The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
Learn from my journey for a successful start-up
In just two years, Skedadle has grown from an idea in my head to a company with 8,000 app users, employing a team of five and serving householdname clients such as Domino’s Pizza and BrewDog, Nick Macandrew writes.
While we are only just getting started, here are the most important things I have learned so far.
Vision is everything
Who would start a business entirely reliant upon people commuting during a time when the whole world was ordered to stay at home?
I did, and I’ll tell you why you should consider doing the same type of crazy thing, and also share my thoughts as to how to go about it.
Firstly, in order to achieve something, you must have a crystal-clear picture of what you’d like to achieve and what the world will look like when you get there.
The truth is that we all have a vision of something we would like to achieve.”
It’s the guiding light that focuses all of your actions towards achieving the outcome.
Without that, you’re aimlessly directing your energy towards things that don’t matter in a world full of distractions.
Passion, belief, and determination
The truth is that we all have a vision of something we would like to achieve. It doesn’t need to be massively aspirational, but it needs to be something that matters to you on a deep emotional level.
It may be business, family, or even sport or recreation related, as long as it matters to you.
Once you find and see your vision, I guarantee that you’ll feel a sense of energy to take action. It’s passion, belief, and determination, and often all three stacked together.
It’s the fuel that starts you on your journey towards realising your vision, but more importantly, it gives you the strength to keep going when the going gets tough, which it always does.
Anything worth having in life requires effort. It is therefore essential to have the energy in you to both start and stay the course towards your vision.
My vision is to completely change the way the world travels. At present, it’s a horrible experience – we are all forced to do it, it’s uncomfortable and expensive.
I see a world where travel is an opportunity for people, a time in which we can earn money and rewards while having fun playing games.
My vision gives me my passion which makes me go after it, and at least in the beginning, do crazy things!
I guarantee that once you find your vision, which is in every one of us, you will feel the passion and energy inside of you and you’ll go full steam ahead towards achieving it.
The quality of your life is the quality of your emotions, and I encourage you to get out into the world and pursue the things that matter to you.
Company culture
One of the most important obligations upon any business leader is to create and promote an amazing culture within the company.
By definition, a company or business is a group of people united together to achieve specific, declared goals, the success of which will depend on the collective ability of those people.
People perform at their best when they are motivated and feel good. It is therefore imperative to create a motivational environment which sets people up to feel good in their work.
At a macro level, this needs three things – a clearly defined mission, a clear plan of how to get there, and an understanding of where each person fits into the plan.
Within this, people need to feel safe, respected and have a strong sense of autonomy – like they are really contributing and making a difference to the business.
If you get these things right, you will create an amazing culture focused on delivering the vision. All you then have to do is protect it with your life. Before I started Skedadle I was a corporate lawyer, so it was a massive change to jump into running a tech start-up. Starting anything new is always challenging.
However, managing constant change within every single aspect of your environment is even harder.
A high-growth business will be constantly working through a series of transitions, whether that’s an increase in customers, staff, product development cycles or workload.
Taken together, it can create a great deal of uncertainty for everyone involved, which human beings hate.
If you can work hard to get as comfortable as you can with handling uncertainty, which again comes back to having a clear vision, navigating these transitions will be far smoother.
The discomfort from entering these periods of change shows that you are where you want to be, at the forefront of achieving something worthwhile.
Understanding and managing that is difficult but undoubtedly a massive contributor to success.