Grand Rapids-based Terryberry greets 2015 with projected job creation

As the Grand Rapids-based firm Terryberry leaves behind a year of job creation and overseas expansion in the U.K., Managing Partner Mike Byam says the company is poised for even more growth in 2015. 

Byam says at least 90 percent of the 33 new jobs Terryberry generated in 2014 were full-time positions, with 50 percent in IT-related positions, including software development and customer service. 

22 of those jobs were created locally, housed in the building adjacent to Terryberry’s Grand Rapids headquarters at 2033 Oak Industrial Drive NE that Byam says the company has been expanding into since 2013. 

“The IT jobs are supporting our traditional business, so the work that we’re doing from an IT standpoint and development standpoint is because our vertical integration is also driving the success of our traditional award production and fulfillment aspects,” says Byam, who attributes much of the success and growth in 2014 to Terryberry’s 360 Recognition and Give a WOW platforms. “We continue to invest a lot of money into having a terrific platform in our 360 Recognition and Give a WOW platform.” 

While the Give a WOW social recognition platform uses the social networking model for peer-to-peer recognition, Terryberry’s 360 Recognition platform is an organizational software designed to house all of a company’s recognition programs - service awards, sales awards, peer recognition and more - under one roof.

However, both programs find their strength in affordability and efficiency, spearheaded in a time where both of those things were essential to a plethora of then-struggling industries. 

“I think a lot of the success we’re having currently is related to investments in a vision that we saw the market having four or five years ago and headed down that path, so we’ve sort of got a jump on that,” Byam says. “If you think about 2009 or 2010 and what we were dealing with globally at that point, organizations were just trying to keep the doors open. They weren’t investing in recognition as something with an additional cost, so we took the fact and said, ‘Hey, companies are going to be looking for additional ways to recognize people…what inexpensive options are there to engage employees in the difficult times?’”

These employee recognition platforms also help to streamline the administrative process to avoid eating up unnecessary resources in an organization’s human resources department, Byam says, and allow recognition to become a daily action versus a monthly or quarterly action, boosting the sense of value of place for the employees that work there. 

In 2015, Byam says he is looking forward to continued growth in both the North American and European markets, the latter of which continues to gain speed as business practices expand with the global marketplace.

“This marketplace, the platform real for recognition, is still in its infancy,” Byam says. “The percentage of organizations with some recognition strategy in place is high, but that real, comprehensive, interactive piece - that percentage of the market is very small. That’s something that over the next five years we’ll continue to grow and increase in.”

Written by Anya Zentmeyer, Development News Editor
Images courtesy of Terryberry, Inc. 

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