Andreas Grammatis: A “handyman” from London
This a prime example of a young entrepreneur who has an old soul. Andreas Grammatis is the CEO and founder of Douleutaras. A marketplace for finding the best handymen or professionals for your home.
First of all, our meeting was so much fun. I wasn’t expecting that, because of the context of the interview, but with Andreas it felt like we were talking casually even for important matters.
At the end of the interview, I came to the conclusion that Andreas is a very mature and composed person. A role model for being a rational business thinker and an emotional, loving person at the same time.
He shared a lot about the business and himself but mostly he was concerned with trying to help me out with my endeavours and my concerns.
So, do we see a correlation between being successful and helping other people? I guess we should.
He had the idea for Douleutaras while he was working in London. He previously completed an MBA in finance, at Imperial College, and ended up staying.
So how did an economist with a stable job in London and a ton of other attractive job opportunities with big salaries and powerful connections, decided to go back to Greece, a country suffering from recession, and start a business?
Most of you, would call him crazy. But that’s not how Andreas’s mind works.
Don’t do it for the money
He believes freedom is more valuable than getting a regular pay check. He actually believes “money” is a counter argument to start a new business. There are other stuff that should motivate you to do that.
In most startups, you are chasing huge growth as early as possible and this may mean huge burn rates (amount of money needed for the business to run for a specific time period). So in consequence, this means you need to put profitability in a somewhat lower priority.
Execution drives strategy
We are told most of the time that strategy drives execution, but Andreas is a true believer of the opposite as well.
Being agile, in the way you work, gives you room to make proper adjustments along the way. You need to be on the roll and then start making small modifications to your strategy.
A good strategy on paper may not look so good in real life, and thus you need to rethink your course.
Pursuing your luck
We have a very good excuse for procrastinating by attributing success to luck. But luck can be pursued, and you need to do that if you want to maximize your chances of success.
Meetings with important people or business opportunities may come on their own, but you can also do that by design. See what kind of “luck” is needed for your goal and suddenly opportunities will come visiting your thoughts all the time.
Integrate work into your life
Creating a business needs extreme amounts of time, so you need to be content about doing it. Steve Jobs has described very famously and he urges us not to settle but to always aim to find our true north.
Your business needs to have as many positive traits as possible if you want to go a long way.
Andreas likes to deal with people in his everyday life and find solutions in their problems. After all, that’s what entrepreneurship is for.
The company he has created allows him to do just that and in a more scalable way.
Scale yourself
If you want to serve more people, you need to have mechanisms that help you do that, by removing the mundane from your daily workload.
Andreas doesn’t get angry or nervous when he has to deal with individual cases of a “job” gone wrong in his business. But he is getting sad for he has less time to deal with matters that can have bigger magnitude.
His aim is to serve as many people as possible by introducing the best professionals to them.
So if you are going to do that, you need to scale yourself by communicating via greater mediums than “face to face” and you need people who share your vision and are motivated to share that vision with others.
Kill your project when needed
Sometimes being passionate about your idea can lead to bad situations.
You can’t have blind faith to your goal. You need to be rational and kill your project if it doesn’t work out.
Andreas had to do that for one of his projects that was running for 6 months. But he objectively looked at the numbers and he had just moved on.
There’s nothing wrong with having failed at something, as long as you learned something from it.
Be mindful
Taking care of your mind can do wonders for your output.
Most good things will happen if you search deep inside and constantly seek for answers within yourself.
Don’t settle for your present self but always aim to understand your inner motives and what “bad” pathways may exist in your way of thinking, so you can overcome them.
So we stayed up until late in his office and then he said goodbye with a magnificent sentence I will never forget.
“If I had to choose, between being on a yacht, drinking fine wine alone, and talking with you right now, I would easily choose the latter”
Andreas is looking for the best talent out there and I believe you have a lot to learn by just meeting him. There are many job openings at Douleutaras so if you feel like it, go on and introduce yourself.
