Coming
together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is
success.
- Henry Ford
Last
month, my friends and I launched our very own company, Tationem. This post is not just to promote our business
but to write about those points which often go untouched in business meetings.
So, I breakdown this post into three parts, a) Coming together and starting b)
Keeping it together and running c) Working together and the road ahead.
Coming together and starting:
It
is very critical for anyone planning to start a business to work with
like-minded people. I have been best friends with my partners for over a decade
now and trust them more than myself on occasions. I did contact more such
people, but it worked out well, only among us three. The first rule that we
established for ourselves was, not to doubt each other’s decision making. We may
goof up sometimes, but we will back each other all the time. And once the basis was
established, we needed to name our baby. This is a bigger challenge than you
may perceive it to be. You come out with the most creative name and that URL
would already have been taken. We decided to do this in a very different way
and left for Bangalore International Airport, at midnight, with a self made promise, not to return till we find a mutually agreeable name, with corresponding URL
available. After having spent over four hours and emptied more than six coffee
cups, we all agreed on the name “Tationem” which is a Latin word, meaning “New
Direction”.
Keeping it together and
running:
The
beginning was challenging, but not as much as running this newly formed entity,
which started to grow at a pace, which beat our anticipation. As per our
original decision, we have been discussing the best strategy for the times that
we encounter and our needs, we have been forming ad hoc policies. Over a
period of six months we will be studying which policies yielded the best
results and formulate more concrete policies. Though each one of us has some
experience to brag about, this has been new to us and every day has been a
learning experience. We have now hired quite a few technical and management
interns, along with some full time employees. Trust me, even hiring and
retaining people is much harder than you think it is.
Working together and the
road ahead:
Working
together with best friends has been a pleasurable experience for me and I would
claim that my partners too opine the same. As we have invested our time, money
and emotions into this venture, the message should be clear, ‘we are here to
stay’. We clearly see us growing into a bigger entity, owning to our expertise
and effective policies that we have been adopting. The only downside has been
that each one of us has already started to suffer from the “no-time-syndrome”. Perhaps
several years from now, one day when all of us would be sitting together, at
some exotic beach resort, sipping tropical drinks, we would say, “Looking back,
it was all worth it”.
