How to Scale Your Organization Systematically, featuring Nikolai Ladanyi
Virtual Frontier- 1,478 views
- 12 Mar 2020
Manuel and Nikolai talked about how companies and organizations in general, can scale systematically. Dive with us into the topic and listen to Nikolai's approach and thoughts. Scaling is in fact something really simple. The first step, verbalize everything an get the implicit knowledge out of your brain.When scaling is simple, why so many entrepreneurs struggle with it?How to be focused on things that really matter?What are OKR's, and how can we use them the best way?Why do you want to make yourself as a founder redundant as soon as possible? Excerpts you might want to jump inNikolai tells us what are important aspects when it comes to localizing content and ideas. [03:44]Nikolai speaks about the basics of scaling and how to make yourself redundant. [08:27]How to conduct successful and productive meetings. [12:56]Start your meetings with silence and get aligned. [20:16]Manuel's experiences with getting things done and how OKR's help him to stay focused. [25:38]Scaling means that you are able to liberate yourself and do other things while the core of your business continues to run without you. [30:42]Nikolai's own story of failing and scaling as an entrepreneur. [37:00]Why it is so risky to fall in love with your own product or service [40:57] Links and hints: Books mentioned in this episode.Scaling Up English edition by Verne HarnishWachstum durch Führung: Die 10 entscheidenden Management-Prinzipien by Nikolai Ladanyi and Verne Harnish (German Edition of Scaling Up)Mastering the Rockefeller Habits from Verne HarnishDeath by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business by Patrick LencioniTrillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's by Bill CampbellMeasure What Matters: OKRs:The Simple Idea that Drives 10x Growth by John DoerrVern Harnish's website Scaling UpThe website from the EO Entrepreneurs' Organization in GermanyFind more details about the Scale Up Summit on October 27.- 28.10.2020 in DüsseldorfGet in contact with Nikolai, writing him an E-MailWatch Manuel's TEDx Talk, and get inspired You can learn more about Flash Hub and Virtual Teams as a service at Flashhub.ioFollow us on facebook and engage on our daily discussions. Connect with us on LinkedINSee what we go for you on our YouTube ChannelGive us your feedback and ask us anything related to our shows or guests. Just drop us a message on events@brightsolutions.de.
Hello and welcome to The Virtual Frontier, the podcast about virtual teams created by a virtual team. I'm Chris and I'm part of the team here at Flash Up on today's episode, we have Nikolai. Adoni Eagly is the founder and CEO of Scaleup. Nikolai Manuell talked about scaling organizations systematic. So here is episode 20 of The Virtual Frontier featuring our guest, Nikolai Lordan. I'm happy to have Nicole Adoni on our episode today of the Virtual Frontier podcast, Nikolais, the founder and CEO of Scale Up and helps organizations to scale systematically explore the concept of scaling up to Germany, which was initially created by Verne Harnish.
Based on the Rockefeller habits, I Nicholai introduced myself to the audience and let us know how it came that you started working with the Rockefeller habits and how you met Verne Harnish. Hi, Manuel. Great to be on your episode. Actually, I met Vern Harnish in 2011 at an event by the Eco Entrepreneurs Organization and he was speaking and he was talking to us about his Rockefeller habits methodology.
And I was extremely thrilled immediately because when he loved about the methodology that suddenly all the best practices that I had in my mind so far that I've learned right and left were combined cohesively in one system. So for the first time, I understood how, for example, people, tools, how top trading tools related to strategic or to execution decisions. And that was actually the thing which really, really motivated me to go deeper into that. I then started to implement the methodology in my company in those days and had two companies, one was a consulting firm and the other one's that firm.
And as usual, when I come back from you events, a lot of my colleagues said, oh, no, Nikolai, not again, is coming back from from from the seminar.
So that is always bad news for them. And we realized that when we translate or when we try to implement the American things, just one to one into the European context, that they lost a lot of the lightness, they lost a lot of the position that they had in the American context when we started adapting the tools, translating the tools into European languages like German, French, Spanish, in a way that we can mirror their likeness in the core language of the American society.
And that was actually one of the core factors why a lot of people who are using scaling up methodology now, Germany, France or Italy, Spain are quite happy because it's not the pure translation of an American book, but it's more an adaptation to our needs and the way we act and think. It makes total sense to me because I also work with people from all around the globe and we have people from America, people from Europe and our team.
And what I realized what was a very, very important moment for me, that the difference between accountability and responsibility is very precisely defined in English, but it is not in German. So which other which other difference do you see when it comes to comparison of American Rockefeller and Chairman Rockefeller habits?
A difference? It is not so much about the difference in the methodology. It's more the difference in how we translate the words.
Another example is, for example, brand promise. In the American context, brand promise is clearly situated or located in the environment of strategic marketing, but above all, strategy. But when you translate brand promise into German language, you often get words like marketing and things like that. The same in French homes. Do math and suddenly you're very strongly entering the field semantically of pure communication and marketing communication, and thereby you lose a lot of the essence of the profoundness of the concept of brand commerce.
Because for us, the scaling up environment brand promise is a concept how to think strategically out of the point of view of your core customer. And it is not about how to improve the wrapping of the product. That's one example and another example that I like a lot of that is that was very important for me was the translation of the word core values. And when we translate the American word core values into German language, we often end up with words like.
When tenements like built Vyatta, the same thing in French language, we end up with work like. But the German word veto or the French word Valere always has a semantic around ethical and moral striving attitudes. So there is a very strong striving element in there. However, when we would then explain the semantics of the striving aspect of the moral and the ethical level, the American would say, hey, that's not the core values that is moral. And therefore you can imagine that all those American management concepts that are based on core values, when you translate the word core values with the moral world, the words they do not stick anymore.
They lose the lightness. And therefore, when we use core values of the German language, we often like to refer to as saying, hey, it's the verbalization of how your brain functions, of how you tickle your brain, we texta to make sure that it is something that is very grounded. It's not about nice words. It's more, hey, tell me, what are your convictions? Because you as an entrepreneur, you want to make sure that I as your employee, that I know how you think so that I can take decisions along your way of thinking when you're not around.
And scaling means that you're not going that you're not going to be around all the time, that you're going to be away most of the time. And you want to make sure that you ensure that I take the right decisions when you're not around. And that is the thing with core values. It has nothing to do with telling me what to strive for. It's more telling me, hey, what is your day to day life right now? So those are two examples where that illustrate quite well the difference in semantics and how different translations, even though Wikipedia or Dudin would propose these translations as being formally right, bring us on a completely misleading track with regards to improving the scalability of your company.
That makes total sense to me. So what you are telling us that as I if I as an entrepreneur, want to scale my organization, one very important thing is structured and systematic communication so that it is not only me as an entrepreneur who has the whole vision and even the today's vision and today's DNA in my mind. But I can also somehow you are delegated to people that delegated to others so that the whole organization does what my initial intent was.
Is that what you understand from scaling? Absolutely.
You know, scaling is nothing difficult. Scaling is basically easy. Scaling means that you start to verbalize every aspect of your organization because once you verbalize it, you can start to explain it to third parties so that third parties can do whatever you have told them to share and share whatever you have told them to do. And the basic principle behind scaling is make yourself as the leader, redundant as quick as possible. And redundant means I need to transfer all the knowledge I have into the company and the recipe book scaling up or the process in the book scaling up and also in our coaching.
Is that our job? Is focused on asking all those questions to get out all the implicit knowledge out of your brains into the explicit to help you to everything that is unconscious, to render it conscious, because once it is explicit and conscious, then you can start to verbalize and delegate it. And that is that it's not really difficult. That is.
But that is really that is really valuable for myself, but I think also for our audience.
So when you say scaling is easy, why do so many organizations struggle with it? Good question, and I think a lot of organizations struggle with that because we as entrepreneurs and I'm including myself, we're often very focused on developing our products. We are often in love with our products. And we sometimes even when our product becomes successful, we lack of seeing that at a certain point we have to switch away with our focus from our product more over to the focus of creating an organization that can deliver that product.
And that is a shift in paradigm that is sometimes well, that sometimes is overseen and scaling up is nothing else but helping you to make that shift as a leader. Or at least if you realize that you're not the right person to do that shift, to find somebody to do that for you, because continuing to focus on the product of the one, that is a good thing. However, what brought you here won't get you there. It means when you grow a company beyond, let's say, 20, 30 people, everything until 2030, people you can guide and you can manage implicitly.
You can do that on a day to day level in your corridor. But once you grow beyond 30 people, you need structures, you need processes in place. And most of us will never learn those processes and those structures in university or whatever education we made. And this is where scaling up comes into. We teach and we share exactly the tools needed so that you can handle this insanity, so you can handle all the challenges that are coming once you grow beyond 20, 30, 40 people and helping you to grow to, let's say, 200, 300, 500 people.
Yeah, that's what what I realized when I transformed my organization from a local one to virtual one, because then it it's even more important, you know, if you have a large office where everyone is in the same place every day. What I saw very often is that people have lots of communication. So they meet in the kitchen, they meet in the meeting room, they have meetings here or talk meetings they are. And sometimes they even scream to another employee like, hey, can you help me to fix this?
And on the other side, I saw that work can only be done with this communication because there is no system that provides structured communication. And then people believe that work can't be done without an office. So when when you help organizations to step up to to build such a structured system so that communication is done systematically on which aspects and part of the organizations do entrepreneurs need to focus? And. But there were a couple of elements we often like to focus a lot of our knowledge that we share with regards to the meeting rhythm comes from Patrick and Cioni has written a wonderful book called Death by Meeting.
And in that book, he shares a couple of best practices and pitfalls. One of the most important pitfalls we always do in meetings is that, for example, we have agendas that sound like, hey, let's talk first about the new priceless.
Secondly, let us talk about strategic procedures and developing a new market. And then let's talk about the menu in the annual meeting. So we are mixing extremely operational issues with strategic issues, and that is the core problem because suppose we are in that meeting, we start first talking about the price list. So my mind is primed on thinking in details, thinking very process oriented. With that primed mind, I then switch over to a strategic topic. Usually those discussions become extremely bad because I can't tackle a strategic challenge beneficially if my mind is focused on nitty gritty processes.
And in many situations you have, you then end up with discussions like, yeah, let's go to France. And then suddenly you say, why we can't? Why should we go to France? The thing we try to deliver something in Munich and it didn't work out. Then I come back. What do you mean? What didn't work? What Brussels failed. And so we end up with more discussions around problems, but we can't ever face the core, the core element.
So. Patrick Cioni points out what we as entrepreneurs, as businessmen, what we need is a feeling for meeting hygiene and with meeting hygiene. He says it means that we need to understand what kind of topics we raise and what kind of meetings. And then we need different kinds and different types of meetings for every different topic. For instance, most of the problems that people have are of bilateral nature. That means between two people and they're waiting for something that somebody has not delivered.
Suppose you only have weekly meetings then usually you end up with 70 percent of the topics that are of bilateral nature, which means suppose we have seven people in the meeting, two people talk and five people sleep.
And afterwards we say this wasn't really worth it.
So, yeah, so Patrick points out and says we first need something that is extremely effective in the programming environment. And that is a daily check, a daily huddle in the daily huddle. We simply quickly chair, hey, what's the what's the most important focus and what's the most important focus of the day? What is the most important thing since yesterday and where am I stuck?
And usually where am I stuck is the point where you can raise concerns, where you are waiting for somebody, when somebody thinks things, where you are, where you have a challenge with somebody so you can always change despite everything. But since you're meeting every single day for, let's say, five to 12 minutes, you can solve all of those bilateral challenges on the day and on the spot. So therefore, when it comes to the weekly meeting, you finally have time to solve a certain type of challenges and we say that that is only let us focus in the weekly meeting only on the operational issues and do not mix operational issues with strategic issues.
So the weekly meetings there only for operational stuff like, hey, we need to look at this process. Hey, let us quickly check in how we do the sales process here. Let us have we look at our website. Let us check on the price with the price levels. When you have strategic elements, you do that on the strategic meeting, and that is every month for, let's say, two or three hours, and we deliberately also reserve one hour for the for the tactical or the operational weekly meeting.
And that is two to three hours for the strategic meeting, because if you want to do real strategic thinking, you need at least 10, 20 minutes until your brain gets to the right temperature. And then you can focus on that. And having this kind of meeting hygiene where you have a certain purpose for a certain meeting helps you to then have a structured approach to topics and solving things faster. Does that sort of does it resonate? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
I'm just wondering how so that requires a lot of clarity. It requires lots of focus, not only for the entrepreneur, but also for everyone in the team. Like I mean, each of you guys in our audience, everyone knows these meetings where we have a clear agenda and then people just randomly start talking about something and they even don't realize it. And all of a sudden the meeting ended and we didn't get anything done. How do you make sure that everyone is really, really focused and does not get distracted without feeling personally offended?
OK, and so there are more out there, two aspects you're raising the first aspect you're raising, and that is the aspect of how do we make sure that everybody is engaged in the conversation? There are two very small hat tricks that you can apply, and those metrics come from Google and also from from listening to the million dollar coach. Bill Campbell, Bill Campbell, who was the coach of of Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, he has to have the first one was make sure whenever you start a meeting that you get everybody to say something.
And Bill Campbell always started his meetings with the week and report, and that is that everybody in the room had to quickly say something that is done on the weekend. It can be something easy, nothing special. However, the reason was that if you get everybody to say something up front, then the probability that the person will speak up later is much higher. You have a lot of meetings where only one person starts at the beginning and the other people already check out.
And that is what Bill Campbell wanted to prevent. And it is a very effective methodology and they're using it from the Silicon Valley. Most of the companies who have been working with Bill Campbell are using that technique, and it's very valuable. The second hat trick that we use that comes from Google, that is making sure that everybody checks in to the meeting at the same time checking in also mentally. And Google has been thinking about different kinds of techniques and processes, how to do that.
And they have realized that has one very simple technique that can really combine that everybody checks in at the same time, and that is starting the meeting with one minute of silence. And we do that and we also do that. We even do that sometimes in a virtual meetings where we simply start, let's say, either one or two, and then we start by having one minute of silence. Everybody signed for one minute. The thing is, a lot of the times people have different paces in checking into the meeting because there are so many things going on in our mind and I am still sorting.
Well, you've already started the discussion and sometimes my sorting takes five minutes, but in those ten minutes, I'm not effective. So having this one minute of silence ensures that everybody has one minute to focus. What are the things on my mind? What are the things I need to do later on? Put all those ideas and the corresponding draws, the leader of the meeting and think about what do I want to focus on?
And then suddenly you have at least the two hundred percent higher activity in that meeting while most of the answers will help.
Yeah, that is really exciting. I mean, that sounds already very systematically in the beginning. So yeah, when people start the meeting and they focus on first understanding what is in my mind and put all these things to say that don't matter right now, I will try that. I will definitely try that. Thanks for all the time. Hey, everyone, this here again, we'll get back to our conversation with Nikolai Latani in just a minute. I just wanted to give a quick thank you and shout out to TIME 91 for their review of our show on Apple podcast.
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Now back to our conversation with Nikolai Adoni. What I'm wondering is how does the methodology of ours help with scaling it helps. Well. Is nothing difficult and nothing special, and I think we have to understand, OK, ours in the context of the modern world and the context of verbalising priorities, I would say that. There is no difference between hours setting priorities or rocks.
The only difference is that, OK, ours is a much more elaborate way how to communicate priorities for a quarter end of the 90s or in the 80s when we had two to five percent growth in companies and people will have to wait two to five percent growth.
It was OK to set the topic as a priority in the years of 2000, 2005.
And then we realized that we need to be more precise when setting and describing a topic. And then we started to come up with this rule that topics need to be smart, specific, measurable, actionable, terminable, and these things that in today's world where we have so much agility going on, even smart doesn't help us any more because it sort of narrows our mind.
This is where I come into game because they are switches its focus away from understanding and helping the people to tell when it goes away from us as managers telling the people what to do more to helping us to explain what is the outcome that we desire and how to measure that outcome instead of telling the people what to focus on. Because sometimes if I tell somebody what to focus on that person or that explanation also implies that I need to be knowledgeable in how to solve the problem.
And that is often not the case nowadays. And OK, ours has to be seen historically or to say systematically in that development of time. So, OK, ours is the wonderful way how to help organizations to understand what are the core elements that need to get done in this quarter. In the scaling up environment, we are absolutely using ours as well with regards to when we when we drawdown, when we come to trying to and try to trying to define what are the priorities for the quarter, we always used to do that and afterwards with regard to bringing them into the into the organization.
So. I'm very familiar with that, and I love them, I use them all the time, I think it is not so very common here in Germany or in Europe, but we started introducing it at the end of last year. And personally, I realized it gives me so much focus. It really helps me to check in every morning and identify what is the most important thing that I need to get done today. Before we had I was crawling my email box.
I was crawling in like I was checking here, checking there. Everything was. And there were so many things more and more every day. And the person that screamed loudest was the one that I saw first and which I can really shut up all this noise and make make much more clarity in my mind about what is the most important thing that I need to accomplish. And then what do I need to do today to get one step closer to this goal?
How would you help organizations to understand for themselves that they would benefit from such a structured approach? You know, which problems do they face every day so that they that they really need to see, OK, I need like hours or structured communication structure. Yeah.
Let me add one thing to the state of ours, because is like a fashion at the moment, everybody thinks that ours is the solution to everything. And I think a lot of companies underestimate how much time you need to implement ours, because ours also means you have a completely different way of thinking. We are all primed in thinking, milestone oriented in ours. You do not think milestone oriented anymore. You switch to thinking only outcome oriented. And that's a long process for a lot of people.
And even America, when you implement it takes the companies at least nine to 12 months until they work. That has been a study that has been made by John Deere, who's written the book, Measure What Matters and Who's one of the Grandmothers of ours is. And he says in America it takes nine to 12 months. So imagine, even if it takes an American nine to 12 months, it not surprisingly that sometimes in Europe it also takes much longer than we think.
And we have some organizations that have moved away from us that have that have moved back to having clear goals like smart formulated goals for for a quarter and having the milestones they check in every every week on their corresponding to each goal. So the element is more. Do we have a process in our management team, let's say six to five to eight people, were we together decide what are the things we're going to do in this quarter and what are the things we're not going to do?
Because we all have too many things to do. And the core question is, rather, to decide what are we not going to do once we decide what we're not going to do and once we decide what we know, what to do and what that we have to decide to articulate what to do, then obviously we need a meeting with them to ensure that we are on track because we don't have a proper meeting rhythm like weekly check ins where we together see and check whether we have made progress with regards to the core elements we have decided to do.
We often lose track and we all know that from the old times. If we never check in on something, then usually it drops off from our our desk and some other people, some other things sneakin. So just like you said, yeah, I just want to want to put stress on that, that's absolutely the case. So whenever you try whenever you do not have a clear rhythm where people are kept accountable, where people need to report about the status, it is not that they have to report it even more, that they need to be aware of the current status and their progress.
Now, let's say a company does this pretty well and they grow and scale and scale. So most people, they said, throwing equal to scaling. And previously you said there are there is a book Death by Meeting. I was almost laughing about this. There is also a term which says you can scale to death. What do I need to monitor that? I don't scale to death. For us. We like to say that. Scaling is more an attitude and an inner attitude, how you look at your company and scaling for us means the attitude that when you look at your company, that you look at it from a perspective that you want to make yourself redundant as soon as possible and create an organism that can run without you.
Because scaling means that you want to liberate yourself, to do other things while the core continues to run without you. You can either continue to grow your company or you can do something else. And scaling to death for me is not really a concept that has come across my way of thinking and. I think. If companies are to death, it has nothing to do with scaling, it has more to do with a lack of leadership because the combination of skills to death is more a company where the leader wants more.
Then his then the company that he has created can deliver. So it's more about the challenge of the leader and not the attitude towards scaling for me. Skating is wonderful and growth is wonderful. And for us, we also like to point out that growth is not only quantitatively, it is not about getting bigger, richer and so forth. It is more a mindset. And I like to provoke by saying we are growth maniacs because in a Vucci environment, in an environment that is characterized by vulnerability, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, if we live in an environment that is.
Characterized by disruption. Having a mindset where you say, I don't want to grow is the biggest invitation to failure because I'm starting not to look into my environment anymore and becoming lazy and observing the market. However, if I maintain a growth mindset, if I maintain a mindset where I say I want to reach something bigger and higher, whatever it is, maybe quantitative and qualitative, it ensures that I'm staying alert.
And we have seen in the years of 2010, 2012, we had a phase where a lot of companies were switching to no growth or zero growth. And a lot of those companies either have disappeared or they have adapted their methodologies because no growth or zero growth doesn't really work because it makes our brain go Lezley. And we can't see the structures anymore. We fail to watch the market. And therefore, we say if markets are very agile, if markets are disruptive, the best insurance to reach the future is to have this growth mindset, to have a very big, audacious goal and follow that.
Does it make sense? Yeah, that makes absolute sense. I mean, I realize that like four years ago, three years ago, when my company was running smoothly and I always managed to get out of the operational business, projects were running. And then I, I really became a little bit lazy. That really, really matters. My my mindset at this time, I was enjoying everything that had run smoothly without me, but I had no monitoring system in place that alerts me when I need to wake up and that, yeah, that was the start of a crash that I shared in my TED talk.
But can you give some people things to their hands like a very easy to use system or so what do they need to monitor? What do they need to make sure they they monitor every week or every month so that this happens does not happen to them? What do you mean by this, you mean this tragic crash, such a huge failure, such of being getting lazy and. Yeah, and not seeing that things are moving in the wrong direction.
And. Well. I think the best. The best advice I can give is. Have a coach. Have somebody that can see you from the outside that can help you to where you have somebody where you have to be accountable yourself.
And I think from my own experience, I've been in situations where I started a couple of years, where where I grew the company quite swiftly from zero to more than 40 people. And then I suddenly. Was so in a struggle of continuing to grow the company and we are difficult times that I was absolutely not open anymore to. Outside advice, and I was running for the sake of running and because I wanted to prove to myself that I can make it.
And I was quite happy because I'm a partner and a member of Eco Entrepreneurs organization, and we regularly meet and I meet with my fellow entrepreneurs and a couple of them were able to see to what extent I was absolutely running into the wrong direction. And they were also able to see that I had difficulties hearing and listening to others. And it was them who helped me to see and get back into the helicopter, see my situation from the outside and really find the proper decisions.
So. I think getting an outside person whom you trust, with whom you can share your own information is extremely beneficial.
Uh, can you share some insights with our audience and myself? What happened to you? And basically, it was quite funny because so in 2011, I met her Harnish and started implementing the things we realized that we need to do to adapt a lot of things for the European context, for the German context. And I I translated and wrote my first book that was the German version of the Rockefeller Habits, where I'm the co-author, because I added an entire chapter with regards to adapting the things to Europe.
And I published that book. And afterwards I thought, hey, I am now the genius of strategy because I just wrote a book with Verne. And when I started my company in those days, the company, I thought I could ignore a lot of the principles that we are preaching because obviously it's tedious to do this meeting rhythms. It's tedious to start and to focus before meeting all those habits that you do. It is not really something that I like as an entrepreneur or that many entrepreneurs are passionate about.
And I would say I made three very, very distinctive mistakes. The first one was that. When creating the founders team, we were strongly focusing on the skills of the founders and we had a great combination of wonderful skills amongst the founders, founders teams, that we did not pay attention at all, whether we share the same convictions with regard with regards to our thinking. We didn't share the core values, and since we did not share the same core values, we hardly ever managed to find the common ground with regards to attitudes, how we comport within the company or towards the towards our clients.
For example, one of my co-founders. His conviction is the glass is always half empty. My conviction is the glass is always half full and we got a price by Deutsche Telekom and we were about and we had Deutsche Telekom as one of our clients. So I was really happy. And I came back completely telling him, hey, we have wonderful success. And his first response was, Yeah, but mind you, we are going to fail sooner or later because you can't ever rely on those big corporates.
And for me, it was like a cold shower. And then I was coming telling him, hey, no, no, it's really going to be great. And after some time, I realized that for him, people who see the glass to be half full are people from his perspective who are not strong, who are naive and who don't have the balls to do good things. And I knew that. And in the end, I use at least 70 percent of my time and my energy to hold the relationship with my co-founder.
And it only left me at 30 percent of my energy to invest into the company. And I never realized to what extent I was always compromising in order to keep that relationship. Can you relate to that? Yeah, absolutely. That is like you are looking in two different directions all the time, right? Absolutely. And we are seeing so many teams where the founders are focusing on. Yeah, those guys that have great skills and they never realize the skills is not important.
What is more important is am I able to create an atmosphere where I can create my work and develop my own creativity and where we can help each other to grow bigger swiftly. And that has nothing to do with the skill set that is second mindset, right? Absolutely, yeah. The second challenge that we face was challenge very closely linked to being in love with our own product. We created a fabulous technology where we were able to send out these documents into apps where every person has his own app and we were able to take time bomb and to also geophones that document.
So we were able to distribute documents without losing control over the documents. That was quite a fancy thing in those days. It was used for distributing sales manuals. So if a person needs you company, you can retrieve the sales manuals. And obviously it was quite difficult to find good customers. We had a couple of customers, but then I will never forget the situation we visited. We were doing strategic thinking and we thought, hey, our technology is so cool that we are actually.
And wonderful for all segments, we are actually good for many, many, many industries. Everybody could use us. So we identified ourselves as being a ground technology and we thought and the most effective way to grow was to find system architects and other other companies to do the last mile based on our technology. And we were trying to grow through system integrators. And what we didn't realize is that we delegated the entire market approach to others. We were alienating ourselves from the core markets and we were focusing more and more on us being in love with our technology and.
Well, and that's always not so good as you could imagine.
I can definitely imagine that that that is very valuable because I had this experience in one of my startups like eight years ago. I was only focusing on the product. I built something that I loved. And then I tried to distribute it by some partners, but I never got in touch with the real market and I never understood what the market really needs. I just understood that I feel the product that I really love and I was the only customer. So I did that.
A big failure. Thanks for sharing that. That is very important for especially startups that are listening to this podcast. So we already came to the end of this episode. Let us know where people can find more information or where they can reach out to you.
And obviously you can always check out our Internet sites w w w scaleup dot the E, and I'd love to invite everybody to come to the scale of the summit in October. It is going to be in Dusseldorf. It is going to be on October 27 and 28. You will be able to experience Verne Harnish life on stage and you're going to experience another another couple of wonderful speakers.
And people like you will be also there talking about their own experience with digitalisation scaling. And it's going to be a wonderful two day event or one the other day event where you have access not only to great speakers, but also to great breakout sessions where you you will have the opportunity to also actually work on your company. So twenty sixth and seventh, twenty eighth of October, that's going to be a wonderful opportunity for the entire European skating crowd together. And I'm very, very happy to answer all kinds of emails that you sent to me.
So if you have a question, just drop in email and I'm happy to answer. Purrfect, thank you very much.
That was a very valuable episode. Thanks for being on the show. Thank you.
And thanks for you for money for doing this. I am very I was extremely thrilled when I saw your TED talk the first time. And yeah, I'm very happy to be part of your movement. Yeah. Thank you very much.
I need definitely more of these open minded people because this will help to really transform the way how the world is working. So thanks for being part of it. Thank you.
Bye bye. I'd like to thank our guests, Nikolai Widney, for joining us today. You can find out more about Nikolai and scaleup at scaleup. You can subscribe to the virtual frontier on our podcast, Google Play, Stitcher or anywhere else podcast or found. And while you're there, please leave this interview reviews, help people find our podcast. And don't forget, your review could be featured on a feature episode just like Tinh. Ninety one was earlier.
If you want to learn more about virtual teams as a service, as a flashlight on hio. On behalf of the team here at floorshow, I'd like to thank you for listening. Until next episode. Keep exploring new frontiers.