FinTech Needs to Take a Break.
Moving Fast, But at What Cost?
The systematic dismantling and reengineering of business processes in industry after industry is relentless. AdTech, MedTech, AgTech, EdTech — all are reshaping the world, but no industry has been disrupted more rapidly, or more positively, than finance.
Early-stage FinTech companies are moving fast to challenge and even displace long-standing institutional players, achieving remarkable growth at warp speed. That’s good. But is the pressure of rapid growth taking a toll on the longer-term goal of building a sustainable company culture?
If that notion resonates with you, we at Lewis have an idea: hit the pause button for your people and take them on a Lewis outdoor adventure. A Lewis experience is one small turn-key step you can take to value your people, reengage them, and let them breathe in the benefit of the outdoors, where good things can happen for them and your business.
The Slippery Slope of Rapid Success
While no two companies are exactly alike, we’ve seen a pattern that looks something like this: A FinTech startup diagnoses a critical gap in an existing business process that new technology can fill or improve upon; founders and their teams move through a frenzied period of prototype development; false starts and pivots and regulatory challenges and investor pressure and serial breakthroughs define the journey, culminating in a solution that customers finally adopt, maybe even grow to love. Then comes rapid growth, and with it no escape from the frenetic pace as new features are iterated upon, new use cases emerge, and endless updates are released. Whew!
At some point, your people may look up from their screens and wonder how they got there, and maybe even why they’re there at all.
Enter Lewis: Delivering the Benefit of the Great Outdoors
At Lewis, we know and love FinTech, and we know we can help. The disruptive power of FinTech start-ups to reimagine a busted industry and deliver better services for businesses and consumers? That’s right in our wheelhouse. We get it. In fact, we’re building our company on the premise that “employee benefits are broken,” too.
So let’s fix it, or at least a small fixable part of it. We believe that those businesses that don’t instill a deeper sense of purpose than the next product release tend to have short shelf lives. Staff burns out. The cost of churn adds up. People lose sight of why they started working there in the first place, especially if the sharp image of a big exit at the end of the tunnel gets fuzzier with time. Many promising start-ups are suddenly left with a good product and nobody great left to move it forward.
But you can take one small but important step to change this trajectory with Lewis. Our mission is to open access to the great outdoors for businesses of all sizes, but we’re especially focused on the NY startup world, where things can get especially tense and claustrophobic. We can lead your team on a unique outdoor adventure, the perfect way to push reset with your people, or cap off the accomplishment of a big push, or just let them know you care about their headspace.
And we make it easy: We know the best places to go within a two-hour drive of NYC to get your people out there and into a new experience — from the breathtaking vistas of a Catskill hike to the soothing rush of water paddling on a lake or river. And we take care of everything, with professional guides and every detail of the day thought through and curated for a memorable experience.
But it’s not what we do that counts as much as what it enables your people to do: refresh, reset, bond, see and feel something new, and connect to the natural world. It’s the unoffice. The great 19th century naturalist Henry David Thoreau put it this way:
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify. All good things are wild, and free.
So let’s stop frittering away for just a day. At Lewis, we believe in the restorative power of nature. Let us put it to work for your people.
