Optoro’s mission is to be the leading market solution for returned and excess goods, providing superior value for buyers and sellers across the world. Through its cloud-based, multi-channel selling technology, online remarketing expertise, and full suite of business intelligence tools, the company offers its clients the optimal solution for managing and selling returned and excess inventory. Since its founding, Optoro’s focus has been on using cutting edge technology and access to the world’s online marketplaces to drive higher recovery rates, quicker turn-times, and more transparency for its client’s goods.

At the close of 2018, there were over 65,000 Black, Latinx and Native American students and professionals on Jopwell’s platform. In addition to helping individuals advance their careers, Jopwell assists companies with diversity recruitment, marketing and retention efforts at scale.

Voxy has served over 500,000 private language school, corporate and higher education students. The company is changing the way the world learns English. Through its a state-of-the-art platform, curricula can be configured to meet the unique needs of any company or institution. Voxy recently launched a new program, its New Americans Initiative, aimed at helping immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers achieve their goals while bringing their invaluable skills to the U.S. workplace and to their receiving community.

Validic maintains a singular focus: to deliver quick and simple access to digital health data enabling its clients to better manage and engage their populations, improve outcomes and reduce costs.

Validic today has over 223 million lives under its client population reach and 372 mobile health devices and applications integrated into its platform.

As the leader in transit technology, TransLoc is building solutions that have a measurable impact. TransLoc has developed a three-step data-driven approach to enhance the rider experience. Through its MicroTransit Simulator, MicroTransit Pilot and OnDemand Solution, TransLoc offers flexible technology to diverse communities and municipalities.

SeamlessDocs is focused on bringing government paperwork and workflows into the digital and mobile age, and was working with over 340 governments at year-end 2018. The company is helping its government customers operate more efficiently, as users benefited from savings of 1.2 hours per form submitted as a SeamlessDoc and $37 per hour in labor costs.

HYLA Mobile (formerly eRecyclingCorps) is one of the world’s leading providers of mobile device trade-in and reuse solutions. Since its founding in 2009, HYLA Mobile has worked to extend the life cycle of mobile devices to build economic opportunity and enable information access for new users, while helping to protect our planet. HYLA Mobile operates in seven countries and partners with leading carries to provide instant, in-store trade-in credit for used mobile devices. The high quality, cleared devices are resold to consumers around the world, extending access to affordable, high-quality wireless technology in developed and emerging markets. HYLA Mobile has helped divert over 18.3 million pounds of e-Waste away from landfills by repurposing 53 million mobile phones to date since its founding in 2009. HYLA Mobile is based in Dallas, Texas, with European headquarters in Belgium. To learn more about how HYLA Mobile is changing the way people think about used mobile devices, visit www.HYLAMobile.com.

NEXTracker has sold or installed 22 GW of its NX Horizon™ solar trackers worldwide. The company is on a mission to mitigate climate change and through its solar power deployments, is working to make solar energy a mainstream power source.

SJF Ventures I, II, III and IV portfolio companies employed 13,071 individuals at year-end 2018 with over 75% of these jobs created after SJF investment. These metrics are inclusive of both direct and contract workers employed across SJF’s four funds.

A leading solar developer, Community Energy Inc. develops customer-sited and community-scale solar projects for businesses, universities, and residential customers. Since its founding in 1999, CEI has developed over 1,700 MW of wind and solar with the help of its more than 100,000 residential and commercial customers.

Unfortunately, restaurants are one of the biggest energy consumers in the commercial industry – consuming about 2.5 times more energy per square foot than other commercial buildings, according to the Energy Star® Guide for Restaurants.

EnTouch Controls provides SaaS-based energy management systems (EMS) for retail and restaurant chains. The company’s EnTouch 360°™ service platform integrates turnkey installation, management analytics, and issue ticketing and resolution tracking that detects HVAC maintenance issues, optimizes performance, and lowers energy costs for national chains, franchise owners, schools and offices.

EnTouch Controls has demonstrated excellent ROI and energy savings at its retail and restaurant chain customers, which include Chuck E. Cheese, Smashburger, Pizza Hut, TGI Friday’s and JCPenney.

BioSurplus has always made a concerted effort to positively impact the communities where it does business and is mindful of its impact on the world.

By the nature of what BioSurplus does, it is a natural recycler. An important part of its business model is searching and acquiring pre-owned and surplus laboratory equipment. Then, the company sells these to new programs looking for affordable and specific instrumentation. Without this type of effort, most lab equipment does not see the end of its useful life. Before BioSurplus, it was too difficult for scientists to buy or sell these hard-to-find instruments. As a result, many valuable items either ended up in closets, storage facilities or landfills. Through the company’s scientific knowledge, web-presence and marketing know-how, it makes finding and selling this equipment possible. In addition, the company extends the life of instruments while at the same time maximizing their value.

The company also started the “Put It Back to Use” program, where it presents an annual award to the best idea for repurposing a laboratory instrument you might expect to find in a landfill.

Today, BioSurplus remains fully committed to achieving environmental excellence and to working with its partners and suppliers to meet or exceed the environmental commitments summarized below:

• Comply with applicable environmental laws and regulations.
• Fulfill its voluntary environmental commitments.
• Operate its facilities with all necessary environmental permits, approvals and operational controls.
• Promote the safe and responsible reuse, recycling and disposition of its products and packaging at the end of their useful life.
• Promote relevant environmental initiatives by its internal organizations, managers, employees, strategic partners and suppliers.
• Be guided by the principles of pollution prevention and continual improvement.
• Periodically review the company’s Environmental Policy and ensure it remains appropriate for the nature, scale and environmental impacts of its activities, products and services.

“You get what you incentivize.”
–Peter Diamantis, Founder: X-Prize Foundation

Employees are a company’s most valuable asset, but motivating them to perform their best can be challenging. To get the most from your employees, Easy Metrics recommends implementing performance based incentives, also called “pay for performance,”, a method in which employees are rewarded for completing their various tasks within a certain amount of time and quality level.

The key point with employee incentives is to align the incentive for the employee with the goals of the company and be careful of unintended consequences. If you incentivize solely for productivity, a consequence may be that quality suffers or bottlenecks develop in production. If designed properly, performance based incentives can dramatically transform an organization’s productivity.

1. Employee Engagement

Employees have to believe in the program, that it is fair, and that it accurately reflects their abilities and effort. There is a direct correlation between the employees’ work level and the incentives they earn. Bonusing production employees on the profit of the company often will not work because many of the factors that affect profitability lay outside of their control.

2. Accurate and Fair Performance Targets

True employee engagement requires performance incentives. The challenge for the company, though, is knowing how to compile all of their data to build such a program. You will need accurate activity based cost accounting and employee performance standards to build a long term, profit driven employee incentive program. The Easy Metrics algorithm calculates the standards and performance targets.

3. The Self-Funded Incentive Program

Employee incentive programs that cost money are doomed to failure, and we believe increasing your costs defeats the purpose of the program. That’s why the Easy Metrics employee incentive programs are 100% self-funded through productivity increases.