As a part of 5th Anniversary Celebration, our Director Jeremy Hopson noted down 5 key takeaway reflections from his journey with FJA so far.
So, we made it five years. It might not seem much but I have personally never worked this hard and the stats say only a small number of businesses make it 5 years.
I wanted to give value and insight for readers whilst reflecting on the journey to date; so what have we learned over these years that might be useful to others…? Hopefully this can be insightful to other consulting business and to our network.
1. You’re not google
When you start a business, you naturally read a lot of articles about how to have an awesome business and that inevitably means you read a lot about what the tech giants do.
Unfortunately, this a fool’s errand as those businesses are amongst the most profitable in the world (due to monopoly status) and if your business doesn’t have their margins, you can’t successfully copy their model.
What we do is take the best of what we read and then look at it through the lens of the FJA vision and try to give our employees the best world that we can. We have recently started free lunches for all our teams, very google.
2. Keep learning
I don’t mean getting more degrees, but your organization needs a learning culture where the whole team is looking for new ways to do things. You do need to go deep into these learnings and avoid just reading the headlines and learning the latest buzzwords.
3. Keep moving
If you are not moving forward, you are going backwards, right? We all know that. All I can add to that is little steps are ok, and don’t chase perfection before moving forward. You are in the infinite game and you just need to keep iterating however small the improvements.
4. Good clients are almost everything
Over the five years we have met a lot of clients and you need to work fast to part ways with clients that aren’t a fit for you. We are lucky that we are still today working with a lot of the same clients as when we started in 2016. Take the time to have open discussions with your clients on how you feel the relationship is progressing. Communication is an area we can all improve, especially in remote teams.
5. Team is everything
Last, but most importantly, you need a team. It is important to build a high performing team with an aligned culture and application to the company vision. You need to enjoy spending time with the team, at least at a SME I think you do. You can be diverse and different but you do need to all be on the same mission. Get together with people you can learn from; be the dumbest person in the room (have I passed the cliché limit?).
I hope this was useful to someone. See you in five years, we hope ?