Spotlight: Avanoo Trains Employees in Three Minutes a Day


employee training

Training and educating team members can seem like a tedious task for any business. But Avanoo does employees  training in small increments so that it can actually be effective and helpful, without stealing away hours of productivity.

Read more about Avanoo and the training the company offers in this week’s Small Business Spotlight.

What the Business Does

Team training in three minutes a day.

CEO and co-founder Daniel Jacobs told Small Business Trends, “We partner with the world’s most renowned experts on subjects ranging from leadership and management, to wellness, accountability, and various other areas of individual performance. We create 3-minute-a-day, month long programs within a platform that allows HR departments to track and measure performance on a number of different axes.”

Business Niche

High voluntary participation rates.

Jacobs says, “Most e-learning platforms have participation rates hovering around or just under 5 percemt, our voluntary participation is over 40 percent.”

How the Business Got Started

With a pile of debt and a chocolate company.

Jacobs was living in South America with his fiancé while waiting for her to be able to come to the United States. Since he couldn’t work there, he built up sizeable debt. So he came up with the idea to start a chocolate company. He had to turn to crowdfunding to get the company off the ground, and it turned out to be the base of Avanoo.

Jacobs says, “It’s crazy to think that company was the roots for Avanoo, which today supports tens of thousands of employees with 3 minute a day training/learning videos from renowned experts; a company that’s since received millions in investment.”

avanoo screen

Biggest Win

Signing a big recent deal.

Jacobs says, “As of today we signed our biggest deal ever — more than double anything we’ve done before! The deal itself is very exciting, but even more exciting is proving to ourselves what is possible when the team pulls together to create something amazing.”

Biggest Risk

Taking a deal that required creating a whole new feature in a short time period.

Jacobs explains, “we decided to launch a brand feature for a client that was ‘impossible’ to launch in the time frame we were given. We were faced with a decision — say yes, and figure out a way to get it done, or say no, and lose one of the biggest deals we’ve ever made. In a startup the word impossible is always relative — even the word itself says I’M POSSIBLE. So we did what it took to get the feature launched on time.”

Lesson Learned

Find which rules to follow and which to break.

In my first few years in business, it was really hard to sort out which rules to follow and which to break. This requires knowing yourself and knowing your business. Business mastery happens when we figure out how to stand on the shoulders of giants … with a message that is still uniquely our own.

How They’d Spend an Extra $100,000

Building their sales team.

avanoo

Team Tradition

Telling stories.

Storytelling is at the heart of what we do at Avanoo, so naturally every team dinner, retreat and activity ends (or starts) with us telling stories about each other, our journey and the company. Makes for fantastic team bonding, and it means our team outings are all centered around great food and great company!

Team Lunch

Stolen freezer meals.

The office has a running joke that I steal everyone’s lunch (I don’t). If Jason tells you otherwise, he’s joking!

Favorite Quote

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but everyone can start today and create a new ending” -Maria Robinson

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Find out more about the Small Biz Spotlight program.

Images: Avanoo

Top Image: (left to right) Sara Dickensen, Head of HR; Cathlin Hendricks, Performance Guru; Nathalie Jacobs, #1 Avanoo Fan/Wife of CEO; Laura Forman, Copywriter and Editor; Elise Otalora, Head of Operations

Third Image: (left to right) Chris Krovatin, Friend of the Business; Jonathan Bryan, Senior Video Specialist; Jason Waldron, Senior Audio Specialist; Daniel Jacobs, Co-founder & CEO; Lucien Renjilian-Burgy, Managing Editor

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Annie Pilon Annie Pilon is a Senior Staff Writer for Small Business Trends, covering entrepreneur profiles, interviews, feature stories, community news and in-depth, expert-based guides. When she’s not writing she can be found exploring all that her home state of Michigan has to offer.

One Reaction
  1. I think it is hard to get real training in that short amount of time. Although it is possible to learn as most YouTube tutorial videos are about that long, in-depth learning still takes time.