Success Stories > Elementus

Elementus is a rapidly growing, data-first Web3 company that focuses on blockchain data intelligence. Whether interested in investigating on-chain activities, identifying risk, discovering valuable market intelligence, or a combination of all three, Elementus’ platform provides the most complete data set and sophisticated tagging/attribution capabilities on the market, resulting in the actionable insights you need to grow and prosper safely in a web3 world.

Elementus is the first company of its kind, and the 20-person startup has already experienced impressive growth since its launch. However, this scaling initially led to a scattered and inefficient internal infrastructure — particularly regarding collaboration.

Challenge

As Elementus has grown, it’s gone through multiple initiatives to create a consolidated collaboration tech stack with the purpose of facilitating idea generation and productivity. However, early attempts to assemble an effective software solution failed, and the issue continued to persist when Matthew Austin, VP of Operations, was hired early in 2022.

“When I first joined, we were in a Microsoft environment and had noticed that collaboration across the company was suffering — mainly because it seemed like the employees just didn’t have the proper tools to collaborate, share documents, and interact with each other in a more user-friendly environment,” shares Austin.

After analyzing the usage data on their legacy system, Elementus discovered employees weren’t using the suite of collaboration tools provided by the company.

“Accessing and collaborating on our existing IT stack was very difficult. There was too much friction, and it made collaboration inefficient and cumbersome. At a certain point, employees just give up.”

This resulted in locally saved files, a lack of document retention, and poor real-time collaboration. In addition, operating with disjointed cloud services created low engagement within the internal staff and a high degree of inefficiency as employees attempted to work within their own siloed worlds.

Solution

In an effort to solve its ongoing collaboration needs, Austin and the Elementus team turned to Google. After initially considering layering in certain Google Suite services, they decided to make a complete shift to Google Workspace. The goal of a single online collaboration suite was to reduce collaborative inefficiencies amongst employees, boost security and increase onboarding efficiencies when new employees received their company-provided hardware. By shifting to Google’s cloud-based productivity suite, Elementus created a centralized hub that brought the majority of its collaborative activity under a single, unified umbrella.

Past technology migrations within the organization had gone poorly, leading to a sense of resistance from existing employees. Data accuracy was particularly concerning, as former migratory experiences had been done internally. This led to inaccuracies or required a high degree of manual labor. 

Fortunately, Austin had been referred to Suitebriar, a Google Cloud Partner specializing in Google Workspace and Google Cloud Platform data migration and deployments, change management, and managed services. Suitebriar efficiently migrated Elementus’ email, contacts, calendar and SharePoint data to the Google Workspace environment. 

In addition, Suitebriar ensured that the migration was a frictionless experience for Elementus’ staff. The company accomplished this by providing Elementus’ leadership with extensive training on the Google Workspace admin console, including the implementation of two-factor authentication and creating the necessary security controls around collaborative management  of internal documents. 

Suitebriar also helped Elementus develop a training strategy for its other staff members. This approach maximized employee buy-in and helped Elementus use its new technology immediately. Suitebriar’s support wasn’t exclusively on the front end of the migration, either. The company continues to provide ongoing technical support to ensure that all Elementus’ Google Workspace resources function optimally in perpetuity. 

Austin has a simple suggestion for anyone struggling with similar collaborative concerns, “Work with Suitebriar. Go with the team that does it right. Everyone I worked with from beginning to end was incredibly professional, very good to work with, communicative, always engaged, and it got to the point where they felt like part of our team at the end of the engagement.”

Results

Elementus’s smooth transition to Google Workspace through Suitebrair has led to several key results. Communication has increased between employees, as has efficiency and the overall professionalism of the team in their online interactions. Engagement has skyrocketed, too, with the brand’s active online users going from three per day to everyone at the 20-person startup. Broad adoption of tech tools is another consequence of the change, as Austin’s team has become more comfortable adopting new tech solutions.

In addition, working with Suitebriar has quickly had a positive impact on both Elementus’s bottom line and cybersecurity. Austin reports that they cut their Zoom licenses from 20 to three (to the tune of over $19,000 in annual savings) by shifting to Google Meet. The VP adds that the security monitoring through the software’s admin console has also been exceptional, “The accuracy is way better than I expected, and security for us is top of mind. So, big, big fan of the Google security monitoring.”

While Elementus has already used Google Workspace to clean up its existing collaborative inefficiencies, the company won’t stop there. It has ambitious goals to continue scaling. As it does so, the startup will continue collaborating with Suitebriar to avoid inefficiencies, reduce friction throughout the employee lifecycle and increase engagement and retention.