Weathering the Storms: The Toughs Truths I Learned From Starting My Own Company
Discover the lessons learned by Wirelab’s founder & CEO, Twan Pastoor, about entrepreneurship, leadership and the hunger for innovation.
There’s Not One Way To Be an Entrepreneur
A lot of entrepreneurs will tell you that they started out early. Selling candy in grade school or flipping tech on eBay in high school. That wasn’t the case for me. I started out with my first entrepreneurial endeavour rather late in life, at the age of 28.
But once I finally did, I fell in love with the thrill of innovation and have been starting projects left, right and centre ever since. Some of them succeeded, lots of them failed. Although, most importantly, I’ve learned a lot about innovation and entrepreneurship, which I want to share with you now.
Full disclaimer: if you’re looking for some rose-tinted motivational sentiment, you won’t find it here. Prepare yourself for the harsh realities of innovation and entrepreneurship that I’ve learned the hard way, so that you don’t have to.
Innovation Isn’t Always Good For Business
It’s not the most motivating statement, I know, but bear with me. You probably expected me to say that in order to progress, companies need to always be innovating. From my experience, though, I’ve learned that the opposite is true.
When innovating, you inevitably spend lots of time, money, and manpower on researching and developing whatever it is you’re trying to make a reality. Not to mention, there’s absolutely no guarantee that the idea will make it to market or improve your company’s productivity or profitability. While innovation is certainly an opportunity, it’s also a major liability.
“Constantly focusing on innovation is not a sustainable way to run a business.”
For me, I’ve learned this lesson the hard way. I started innovating Wirelab’s product offering when I started the company back in 2008, and up until this year innovation had been my primary focus. While this has resulted in a quality of work that I — and the rest of the team at Wirelab — are very proud of. In the past this focus on innovation has led us into situations we didn’t want to be in. Situations like taking on projects that didn’t suit us, simply because we needed the money. We had directed so much of our resources into innovation that we had quite literally innovated ourselves out of financial freedom.
Essentially, unless you are an R&D company, constantly focusing on innovating is not a sustainable way to run a business. Don’t get me wrong, that’s no reason to shy away from innovation. Instead, this is a directive to find a balance between innovating and producing what you’re already good at. By doing so, you’ll be giving yourself the financial freedom you need to support your business and sustainably pursue future innovative endeavours.
You’re Going to Mess Up
Aside from Wirelab, I’ve started numerous different projects and had ideas for countless others. Dribbble for hairdressers, Pokémon GO for hardcore festival goers, you name it. All of them failed. What anyone venturing into entrepreneurship will realise is that you’re bound to mess up and fail sometimes.
You’ve got to accept that you’re going to get a lot of things wrong, that your employees are bound to make mistakes, and that even when you think you’ve learned your lesson you’ll get it wrong once more. But not in vain. It’s good when things go wrong, because eventually, you’ll know how to do it better in the end.
Mistakes and failure have played a big part in my growth as a manager and coach. I’ve had to learn to change my communication style from telling employees what to do, to giving them the tools they need to succeed. If it hadn’t been for the times in which we failed, I would not have learned how to be a better leader and how to steer the team in a better direction for the future. Failing isn’t a loss. Failing to learn from those failures is.
Letting Go is the Only Way to Progress
As an entrepreneur starting your own business, you’re going to be both the captain and the crew of your ship. But as your business grows and you start taking on new clients, employees, and projects, you’ll soon come to realise that the company you’re running can no longer be a one-man show. You’re going to have to hire someone to help you and relinquish your control over processes and roles that you once had full control over.
Giving up that control is difficult. I, for one, struggled with it for a while. The biggest challenge I’ve had to face since starting Wirelab was adapting to my role as CEO. Stepping away from the hands-on work-floor and into a managerial role has been one of the hardest, but most beneficial, things I have had to do.
My advice? Don’t try to do everything yourself. Identify the areas in which you struggle the most, and hire someone to do it for you. The best way to reach your vision is to gather together a group of people who are better than you, direct them towards a common goal, and then give them total trust and autonomy to do the job.
With the right specialists on board, and more time for yourself to focus on fewer things, the quality of your output will soar
The Origins of Wirelab — Digital Agency
Wirelab, like many other businesses, started out of a passion. Having studied at Saxion University of Applied Sciences, digital media production was my thing. I figured, why not make some money off of my hobby? And so together with my best friend, Jan Doodle, we started Wirelab, offering every kind of online and offline digital production.
Needless to say, everything has been a rollercoaster ride since. Back then, I knew nothing about sales. I would print out the websites I created and walk door to door asking the local businesses if they wanted one. Unsurprisingly, there weren’t any takers. We finally got our first clients through an email campaign blast — you know, back when you could send something out to thousands of people without them having to opt-in.
Things started to pick up, we shifted our focus to digital, and our company continued to grow. Then, in what I would say was the biggest challenge I had faced since starting Wirelab, my partner Jan Doodle left the company. I brought on three new stakeholders in Amsterdam, and some big brand names, like Renault and Transavia, started to come in. We expanded to Amsterdam, but closed that branch fairly quickly as it wasn’t working out. After focusing on Enschede for a while, we decided to open an Amsterdam branch again, and this time it’s going very well. Now Wirelab has multiple businesses units across the Netherlands, with plans to expand internationally.
So, keep your eye on our social for the next step in the Wirelab journey!
