Last week, in the first edition of BTS, I talked about the simple but strong lessons we at CaptureFully learned in our first few weeks and how it significantly changed our course for the better.
Well, we just got back from our second annual Founder's Retreat and I have several insights to share about that experience.
Last year, in the first retreat, it was really just to confirm we were all on board for this journey—before we invested our money, time, emotions, and maybe even a couple of straggling friends and family members over the next few years.
But this year, we were an actual company.
An actual company with new team members and subcontractors; with a website and social media pages; with investors, advisors, and some money in the bank; and, by the end of the weekend, with actual customers.
Things have been moving fast.
After a month of testing (1001 things, remember?), we quickly partnered with four senior living facilities in the Raleigh-Durham area, conducting seven interviews in just our first two days, with a second shoot just days away.
But what we hadn't done in months, especially since our pre-launch tests in May, was zoom back out and discuss our overall strategy and goals. And with multiple co-founders, C-suite employees, investors, lawyers, and advisors now on the overall team, it was really easy to move forward fast without alignment.
Fortunately, sandwiched in between our first two shoots (wisely, even though it felt like bad timing) we had our Founder's Retreat.
Last year included several sunny days in May, full of giddy-like excitement over this huge leap we were about to take—with hikes, kayak trips, and cool dips in the lake peppered into the schedule.
This year, however, was full of cold, rainy-day strategy sessions stacked with Post-It notes, surveys, and the occasional head-bumping from two conflicting ideas—only breaking for meat-grilling and coffee brewing.
One of the main things I learned is that there is a huge difference between working in the business and working on the business.
Of course I knew this concept before, at least in theory. But I had never seen it in person so clearly. Our team is divided almost in half, with two teams focused on each of those aspects and our CEO with one foot in each camp.
This created disconnects at times between what the "on the business" team thought we should be doing and what the "in the business" team was actually learning from user tests out in the field. Throw that all together with the additional outside(ish) opinion of our lawyer, and we were all over the place with our priorities.
Should we focus on one thing and build it in a lab with our best intentions before bringing it to the public? Or should we get out there and get our hands dirty and iterate with qualified customer research?
Should we go with the higher-ticket product that was harder to sell or the lower-cost alternative that kept our margins thin, but gained customers faster?
We should do this! WE SHOULD DO THAT!
We should zig! WE SHOULD ZAG!
What does the customer really want?!
The "on the business" team thought we should zoom back out and focus fully on strategy before moving too far, too fast.
But the "in the business" team, which I am on, was working hard and fast because we had started shooting interviews and partnerships were happening quickly, so we wanted to keep the momentum going.
But because of that, we often neglected important big-picture priorities for the urgent ones that seemed to arise, and change, every day. And because of that, we were sprinting in several different directions.
And even though my 17-year-old soccer-playing self might disagree, the 40-year-old version knows damn well you can't sprint nonstop for very long without burning out and possibly creating serious damage.
So just like we needed the "on the business" team to trust our tangible learnings, we also couldn't be locked into our tunnel-vision perspective. There's a lot to be learned from the bird's eye, after all.
The point is: on a good team, ALL points are valid.
It had just been a long time since we'd all gotten in a room together to hash it out and lay all our points out on the proverbial table.
(There was an actual table, too. And it was full of those points on Post-It notes.)
On our final day, we left the lake with a concrete goal for the next 90 days and easy ways to measure its success.
We had alignment and we had a strategy that we all agreed upon.
We had clear communication and we had clarity.
And before our CEO had even landed back home, we received a Slack notification that told us we had our first two customers. We all rejoiced with virtual high-fives and funny GIFs celebrating each other's contributions.
Then, not even an hour later, we got our first two customer service calls.
And so it goes, in the life of a storytelling startup.