I’ve learned to never count your chicks until they hatch (never count your cash until it hits the bank!).
We’d love to hear more about Arcade.
Arcade is a performance engagement platform for remote workers that motivates positive employee behaviors and productivity through gamified goals, rewards and recognition. Every sales and service team understands the difficulty of keeping the majority of their employees highly engaged and motivated on a daily basis.
We’re known for making ‘fun of work’ – helping businesses merge performance management with employee engagement in a way that measurably improves sales and service team results. Our unique approach is the gamification we overlay onto employee goals, rewards and recognition, designed to motivate the behaviors and actions the move the needle for the business. For instance, a sales team can set up Arcade to instantly reward employees with a randomized prize every time they set an appointment with a customer. They can also simultaneously run a live-time race that awards the person that makes the first sale of the day. In this example, as employees set appointments and make sales, they earn rewards from hundreds of their favorite brands (visa, Amazon, Nike, etc.), which are instantly delivered to their mobile devices.
I’m most proud of our team – we really practice what we preach. Our road to one million happier and fulfilled workers starts with the people in our own Arcade team. We all fundamentally believe in the importance of feeling fulfilled at work and are unified in the pursuit of solving the enormous problem of employee disengagement in the global workplace.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
Well, the obvious luck I’ve been fortunate to have had is the fact that I was born healthy, with a loving family in a place and time that offers me the opportunity to pursue my passions and dreams. I recognize how incredibly rare that is and it has certainly put any of trials and tribulations I have faced into perspective.
On that note, I have the mindset that most things are not in my control, and therefore my approach is to work hard, smart and purposefully so that I’ll maximize the opportunity to be in the ‘right place at the right time.’ So much of the difference between success and failure in a startup is ‘timing.’
Pricing:
- Free for teams under 10 people
- $15 per person/mo for teams between 10 – 250 employees
Contact Info:
- Address: Capital Factory, 3102 Oak Lawn Avenue, Dallas TX 75219
- Website: arcade.co
- Phone: 8335 ENGAGE (364243)
- Email: sales@arcade.co
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/workplacearcade
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/WorkplaceArcade
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