CLIENT CASE STUDY
"You can't afford
not to."
How a tech team traded homemade culture games for a weekly habit that runs itself.
🔽 Watch the video. 🔽
Location
Dayton, Ohio
Industry
Technologly
Founded
1995
Notable Facts
Cloud Service Provider, Hosting Provider, Consulting.
Runs infrastructure behind multiple state lotteries like Mega Millions.
Family-owned since 1995.
Originally started as Donet, a dial-up ISP with 8 phone lines.
The Problem
DataYard’s culture is to "work hard and have fun" says David Mezera, President. The catch: some of the team works remotely, and the technical people are heads-down by nature. Getting everybody in the same room took some effort.
For a couple of years after COVID, Natalie Mezera, Director, Client Partnerships, ran the "have fun" effort herself. Games. Food challenges. Pictionary. A new idea every week.
“It accomplished what we wanted,” she says, “but it was very time-consuming on my part.” Buying groceries. Plan worksheets. Coming up with something new almost every single week.
“We’re a high-tech company, but there’s always a human being using our service somewhere in that chain,” David says. Technical people go heads-down fast. He wanted something that pulled them back up for air, on a cadence that they didn’t have to invent from scratch every week.
It worked, until it didn’t. DataYard started tapering the games off, and they knew it was hurting the culture they’d built.
One of the many games the DataYard team
used to rely on for culture & team building.
The Fix
Now DataYard runs a Coffee with Champions session every week.
David and Natalie split the job, and some weeks neither one remembers whose turn it is. But it's so simple, it doesn't matter. There's no prep.
“All we have to do to lead it is print out the worksheets and guide the discussion,” David says. “It makes it so easy for the leader to actually facilitate.”
The program stuck almost immediately. They scheduled it weekly from the start and had most of the team showing up from week one.
The room doesn’t stay quiet, either. “We have a lot of involvement and a lot of engagement,” David says. An hour of people actually talking, not just one person doing all the work up front.
Why Coffee with Champions?
DataYard didn’t shop around. “We hadn’t really thought about alternatives,” Natalie says. “We just knew that what we were doing wasn’t sustainable.”
The timing did the rest. “Honestly, we knew that we were falling behind in our ability to pull it off,” David says, “and you emailed at the perfect time... here you showed up with an idea that was easy to implement.”
The food-first setup meant no one had to be talked into showing up twice. And the little things stuck.
When the team walks into the room, they always say "Welcome Champions," imitating Lance's trademark video welcome. David smiles and says it's "one of the highlights."
The DataYard team having Coffee with Champions
What changed?
Two years in, David says the real payoff is knowing people. “You learn your coworkers, you learn about them, their personal lives, what makes them tick, a whole lot better,” he says. That shows up directly in how work gets done: “You know what drives that other person because you spent week after week talking about very personal things.”
For Natalie, it’s face time she wouldn’t get otherwise. She works a different part of the business than most of the technical staff. “Having a dedicated hour where I know I’m going to see these 10 people and be able to talk and have a conversation is really great,” she says.
It travels home, too. David’s wife asks him what the session covered every week, and Natalie brings topics home to her husband.
One session, where Lance shared about hitting rock bottom financially, stuck with David enough that he brought it up again months later. “Your honesty was really incredible during that,” he says. “That helped us become more honest too.”
Their advice
David doesn’t hesitate. “I’d tell them absolutely to try it,” he says. “They've got nothing to lose. You’ll find out really quickly how well it works.”
Natalie puts it in five words: “You can’t afford not to.”
