Weekly Recap #23: The best is yet to come!
Max + Harry fly to Stuttgart, Lorenz is angry because no maultaschen for him and Lars makes pensive faces. Week 23, here we go!
I’m Harry, we’re diesdas.digital, a fresh agency for digital bits and pieces, and this is our 23rd weekly recap. As always I have no idea what I’ll write about this time, but we shall find out in a bit. Stay with me!
But first, here’s Lars contemplating a tough decision:
Let’s tackle everything in chronological order though: On Tuesday Max and I boarded the first flight in company history, going to Stuttgart (of all places, haha). A former colleague of Lorenz is now working in an agency there and wanted to touch base, so we did what had to be done, boarded a plane in the morning and flew to the south. We only had a rough idea what the meeting would be about, but no risk no fun. Around 11am we suddenly found ourselves in a fancy meeting room listening to a bunch of people talking about a hardware installation involving printers and cameras and stores without wifi in Vietnam. Umm … okay.
Usually working with other agencies is a huge red flag for us because considering that we’re quite small it usually ends up being a weird setup, with us becoming a sub-contractor instead of a partner — and usually the other party then dictates the workflow, shields us from the actual client and wants us to work for a lower day rate. Not good. Luckily there are exceptions to this rule though!
In this case everything turned out to be the total opposite: The others know what they’re doing, accepted our proposal within a day and without negotiations, joined our Slack immediately and seemed very open-minded about everything we suggested. Super cool. This is fun!
The project is basically a revamp of a hardware installation in stores around the globe … we’ll draft up a new concept and design the interface, in close collaboration with another company doing the development. The timeline is rather rushed, but doable and it’s 95% design work, so Lorenz and I can continue to write code on other projects, while Max and Lars get busy designing. We were pretty much in panic mode for two days, but when the proposals were written and we had drafted a timeline, we felt comfortable with the suddenly added workload. Everything has to be wrapped up by the end of June to go into manufacturing, but that seems possible and it’s good money combined with a challenging task. That’s how we like it. 😇
Speaking of money: We are finally at the point where we definitely decided to add a new person to the team … we have the projects, we have the workload across different disciplines and we feel that after half a year of working among us four, we need a fresh perspective and somebody to shake things up a little.
So we talked to a couple of people and while we could imagine working with each and every one of them, one person really stood out and ticked all the boxes. We’re giddy with excitement to get started, but it’ll probably take a few more weeks before we can say more. Or maybe it doesn’t work out at all and we have to start looking again, you never know until papers are signed (fingers crossed though).
Financially that’s a pretty big commitment from our side … having somebody permanently as a freelancer is tricky in German law (they cannot have an email address, cannot have a fixed desk, …), so we probably need to look into properly employing that new team member. Assuming an appropriate salary and that we need to rent another desk, buy a Creative Cloud license, buy a Macbook + screen, a new person easily ends up costing the company much more than each of us do (we are technically not employed). That’s a rather crazy thought, but we’re fine with that.
Before reaching that conclusion we had long and tough discussions about whether it’s the right point in time to grow the team, because there are so many factors and considerations involved:
- If we take a new team member we have a responsibility to provide financial security, since that person puts a lot of trust in us.
- We also have a responsibility to make sure the company itself is in good shape and we can pay all other bills.
- We need to make sure there’s never too little or too much work, so everyone with their respective skills is occupied, but not overworked.
- It’d be good to have a few bigger projects lined up for the second half of the year, but is that realistic? We’re a small team, it’s going great right now, but we’ll never know what happens half a year down the road. We don’t even exist for a half a year yet.
So yeah … it’s a risk, but a well calculated one. We feel comfortable to make the jump, but obviously sometimes doubts creep in as well. That’s only natural. We’re sure it’s gonna be great and the best is yet to come!
And that’s it already. If you liked this post, consider subscribing to this very publication. Also, next week we’re gonna do a lot of snapchatting in German, so add us before you miss half the snaps. There’s also Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Sorry, but I had to mention it. 🙃 #growthhacking #notreally
Now enjoy your weekend, take care and see you next week! 💚 🤖
