And just like that our first 10 days trading as Dataworks has passed…..what have we learnt?
- Launching a business at the same time as having a baby is tough… really tough. Thank god for coffee and a very supportive wife!
- Home WIFI is terrible, especially when you have 2 children all watching their various devices simultaneously
- Working from home on your own takes extra ordinary levels of focus and self-discipline and can be lonely at times.
- It’s easy to get distracted on the “operational” side of a startup. From designing new logos through to playing with your new shiny CRM, you can very quickly find yourself becoming a slave to ops, and not focused 100% of your time on the important stuff, sales!
- If you don’t set yourself targets and clear objectives for each day, then it’s hard to gauge whether you’ve had a productive day or not!
- Balancing work, family and down time is a job in itself and finding the right balance will be an ongoing challenge, however it’s something I am hugely passionate about! If this means getting up early, or working later to fit in around certain “life events”, then that’s the added benefit of working for yourself, and having the opportunity to work from home!
Despite a tricky start to our first day where our LinkedIn launch fell over at pretty much the same time as my internet connections chose to suddenly become “optional”, we have been blown away by the positive feedback and reactions we have had to launching the business.
We went into this with our eyes very wide open and knew that getting a business out of our head and into a fully functional business was going to be challenging.
So how did we go about it?
Decide on the “What”
- What will make us stand out?
- What do we want to be known for?
- What do we want to get out of this?
Agree on a name
Easier said than done when you take a look on companies house and find that every single name you like the sound of has been taken! Even harder when you want to choose a name that stands out(for the right reasons) and means something to the target market(people in data!).
One final thing, was to ensure the name would translate well and mean the same across multiple languages! This is where having a business partner with fluency in another language really helped!
Define our Service offering
Defining how we want to be perceived by our clients and candidates alike was the most exciting part of the “set up” journey. When our clients or candidates have partnered with us, irrespective of whether that resulted in a successful placement, we ask ourselves “how do we want them to describe their experience”?
That started and ended for us with our service offering. In a world where transparency and honesty is expected, but very often not lived up to, we as recruiters wanted to ensure that everything was clearly laid out from the outset.
From the fee structures, to the delivery model and our service backed up with full “replacement guarantee”, it was important that anyone working with us knew where they stood from the outset, so as to avoid any nasty surprises at the end!
Once our service offering and promises were agreed on, it was then far easier to ensure our business model and supporting marketing collateral supported this.
Design the website and marketing material
A word of warning to anyone thinking of launching a new website, it’s imperative you have a very clear idea of what you want your site to look like before speaking to web designers. This is your site, your vision, and your idea; Give them too much free reign and you end up with someone else’s ideas with your company name! One nice tool we found when looking at colour palettes was https://coolors.co/. Pop in your favourite primary colour, and then press the spacebar to see a whole host of colour combinations. Trust me when I say, we are far better recruiters than we are web designers!
We spent many an hour looking at we wanted our site to look like, and this meant painstakingly looking at competitors, tech brands, well known blue chips through to lesser known startups. This was a great exercise on seeing and agreeing on what we “didn’t” want. Our view is that it is far easier to start from there, than to try and build something based on everything you like.
We were very fortunate to work with a great team @Recruithub who took our brief and painstakingly built a site and supporting marketing material that was modern, clean and in line with our service offering!
The positive feedback we have had from people about the site reaffirms our belief that the time spent on this part of the “launch” process was well worth it!
Be strict, be focussed
We have a background in working in very niche verticals in one of, if not the most competitive labour markets in the world and we didn’t want to reinvent the recruitment wheel when it comes to how we went about our respective roles. We agreed very early on what our markets will be and how we will engage with and work with our customers. Having these conversations upfront and from the outset is imperative to avoid any problems further down the line.
And that brings us to now…..We have loved every minute of the journey so far and can’t wait to see where this takes us. We want to create a business that we are proud of and that is well respected in the communities we serve.
If the first 10 days has taught us anything, it’s “why didn’t we do this sooner!”.
For any budding entrepreneurs out there who are considering doing their own thing and taking your career into your own hands, our final bit of advice is don’t think, don’t wait, just do it.
Thanks again to everyone that has supported us on this journey already and we are excited to see where this takes us!
Alex
