How to build a business (during a pandemic)
Any startup finds itself on a steep learning curve in its first couple of years of existence. Do you have the right product? Have you identified the right customers? Is your pricing right? Do you have the right people in place to get you where you need to go? Can you prove commercial viability?
For Firehaus, 14 months of our first 2 years have been lived through the pandemic. It’s made the process of answering and addressing these questions trickier, but even more essential. No business trying to grow in the current circumstances can afford to do otherwise.
So, what has the experience of the past year taught us?
Focus only on what you’re truly expert at.
Specialising might seem like a luxury in the current economic environment. Surely any source of revenue is lifeblood to a fledgling enterprise? And ours at first glance has been pretty diverse. But as David C. Baker advises in The Business of Expertise, it’s vital to identify patterns in the opportunities coming your way, and then double down on those.
For us, that pattern has been businesses looking to go from early adoption to scale - those readying themselves to cross the chasm from their initial customer base to a wider audience. More often than not, there’s been a technology dimension to this. Sometimes that’s been for fellow startups - we worked with AI-powered letting management provider iLetpro for instance. But frequently it’s been for organisations looking to scale new revenue streams - we’ve been engaged by Thatchers Cider to overhaul their eCommerce approach, the University of Bristol to help shape their Quantum innovation and enterprise offering, and social enterprise SEMBLE to brand their new ActionFunder platform.
In each case this has meant helping clients navigate the journey from honing their product to using brand as a catalyst to growth - a vital step in the journey to next-stage investment. Identifying this pattern has created a breakthrough in how we focus moving forward.
Creating momentum and impact requires collaboration and partnership.
Building a business takes energy, resilience, flexibility and pace. It’s a way of working that doesn’t sit easily with conventional corporate structures. That’s why the likes of McKinsey advocate a growth engine team for businesses looking to scale innovation - a core senior team able to appraise situations, make decisions quickly and put these into action.
Our most effective projects have been ones where we’ve operated as a senior team in partnership with a client’s leadership team. For Vittoria, the global bike tyre brand, we’re working directly with the founders and investors at the heart of the business, evolving their positioning and brand idea so it can encompass new markets and product innovation for long-term growth. For ActionFunder, Firehaus became an integral part of what Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in Built to Last define as a Mars Group: a core team present at each workshop and decision-making point, representing the best values of the company and the different interests of a wider complex system of stakeholders.
Getting impact more quickly by working closely and collaboratively in this way has been good for our clients. And good for us as a business too.
Success stems from thinking, then quickly creating and doing.
Working out what sells starts with knowing what problem your business is here to solve. And that takes insight and understanding of your market and audience needs - from their point of view, not yours. But ultimately the only way to finesse your product is to get out there and experiment by putting theory into practice. Taking risks and knowing that failure can teach you as much as success is a crucial part of that process. But there needs to be rigour, method and focus behind how you do that if each learning is going to play its part in building momentum.
At Firehaus we’ve realised that this combination of strategic clarity and intense in-market learning is vital to building momentum for our own business as much as for the clients we work with. We call this Light + Heat.
Who you are as people matters.
No matter how differentiated your offering, or how rigorously you’ve crafted your market fit, it’s important to recognise that it’s often who you are as a startup team that creates real distinction, and shapes whether the business is truly set up for success. Your culture - your values, the ways of working you practice from the outset, and what connects you as people - plays a huge part in fuelling the resilience, energy and creativity needed to drive and sustain growth, and to build fruitful relationships with stakeholders and customers alike. There is nothing quite like a pandemic to test a fledgling business in this regard.
Our clients have been good enough to tell us how valued we are beyond simply the quality of our work, as important as that is. ‘Trusted’, ‘easy to work with’, ‘a shared goal relentlessly pursued’, ‘very smart and kind people’, ‘rooted in pragmatism’, ‘nimble’, ‘a lovely bunch of people’. This is the validation on which trusted partnership and business growth is built.
The proof of the pudding.
And what about that vital commercial viability? Well, it would be disingenuous to pretend that the pandemic hasn’t had an impact on where we originally envisaged we’d be, or that we haven’t had to run things lean. But there are still positive signs - all the more prized for being hard-fought. We exceeded our year one targets despite the first lockdown hitting during our fourth quarter. And we’re set to deliver double-digit top-line revenue growth for year two.
Equally importantly, we’ve just conducted our first NPS survey with clients, and have scored a business-affirming 86% recommender score. We may not know precisely what terrain awaits us on the road ahead, but we now know we’re equipped with the skills, experience and support we need to make the most of the opportunities and challenges it presents.
Interested to know more? Check out how what we’ve learnt has shaped how we talk about ourselves.