The tables were turned.
I regularly get asked to speak at events. Sometimes annual conferences, sometimes kick off events, sometimes company launches. On Tuesday I spoke at another company launch. This time it was my own! It is the first time that I’ve launched my own company and it was interesting and very different.
In February last year I spoke about Making The Boat Go Faster? at an event for Blessing White, a corporate training company. I gave the CEO, Tom Barry a copy of my book and in May he rang me suggesting that we meet up. To cut a long story short we started working on our new business in September, took on our first employee, Ella, in October and we publicly launched our company on Tuesday.
The last few months have been great fun, we’ve set out our Crazy and Concrete goals both of which look incredibly hard and at times I doubt that we will be able to achieve them but I need to keep reminding myself of the reasons why we can and using my Bullsh*t filters to block out those who tell me that I can’t. We’re regularly talking about ways of working between ourselves and we are helping each other do the simple things that we know we should, such as our goal sheets and journals. We’re a long way from perfect but we are getting better at it.
We’re trying very hard to follow the steps that we talk to others about. We have regularly been challenging what we should be doing and how we should be doing it. It’s not always easy, as a start-up we’ve got to look at every element of our business, from CRM systems, to contracts, to sales materials, to the programme we will run, to the website. It’s sometimes hard to make sure that we are all doing the right thing but the most important thing is that we keep challenging and learning from what we do.
Our launch at the British Olympic Association went well I think. We had a fantastic turn out; thank you to everyone who came. Ella did a great job of pulling all of our logistics together and I think that Tom and I did a reasonable job of explaining what we are trying to do and how we are going to achieve it. We had a good review afterwards recognising what we had done well and discussing what hadn’t gone so well and how to make sure that we will do better next time. It seems as though it is often the simple things that we overlook or miss, making time -for planning and reviewing in detail. Whilst rowing we practiced and practiced until we could perform at the level we want. In business we need to do the same.
I really enjoyed our launch and I’m really excited to be up and running, working with others to achieve a shared vision and pushing each other to perform. We will learn huge amounts, we will make mistakes but as long as we are challenging each other about what we are doing and how we are doing it I know what we will achieve what we want.
