When DesignMyNight.com grew from two to 20 people in two years, its founders worried the business had lost its spark.
Just four years ago, DesignMyNight.com were two people. Two years later we were five, and today, we are 20. Just four years ago we were working from Starbucks. Today, we are in an Old Street open-plan warehouse office space. The journey has been short but the expansion has been big.
Last week my business co-founder Andrew and I sat down and wondered if we had lost our startup spirit. As a brand new company, it was easy to get washed away with the excitement of being a startup – few bills to pay, few clients to worry about, only a few new members of the team. This was why we left our corporate snooze jobs; working hard for the boss wasn’t cutting it for us.
Two years on, we had a serious discussion about whether this was going to work and as fate would have it, an angel landed in our lap. A group of angel investors, in fact, who decided to invest £250,000 into our dream. While this was obviously life-changing for us, it also quickly changed our startup dynamic. Suddenly we had to put together serious five-year plans, forecasts, cashflow projections and growth strategies … and, moreover, had to be accountable for them.
This of course brings a whole new excitement to the table too. We were now in a position to create a viable company and one that could grow quickly, and here we had angel investors – of Friends Reunited, Yell.com, Vodafone and Quidco fame – all believing in the business plan. The startup engines were on fire, with a fancy new office, 10 hires and a sizeable marketing budget to play with. The following year saw a further £250,000 invested allowing us to grow to a team of 20 with an even fancier office and managing to poach talent from the likes of Google and Accenture.
After four years of strong growth, we witnessed more and more desks filling the office, HR policies being put in place, new managerial structures, but fewer opportunities for impromptu fun nights out with the team (after all we had budgets to stick to). The lack of atmosphere became noticeable. Our fantastic team had joined DesignMyNight because of the whirlwind fun and unpredictability of a startup, and we had lost that spirit.
At a startup, your most important asset is your team. For our team, DesignMyNight is their baby as well as ours and we’d forgotten to keep the dialogue open with them. We had an open lunch with the team to ask them what they wanted and a few weeks later we had installed a ping pong table, darts board, new lounge/chill out area, regular top-ups of fruit, tea and coffee. We started having more regular team nights out, and handed the office decoration over to them. We were reminded to thank and praise the team more than we did, and began announcing “weekly wins” and wind down Fridays (where we shut laptops at 5pm and enjoy each other’s company, and a few cocktails), as well as randomly rewarding the teams with lunches and gifts if there had been noticeable achievement.
These simple, yet inexpensive, improvements instantly re-injected the team and the office with that entrepreneurial startup spirit again. A happier team equals better results. As founders of a new business it is vital to remember why you entered this crazy startup world … because it shouldn’t be simply for the money.
You must regularly step back from the pressures of targets and have fun: enjoy the job, enjoy the emotional rollercoaster, enjoy the freedom and most of all enjoy your team, otherwise you might as well go back to that snoozy corporate job.
Source : theguardian.com
Accelerators & Incubators, accelerateur, incubateur, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, Executive Business Accelerator, Gilles Bouchard, Harvard Business School, Harvard Business Angels, innovation, Louis Catala, reconversion, startups, Audra Shallal, expertise, entrepreneur investisseur, développement, international, entreprise de croissance, accompagnement cadres et dirigeants, cadres, dirigeants, grands groupes, outplacement, startupper