Our Rocket Fuel

It’s an emotional sentiment the customer feels when they achieve a desired outcome in ways that truly speak to them. We add value when the customer feels they cannot live without us.

To live our purpose, we doggedly focus on the challenges, hurdles, pains, and successes of entrepreneurs with the outcomes they aim to achieve.

We listen to our customers, a lot. In brief interactions and lengthy conversations, we strive to build meaningful relationships rather than transactional ones. Be authentic and leave customers feeling better informed. Customer feedback provides insight for continuous improvements to our product.

Managing the finance of a business can be tremendously complex, so we design on principle to simplifying everything we touch. We share relevant and timely insights and provide approachable support and tools for our customers to manage their business.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We strive to consolidate the entire Wave journey into one holistic experience; uninterrupted, intuitive, and simply put: impossible to live without. OneWave will be the centre of our customers’ financial universe.

Fostering our technical expertise unlocks a smarter execution against our goals. Development of character inspires higher levels of trust, better leadership and faster decision making. As one ups their game, others take up the challenge.

Business owners problems aren’t 9-5 so neither are we. If a developer introduces a bug in our code, they fix it. If an entrepreneur tweets about an issue, our social media team answers and support will rally whatever help they can to resolve it. In these responses, we get better, and as we get better, what we create gets better too.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Every day we take incremental steps towards our vision—the system that a small business owner truly cannot live without. What we are building must have the characteristics of the future we’re dreaming of. Our goals are a depiction of our dreams with a timeline attached.

We can’t afford to waste time, money or effort, so we experiment to fail-fast and succeed hard. As passionate practitioners and domain experts, we build what entrepreneurs need, and we don’t waste their time either.

There’s no micromanagement; teams at Wave have high accountability, and we rely on each other to hold ourselves to that standard of accountability. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

Each team has an individual North Star to guide it in service of Wave’s True North Star. We’ve intentionally removed obstacles and when untangled, we optimize each team’s potential – that’s the alignment we seek. We trust our use of good judgement and we act in the best interest of our customers and the company.

We understand that many other teams at Wave depend on us. We are explicit with and serious about our commitments, and always communicate the status of our work. We keep everyone appropriately apprised of the need-to-know, and treat all questions and feedback as extensions of the constant: will this help customers succeed?

We strive to plan, execute and ship at the speed of light, but we never let our need for speed compromise our commitment to excellence. We refuse to let the need for one outweigh the other – the hard thing is that we need both. Communication, collaboration, honesty and integrity are pivotal to our efficiency and success. In other words, we move together with urgency as one.

Business owners juggle a million-and-one things to do at all times. We feel their burden and do everything within our ability to lighten the load

Solving problems and championing the needs of the brave entrepreneur is not always easy. We don’t tap out; we go the distance and won’t rest until our business owners’ problems are solved.

We don’t just solve the problem, we find out why it happened and ensure we fix it at the cause to prevent it from happening again.

Whatever it takes, whatever they need, we are working non-stop, until our customers needs are met and our job is done.

No person is an island. We are at our absolute best when we work together. To achieve extraordinary results, we must make an extraordinary effort. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

We are not naturally patient people – that’s why we work at a startup! But when it comes to listening to our brave entrepreneur customers, we are patient and poised in order to listen and understand just what our brave entrepreneurs are telling us. We hear what they are saying, even when they aren’t saying it.

Our Support Heroes are not your average Tech Support. There is no problem too complex for us. Whatever may be going wrong, our customers can be assured that if it is possible to solve the problem, we are going to solve it.

Sometimes things simply aren’t possible and there is nothing more important than an honest relationship between partners, and there is no partner we’d rather have than our customers. So we don’t mince words – we are honest with them about what is and isn’t possible and we don’t waste their time.

We respect our customers’ time and money, and we pride ourselves in showing that respect through honesty, openness, personable relationships, and obsessive devotion to their cause.

We believe that a diverse and inclusive culture is a priority for a winning team – you don’t get innovation without diversity. We are not afraid of different opinions when we disagree respectfully. But Diversity is not only about the way we look, it is also about the way we see. We don’t get to the right answer by agreeing on everything. We don’t think up new ideas without exposure to different ways of thinking. We hire, promote, compensate and support the very best people, without regard to race, colour, gender, gender identity or expression, religion, sexual orientation, nationality, disability or age. If we have a group of people who think differently, they will very likely look differently too. To create a culture that encourages diversity of thought, we need to be truly inclusive.

We recognize the power of relationships and work to strengthen connections between Wavers so that there’s a solid foundation for growth, transparency, and challenging ideas to flourish. We are the same in our values and different in our skills, opinions, backgrounds and experiences. We embrace our differences, value individuality, and respect the broad spectrum of skills and abilities of every Waver. When people are included, good things happen.

We are different from other companies in many ways, first and foremost by our culture. We are not perfect by any means. We can all get better and as a company we strive with uncompromising integrity to be better every day. Culture is the outcome of behaviours – so the way we behave, and the way we allow others to behave – is what determines our culture. If we are aware of any kind of discrimination, harassment or disrespect causing discomfort to any Wave employee- regardless of gender, race, religion or anything else, we are obligated and responsible to bring that to the attention of someone who can stop it right then and there.

Unequivocally, disrespectful behavior will never be tolerated at Wave, not even for a second, no matter who the person is, how senior or how valuable to the company. Top down, CEO included, nobody is excluded from our values that demand behaviours that treat each other with respect at all times. The kind of discriminatory and demeaning behaviour happening at other companies would be cause for dismissal at Wave – and if there was an issue brought to our attention that was real and destructive, that would be the outcome in no uncertain terms.

Actions speak louder than words. And of course the way we protect our culture (apart from hiring carefully for character as well as competence) is by acting swiftly when something negative rises to the surface. Even under tremendous pressure to fill open roles, we turned down quite a few very competent people who did not pass the character bar in our interview process. We do not hire competent jerks, even under the pressure of significant product delays which negatively affected our revenue.  This is us living our values.