.webp)
At Moxie, we empower entrepreneurs to launch, run, and grow their own aesthetics businesses with a combination of software and services. In less than 2 years, we have grown from an idea to a team of 50, with a business that is in the top-decile in terms of growth.
Our remote-first team has been self-described as high trust, low ego, and high output. We attribute that, in part, to intentional organizational design choices and tactics—which we’ll share with you here. We knew we could only win if we built a high-quality organization from day 1, and so started investing in talent strategy far earlier than is typical. Our first Head of People joined when we were only 5 employees.
We built Moxie around the belief that talent craves working in (1) high-trust teams, (2) where safe feedback enables great work, and (3) work is aligned and impactful. We’ve been building an environment for people to do the best work of their careers. Sometimes, momentum is not about inventing something new, but doing the right things well, and earlier than others tell you. This focus has given our team escape velocity.
High-Trust Team
“For a remote organization, I think that Moxie does a phenomenal job keeping everyone connected and engaged, and am so excited for [our first company offsite in] Miami. I love that our values are shared, reexamined, and woven throughout what we do and how we communicate. Love this team :)”
(1) Simple organizational discipline: For us, this means an explicit approach with bias towards keeping structure flexible, hierarchy flat, and formality low. We’ve committed to organizational discipline since the earliest days so that our employees know how they can grow their careers:
- Clear goals combined with explicit performance standards,
- quarterly performance check-ins between managers and employees, and an annual 360,
- quarterly Leadership Calibration sessions to keep standards and evaluation consistent,
- a clear system for determining compensation: based on a current market benchmark range, we determine compensation based on performance, location, and seniority. This is true when we hire, and when we review.
(2) Intentional, alive culture: We’ve been explicit about how the mission impacts our values: we wanted to build a healthy, “grown-up” culture in which our values should guide how we work and behave in all circumstances. We first published them in December 2022, and updated them a year later with input from the team. These values don’t just live on paper, we interview for them, and base shout-outs on them in meetings so we hear what values look like in practice.
- Act as owners.
- Give more than you take.
- Speed with care.
- We simplify and learn, every day.
Read about our values and more in: Interviewing with Moxie
(3) Being remote-first has been a first time and a special perk for many of our employees, whether they have or are starting families, or not. Slack has gone a long way in helping us maintain synchronicity while we’ve also tried to live a healthy respect for unavailability from the top down: we’ve made communications norms explicit, and are teaching tactics on how to use Slack well.
Safe Feedback Enables Great Work
“I really love working at Moxie. This job is challenging and that is exactly what I signed up for. I enjoy being a part of other projects and feeling like my feedback is important.”
(4) Consistent, direct, low drama feedback has been a power move for our team. It reduces anxiety, raises the bar, and propels us to progress. Radical Candor is a great ideal we lean into, yet it's uncomfortable and new for most – it takes leaders who practice, remind, and encourage it to ensure transparent feedback is part of our reality every week.
It's when you get pulled aside after a meeting: “I have feedback I hope can be helpful. Do you have a few minutes?”
(5) Practiced managers: Your actual manager matters a lot. Instead of hiring juniors, we’ve biased towards hiring ‘practiced professionals’ for leadership roles - because becoming a great manager takes practice for most of us. We’ve also spelled out clear expectations for people managers, and we collect upward feedback.
(6) A company-wide feedback rhythm: We seek feedback everywhere because the best intent can still get it wrong. Quarterly Team Surveys are a key tool for checking-in with everyone on the team, and to collect feedback on what works, and what we can improve.
- We work to find practical, realistic actions to follow on lessons: we’ve created new roles to fill gaps, have taken on our processes/systems, and have locked in an annual get-together. We also share the anonymized results with the team.
- In Q1, we scored an average of 4.4 out of 5 with the far lowest score being 3.5 out of 5. Quantitatively, these results are among the best our team has seen. Importantly, every critique was a constructive one phrased with a clear desire to make us better.
Aligned, impactful work
“I am incredibly proud to work for Moxie. Specifically that while we have big and important goals, we know when to change course and that the best place to focus is on our next step.”
We believe that the Moxie model can unlock entrepreneurial potential, and keep this industry in the hands of the individual business owners who care for their patients, personally. This mission has deeply resonated in an industry that has largely been run by women, for women. Yet this doesn’t suffice: people want to understand how their work contributes to the larger mission. Three our our main answers are:
(7) Customer at the center: the ultimate meaning comes from being close to our customers: company goals center on their growth, we start each month’s review with a customer quote, and seek other ways to put their voice and experience at the center of what we do.
(8) Setting rhythm and alignment via 3 goals and 3 themes: the concept of clear, shared, cascading goals is nothing novel. It's doing them well that makes the difference: ours are still set monthly (keeps us focused and iterative), focused on the most important ones (not a list of everything), shared in a public doc, and reviewed every month with the entire team.
(9) Jobs framed in impact, not responsibilities: We anchor job descriptions in the 3/6/12 month OKRs and how that links to our mission. This also pushes us to be clear-eyed (not fall back on some generic title and job description written by GenAI), candidates love the clarity on what success requires (versus vague lists of responsibilities), and expectations are clear before day 1 of working at Moxie.
What we’re Working on Next
We have a lot of work to do! To succeed in keeping this industry in the hands of individual entrepreneurs, powered by Moxie, we need a tightly aligned, high-performing team proud of its efficiency over mere growth in numbers. We're transitioning from a small, tightly-knit founding team phase to one where creating and reinforcing alignment and culture becomes more crucial.
For example:
- Processes need to be up-leveled or be created, completing the foundation for growth—from better onboarding, to more interview training, to SOPs like an employee handbook.
- Find constructive ways to drive productivity, from practicing/celebrating Radical Candor to automating with the right tools.
- With a larger team, we need to architect career pathways and compensation frameworks that not only recognize achievement but also inspire progression.
We can't wait to see what the next chapter of Moxie brings!
