Why Homebase encourages its employees to run small businesses on the side

Sometimes, in order to better support the employees in your business, you have to let them start their own.  

Homebase, an end-to-end HR platform for small businesses, is known for offering its clientele every service it needs to successfully run a business, from timesheets and payroll to intercompany messaging systems and shift trades. But these resources have also helped Homebase employees launch their own small businesses on the side.

Terence Williams, the engineering manager of the mobile team at Homebase, is also the creator of Moxy Messenger and Quik Card, two apps that help facilitate communication between team members while at work. He was already developing his businesses when he started working at Homebase four years ago, but it was never a point of contention with management — it was the opposite. 

"Homebase was very supportive of my ambitions and the online presence of my individual brand," Williams says. "Our co-founder would often check in with me and has always been an available resource for helpful entrepreneurial information, guidance and resources that made a big impact on my products' success." 

Read more: Salary transparency laws create unexpected challenges for small businesses

Homebase is headquartered in San Francisco, but Williams works out of their second largest hub in Houston.  Despite not working a customer-facing role, he has witnessed the many ways Homebase's services have changed the lives of the clients it serves. He's been been able — and encouraged — to use those experiences to better support his own brand.

"I'm able to see how we're creating solutions for other small businesses, which exposes me to the insight and challenges other small businesses may face, and how my small business can help," he says. "I'm able to get a gut check of what small businesses are actually up against,especially coming out of the COVID. Solutions from three years ago may be outdated now, so being at Homebase, I'm able to see through our organization how to position myself for the future." 

Not only has working at Homebase and collaborating with management given him a strategic advantage, it has also helped him develop his philosophy on the kind of impact he wants to create in the communities he serves, including his own. Williams was Homebase's first Black engineer, but the company's DEI efforts extend well beyond him, as the diversity within the organization as well as that of its clients has continued to expand..

According to the Network Journal, a quarterly print and online business magazine for Black professionals and small business owners, about 50% of minority-owned businesses make it to at least the 5-year mark, and approximately 62% of those survive to be a decade old. For Black-owned businesses, the numbers are even more bleak — eight out of 10 Black-owned businesses fail within the first 18 months. 

Read more: This tech CEO grew up among small business owners. Now he's helping others with their HR needs

"I love being able to empower other people who actually look like me and get to see them in professional environments as they get access to the resources that are out there," he says. "We get to empower other people who are beginning in the communities where we come from, which is part of the reason I started my own small business, to create software specifically for those communities that normally don't have access to resources." 

In the face of a turbulent economy where paychecks aren't going as far as they used to, the entrepreneurial spirit is thriving. In fact, in 2022 45% of Americans had a side hustle, according to career insight platform Zippia. This means that if they want to keep retention up, more and more companies may need to follow in Homebase's footsteps.

"In my experience, Homebase really went the extra mile to support all small businesses," Williams says. "Everything they do is to serve their employees and customers."