The Importance of Learning
About myself: I’ve founded several companies before starting the VIPERdev journey. I am now finding myself being a CEO of a company that feeds 14 people and is on a good sustainable course to grow further.
Now, I can say that I am proud of having built that. I can just as well say that this is just the beginning of our journey and vision. In this blog post I want to focus on one thing that I believe has helped me grow and that has helped us grow as a company — and you’ll see that much of it isn’t just me but it’s a big team effort :).
As you’ve probably guessed from the title this is about learning. It’s about investing in yourself. That sometimes feels oddly unproductive. When there are client emails left unanswered and projects unfinished, it’s easy to get back into the hamster wheel of everyday life. As a startup founder one thing is clear to me though:
We Need to Think Multiplicative, not Additive.
When I’m in the hamster wheel, I’m possibly adding one more customer to our base. I’m possibly making one more person happy. But I will keep having the same issues blocking me all the time. I’m always doing a “+1” to what I have. I’m working additive.
When I start investing time into figuring out what’s making that customer unhappy in the first place, or how I can help them faster in general, I start becoming multiplicative. I’m multiplying my ability to provide value, “times 1.1” by investing time — it’s not going to give me the short term reward, but let it run for a couple of weeks and you’ll notice how things become smoother for everyone.
Right now I’m reading a quick article on some topic that interests me almost every morning. I am also creating a blog post per month to make sure that I reflect on what I do and actually do it ;).
Invest in the Whole Team
Okay, we’ve got it. We’re investing in ourselves, our business is slowly starting to grow. The problem that we’ve had for a while is that I couldn’t delegate some tasks to free up more time of mine and eliminate me as a bus factor, I’d still be a single point of failure if I was sick. Plus, if we wanted to grow we needed to hire more and more people.
We’ve always enabled people to take time for themselves and for learning and improving. Now we’ve started to push this topic harder, making people do it (some didn’t even know they could :/). Within just the first week we’ve seen people step up, raising important discussions and shaping the vision of our business more than ever. The interesting thing here is that not only this helped us do our job in less time, but it also brought points to the table that I didn’t see for ages, and possibly would have never seen. Points which we are right now actively building our future on. Since we are all investing more time in ourselves, we can grow as a company without having to constantly hire people (which makes a company generally less efficient!)
If we all keep learning, we can apply the multiplication to our whole business.
For a business this is great. As a person it’s awesome too: when learning you invest in yourself, this is something for you; which you can take with you wherever your journey goes. Working on that gig is something you do for the company. So if you can use your work time for learning and growing — do it, it’s a win win.
The Results
Looking at my timesheet for last week, I’ve worked about 35 hours total. If I look around at other CTOs of startups in a similar stage like ours I see that many of them are working all day, often also all night. That’s not because I’m smarter than them. It’s not because we only employ geniuses. (Our people are rather awesome indeed though :)) It’s because we are focusing on growing us, as people and we take the time to lean back and relax if needed. If we invest time, we do so smartly.
We’ve been pushing this topic hard in the last couple of months and while taking back our overall time investment, we’ve grown in stability and happiness. One of our biggest projects right now is ahead of schedule and probably finishes early. (Yes, you read right, a software project that finishes early!) We are signing several new projects and we currently have to start queueing up customers who want to work with us.
Everyone gains something that will prove useful to her or him in the future. Quite honestly: VIPERdev is doing better than it ever has since we are learning more and working less.
Think about it. Learning and growing is an investment that stays and multiplies. That’s true for your whole team.
If you’re still not convinced on dialling back your hamster-wheel-time, check out this video on how many entrepreneurs are slowly killing themselves:
