People & Purpose

As far as we are in 2023, I’d define my key challenge for this year to be ‘focusing on people’. Well, yes I’d be the first to admit it sounds very cliche because that’s what people usually say to make them sound cool? I didn’t believe it back then, but I do believe now. Here’s why.

Idea, Money, People

Not long ago, I had a conversation with my mentor, Dr. Eakapong — CFO of JWD Group about many roles of a founder. He kindly shared his wisdom:

“…Being a founder, your focus would always revolve around 3 things — idea, money, and people.

When you start out, you’ll have a lot of good ideas, and you’re small enough that people and money are not your pressing issue. Your focus should be on finding the right idea to execute.

Once your project takes off with growing customers, your obstacle will be the lack of funding you need to grow. Now getting the money will become your biggest challenge.

Here’s the critical point, many startup founders would devote their time for fundraising and keeping customers happy. The mistake here is they would forget and put their people last, and that comes with a price of losing good people, usually founding team members, along the way.

Once the dust is settled, you have money in your pocket with lots of good ideas; you’ll find that it’s even harder to have the right people to help you execute well. Finding and growing good people take time, no VCs or banks can help you on that. People will replace money as your biggest concern. Don’t make that mistake.”

I’m glad we didn’t make that mistake.

Danger of ‘Hiring for Culture’

Among many things I read about startup, this one is straight out of the playbook. If we can do it right, it’ll be a thriving place like AirBnB, but like every other advices, we should take it with a grain of salt.

Many companies succeed in ensuring employees culture fit & happiness, but can’t find profit.

While I do believe that good culture, happy team and making successful business are correlate, but certainly not a guaranteed causation. But if your business is a success, you certainly do have capability to make your team happy.

Path to Resilience Company Culture

I try to combine many different approaches from readings, advices from good people, and my experiences to establish direction for myself and Arincare at this stage. The three things I’ll keep in mind:

Start with the right people

As we are in growing phase, I dedicate 6–8 hours per week on interviewing and getting to know the candidate as much as I can before deciding if they are a good match for the team. Recruiting is now a mandatory slot on my calendar, not a fill-in.

There’ll come a time when I won’t be able to do this anymore, but before that, I want to make sure we give the candidate attention they need.

Authentic workplace

For a relationship between organization and its people to sustain — place, process, performance, and pay must align.

Let’s not kid ourselves, building a good workplace environment costs money. High individual performance/responsibility is required as tradeoff for freedom and autonomy. Trust and respect from the team must be earned. And every good thing has its price tag.

We want to be straightforward and transparent with our people on these issues as much as we can. Only then we can have an authentic workplace.

Personal development x Company purpose — Sustainable Growth

We keep company purpose and personal development as aligned as we can. Of course, not everything would fit perfectly.

Sometimes we get to do things that excite us, most of the time we do what we must; no matter how tedious. We still have to do things we don’t like but necessary, still have to put company’s best interest before personal preference, and ‘disagree & commit’ in many decisions.

What we can do is trying our best to finding way to add personal growth for our team in everything we have to do.

Be the Right Place to the Right People for the Right Purpose

Nothing will be perfect, easy, and pretty from day one, but we can build them to be. For everyone on our team, those whom have previously been with us, it’s our privilege to have you.

Onward & Upward

Teera