A company that has numerous multi-national corporations as clients and specializes in the finer points of messaging, storytelling, and sales training may seem like an anomaly in Tahoe, but Corporate Visions has been growing in that role in Incline Village for several decades. And to hear it from the CEO, the work/life culture he has found in Tahoe has been nothing but advantageous.
Corporate Visions has 105 employees, with 12 in the Incline Village office on Incline Way. There are also offices in Larkspur and Pleasanton, Calif., Washington, Connecticut, and England. The company helps clients like Dell, Oracle, and Cisco try to improve the conversations they have with their customers and the market by developing more compelling messaging. Of the many levels of messaging a company might have, Corporate Visions works mainly with field-level messaging — the conversations that a company’s sales reps have with its customers. The company works on ways to improve those discussions by training salespeople in a variety of conversational, business, and negotiating skills so employees are able to have an effective dialogue with customers.
“We build the message and then train the sales people how to deliver those messages and those tools all along the buying cycle so that they can differentiate themselves [from the competition],” said Corporate Visions CEO Joe Terry.
The company was founded in Texas in 1986, but the owners moved to Incline Village in the late ’80s and grew the company out of the basement in their Incline Village home. In 2008, ownership switched hands and Joe Terry, a former linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks, took over as CEO.
Culturally Sound
Corporate Visions prospered in Tahoe, and Terry said one reason for that is that Tahoe mirrors the company’s ideals.
“The culture of Tahoe represents the values of the company,” said Terry, 49, who has a condo in Incline Village. “We are a very active, very outgoing, very aggressive company that loves to have fun but we work hard, and the whole Tahoe environment is like that as well.”
Terry promotes a company-wide policy of performance-based results so employees don’t have to adhere to traditional office schedules.
“Some of our employees will take off midday and go skiing for a couple of hours and come back, or go running down Lakeshore,” he said. “We don’t care what time of day you do your job; you don’t have to clock in and clock out.”
Terry goes as far to say that he strives to take the “Tahoe model” to the company’s offices in urban locations.
“When we began to expand and acquire other companies, we were able to streamline those other companies and do more with much less by applying our Tahoe culture to Seattle and Larkspur and Pleasanton and say: ‘It’s work hard, play hard,’” said Terry, noting that the company has acquired one marketing company, one visual storytelling company, and two sales training companies since 2008. “Rather than run a Tahoe branch based off a Bay Area model, it’s really been the other way around.”
Although the Tahoe culture has been a benefit to the company, Terry said the small population base in the region can make hiring difficult.
“The downside is the talent pool itself just isn’t that big; you have to search hard,” he said. “The background of some of the Tahoe hires doesn’t necessarily fit the job description, but we are able to take some risks and they’ve turned out fabulous.”
An example of this successful hiring is Jeannie Frantz, who took a job as an administrator at Corporate Visions after she graduated from the University of Washington in 2007. Since then, she has risen to her current role as director of marketing campaigns and operations and chief of staff.
“I had been planning to ski bum it for a year before heading off to law school,” Frantz said. “I lucked out in finding a position with Corporate Visions, but fell in love with the company and the Tahoe area … I came here for the snow but stayed for the career.”
Giving Back
Corporate Visions may be well versed in working with large corporations, but they also prioritize involvement with local nonprofits.
“The third leg of our stool is community [after the employee and the customer],” Terry said. “This model allows our employees to give back to the community, and there’s a lot of opportunity to serve in Tahoe.”
Corporate Visions works mostly with Project MANA to organize an annual Turkey drive in Incline Village. Other local groups the company donates time and resources to are the Northern Nevada Children’s Cancer Foundation in Reno, the Tahoe SAFE Alliance, and the regional chapter of the Salvation Army.
To say that Tahoe has been good to Corporate Visions would be an understatement.
“The Tahoe culture has enabled the company to grow from $6 million to $70 million in 10 years without adding so many employees,” he said. “It’s been huge for us.”
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