Four years and four learning points
Four years and four learning points
Privacy Company recently celebrated its fourth anniversary. From a rough idea to a company with international presence and more than forty fantastic people. In this blog I will share four of my key learning points.
Learning point 1: Share.
From the beginning we shared lots of information. We offered free downloads of books, templates, agreements, overviews, frameworks and otherdocuments. And to get all this great documentation we didn’t ask anything in return. No obligation to leave contact details, or to post something below aLinkedIn message to increase traffic. We found out our documents are appreciated and used in places that we would have never imagined. And yes, we dolove it when people get in touch and tell us that they appreciate our effort.
Learning point 2: Be grateful.
Companies need customers to exist. That means people need to be convinced to hire our company. By being grateful and humble for the opportunities we get and by giving everything we do, we try to make customers as happy as possible. Happy customers often lead to more opportunities. Being grateful also makes the world a bit more beautiful. It means we appreciate the chances we get even more. We like to make the world a nicer place.
Learning point 3: People are key and the power of a team knows no limits.
A company is a group of hardworking people, who together buildthe best possible products and services. Nice competent people are the absolute foundation of our success. We had expected the power of a team to be great, butit turned out to be much greater than anticipated. The power lies in the skills and creativity of our employees and the fact that you know much more togetheras a group. In the privacy field of work, which has become quite extensive, that is important. Also, an enthusiastic team is a magnet for new people. Wehave spent nearly no money on recruiting platforms and have not hunted on people, even when our competitors did so in the tough privacy market. This waspossible because of all our committed team members who shared their experiencesat Privacy Company.
Learning point 4: Keep it simple and make it easy.
In most cases the simple solution beats the complicated solution. We force ourselves to keep our products and pricing as transparent as possible. That benefits our customers as they have no surprises. It also helps us to prevent complex calculations and long commercial negotiations. Our ambition is to make privacy easy. As a brain teaser I sometimes say: It is easy to make something easy complicated. And it is complicated to make something complicated easy. That touches the essence; it is hard to make complex rules with many exceptions and nuances easy. It requires the knowledge to understand the essence. By preventing legal speak, long sentences or long texts about all the exceptions, we can bring the field of work to a larger group of people. The nice part is that we have seen many times that people that started with hesitance towards the topic of privacy became enthusiastic over time.
Final remarks
Of course, there were many more learning points andfortunately there are many more to come. Learning is impossible without makingmistakes and with the knowledge now of course we would have done certain thingsdifferently. But the essence of the company and the people would remain thesame. And the character of both our company and our people would not haveshaped to the beautiful company it is without continuous learning and aimingfor the right goals to pursue. The journey will continue, with many greatadventures ahead.
