A decade ago, Huge Inc.'s employee count was in the single digits, and the then-tiny agency was struggling to sell brands on the promise of digital advertising. Now, Huge has more than 800 employees and offices on three continents, and it is a fixture on Advertising Age's A-list. Along the way, CEO Aaron Shapiro and the rest of the company weathered one of the happy but serious challenges of rapid growth: scaling IT.
For Huge, that challenge was about a lot more than server space—it was a matter of finding a way to maintain its secret sauce as a nimble boutique agency even as the company grew a hundred times over. After all, clients like IKEA, Jet Blue and HBO came to Huge because the agency worked differently than old-guard counterparts on Madison Avenue.
"One of the things that any rapidly growing company has to deal with is maintaining the culture and spirit that you have as a small firm where everyone is intimately connected at scale," Shapiro explained.
In response, Huge built honey.is, an internal social enterprise tool that connects employees and helps them stay up-to-date with what everyone is working on.
"We’ve done a lot of work to ensure that the values of the company remain consistent across offices and built honey.is to help everyone feel like they’re part of the same democratic, transparent company culture—regardless of where they are physically located," Shapiro said. "Everyone uses the platform to share news, updates and topics of interest, which not only keeps people informed, but also keeps us close."
A People Problem
Indeed, when you talk to fast-growing businesses about scaling IT, the conversation quickly turns to people. For Shapiro, the challenge wasn't just investing in smarter technology; it was about investing in ways to make employees smarter.
"We encourage employees to continue their learning while at Huge," Shapiro said. "In digital, you need to be learning and incorporating new skills into everything you do; otherwise, you’ll be obsolete in a few years. ... We’ve invested in employee development and have rolled out coding classes for everyone who is interested in learning, as part of an effort to ensure that the whole company is truly fluent in technology."
The Cloud to the Rescue
The use of outsourced cloud computing infrastructure allows tech companies to address one of their biggest problems—scaling server space and computing power as they grow, by renting server space and computing services via the cloud.
At Snip.ps, a Chicago-based startup that enables people to monetize their social media activity, CTO David Zaretsky and his team have leaned on cloud tools.
"The powerful tools ... provided a significant boost in performance and reliability," Zaretsky said. "A majority of our design and development work is based on open source technologies, so we can keep costs minimal but still maintain high-quality infrastructure and security."
For Shapiro, the process of scaling Huge's IT has both driven and been driven by the digital wave the company has ridden to massive success: "Even when the company was small and comprised of only a few people in one tiny office, we had big aspirations and worked really hard to be able to capitalize on the moment we're at right now—when digital services are not just in demand, but are essential to the long-term survival of any company."
