A TOUR OF Commehrs' OFFICE IN BERLIN

We visited the company commehr in Berlin.

Here is the interview with commehr as well as a look at their office in Berlin

Your Business

What is your core business?

We help organizations grow. Our customers can focus on their core business while we take care of all internal IT operations by providing fully managed services.

How did you get to your business idea and when was your company established?

In 2008 Sebastian´s studies came to an end and at the same time Timo was finalizing his thesis.

While talking for hours and sipping whiskey on the rooftop at home, the idea of founding their own company to enable collaboration blossomed.

On May 25th of 2009, it finally has happened: The two friends founded commehr GmbH and operated it out of the basement of the kitchen store of Sebastian´s father.

The main goal was to help the start-up community in Berlin by taking over their office-IT to let them focus on their own goals and growth.

Not only start-ups, but conventional companies too needed help with analysis, concept and implementing of their IT infrastructure.

After a period of bootstrapping and the successful completion of the first projects, the team had to grow. So people got hired and some of them are still part of the company today.

In which countries are you active?

We started operating in Berlin, due to the short distances. Slowly, the client base grew outside of Berlin and our customers, mainly start-ups and scale-ups started openening other worldwide locations.

Our focus on cloud-based technology helps us to slowly grow our customer base over the borders of Berlin and Germany.

We are already having some customers in the US, Italy or the UK, just to name a few.

Are you planning to expand your venture in other countries?

Lets say, we would not mind. Some services or technologies we sell can be offered worldwide.

We are planning on providing more services that do not need any physical hands on, for other products, such as a physical network stack, we need to build a strong partner network.

Are you using Venture Capital? And, if so, – who are your Venture Partners?

Right now, we were never in the need of taking external capital. We were bootstrapped 10 years ago.

We admit that we are thinking about this sometimes, as we plan to build some products or services that will change some markets. But for now we like to be boss of our own strategy and timeline with a family style management.

Where do you see the company in 5 years?

We see ourselves as the going-to partner when aiming for scalable services that can be booked and used out of the box.

We want to make scaling infrastructure and internal IT services a no-brainer.

Monthly fees, fastly delivered and state-of-the-art hardware and services is our personal mindset that we also would love to use ourselves when building a new company or growing one.

Your Team

How many employees work at your company right now? Are you planning to expand?

At this time, we employ about 60 people. We are constantly expanding but we also have as strong focus on long-term employment relationships. We are happy that most people are staying with us for many years.

What is the average age of your team members?

What kind of attitude should new employees have in order to work at your company?

As we share our fundaments, we love doing things right from the very beginning.

We are not a fan of the „just fix it“ approach. We try to get back into the problem domain with our customer, away from the solution domain.

We challenge the status quo and we need motivated employees that love asking questions and proposing things on how to get better on the customer site as well as also internally.

Long term relationships is a must. Stay with us and we stay with you.

We are constantly developing the way we work together and what we work with.

We started migrating our pool-cars to electric vehicles. We bought a heavy-lifting bike.

Communication is also a the key to work with us and especially with our customers.

Show us that you like discussions. Show us that you like asking questions.

Show us that giving and taking feedback makes work better.

How does your recruitment process look like?

People can apply using our career portal. Promising candidates will be invited for a job interview.

We interview the candidates according to the six-eyes principle. For example, it involves a CEO, the HR Manager and a third person from our team.

Thus, the interview will take a greater amount of time compared to other companies.

We will talk about the candidate’s expertise and his motivation but also about our company and our core values.

This way, both us and the candidate can get to know each other in a proper way.

We offer remote interviews for people who do not live in Berlin using “Lifesize”.

Why is it fun to work at your company? Do you offer any employee benefits?

Thanks to constant growth we offer our employees thrilling career chances and interesting development options. We actively support our employees.

All this in a work environment that is harmonic and pleasant.

Kicker in your break or joint lunches are only a few of the benefits that you can look forward to working at our office.

A mobile phone, notebook, options to use our car pool or your own car, even for private use, will be given on top. Flexible work times as well as various offers for home office days or part time work help our employees to find their work-life balance.

Last but not least, for the improvement of the personal retirement planning our company pension scheme provides an important contribution for a careless retirement.