Reduction In Force

Our First Reduction in Force

It’s December 2025. We laid off about 200 people in October. We had never done layoffs before in our 20 years of business.

Corporate responsibility begins at home. When we hold the livelihoods of hundreds of people in our hands, there’s no rolling back or brushing off mistakes. It’s our responsibility to do better by and for our people.

We want to address 2025 and the reorganization we did that resulted in eliminating the roles of 200 good people who didn’t deserve that outcome.

It Looked Like a Good Year – From the Outside

Over the past few years, we expanded from an entity management software for registered agents, CPAs, lawyers, and business formation customers to a telecommunications company and a domain registrar. We dug into credit card processing and even owning data centers. That part was good. That kind of growth was exactly what we wanted.

From the outside, 2025 was another banner year. We’ve averaged 35% growth over 20 years and 2025 was no different. Millions of active customers. The largest registered agent and corporate filing provider in the US by far. 1500 employees. Good improvements on our tech stack. Good improvements on our vendor relationships. Good improvements on our benefits for employees.

But something was off. The product we provided our customers wasn’t getting better. The more people we added, the slower it took to get anything done.

Where It Started to Go Wrong

In around 2022, we realized we were quickly going to be a company in the 2000-5000 employee size range. We were going from a mid-sized company to a large mid-sized or even small large-sized company.

We embarked on a mission to retool ourselves. To establish a process and organizational structure that works at scale. We looked to other large-sized companies as models. Hired some of their thought leader types and tried to make a big company structure. We grew from a small, scrappy, and nimble company to one with 70+ product groups. Layers and layers of management and process.

And we became all about the process instead of our people.

We lost our way because the kind of company we were trying to be wasn’t who we are. There’s a reason you buy something from a publicly-traded company with billions of dollars of revenue and hundreds of thousands of employees, and the experience still sucks. That’s because that’s not the way. We fell on our faces exploring that, and that was a mistake. One we needed to fix.

The Reorganization – Getting Back to Our Roots

We made the mistake of thinking that what got us here wouldn’t get us any further. We needed to go back to our roots. And with so many managers, so much structure, so many redundancies in siloed groups, one of the hardest things we had to do was layoffs.

To be clear, none of the people let go were the problem. Our problem was a naive, bad decision about what we thought we needed to become. None of the people let go deserved to be caught up in this. But they were, and we’re sorry for that.

Layoffs alone don’t fix a company structure in jeopardy. In our commitment to get back to our roots, we had to make other changes as well. Some of the biggest changes:

• Reorganized ourselves from 70 plus groups to 12.
• Went from layers and layers of corporate structure to 3: Individual Contributors. Managers. Directors. There are no more executive VP layers.
• Focused on managing, not leading. Managers going back to working WITH people 90% of a their time and managing 10%. This is the exact opposite of the management model of the large-sized companies we had tried to emulate.
• Doubled and tripled down on growth plans. Investing in the long run for our employees to grow leaders and managers from within instead of hiring externally and hoping they somehow save us.
• Focused on reducing the friction of our employees doing their jobs and our customers interacting with us.
• Reduced analysis paralysis. Getting folks in the same room talking and moving fast, not taking months to produce.
• Changed how we hire. No resumes, no LinkedIn profiles—we only use the cover letter, followed by a culture interview, and then a skills interview.

And the biggest fix we did revolves around taking a deep look at what originally got us here. We sought to codify those principles into something to attract the right type of people and help provide guidance to our current people about what we want to be as a company.

We started to create these as company principles: https://www.corporatetools.com/company-principles/

Our Commitment

We’re committed to rebuilding a culture of smart, scrappy people who are humble and hungry. Everyone we let go in October 2025 could have been those people, but the organizational structure we created was holding them back. And in reorganizing, we were simply about 200 people too heavy. Not by their actions, but their roles; those roles were adding organizational bloat.

We have to have the corporate structure to reward scrappiness, hunger, and humility, and to promote these core values from within. So 2025 ends with going back to our roots, owning what got us here, and forgetting the idea that we need to be like all the other large investor-owned companies.

If anyone affected by our Oct 2025 layoffs reads this, we hope to be able to employ you again someday in a different capacity. You were hired because you’re a good human we enjoyed working with. We just did a bad job as your employer and didn’t set you up for success.

For those that we’ll never see again, we hope the next phase of your career will be better because of your time and experience here.