I‘ve learnt an awful lot about myself in the last 6 years.
Particularly about myself as a person, my requirements for happiness and what I need to maintain equilibrium.

And, through destiny, luck or fate, whatever you want to call it, I’ve had the opportunity to navigate some intensive experiences that have shaped me profoundly, as well meet and work with some incredible people who, through tough periods as well as good, have driven my understanding of people.

Understanding people is the key to leadership. Which is why a good leader needs to understand themselves as well as those around them. They need to recognise their blind-spots as well as their strengths; be aware of their limitations as well as their potential. And they need to be willing to share the human side of themselves to drive growth in others.

“The human element in leadership is what inspires people.”
Loretta Malandro, Ph.D

This quote sums up exactly what I have discovered in my meandering journey through life, work and technology. It’s our human experience that inspires. This ability to show vulnerability and share mistakes made and lessons learnt is going to be what fortifies people when they are low, enables them to make mistakes without fear and evolve as leaders themselves.
But they need to lead by example.

I hope to do this in some small but meaningful way. In this article, we’ll wander into my journey and my experiences, how they drove my own personal evolution and look into some of the invaluable change inducing techniques I picked up along the way.

My own evolution

I don’t drink.
There are good reasons for that that I will not bore you with today, but the process taking me to my teetotaller state led me to the most raw and critical self evaluation I will most likely ever experience.

And, with that extreme plunge inward to unearth years of pain and hurt and confusion and frustration; with this unrestrained, no holes barred screening that I received at that time, there emerged a person who was clear.

Who knew at all costs what was acceptable and what was not, what was normal and what was not, what was quality and what was not, what was life and what was not.

• This person knew what her triggers were, so she could avoid them.
• This person understood what certain situations would mean for her psyche, so she could manage them.
• This person realised how she tended to react instinctively, so she learned how to assess and apply logic to ground her back to earth.
• This person understood when language was being used to manipulate her, so she learned how to cope and she learned how to converse to protect herself and gain control of the situation.
• This person understood when the build up of a situation would cause her to implode so she learned how to not only step away, but how to avoid getting there in the first place.

There’s a beautiful quote from Samuel Beckett who said:

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Samuel Beckett

You can apply these words to Scrum and Agile as well as you can apply it to life. It pays to fail if you learn from it.

And while I wouldn’t recommend alcohol abuse as a fast track course in personal development, I will give thanks for every single sip that got me there because a person emerged on the other side who knew intimately who she was, through deep and powerful introspection.

A person who emerged with solid tools to maintain an equilibrium. Maybe at that stage, I wasn’t a leader of a team. But I did lead myself out of chaos and it is by far and away my greatest achievement.

And it turns out that leadership translates. These skills translate. Your evolution can start immediately if you are happy to take the first step in the right direction. And you don’t need to take the scenic route like I did.

Applying this introspection to your teams

Leadership, whether its for a large team or simply yourself, is not going to take effect until you acknowledge your human flaws and address them, using them as the catalyst to make you ignite.

It always makes me laugh when I think back because at times, I honestly think working in my field gave me the tools to live my life better. This is the power of UX. You experience, gather data, reflect and then pivot based on feedback.
It works for technology as well as it works for humans and I love it because it just makes sense.

Find and fix your bugs, make a better product.
Find and address your flaws, become a better person.

My father used to love the metaphor of getting your hair cut, allowing you the rare opportunity to see the back of your head and used to comment how everyone who is too busy avoiding dealing with their shite needed the mirror to the back of the head to deal with their blind spots.

Holding the mirror up to the back of your head (Image from iStock)

Your willingness to self reflect is the differentiator between you staying where you are and you rising to a stronger place, both personally and professionally.

Confronting your own blind spots as a person is one of the greatest things you can do for yourself as a person, or for your partner and family but also keep in mind how much this doubles as an incredible gift to bestow upon your business.

“Organisations at their core are a collection of people, who make decisions based on feeling…”
Simon Sinek

When you are unwilling to learn and explore areas outside of your remit and experience and comfort zone, you are not only limiting yourself, you are limiting your organization. True leadership is having the courage to not only look for the gaps in your skill sets and your own perceived flaws but seek to understand them from other people.

We can all say intellectually what we think we could work on to improve ourselves, but going a step further is facing those things that you haven’t realised are actually issues and you can only get that from directly asking those you work with to, respectfully, give this feedback.

Ask the question and let the answers come back, but think structurally.

State the issue.
State the consequence.
State the solution.
Be respectful.

Take an example:

“Every time you cut across me, saying ‘I know’, I feel like you’re not listening to what I want to say and that makes me think, Why bother?
Let me finish my thought and then respond.”

Hearing this kind of feedback is difficult. It can be honest, at times brutal and direct and while we may claim otherwise, we do not live in a society that loves being honest and direct all the time; we are in a society that prefers head down and muddle on.

With this feedback, your mind may react in several ways, from:

“Feck, I thought I was getting away with that…”
to the more common…
“Really, was that really causing such an issue…”
or…
“Is that seriously how they perceive me to be?”

 

But you are going to move past this discomfort, and it may be initially terribly uncomfortable or awkward, and move into the beautiful land of knowledge where your potential to grow and evolve lies.

Take any feedback as a gift.

You have to start looking on feedback as a gift. A chance to know areas you could work on, the awareness of the things you tend to do unintentionally that impede others work flow. Or, on the flip side, giving someone else feedback that is incredibly awkward, but may alleviate the difficult situations that seem impossible to ride out.

These are gifts that make you better as a worker and as a person. These are gifts that are forcing you to grow.

The result of a moment of awkwardness?

This awareness leads to knowledge and growth, as well as a chance of building a better rapport between you and your colleagues, who will see you putting yourself out there, respect your seeking to genuinely improve yourself and potentially, with the power of the ripple effect, will now in turn seek to know the same about themselves.

And there are simple ways to do this as a team. Whether you’re asking within a retrospective as part of scrum ceremonies, or simply one on one, ask three simple questions to get the ball rolling:

1. What are my top three blind spots?
   And what is their impact on you, the person who deals with them?
2. What are the top three blind spots of the team?
   And what is their impact on the productivity in the team?
3. What can we do to avoid these blind spots being issues?
   How can we make things better?

These are simple questions that lead you on to revelations and knowledge that could genuinely impact and benefit your company in ways you cannot imagine. The proof is in the pudding and it all comes from asking the right questions.

Asking the right questions is half the battle

Asking the right questions

The power of asking the right question was a game changer for me. This is a technique, picked up through the audiobooks of Tony Robbins, that allowed me to actively take control over my state of mind and shift myself from self pity to practical, from frustration to solution. This can have a profound impact on how you live your day to day life. And it’s simply applied.

Reframing is seeing the current situation from a different perspective and is invaluable in problem solving, decision making and learning. It can help you more constructively move on from a situation in which you feel stuck or confused.

If you find yourself getting frustrated, if you find yourself in a mood, if you find yourself getting irritated by someone’s behaviour, drill down into the problem until you get the answer.

And be wary of your instinctive reactions.
If you ask an unhelpful question, like: “Why am I never able to get my point across?”, your negative headspace may instinctually reply with “Because you’re a bad communicator,” or “These people are stupid and can’t understand what I’m talking about…”

Hardly helpful and more likely to keep you in the negative space you’re trying to escape.

Whereas, if you were to reframe the question and ask something like: “What would help me get my thoughts across better? What would best resonate with this group?” All of a sudden, your brain is triggered into solution mode and is far more likely to find a more useful answer.

If you don’t get the answer right away, ask a better question. Reframe and ask again. No good? Reframe and ask again. Be the little five year old sitting in the back of the car, saying “Why, why, why?” but instead of why, reframe the narrative.

The aim of reframing is to shift your perspective to enable yourself to be more empowered to act. Sometimes, merely reframing one’s perspective on a situation can help people change how they feel about the situation as well as influence both how they’ll approach it and you in the future.

I am empowered by my experiences. I am living the happy life I currently live as a result of these experiences and despite all the hardships, painful moments and the hard learning that came from the journey to get here, I proudly honour, remember and am grateful for everything that got me to this point.

I can speak happily of my experiences because I know they have the power to instruct and have the power to lift people who feel like I felt a long time ago, or are dealing with difficult people or situations that don’t allow them to be their best version of themselves. I have been there, bought the T-shirt and went back for another. But introspection is a good healer.

My own sense of self confidence comes from knowing I survived every tricky situation and learned something from it. How I kept exploring my personality, my own needs for happiness, my quirks and actively understand the need to keep pushing this exploration. What I can say is that change is possible and I’ve lived it. And it doesn’t have to stop at you.

Change starts from you and trickles down through your example to those around you. It takes effort and an honest desire to achieve it but I swear, it is addictive. Don’t wait for it to just happen, instigate it.

Be the change that inspires the others.

How many times have you been at a meeting where your research has been circulated beforehand and as time goes on, it dawns on you that no-one has really processed your work?

It’s frustrating, yes, but by no means a reflection on you, or even your intended target readers, but more on how you approached the task.
Today, I suggest an different route to ensure your messages sink in and actually resonate with your audience.

I do this through the power of empathy in sharing research to ensure your content is read. You can apply this to UX content strategy, mobile and web content design, copywriting and presenting, enabling you to make the impact you want.

A Microsoft consumer study done in 2016 claimed that the human attention span today is 8 seconds, down from 12 seconds in the year 2000.
The goldfish, incidentally, has an attention span of 9 seconds.

Not really reassuring.
So in a nutshell, you’ve got to make those eight seconds count.

The designer’s mantra of user-centred design optimises products for how users want to use them, rather than forcing a user to change their behaviour to use a product.

I believe the same principle can be applied to ensuring your thoughts, reports or work in general gets noticed by the people who matter, by tailoring your material to the format that person lives and breathes.

A wise person knows their audience. A wiser person knows that even though you have worked weeks to produce a in-depth comprehensive report that outlines your client’s market competitors, if you present them with a daunting 40 page document, they are not going to read it all.

And even if they are, you are relying on them to digest it as you want them to and not just skim. You are tempting fate and risking some of your hard work being lost.

“When creating content, be empathetic above all else.
Try to live the lives of your audience.”
Rand Fishkin, Founder at Moz

During a recent client’s fund raise, we must have tailored 20 different slide-decks, one pagers, 2 pagers, white papers, info-graphics, teasers, even an explainer video to potential investors and partners all over the globe, with different approaches for different people based on our knowledge of the people we were pitching to and previous interactions with us and the team.

Tailoring your content to individual consumers, whether it be document, visual or video

Tailor fitting your content to the reader, while time consuming, is perhaps the most effective way of ensuring your work is noticed. This is empathy, this is showing respect to the person in question, respect for their time and actively builds rapport. But, from a business point of view, it ensures your pitch hits the nail on the head.

Just keep in mind these three main points:

Structure — Make reading this document consistent. Don’t strain their attention or focus with lots of random pages or treatments.
Underscore the topic — Give them a hold to lock their attention to
Brief descriptions — Keep it brief and to the point, and finally…
Only communicate what is relevant to the person.

Keep your documents structured with key info first, followed by a more in-depth look

If you can, take the time to ask them what they want from you in terms of communication. It’s one question that they will respect you for asking and will make your job infinitely easier.

And while we’re talking clarity of message… Don’t assume because you understand the technical jargon being thrown around that your clients or colleagues do too. A lot of the modern acronyms and tech concepts being bandied about by the tech community are lost on the general public and there is a lot of pressure to be informed on all the different things going on in the digital space. Never assume that because you know it, they know it.

Support your research by creating visuals and assets to share high level information

Help others get there. Help them understand.
Info-graphics, explainer videos, posters, these are so effective to keep a decent high level knowledge throughout a team and are a great way to support our clients who may be struggling to convey these concepts to non techie investors, stakeholders and even their own families.

We can all relate to this. It’s still one of my favourite games, asking my parents to define what I do and every time, the definition gets ever more fantastic, which is lovely for me! There is a lot of information in the world so we should never assume we are all singing from the same hymn sheet.

Gauge your client like a user: Are they more visual, are they more fact driven, do they enjoy a deep dive or are they more analytical and prefer to see the charts and figures as opposed to write-ups?

Ask them for copies of reports, e-mails that they’ve actually enjoyed and are more likely to respond to. Ask them to define what they need in a report before you write it and you’ll find that your job is going to be much easier when you need to deliver it.

And that’s not to say you’re not thorough in your research and you cut content to the point of madness. Section your document relevant to the reader, while including a link to the entire document. Structure this well, with easy to find, digestible sections — but always assume that this will not be read in full.
Steve Krug, as ever, nails it perfectly, when describing web-users:

“They don’t read, they scan.”
Steve Krug

Trust in the time spent getting to know your clients, colleagues and end user. Knowing their drivers, knowing what they respond to and why they do what they do is never a bad investment of time. The power of your relationships will always pay dividends in the workplace.

This also lets you find the freedom to be your authentic self at work. This will inevitably help you to do your job better, as you will be acting on instinct, asking honest questions and diving deeper to get a better understanding because you will be emotionally committed to doing right by the person, not just getting the task done.

The benefits of this approach?
Simple:

1. You’ll get your point across faster
2. Get buy in faster
3. Move processes along faster
4. Strengthen your relationship with the client/target reader

The target readers will appreciate the efforts to deliver to their remit and this massively increases trust in you and your work. This is why clients will stay with you.

Empathy is the ability to understand and share in the internal states of others and it’s an invaluable tool, not only your UX arsenal but your toolkit generally for life. Every interaction you have benefits from you rocking this skill because this can be the catalyst to incredible products and possibilities.

So to sum up:

Don’t lock yourself into one format — Adapt your approach.
Tailor-fit content to the person — Don’t overwhelm with a one size fits all.
Ask your audience how they want to digest information — Always have at least one reference.

And remember, 8 seconds… you’re dealing with the equivalent attention span of inattentive goldfish most of the time…

Make it impactful!

We have now celebrated an anniversary as a new start-up and it has been an amazing year which has been intense and fulfilling. So, as we approach the festive period, I felt like reflecting on what has happened.

In this first part of rumination, I dwell on some reminders of what happens when you are a start-up and I’d probably sum up that this episode articulates why big companies are only really set up to do business with other big companies.

The lack of transformation in “Digital Transformation”

One of the things we at Elemental Concept pride ourselves on is our ability to help any type of company innovate to enter, create or transform a market. Given that this is the age of obsession with the words ‘Digital Transformation’, you would think our approach was tailor-made for the companies that know they need to do something for fear of being left behind.

Before I continue the rant, remember that the key word in Digital Transformation is transformation. This means the business model needs to change and the company must do something different.

However, it has taken me this year to remember why it took us a long time, in our previous guise as Leo Tech, to really be engaged by big companies who truly want to transform. I give some of the reasons below, it’s not exhaustive but will hopefully help fellow start-ups understand why things can be bewildering.

a)     Fear of Self Cannibalisation

Overwhelmingly, this is the biggest obstacle to a company taking on change/doing something different. The fear that this new path might impact on the existing way of creating revenue for the company. This as an objection sounds sensible until you really think about it. Just remember, if they don’t do it, someone else will. When you look at the great companies like Blockbuster, Nokia, Kodak, Blackberry, whose once extremely successful product and business units have become footnotes, you realise that in part their lack of adoption to change caused some of their decline. The other half being other companies releasing products that did the cannibalisation. The lesson is simple – Do it yourself, quicker and better than anyone else can.

b)     It doesn’t have the right buzz words

Technology gets new buzz words from time to time. For some big companies, showing that they are in the know with the latest and greatest and trying to adopt it is more important than whether it actually delivers value. Two of the latest buzz words are Blockchain and AI.

As technologies go, they will definitely change a lot of things and create efficiencies, accountability and learning that at present, we don’t really understand. We are lucky enough to have some exciting projects that allow us to build and learn more about both technologies (see later).

However, we won’t recommend to a customer to utilise these technologies if they don’t seem appropriate.

Herein lies a problem you can probably sell something for a lot of money that doesn’t make sense because it might help them with investor relations, but does that really help you change their business?

c)      You haven’t done the same thing for one of their competitors

Probably the one thing that makes the least amount of sense to me is that some companies are reluctant to engage because you haven’t helped one of their competitors do a similar transformation. Is it me or is this nuts?

From where I look at it, they shouldn’t want to copy others from the same industry. They might want to understand best practice and even adopt features that work well but we are all about helping companies differentiate and lead a market not follow along..

So, our problem here is that we don’t have a boiler plate template that we can roll out and say this is the best way to transform if you are in blah, blah industry. If that’s what you want, the big consultancies are absolutely right for you. As a consumer, that is really worrying as every product will be the same and we can live the nightmares of sci-fi films that project a future where everything is uniform and controlled.

In our world, we recognise the true talent for change, as well as the real appetite and knowledge for what it should be, comes from within the company we are helping. All of our practices are designed around teasing it out of them. We don’t offer boilerplate solutions because each case is different. All we can do is help them by bringing insight from other industries and challenging them to see if they are really solving the problems for their customers.

d)     Procurement processes

Assuming you somehow manage to bypass the obstacles that I note above, and you have managed to convince a big company that you don’t need 15,000 employees to know what you are doing, you still have to deal with the elephant in the room – The procurement process. This is an archaic process which serves as the ultimate road block.

Procurement processes, whilst designed for the right reasons of corporate governance, are also some of the most inappropriate and innovation stifling regimes I’ve seen. Below I list some of the questions we get asked and the some of the answers that go through my head (but thankfully don’t leave my mouth) in response:

Q: We will have to get three quotes for this piece of work, can you please provide a full proposal with detailed costings?

A: Sure – I think that I have done this a few times already to win this piece of work but if it makes you happy, I will resend what I have already sent to a number of your colleagues.

Q: As this is now an RFP, please can you ensure you are on our pre-qualified suppliers list?

A: I’m obviously not, otherwise I don’t think I would be speaking to you. We are also a brand new company so I would have had to have qualified before we actually existed.

Q: To check your financial viability, can you provide your past three years of profitable accounts?

A: I can provide you with the fictional accounts that I used to prequalify before my company existed. By the way, when you did your D&B check on us did you not notice we have no history?

Q: Please can you provide three reference clients of a similar size and nature to us?

A: I can’t as I had the same problem with all of their procurement processes.

As you can tell, big company procurement isn’t really designed to enable the start-up to sell to them. Indeed, it isn’t set up to do anything quickly.

e)     Fear of entering the void

Commercial processes being designed purely for big companies doesn’t stop at buying services, it even applies when they are providing services. We experienced similar problems when we realised we needed to expand to a much bigger office and take on a grown-up lease. Because we couldn’t provide three years of profitable accounts, we were being asked by landlords to provide one year’s rent as a deposit and personal guarantees. As a start-up, this is nuts: Tying up a year’s rent would only really be possible for a ridiculously well-funded start-up or surprise surprise a big company

Many years ago, when I was going through one of my first start-up experiences, a good friend explained the big company thing to me, stating that “this phenomenon is simple” and he used the phrase “Nobody got shot, buying from IBM”. I have nothing against IBM so you could quite as easily replace their name with Accenture, PwC, BCG, etc. What I took it to mean was they are the safe option, they will generally have a sensible solution which no one could be blamed for procuring, but was it the optimum choice?

This makes a lot of sense but our world will become pretty stagnant if we rely on big companies for innovation. They have processes to eliminate risk and that is sensible management. Unfortunately, transformation requires risk and guts to change and do something different.

All I can say is hooray for the small guys. (see next post).

I haven’t posted an update to our story for three months. A lot has happened in this period, but I regret to inform you that I am still none the wiser as to knowing what the purpose of Twitter is.

To not overwhelm or simply bore you, I’ve tried to keep the latest happenings in our little world to a few different posts.

PART A: Salvation comes

My last update became a plea for help. I was struggling to find the words and branding to really explain why we are different and wanted to know how to create a brand that symbolises us. Whilst this series of blogs is a limp effort in that direction, we needed guidance. Within hours of me posting, I received a fantastic offer from my good friend @dave katz

Our slightly bizarre conversation went something like this:

Dave: Are you serious about needing help?

Clueless Bim: Help? I’m not really sure what you’re talking about.

Dave: You just posted a plea for help

Clueless Bim: Oh yeah that – (At this point I’m embarrassed that I have forgotten what I had done literally a few hours ago)

Dave: Well, are you serious?

Embarrassed Bim: Yes, this is definitely something we need help with (I’m also thinking I need help with my memory as I didn’t know that Dave worked on helping companies improve their messaging and brand identity)

To cut a long story short, (and minimise me providing more examples of my senility), Dave, as a friend, offered to help us understand and express our core value proposition. This was a brilliant offer and from a selfish perspective, the way it worked was even better.

For us as founders, the task was simple and enjoyable. We got to sit in a pub, drink beer and talk to Dave about what we do. Maybe it was the magic in the questions he asked or in the way the conversation was guided, but what happened was that all of us talked about the why and how of Elemental Concept in a deeper and more real way than ever before. I know some of you readers are thinking that the magic ingredient was the beer but I disagree – there was none of the gushing nonsense that normally comes with too much alcohol… or maybe there was a little of that as well. Dave understood how to get us to open up on what we understood individually and agreed on collectively in order to help us establish our core identity and brand values.

Though it sounds simple, one of the greatest gains I got was learning that our messaging was confused because we didn’t spell out what we did. Dave listened to us ramble on and asked “Why don’t you say ‘We are a hybrid of three things – we are a software designer and developer; we are a consultancy; and, where relevant, are an investor in our clients businesses’”

He was absolutely right. What he made me realise was that I had been talking about how we helped businesses whilst shying away from saying we did software development. This was because of my random perception of how such organisations are badged. I’m not sure everyone thinks the same way but in my head, saying we were a software development company made me think of cheap offshore development, churning out cookie cutter code and charging over the top for a bloated product. I had become so paranoid about differentiating us from that that I was forgetting to make it clear that we do build technology and love doing so. Instead I should be explaining that we do it differently bringing our customers value economics to the fore because we try to understand their business.

So Dave gave me a reminder about what we do and pointed out that we should explain the elemental concept of our business. So with our initial messaging solved, we moved on to how we express our core values and build a brand around them.

If you remember in The Rollercoaster Part 2.5, I had tried to create 4 words that symbolised us. Though some worked to encompass us, they also had some significant downsides. On top of that, I had arbitrarily decided that there should be 4 words by trying to equate us to superheroes. Whilst we do obviously have phenomenal powers, branding our company was not one of them.

Dave patiently listened to us explain our approach and process to solving a problem. He understood the fact that we believe in testing a hypothesis as quickly and simply as is possible. For him, this was part of our overall scientific approach to helping businesses change and evolve. The reality was our branding should be scientific. We use knowledge and logic to test, measure and learn, all are part of the scientific learning process.

He took it further and helped us take our four words that encompass us and express them in a way consistent with the new branding. So what we now have is as follows;

At Elemental Concept we live by three core principles;

The bonds we build with each-other, our customers and partners,

The distilled solution –  keeping everything as focused as possible

And enabling or providing the spark and willingness to experiment with uncertainty.

There will be much more detail and evidence of Dave’s great work in our soon to be updated website. In our true fashion, it will be an evolving piece. We have been busy (see upcoming posts) so are yet to launch our so called minimum viable product which should simply tell people what we do. It will evolve as we have time and as we listen to feedback.

As usual, we would love your feedback. Watch this space for when we are live and then please visit the site and let us know how we can improve.

For those of you kind enough to have a read of the site when it is live, be grateful that my fellow founders stopped me from taking the science theme too far. If I had my way, you would see pictures of us all holding vials, wearing lab-coats – think Beaker from the Muppets – and giving our processes pretentious names like ‘metamorphosis’ and ‘photosynthesis’

We are now in week seven of our adventure and I already have so much to reflect on. What’s top of my mind today is the fact that being in a start-up of 11 people makes you notice and appreciate things that maybe you take for granted when running a business of 150. I’m probably writing this as a note to myself to hopefully not forget the details when we start scaling.

I’ve grouped my thoughts for no particular reason other than this is how my mind works;

Observation 1: So Why You?

In my last post I put into words the dialogue I had with my children when they asked me to describe what we do in the most simplistic way. In reality, I’m having variations on that very conversation everyday.

Until you have created a brand (and even after that) you have to continuously explain why you are different and why someone should choose you for the services or product you offer. As a start-up this is painfully obvious as you need to be able to explain why your process, product, experience, etc means that someone will get more than the long established competitor or the typical way of doing things.

So I’ve been going through this soul searching with the whole team, challenging us to find the words that explain why we love doing what we do. It’s that thing that’s in your head and you know it is right but you struggle to verbalise it.  As this isn’t meant to be a sales pitch I’ve not included our efforts to explain ourselves, instead for those interested see the Rollercoaster Part 2a which is coming soon ……

The thing to note here is that as a Start-up you are made to question what you do and why you do it which you might quite easily forget when you are in an established business. Continuous validation and adjustment to your business can only be a good thing. We profess to believe in customer centricity but are we really placing their needs first? Further to that we have to make sure we understand why we should be chosen over everyone else. The answer as a message needs to be understood by you, everyone who works with you and everyone you want to work with.

Observation 2: Wow I’m blogging!

I have now had the fortune of starting a company with three brilliant people who are friends even more than colleagues. We aren’t the youngest set of founders (we’re not in old peoples home either) which means that we’ve had established roles and ways of working.

We are lucky enough to have been part of successful growing businesses. This means that we are more likely to identify what needs to be done. However, that doesn’t mean we know how to do it. The bigger you get the more defined the role you and everyone else do. In the end there is someone responsible for different things meaning you don’t really need to know how to do whatever it is they do.

Being in a start-up means you have to throw your traditional role in the bin and do what needs to be done. There is something slightly scary about this as apparently the older you get the harder it is to learn (something about old dogs and new tricks I think). There is also something very refreshing about the new adventure you end up facing every day.

Given we are a technology company we have had some brilliantly ignorant conversations between us founders. We have had questions like “what’s the difference between Sharepoint and Onedrive?”, or “what’s the point of twitter?” and we then follow them up with nervous laughter and one of us giving a completely unconvincing answer.

Ultimately one of us takes on the mantle and gets it done. I can guarantee you it isn’t easy and our implementation will be inefficient but there is something great about knowing all the facets of your company with more than superficial knowledge.

I used to think it was great that I talked to everyone in the company about their roles but I definitely now have a deeper understanding of what they say since I have had to figure out what they do. So, it’s something I don’t want to forget and one day I actually might tweet (when I figure out the point of it).

Observation 3: It actually is in the details.

It really is true that the more successful you become the more you take for granted. Everyone reminds you to celebrate your successes but they don’t define what success is.

When you are a start-up you notice all the details and really appreciate all the bits that help put your world together. Everything seems like a little victory. Whether it’s getting a great pitch deck together, us completing what we promised to deliver early or a laptop (that you forgot to order on time) turning up straight away. All of these are recognised and appreciated.

I’m not saying we should uncork a bottle of champagne to celebrate people turning up for work (though the results could be interesting), but it is great to feel the appreciation for the details. It will definitely be hard as we grow to not just celebrate the big things, but I work with a great team who will keep me grounded.

Observation 4: People are Brilliant

This could quite easily turn into a huge list of thankyous, with me crying like Gwyneth Paltrow at the Oscars, but I do want to acknowledge that there are so many people who are trying to help us succeed. The great thing about it is that there is genuine interest from friends, family, colleagues who are taking the time to really understand what we do and then find ways of making it even better.

Apart from the obvious potential sales opportunities, there has been so much more that we have gained. We are definitely stronger because of the support we receive. Whether it is the theory that “as Brits we like the underdog”, or the much more obvious fact that people are genuinely nice, we have felt more likely to win because of our community.

The past two months have reminded me that I’m extremely lucky. As I said I have three good friends who have joined me on an adventure, and the network we are part of is definitely backing us. The one thankyou I do have to note is that as founders we have felt honoured by the team that have joined us. As of today, we have grown significantly this month and are a team of eleven trying to fulfil what we believe. Not only did our team surprise us by asking to join our adventure after a well earned break, they did it with the knowledge and enthusiasm we need given that we are a start-up where there is obviously risk.

I’m really hopeful that it was the belief in what we do that made them ask to join us but I guess that there is a slim chance that it is because we celebrate and open a bottle of champagne every time they make it in to work.