I talk a lot with my family, friends and colleagues about what moves me and what I do or want to do. That is, what I have been doing over the last few months and people – vital to me – encouraged me to write about it. I am doing this to start a discussion of how others are coping with the situation a lot of us are in these days. Let’s dig in …
It was in the summer of 2008 when I logged into the admin dashboard of my web hosting provider at the time and registered the domain kreait.com. I like the name as much today as I did when I came up with it: „kreait“ is easy to pronounce, but difficult to spell (by the way… Hi, I’m Gauri, nice to meet you!). Most importantly: it’s synonym with what I love doing most – creating and enabling others to create, in each step of the process.
And that’s what I’ve been doing since – in the first years alone as a freelance IT-consultant, since 2012 as a managing partner of the company that is kreait today. I’m proud to say that we don’t see ourselves as a typical company but as a team of highly-skilled, like-minded, and dedicated people with a shared set of principles, values and ambition.
I believe that empathy and the understanding of the situation of others plays one of the most significant roles for the success of a project. I think that this is the reason why our clients liked to work with us in the past: money is what we need to keep going, but what we want is to provide sustainable solutions up to the point that we can say „that’s it, you don’t need us anymore“ which sometimes led our clients to want us around a bit longer, include us in their next projects, or recommend us to others.
It fills me with joy and pride when I think about what we achieved in the past eight and more years together with our clients – the one thing that all of your projects have in common is this: they forged meaningful relationships and sometimes evolved into friendships that lasted longer than the duration of a single project. Words wouldn’t do justice to how thankful I feel having met so many wonderful people, nor how proud I am having worked with so many iconic brands.
Sustainability and purposefulness are topics that have been occupying me since some time now. I’ve been telling my partners and colleagues (and my family and friends) for years that I wanted to do something with a positive impact besides entertainment or other industries we’ve been working in. Waste-management is a largely unsolved challenge; green energy and technology need to become more critical (and fast); health and self-care is another topic where I see a significant need for development, and there are so many more challenges that need awareness and solutions.
We tried to implement some ideas as side-projects, but we realised that these are not topics that can be handled on the side – and as some of you know, 2019 was a year when kreait itself had its fair share of own challenges. We managed, but we needed to consolidate our service offering and reduce our team size. It was painful on many levels.
By the start of 2020, the situation started to look brighter. With a smaller team and consolidated service offering left, the financials were starting to look good, even above plan and the outlook on the rest of the year was a positive one. Our short-term goal was to improve parameters such as quality and speed to increase next to margin, but our long-term goal was to do something where our hearts were looking at. Most of us are product builders. We’ve gained tons of experience while working on well-known or now-known products. Some of us had founded their own start-ups. And all of us wanted to create something on our own; something for the good, something with a meaningful impact, something to ease the lives of others and our own as well.
Then came COVID-19 and it hit us. Hard. Our main clients were big brands in the Sports- and Travel industry, and they were equally impacted. Important income streams just vanished: how can one travel in/from a country in lockdown? How can you handle when football games get cancelled for the rest of the season, and the European Championship is rescheduled to the next year? It’s crazy!
Understandably, our clients needed to be cautious with their spendings, and it impacted us immediately. We are lucky that the German government acted reasonably quickly and provided some instruments to cope with the new, unprecedented situation, but it wasn’t enough. By April, the majority of our team was out of work, the uncertainty was huge, and the chances of being able to hold our short-term goals and even the company became slimmer by the day. I am sure many of you have experienced the same.
Something had to be done. So, what do you do with a kick-ass courageous team with an agile mindset, ready to adapt?
You adapt!
Read the next part of this series in which I will describe how we prepared transforming from a service-oriented company to a product-only one. If you have feedback on the story so far or comments and suggestions, please let me know, I’d greatly appreciate it!
(Thank you, Jérôme Gamez, for supporting with these articles!)
