Welcoming Ben Eckerson as COO of Savas Labs

For a little over a month now, Ben Eckerson has been working hard to make an impact as Savas Labs’ new and first Chief Operating Officer. Ben joins us after six years at premier digital agency Viget, where he led business development and experimental IoT efforts for their Durham office (a couple blocks away from us in downtown Durham). Prior to Viget, Ben spent six years at creative New York/Durham agency Mckinney.

Here’s Ben dressed up in his finest:

With well over a decade in leadership roles in digital agencies, Ben will help to improve our operations to enhance the value we’re providing to our partners. He’ll also help get the exemplary work we do here at Savas out in the world better. Known for his knack for turning creative visions into reality, Ben will be the first person a new organization has a conversation with about how we can help them achieve their hopes and dreams or the first phone chat of a prospective job candidate. Beyond his official duties, Ben is a high-energy, team player who seeks to foster a fun and healthy culture with his new work family and we’re seeing that impact already.

• We’ve transitioned our internal team planning and scheduling efforts to use Harvest’s forecast.
• We’ve improved our retrospective process and documentation as well as our organization of project files in our Google Drive
• We’ve had to up our Slack subscription to keep pace with Ben’s uncanny ability to find the perfect GIF (or create a new custom emoji) for any conversation.
• We’ve implemented a Secret Santa tradition in the office.
• We’ve instituted (and started planning) semi-annual retreats to bring together the full distributed team.

Ben has gently recommended that we more frequently share how special what we’ve created at Savas Labs is – hence my writing of this blog post that he made me write about him. He also noted that the team has been so busy there was little time for engagement on social media. For fears he was beginning to detect some early onset grumpiness, Ben has taken swift action to combat things before it’s too late.

Welcome Ben; we’re grateful to have you! ?

Stay tuned ? for more hiring announcements coming soon.