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“A quote I try to live by is ‘work double time part-time to have full-time fun time,’” says Kendra Stevens, Associate General Counsel of EverCommerce. For Stevens, work-life balance transcends a personal approach to work. She evangelizes the importance of work boundaries to any professional, but especially to her teammates.
When they decide to use the company’s Flexible Time Off policy, Stevens practically forbids them from checking in at work to ensure that they can fully disconnect and recharge. “It’s important for them to know they have a team that they can rely on,” explains Stevens. “Nothing is going to burn down, and no one is going to die, and everything will still be there bubbling right along without you. It takes a leap of faith, but it does wonders for your mental health.”
Lisa Storey, Chief Legal Officer of EverCommerce who has worked with Stevens for over five years, says, “Kendra has done an amazing job leading the team and getting the right people, processes, and systems in place so that the team doesn’t miss a beat, even when people are taking time off.”
Like many attorneys, Stevens’s interest in law was sparked when she was very young and began watching legal procedural dramas and movies. As she went through college and law school, her eyes were opened to the variety that the field has to offer and she discovered that she was better suited for law that could help leverage business, and not as suited for criminal law.
Even prior to her education, Stevens joined the workforce in her teens and built up her experience in sales, which developed the entrepreneurial spirit that continues to serve her today. “Experience in sales changes your communication style and the psychology of how you approach people. You think about customer service and you kind of feel the push and pull in those interactions,” shares Stevens. “Through my experience, I saw that the customer side experience of the transaction could just be a whole lot better. That’s been a driver for how I practice and how I advise clients.”
That entrepreneurial spirit drew Stevens to EverCommerce in 2019, where she is currently Associate General Counsel. EverCommerce offers software as a service solutions to help businesses market their services, streamline day-to-day operations, and modernize customer engagement. “I always wondered what you could do if you took a lawyer, an HR person and an accountant, made them a full back office, and then offered those services to small to midsize businesses,” Stevens says. “The people who get into business for themselves, these entrepreneurs, are passionate about what they do and oftentimes they just need someone to take that other stuff off their plate. ‘Empowering the lives of small business owners’ is what drew me to EverCommerce.”
Stevens and her team see everything in their work. The team of five addresses all the legal needs of the company, which deals with over half a billion dollars a year in revenue, 2,000 employees, and nearly 50 solutions that form the company’s global footprint.
“Experience in sales changes your communication style and the psychology of how you approach people. You think about customer service and you kind of feel the push and pull in those interactions.”
Kendra Stevens
With that kind of variety, Stevens and the rest of the legal team need to be mindful about how each member of the team can contribute a different strength to fill any of the needs that arise legally. “When we go about hiring someone new it’s never ‘I need a new lawyer,’” explains Stevens. “It’s always based on figuring out the things that we really need to address better or address more of and then building out to that title.”
Strengths and qualifications are important, but so is a candidate’s personality and chemistry with the team. Stevens knows that a good portion of our lives are spent at work, so it’s vital that the team truly enjoy one another’s company. “I often think of it in terms of ‘Do I want to be stuck with this person at the deal table at three o’clock in the morning? Would I want to grab a drink with this person? Would I spend time with them outside of work?’” says Stevens. “We dive pretty deep on both personality and skills. That will always be a driving tenet of our hiring strategy.”
Stevens keeps candidate interviews to just thirty minutes, testing whether they can fill that time with good conversation. She also likes to make a point of asking candidates qualitative questions, especially asking them to share a time that something went wrong. She wants to know if a person is self-aware and humble enough to admit a mistake.
For Stevens, it’s neither a “live to work” nor “work to live” mentality. Work should not feel like a place you have to escape from, but it also should not be the end-all be-all. And she knows that fully disconnected time off allows us to get the most out of life and do even more of what we love. For Stevens, on any given weekend, this might mean skydiving. Stevens jokes, “You can call me on the weekends, but I don’t put my phone in my pocket because it’s liable to fall out!”
