Honored
Leader: Diane Hessan, President and CEO
Company Name: Communispace Corp.
Location: Watertown, Mass.
Nature of Business: Provider of online target-customer communities.
Founded: 1999
Revenue: $8.5 million
Growth Rate (2004): 112 percent
Number of Employees: 65
Average Tenure: 2 years
Six-year-old Communispace helps its clients generate market intelligence by building, managing, and facilitating proprietary online communities of customers. President and CEO Diane Hessan's goal is to create leaders, which she believes is a key to growth and longevity. She stresses employee development and deploys open-book management principles, teaching employees how to understand financial statements. To encourage employee engagement and feedback, Communispace has its own private online community and holds annual employee interviews and weekly staff meetings. All 65 employees benefit from the successes of the company and find ways to pull through in times of difficulty. For example, to survive the dot-com bust, the staff came up with a survival strategy where they took a voluntary pay cut to avoid lay-offs. The company continues to thrive, now growing at a triple-digit rate.