Employees from across the country recently gathered in Austin for the annual Spark retreat. Since Spark is a remote-first company, for many of us this was the first time meeting each other in person! It was wonderful to connect with our teammates in person. We spent meaningful time discussing cross-functional success and challenges, and brainstorming what the future of Spark looks like for our product, our company, and of course, our agents. Our goal is to create solutions for our agents and their clients. 

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Over the last year, Spark has doubled in size and has grown our presence nationwide. This was an amazing opportunity to meet each other in person and truly collaborate on how we can continue to innovate on the agent experience at Spark. We can’t believe how much we’ve grown over the past two years. Check out this map that outlines current Spark employee locations (yes, many of us are really on the opposite coast from each other). The Spark team really took advantage of the opportunity to connect in person. The next step? Start implementing all the inspiring ideas from this year’s retreat!

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Three main takeaways from the retreat:

1. Agents value transparency from their upline, and Spark has the opportunity to maximize the visibility agents have regarding their commissions, contracts and the status of pending requests they have with their own upline. 
2. It’s clear that agents could benefit from more sophisticated prospect management tools, so they can optimize workflows and turn those prospects into clients. We already have a few things in the works that will address some of these needs (stay tuned!) and will continue to build solutions that help agents save time and make more money through the power of automation and lead generation. 
3. We have many teams that interface with agents, such as strategic growth, contracting, product & engineering, and marketing. But it’s our client services team that is tasked with resolving client requests every single day. We’re going to be investing in new ways to ensure that every member of that team is constantly kept up to speed on the slightest changes across the industry so that we can continue to support our agents quickly and maintain our standard 24-hour timeframe for getting client resolutions started.  

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While in Austin Texas the Spark team had many opportunities to collaborate on various team-building activities, engage in presentations from other departments, workshop current problems and potential solutions cross-departmentally and truly connect with one another in person. Check out this collage to see some of the collaboration in action! 

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Overall, the retreat allowed brainstorming valuable ways we can improve to serve our agents.  We’re excited to put these solutions into action, and are confident in the productive road ahead! 

If you have any questions or feedback please do not hesitate to reach out to support@sparkadvisors.com. We always welcome your input and strive to exceed your expectations.