As I’m writing this, hr-haven, inc. is coming up on its fourth Birthday. Four doesn’t sound like a whole lot – unless it’s you who’s building it – in which case four is all there is or ever has been.
I could write a long diatribe about the highs and lows in those four years, but as anyone will tell you, keeping it concise is the only way it’ll get read, so I’ll try to make it concise, but I can’t promise. And my point? If anything I’ve said in here can help one person out there gain clarity, it will have done its job.
Year One – Believe
January 2010 and we launched hr-haven after only a month of work to get it up and running. Seems this business was already cooked in my brain – it just needed me to release it.
Everyone (but my ever supportive family) told me I was nuts. Here we were, launching a service based business in some of the worst economic times in living memory. I exited my corporate career – it left me with a level of corporate disgust that meant there was no going back. It seems that wrong is only right if your superior says it is. For a free thinker it reached a point where my values had been compromised for years. It was time to let it go. I wasn’t practicing HR, I was practicing politics. In hindsight, I don’t know how I sold myself out all that time for the lure of a bi-weekly paycheck.
I kissed babies, shook hands, met with everyone I possibly could. I didn’t get my first client until four months into this endeavor. Month 3, day 28, I’m lying in bed wide awake in the middle of the night asking myself what the hell I had done. The clients slowly came, one by one, every one of them awesome, and every one of them in a position where the
help I provided made a big difference to them. We were lean, but we were staying alive, barely alive. We created a product which gave companies all the tools they’d need to get a nominal HR program off the ground in response to the absolute possibility that hr-haven might tank, and we might actually starve. Productizing was the absolute best thing we did. When the HR StartUp Toolkit™ was launched, people bought it. Not tons of people, but enough that we could keep the roof over our heads. We trademarked it, by the end of the first year it seemed that we might make it. The only thing I can say about year one is that I fully understand why startups don’t make it.
Simply put, you’ll work harder than you ever have for less than you’ve ever made. Without an ABSOLUTE belief in what you’re doing, you won’t make it. Without ABSOLUTE determination to make it work, you won’t make it. It’s gut wrenching at best, stressful beyond belief, and it never grows according to your dreams. And if you don’t make it, you should have no shame whatsoever, in fact at the end of the first year I was frankly questioning my sanity.
Year Two – Watch the Ball
We’d grown enough to need employees. Here’s the crappy thing – you can’t afford employees yet. This is the stuff they don’t teach you in school, this is the stuff your business coach doesn’t tell you about. You just get to the point where you think you can breathe (or at least cover the bills even if you are still eating beans and weenies), then you plummet yourself back into debt to hire folks to support clients and customers you don’t have yet. This was a particular surprise to me because I had ANTICIPATED it well in advance, but wasn’t prepared for how this small action could kill off your business even after you survived your first year living on thin air and a dream.
Then when you need employees, you need space. We moved out of the spare bedroom, and took a small, but comfortable little office in OP. Guess what, you can’t afford an office yet. Again, I anticipated it well in advance and was prepared for the fallout from a cash flow perspective, but no matter how much you anticipate, it will still come back to bite you.
The biggest lesson in year two was this “don’t take your eye off the ball.” While I was busy trying to find people that would come work for a pittance, and trying to piece together an office with used furniture to make it look like we had our “$h*T” together – it was hard to pay necessary attention to driving the business that would keep us afloat. We grew four-fold in the second year over the first, but you have to remember that 400% of nothing is still nothing.
Year Three – Refine
Two years in, I felt like we would make it. Having an office was awesome honestly; it did change our perspective of how real we were despite the additional cost. This was the year we cleaned house. Having processes in place that we had determined worked, we started cleaning them up. Our culture took shape, several people joined us. Some people left us too and for their sakes and ours I’m glad they did. You see, it doesn’t make them bad people; it just makes them the wrong people. You can’t hope to build on a flawed foundation – if there’s no alignment between the belief systems of the business and the employees, you won’t make it.
I know we preach this to the choir day in and day out, but I can’t stress the importance, especially in a startup environment. Time is wasted, money is wasted; your eyes are off the ball again. Despite that, we kept going.
Another lesson learned? Think Big, I mean BIG. We’d grown out of our 1350 square foot office within 7 months prompting us to have to explore then execute another move exactly 11 months after we originally moved into our first office. We took 3600 square feet this time which was another major expense after moving less than a year before. It was a stretch office, and the mere thought of that rent payment gave me the bad willies, but the prospect of moving again scared me more. Again, eyes on the ball – you can’t take your eyes off the ball for more than a minute and no matter what you do in terms of people and space, you’re going to be distracted from the mission. Our revenue grew by 80% despite ourselves.
Year Four – Purpose
It’s pretty funny actually, as we entered year four you’d think, with as principled as our belief systems are and our never-wavering goals, we’d actually have pinned down our purpose.
We had of course, in our heads, nailed that purpose statement – but we hadn’t nailed it for everyone to see. We finally had a good crew of people. We finally had hr-havenites who truly believed in the vision and mission of the business by mid-year. Growing the business during the first six months of that year was difficult; we had an overall economic slump that we weren’t anticipating. I’d hung a “new business bell” at the end of the first quarter. I swear to God that I
thought we jinxed the whole enterprise by hanging that damn bell since it didn’t ring a whole lot for four months or so. But, after coming out of the house cleaning process, building the right team, feathering the nest we call home so that we had a creative and fun environment to practice this off-beat HR that we practice – we sat down together and carefully crafted our purpose.
Not for the faint hearted – and the end result? That purpose led us to leaving clients. You see, our hr-havenites are promised something when they come here. They aren’t going to practice HR as usual, they’re going to get to do more, dive in, build and grow the companies they’re working with. If we aren’t doing that, then we don’t have the right clients.
Painful? You bet. But guess what, revenue for revenue’s sake just isn’t worth it. If you are going to walk away from a corporate career and a financially secure “job” to come work with us as an hr-havenite, then you’re not going to trade it for work that’s not going to make to you fulfilled, happy and proud of what you do. We turned in 64% revenue growth despite a flat-lined growth pattern for the first couple of quarters.
Year Five – Who Knows?
We’ve been blessed over the past four years to win numerous awards, achieve recognition, and build something truly special – despite the fact that we’re labeled as an HR company which doesn’t seem like it should be.
Just recently we were accepted to HEMP – the Helzberg Entrepreneurial Mentoring Program. This is a big deal. I have to tell you that I felt like a total newbie when I had a site visit from 14 well-respected and established HEMP business owners in this community to determine if I’d be a fit for the program. What HEMP has forced me to do is forecast out beyond a year, even if it’s too difficult to imagine. When you’re starting out, you’re not looking too much past the here and now, just like the jinxed new business bell, you don’t want to let your dreams and aspirations get the better of you.
I just got through realistically trying to forecast what might happen in the next three years – and this for a person who tries to vision out and anticipate was humbling to say the least. I have no choice to believe in this awesome thing that we’ve built, despite the fact that sometimes I still worry that I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
Then I consider this – who does know what the hell they’re doing? As small business owners you spend your life trying to be agile and respond to market, you work hard to achieve quality, you tackle the most difficult issues and don’t let anyone see you sweat, you work like a dog and have little financial reward, and you never really know where that next client or customer is coming from.
BUT, in the event you think that we aren’t LOVING every minute of this, that we’re any less PASSIONATE about what we’re doing, or we BELIEVE less in what we’re doing over here you’d be mistaken. It’s like a roller coaster ride, scary and exhilarating all at once, and despite the ups and downs I don’t think I’d ever want to change a minute of it.
It takes guts, gall, work and strength – but there’s no experience like it if you hold onto what you believe.