Starting a Company in a Crisis.
How the recession helped us build a business.
In October of 2008, just after we finished school, Ben and I met a powerful business woman. We waltzed in with our plans for building the grand empire. She nodded politely as we darted through our vision like Pinky and the Brain and, when we finally paused to draw breath, she made one chilling comment: “You’re trying to do all this in the midst of the darkest recession in recent history?! You’ve lost the plot!”
We were fairly sure we never even had “the plot” in the first place, so to have seemingly lost it already was somewhat disheartening.
I was reminded of this over dinner recently, when a new friend posed a similar question, albeit in retrospect. How, he asked, were we able to survive in an economic slump when we had no experience, no investors and, to be frank, very little idea of what we were doing.
Sheer ignorance is probably the best answer. We never knew a business world without recession. There were no glory days for us to reminisce or make comparison. It was simply, as far as we could tell, the daily grind of starting a company. Nothing more.
But further to that, we are eternal optimists. It’s not that we see the world through rose tinted spectacles, but that in the face of disaster there always lies opportunity for those with the tenacity and grit to discover it. There is always a silver lining.
“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger—but recognise the opportunity.” JFK
[On further inspection, it turns out that he was talking bollocks, which is mightily disappointing but the sentiment stands.]
At The Eleven, we’re far more interested in possibility than probability. Our mission is often to make that which is possible, probable. And we have a lot of fun doing it.
Starting out in a recession was, in hindsight, one of those improbable but possible ambitions we ran into headfirst. We were up against it no doubt, but as we fumbled our way through the early days with little but conviction we barely took notice of the giants that were tumbling around us. It was naivety, rather than bravery, for the most part.
But my conversation the other evening encouraged me to look back on the last six or seven years and address where the recession may, in fact, have been a help rather than a hindrance. I don’t pretend it was conducive to our efforts — there’s no doubt we’d have had a hell of an easier ride in a more buoyant market — but it definitely created some opportunities, disciplines and learnings for which we now stand positively richer, even if the overall effect was unfavourable.
In the coming months I want to explore this in a few posts as a way to get my head straight and discover if anyone else had similar experiences. Perhaps most importantly, I’m keen to see if anyone cries “bullshit!”. This is very much retrospective, and I am no true economist (I once studied it at university, appallingly) and certainly have no compelling grasp of the political landscape of our time (I almost avoid it with disdain).
I aim to address the following three areas… how they gave us headaches, but ultimately how I believe they’ve baked into our DNA some important, positive characteristics for the way we now do business and, in some cases, how our generation has been forced into decisions that they may reflect on as the best they ever made.
- The Overarching Problem : a stagnant economy with slow growth and little confidence
- The Funding Gap : conservative investors and a lack of access to venture finance
- A Lost Generation : graduates coming unstuck
I was going to refer to this as #silverliningseries — but I decided not to be a douchebag — so I’ll post them in the The Eleven’s Medium collection as and when I get time to stick my thoughts down.
More to follow soon …
With thanks, as ever, to these heroes @gateley and @tomcarra for their help.
