My wife and I founded Home Science Tools in 1994 when we discovered, through personal experience, how difficult it was for parents homeschooling their children to find good resources for teaching science. We launched Home Science Tools, and it grew steadily; there was indeed a demand for this service! By about 2015, we had grown to a $6 million business with 30 employees, and we were starting to face growth-related challenges. We had ideas about how to grow further, but our structure and team at the time did not seem poised to take it to the next level. We knew something had to change.

There were many reasons we struggled with growth at this stage, but we soon realized that, at the heart of it, was our approach to taking care of our team, and specifically compensation management. We had tried versions of benchmarking salaries, worked toward ensuring fairness, and strived to create clarity for employees about their growth and earnings potential. But ultimately, we realized nothing could change until we embarked on a thoughtful overhaul of our pay structure that could solve internal administrative headaches and also strengthen employee trust and satisfaction. It had to start with a scalable, transparent compensation system.