What it takes to fall in love with your business
2019 is drawing to an end. People are gathering with their families and friends to get some rest, spend some good time, and go through some epic fuck-ups with food, alcohol and other dopamine-boosting substances.
Although I enjoy all of the above-stated activities (in no particular order), this is also the time of the year where I like to take some time to reflect about the previous year’s achievements, about what I have realised as an individual and the ways I got better (or worse) at the various aspects of my life.
This time, I have decided to not only make it about myself, but about a collective, amazingly rich journey I have been on over the last three years.
This is the story of an entrepreneurial adventure that started in 2016, when I’ve joined a lone founder in the early days of a what I saw as a promising venture.
This is the story of a journey filled with excitement, ambitions, hard work and enriching learnings.
This is the story of a startup that started with two persons, and that is evolving into an amazing team gathered around a shared passion for sport, a common determination to succeed, and led by a strong vision of changing the world by making it a healthier place through sport.
As we grew AirFit over the last years, our ambitions grew with it, and so did our confidence in its future.
More than ever before, 2019 made me realise that we weren’t just working on developing a business we enjoyed, and that we saw as a mere way to pay the bills and put food on the table.
It’s way more than that. In fact, 2019 made me realise that it was something more than just business.
It’s about something that provides us with an ever-lasting sense of reward, personal fulfilment and pride about what we are doing. Something filling us with a grit that knows no week-ends nor holidays.
It’s about the faith that we are building something bigger than ourselves, something that is making us better versions of ourselves, and that we believe can make better societies.
This is the story of a business I fell in love with.
Before you choke on your 99th piece of Christmas cake and accuse me of being full of shit, let me take some minutes of your precious time to share what I believe it takes to fall in love with your business.
This is the story of a journey filled with excitement, ambitions, hard work and enriching learnings.
Follow a vision that is bigger than your business, bigger than yourself
As I joined my associate Pierre in the early days of the AirFit adventure in 2016, I surely didn’t see the company potential as I see it today, neither did I have the same vision about where we want to take it.
The shift in our perspective about this fascinating journey could be summed up very well in one of the most enriching Ted Talks by Simon Sinek, whose main message is as follows: great companies Start with Why, not What.
Sinek argues that these great companies don’t sell products (the “What”), they sell a vision, a purpose, a reason why they are doing what they are doing (the “Why”). Where average companies sell product features and specificities, great companies are selling the people a way of becoming better version of themselves.
In the early years of AirFit in 2016, we saw ourselves as pioneers in the outdoor fitness industry, as the first company ever to sell outdoor cross-training stations that are connected to a mobile coaching application. See how we only talked about the product? That’s the “What” that somehow limited our vision. We were still looking for our “Why”.
In 2018, we expanded our product range, and positioned ourselves as creators of cross-generational outdoor fitness areas, with the aim of offering a free access to sport for people of all ages and sport levels. We were thus slowly shifting away from the “what” (the outdoor fitness station) and getting closer to our “why”, our vision: we weren’t afraid anymore to say that we stand for making sports free for everyone.
The shift in our purpose: how can we build healthier societies through sport?
As we entered 2019 with the objective of making our mobile coaching app evolve to offer a better experience to athletes, we soon realised that we were, again, too focused on the product and its features (the “What”) and not on bringing the company closer to our vision. The question was pretty straightforward: how can we expand of product / service offering to better answer the needs of our users, all the while getting an edge on the competition?
We figured that developing a better app won’t help people get access to an outdoor sports experience.
After months of thinking and debates, we came up with an idea that we believed would expand the value offered by our outdoor cross-training areas.
To better help people get access to an outdoor sports experience, we decided to start organising outdoor cross-training classes on our AirFit areas.
How is this new service getting us closer to our vision?
We believe that it takes more than just outdoor, free-to-access fitness facilities to help people improve their lives through sport. Installing outdoor equipment don’t necessarily make people use them, neither does a coaching app, even the best one.
But what if more than a free equipment, we offered people a complete outdoor sports experience, a new way to push their limits in an outdoor environment, surrounded by a group of peers, and led by a great coach?
Exploiting our synergies with the leading fitness coach booking platform in France, TrainMe, we became the first outdoor fitness manufacturer to organise and host outdoor cross-training events on our areas.
The promise is straightforward: we want to offer every person the access to an outdoor, collective, expert-led fitness experience. We want to allow you to get a free access to an outdoor fitness facility close to where you live, and enable you to book a cross-training class with a group of peers on this AirFit area.
And what if we do that on every one of the 200 fitness areas we have installed across France and Europe, and then on the hundreds of upcoming areas?
Well, we would not only be helping people get access to sports anymore. We would be doing more than that, as we would have a real impact on society as a whole.
This made us realise that the vision we were pursuing is bigger than what we had thought until now. It is surely an ambitious purpose, but one that we are not afraid of claiming anymore.
We are not afraid to say it aloud: at AirFit, we are building healthier societies through sport. 💪
This might sound as pretty ambitious (or full of shit, depending on your perspective).However, this purpose is what provides us with the belief that we are contributing more than to ourselves or the people we are working with. This vision is the reason why we do what we do.
Once you realise that, your whole perspective about the business changes.
Build a company culture around strong and values
If vision is where you are going, culture is what makes sure you get there.
I have long heard about company culture and its importance in developing a sustainable and sound business from the inside. But it isn’t until I found myself on the frontline of managing a growing team that I really understood the paramount importance of shaping and nurturing a company culture in line with the values that we share as a team of individuals.
But what is really a “company culture”, and what defines it?
Culture is a set of intangible assets, behaviours, events and relationships that make the people of a company stay for more than just a payroll.
It is the manifestation of the shared values of the organization as represented by the actions of its members. In other words, culture is the stuff people do without noticing it.
Culture is not only intangible, it takes time to build and cement.
You cannot build your culture the same way you implement a new process or strategy. Culture doesn’t come as a pre-installed software and isn’t created overnight.
It took us some years to shape our culture at AirFit, and 2019 enabled us to clearly outline it and share it among the growing team.
Culture isn’t built solely by the founding team or the management. It is shaped by the first people joining the company, around the set of values they embody and share on a daily basis.
It is indeed only when you spend some time with the core team of your business that you will see some cultural patterns emerge.
At AirFit, we cherish a set of values that each member of the team shares as a person:
- Caring and goodwill: towards our co-workers and friends, towards our clients and our community of users. We help and care for each other as a team, which helps us go through the hard moments, while making the good ones even better.
- Perseverance and pugnacity: we don’t give up when the work is hard, we don’t compromise our goals because “there is too much to do”. We know that hard, smart work is the price of our future success, and we are ready to pay it on a daily basis.
- Ambition and determination: led by our purpose of building healthier societies through sport, we are not afraid to be ambitious about our goals. We don’t see our young age and relatively small team as a limit, rather as an advantage allowing us to go fast, stay lean and agile and smash the market along the way.
- Discipline and consistency: because yesterday home runs don’t win today’s games, consistency in your efforts and your work is the only thing that leads to success in the long run. As Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”.
These values were shaped by the first people who joined the team, and who constitute the core of AirFit today.
Even though your values tend to be refined along the journey, they must be nurtured and preserved, as they become the pillars upon which you recruit your new people, the framework where you build your company culture.
This is a statement I couldn’t make loud enough: always act according to your company values, never compromise them, and never take a debt on your company culture. The interest rate is too high and will kill your business on the long run.
Once you’ve defined the right values and communicated upon them so that they are shared by everyone on the team, the right context can be set, and the right processes can be implemented.
It is only then that you can expect to have sustainable results on the long run.
To sum up, here is what I believe is the formula:
- Select, shape and nurture the right values that are embodied by the members of your core team.
- Recruit people based on these values (and surely not only based on their hard skills).
- Allow these people to express themselves in the framework of the company culture, which they will contribute to refine.
- Based on this culture and environment, work with your people and empower them to set the right processes and context.
- People will then be naturally empowered to reach the most ambitious results.
A culture built around strong values that we share does not only make our offices an amazing place to work, it amplifies our abilities to help us do our best work.
Set ambitious goals and crush them
As persons, my associate Pierre and I have always been ambitious about our goals. Fueled by the success stories and the hard work of the best people in both the business and sports worlds, we personally believe that the only thing that separates us from our most ambitious goals is the amount of smart work and energy we need to put.
Even though these words sound very nice on paper, they are harder to keep up with once you are confronted with the reality of the market, of low-cost competition fucking up your margins and sales pipeline, of human resources management sucking your energy, of cost control freaking you out, and everything else that get mixed up in the giant cocktail of running a successful business.
It is however paramount to set the right business objectives through the right KPIs (Key Performance Indicators for my less business’ fans friends), and push your team to reach them. As a fast growing business whose lifeblood is cash, like any other business, the sales revenue figures are one of our most prominent KPIs. 📈
As we entered 2019, the million euro turnover has been an objective we used to contemplate as a milestone in AirFit’ development. Since we have been doubling our revenues over the last three years, and as we were adding new salespeople to the team, this objective seemed like a natural one.
However, it appeared to me that we were suffering from the imposter syndrome and surely setting ourselves our own limits. During the months when sales were slowing down (as our specific business cycle goes) one million euros of sales seemed as something we weren’t sure of making without further growing the team and investing more money in marketing.
It turns out we were wrong, and I regret to say that we lacked ambition. Not only did we reach the million euros turnover, but we crushed it heavily.
We closed 2019 with 1,4 millions euros in sales, more than doubling on the previous year’s revenue. Talk about objectives, motherfuckers. 💸
All it took was to trust the sales strategy and the processes we had developed and implemented, to put the right amount of hard work and dedication, and to stay consistent in our efforts.
I am not saying there are no surprises (either good or bad) and events that can affect your results. Of course there are, and the only thing you can do is be prepared as good as possible to absorb these variations.
However, if you trust your processes, refine them along the way, while always keeping an open mind to new ways of operating you could adopt, the results become a byproduct of the business journey.
Bottom line: don’t be afraid to set yourself ambitious business objectives. Don’t let your imposter syndrome tell you that can not make it because you are too small, too young, too expensive or whatever bullshit you can come up with.
Or goals will get more ambitious as we grow. And you know what gives us the confidence that we will keep on crushing them? The path we have covered over the last 3 years, the difficulties we have overcome, and the challenges we have met. We are not afraid to say that 10 years from now, we will be one of the leading company of the outdoor fitness industry, enabling millions of people to get access to a healthier lifestyle.
It will surely take time. But patient and dedicated we are.
We haven’t come this far to only go this far. 🚀
How my perspective about “business” shifted
These past 3 years have been filled with learning and “aha” moments. I could spend pages writing on the infinite insights I have gained about how to grow a business, recruit new members and on-board them, sell more products and have the whole company aligned behind your vision.
As this is not the topic, and you surely must be wondering when this long article is drawing to a fucking end, I will keep these insights for a future writing.
I can however tell you how this journey is making me a happier, more fulfilled person. I am grateful for everything that has happened over the last 3 years: the encounters, the events, the moments of joy and success, however we define it. I am happy to share these precious moments with people I deeply respect and care about, and without whom this experience wouldn’t be so enriching.
Personally, growing this company from scratch and focusing on a strong vision, on tangible missions has provided me an amazing outlet to throw all of my heart and energy into, which is a fantastic thing.
Over the last three years, my perspective about business shifted. I redefined the notion of success in business and expanded it beyond my original definition of merely staying alive, of growing the revenue, of generating enough cash to pay everybody well and eventually become the market leader.
I now see business as more than that.
As the company is growing, we dare to say aloud that we want to contribute to making people’s lives better, and we are not afraid anymore to hold these strong ambitions.
We saw the amazing impact that sport had on our lives, and is still having on our well-being. We are therefore convinced by the impact we can have on people’s lives through sport.
And when you do such thing, when you contribute to making the lives of strangers better, when you make them happier, healthier or better, and when you do it all efficiently and smartly, while becoming yourself a better person and building meaningful relationships along the way — you’re participating more fully in the grand human drama.
More than simply building a startup and developing a business, you are becoming a better person, helping others around you become better versions of themselves, and striving to build healthier societies.
Our work represents our passion, our desire to contribute to our culture, especially to the development of other. By passion I mean the talents we have to share with others, the talents that shape our destiny and allow us to be of real service to others in our community.
And if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman.
Maybe it will grow on me.
