Why Work Here

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We don’t take this question lightly, as is probably evident from the length of this page. But it’s worth the read. What will you find here?

After reading this through, if this sounds like the kind of place where you’d thrive, then we’d like to hear from you.

Our Company:

Corporate Tools serves millions of companies, including small businesses, registered agent companies, filing services, lawyers, and even massive corporate conglomerates. We provide a variety of services that reduce the friction it takes to start and run a business.

We have 1500 plus employees and have grown 40-60% for the last 15 years straight. We run 500-700ish people in the Spokane and Post Falls area and have people working remote or hybrid in basically every state. We have hubs where you can work hybrid in about 30 states with more being added every year. These hubs are buildings we own. We are committed to the local vibrancy of our hubs. We see a hub in every state in the most populated areas as a key to our long term success.

What’s unique:

We are not investor owned. We have no debt and never have. Not even a credit card. Our company is owned in a trust that has no end. We’re not for sale and do not have any financial goals. We don’t have to really be profitable because as long as we’re not full blown losing money, we don’t have to actually make money to return to investors like our competitors. We see this as our super power.

Other large corporations in the market need to focus on profit. That’s their mandate, even if they say it’s not. They have to then use their corporate profits for…. more profit. Ever wonder why large companies suck at making software or providing an exceptional experience to their employees and customers? It’s just never going to be their focus because mediocre is still profitable. Competing with giants can be scary, but we have refined our craft of out-maneuvering them to the point where we can be successful along side the corporate robot factories.

We compete with giants. Companies making billions a year of profit, not revenue, profit… So we have to be crafty and smart.

A Day in the Life:

Culture

What is the day-to-day experience like? Most people that have worked at companies with 1000+ employees end up climbing a ladder and surviving by playing the corporate playbook. Talk big. Talk intelligently. Overcomplicate things to sound smart. Motivate people to hit revenue goals with stock compensation and bonuses. We have none of that.

We respect doers. Some might find our environment crazy. One of our failed attempts at hiring a chief with a great resume called our culture “Feral.”

Our workplace isn’t for everyone. When you grow as consistently and fast as we have, nothing is ever the same. It’s a constant state of change. Change should excite you if you’re looking at a job here. Change should sound like opportunity for you. Opportunity to make a real impact. Opportunity to have your work matter for our employees and our customers. We are organized very differently here. As you could guess, the traditional corporate structure doesn’t work here.

Product organization

We are organized by products. We have about 75 product groups. Every product has a toolkit. Each product group creates their product standards, tenants, priorities, strategy, and roadmap. We work in two week sprints. Your objective is to own your product. We want the power of the company to be as low in the company and as close to the customer as possible. We try to empower people by having some kind of big corporate stuff like:

Each product group has individual contributors, managers, and directors. Directors are the top of the food chain here. There are no VP or chief titles in the org structure. We did try that and it was a colossal flop. And that is the thing you should understand. We try a lot of things here and most of them don’t work. That should excite you because they are learning opportunities. If you’re into learning, you understand the quickest and easiest way to do so is to fail a lot of times. You’ll need to understand the fundamental differences between errors, mistakes, and failures to succeed here. Errors and mistakes happen and are unfortunate. Failures should be celebrated as opportunities to improve and learn something. Failures show you tried something, and if your eyes and ears are open, an opportunity to improve with a new knowledge you didn’t have before. If you have trouble acknowledging failure, this will be a miserable place for you to work. You should think about it. Can you even say the word without stuttering? It doesn’t come natural for 99% of people. This is a 1% kind of person place. Not a corporate robot factory.

Leadership/management

We don’t want leaders who lead by title, using the weight of their title to put pressure on people and bark orders. Leading by title creates toxic work environments of analysis paralysis, command and control, and developing corporate robots at scale.

When someone leads by title, they are leading as a noun. We find leading as a verb works better.

So we focus on developing our managers and directors to lead by example and build trust in their peoples by empowering and supporting. This is a very awkward and uncomfortable role for almost 100% of people. We develop people. We focus on being great managers which develops you into leading people the right way and ultimately forces you to learn how to be great leaders… the right way. We find developing people here works best if you’re willing to get your hands dirty and learn and support as you grow yourself into new skills you haven’t gotten to use at other jobs. We recognize it’s a process and won’t come very naturally for most. We’re patient and can play the long game.

Our hiring process

You’ll notice on our Jobs page that we don’t have you upload a resume. We don’t care about your resume. A lot of companies focus on hiring based off your experience. This is our order of hiring focus:

  1. Culture fit. You need to be someone who can acknowledge your failures and learn lessons. You need to be someone who doesn’t need to be right. You need to be comfortable in your own skin, finding the best answer and outcome over being right. You need to be okay being wrong a lot.
  2. You’re a good pleasant human to work around.
  3. You have something that helps us. A skill that will help make this place run better.

Here’s our interview process:

  1. Phone Screen with recruiter
  2. Video call with a few people
  3. Something else. Maybe an in-person interview where we make sure you have the actual technical skills we’re looking for to help and we’re not setting you up for failure. We can do it in person at our office or hub or over a video call if you’ll be working remote, but we’d like to work through a real world problem together so we both know if you can do the work and it’ll be a pleasant experience for both of us to work together.
  4. If all that works, you’ll get a job offer fast and we do a background check and we have an in person onboarding class and you’re off to the races.

But what about your resume and great LinkedIn profile you worked so hard to build? Those are cool things for other places, but they’re not what we’re interested in. A core lesson we learned as we grew was when you hire people for their work history alone, it complicates the org structure and you miss out on great people.

We’re looking for special folks

We don’t do power point presentations. We talk.

We don’t do resumes.

Please don’t just upload your resume and think we will look at it. If we’re a good fit for you, adjust your normal approach. Catch our attention. If that feels too awkward, it’s okay to just pass on by and go find a more typical job where you can pull out the corporate robot playbook and play it comfortably.

There are endless opportunities of Venture Capital and Private Equity using institutional money like pension funds, union funds, and all kinds of government funds, placing hundreds of millions of dollars into the small business ecosystem to focus on profits and ruin everything that is good about capitalism. Those places love resumes.

Join Us

That’s where it all starts to get a bit feral. And that’s the core opportunity.

Are you someone who gets nervous surfing a tidal wave? Or someone who wants to surf the tidal wave? Someone who is willing to think about your end result and manifest that outcome with actionable steps, grinding away at it until you develop the skills to not just survive a big wave, but to wake up every day jazzed about the doing it.

If so, this place you’ve been searching for. Come join a bunch of feral buffaloes riding tidal waves.

Apply Now

The Stuff You Really Care About

  • Paid Time Off Everyone starting at Corporate Tools begins accruing 22 days of paid time off in addition to four paid holidays (New Year’s Day, July 4th, Thanksgiving, and Christmas). That’s almost four weeks of paid time off for brand new employees. We let you spend your days off on what matters most to you, so take off for your birthday, your dog’s birthday, your kid’s graduation, whatever.

    On your three-year anniversary with the company, you gain seven more days off per year. That's 29 days of PTO + 4 holidays a year once you hit year three, and at year five you’ll transition to flexible time off, which means your days off aren’t capped at any number.
  • Retirement Corporate Tools provides an optional Safe Harbor 401(k) plan managed by Fidelity and makes matching contributions of up to 5% of an employee’s annual compensation. Employees can enroll after 60 days of employment and take advantage of the 401(k)'s tax-deferred growth potential with pretax contributions.

    And get this—employer contributions are immediately vested. That means you don’t have to wait years and years to earn company contributions, like you might find with other businesses. With Fidelity, you will have a full brokerage account to buy individual stocks with your investments if you'd like instead of being limited to your employer's company shares or pre-picked funds.
  • Health, Dental, Vision Corporate Tools is proud to provide 100% medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage for employees. All health insurance isn't created equal, which as a nationwide company can create lots of wrinkles for our employees. We created a self funded Insurance option to be able to force coverage for employees when their preferred providers are out of network.

    We're very proud to focus on the experience of health for our employees, not just providing insurance. We have in-house therapists and are working at adding in-house primary care doctors, nutritionists, chiropractors, fitness coaches, and anything we can do to make our employees' lives function better.
  • Quarterly Allowance When you start at Corporate Tools, we’ll set you up with all the equipment you need to be successful in your role. And, after you get settled, you can select even more home office additions that will make your work-from-home environment comfortable and productive. Standing desks, comfortable chairs, extra monitors—we’ll ship them right to you.

    We’ll also include a quarterly allowance (added to your paycheck) that you can use however you want: a gym membership, a better coffee machine, a massage, whatever. You’ve earned it, so treat yourself!
  • Internal Growth Wages at Corporate Tools are regularly adjusted for competitive analysis, and we love promoting people internally. One of our core focuses is growing and developing people from within.
  • Employee Engagement Initiatives We’re always spearheading new initiatives and activities designed to enhance our company culture. This includes paid quarterly group activities (recent outings include baseball games, bowling, and picnics), regular prizes for meeting health and fitness challenges, and a company-wide book club. Our goal is to create a sense of community for those near and far so that all our teams stay engaged and thriving.
  • Be Yourself. We Like It That Way At Corporate Tools, our goal is to foster a workplace and team environment that is representative of our various identities, backgrounds, races, and genders. This includes creating a place where all applicants and employees feel secure, comfortable, and supported. A diverse team means that we can better recognize our clients’ needs and communicate more effectively with them. It also means we can push our services in more innovative and creative directions.

    We believe that the more inclusive we are, the bolder, stronger, and more creative our work will be. Join our team and embrace your individuality, ignite your passion, and unleash your unique potential.