Two years have passed.
Was it easy? No.
In the beginning of this week, while I was riding through the streets of S. Paulo, in Brazil, I saw a mural on a big building with letters saying “Não há começo sem dor”. It’s Portuguese for “There is no beginning without pain”. This couldn’t be more true and it wasn’t different on our beginning.
There were moments of excitement, moments of happiness, moments of confidence, but there was also doubt, and fear. There were times of rush, euphoria, and also times of monotony. We earned clients, built trust, kicked off some projects, and wrapped up others. When we weren’t all about delivering, we were brainstorming ways to grow and expand.
When we make a decision, we choose a sequence of events over another, events that are not predetermined but instead a consequence of a chain of decisions. Therefore, at the time of this very first decision, this sequence of events can not be predicted. But as the sequent events and decisions unfold, they form a sequential line that would be completely different if that single first decision had been different, resulting on taking one of the alternative paths.
When I made the decision to invest my time and money in Phi, I didn’t know what the outcome would be. Looking back now, at the time I knew very little to rationally evaluate the potential of this project.
The Kickoff
The year was 2021. We were living a global pandemic and I was working remotely in Porto. A few months before I flight back from Brussels when I heard in the radio the announcement that the Belgium borders were about to be closed.
Since the beginning of my first job I was saving as much money as I could. And then I was looking for a good investment for that money. On that search I made some attempts in the stock market, buying and selling stocks and ETFs here and there. Although the main goal, naturally, was to make a profit, I wasn’t motivated to invest in companies I didn’t identify with. And as such, I didn’t feel motivated enough to truly study the market and understand what I was doing. Because of that, I ended up losing a small part of my savings. Eventually, I withdrew all the money and continued to think and consider various other forms of investment without much success and never really focusing enough as I had no availability or real motivation.
In paralel, Lídia was working on some freelance projects to clients from Porto and Lisbon, on the spare time from her full-time job. A client portfolio that was growing and requiring more and more time. The workload was becoming too high to be able to keep with it. So the moment came when she had to decide between leaving the company where she was employed or stop accepting new projects. When it came to making the decision, her primary concern was ensuring stability, securing funding for growth, all while maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Establishing this on her own would require a significant amount of time.
It’s funny how sometimes simply combining the problems of different people automatically gives us the solution for both. The solution for our problems became obvious: starting a business together. And, a third big problem, a global pandemic, gave us a great opportunity as, on one side, we were both living in Porto because of it and, on the other, we had not much to do to spend our free time as most entertainment businesses were closed and gatherings were not allowed.
By coming together, we had the resources and the clients. What was lacking was a specialized design profile that would relieve Lídia’s workload so that she could focus more on communication, while getting more availability for the strategic aspects of growing the business.
Meanwhile, Cátia, finding herself out of sync with the work culture of the agency where she used to work – where she and Lídia had met a couple of years before – was looking for a new opportunity with a better work environment and higher professional growth potential.
And so, once again, by combining the problems of different people, we arrived at the obvious solution.
Cátia joined the team shortly after. Just in time to make a fundamental contribution to the creation of our brand, before the official launch of the company.
As our project grew, the workload kept increasing, as well as the need to define and consolidate a good business strategy, and keep finances in order. Thus, I gradually reduced my workload as a Software Engineer in Brussels in order to invest my time in this project that was taking shape.
So, we were a team of three. And that’s how we started this last year.
The growing Pains
Throughout the first few months of the year, the workload became too high for us, and with the increase in marketing and social media management contracts, we started to feel the need for someone specialized in that area. We then started the recruitment process and, after filtering hundreds of applications, analyzing dozens of resumes, and conducting about 10 interviews, we found the perfect person for this role, and in mid-May, we welcomed Ana.
That was our main success this year. And also, one of the biggest challenges.
Now, in addition to having a larger workforce that allowed us to expand our marketing management services, we could strengthen our own communication channels. On the other hand, the inclusion of a new person in the team resulted in increased responsibility as the team grew and we became responsible for more people.
In parallel, at the end of the same month, I made the decision to leave my job in Belgium in order to focus full time on Phi. This allowed us not only to improve our website development capabilities but also to increase my focus on the business management.
The Terrible Twos
Creating a business is not simple.
Building a project from scratch, forming a team. Ensuring that the desired culture is built and still being able to pay the bills… It’s a real challenge. And suddenly me and Lídia had no one to look up to guide us or ask for advice. We were the ones at the rudder.
While you build a business model and think about the strategy everything is fun and games. But nothing can prepare you for the real world. When you start applying the plan and jump into the jungle you realize a lot of things don’t work as you imagined. It takes time to earn trust on the market. We made mistakes. We failed, sometimes in the simplest things. We felt the pressure on having the future of other people on our hands and although we both agreed on the company culture and values sometimes we didn’t agree on the way to make things happen, and when the problems arise you have to think fast, agree fast in order to solve them before they take much damage.
When I was in college, on my first year my grades weren’t as good as I wanted. So my parents asked a friend to help me organizing my study and be a tutor, not in a specific matter, but the main focus was on how to organize my time and materials, and study more efficiently. At some point I was loosing momentum and becoming less motivated, and one day I found a paper on my desk with his letter saying “A glória não está em nunca cair. Mas em nos levantarmos sempre que caímos. (Autor desconhecido)“, which means “The glory is not in never falling, but on rising every time we fall. (Author Unknown)“. Well, I came to know the author was Confucius. Nowadays we find this kind of sentences everywhere on social media, but at the time, being written by hand by that person it had a lot of meaning.
And that was what we did. We rised every time we fell. Everytime we doubted we came out more confident. Everytime we made a mistake on managing the team we learned with it and became better leaders. Everytime we lost a prospect for a competitor we improved our budgeting and workload prediction.
That’s how it is. It takes resilience to take the punches of the market. You have got to take the hit, hold on and keep going. Then, you get the best project so far. You become better at creating budgets, negotiating, managing, leading, creating and applying a strategy…
It’s a roller coaster of successes and failures, constantly learning and improving.
I am not the same person I was when we started. I am more resilient, faster, wiser.
We are all better than we were at the beginning and we keep constantly evolving. We have grown as a team. We have learned to communicate better, to fill each others gaps and to use each others strengths to take the team further. It’s all about teamwork.
Now we are a team of four people with clients in Portugal, Belgium, and Switzerland and dozens of projects on our hands.
None of this would have been possible without Lídia’s communication skills and effort capability, without Cátia’s keen eye for colors and shapes, and her extra effort when things crumble, Ana’s great organization and marketing management, and (I like to believe) without my resilience, programming skills and annoying, some times counter producent, perfectionism.
But above all, none of this would have been possible without the existence of a good synergy between the four of us, which, in addition to combining all these skills, ensures that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Was it worth it? Absolutely!
Thank you, team!
Happy Birthday!
