A year in

Unbelievably, it’s just a week from my first anniversary at Brandwatch. These are the things that stand out for me.

Teams

If my experience has confirmed one thing to me it’s about the importance of teams. The quality of the people in them. The communication within and between them. Their environment, their happiness. Their sense of purpose.

The moments I’ve enjoyed the most over the last 12 months have been being part of focused happy groups doing great work and accomplishing new, difficult things.

The moments I’ve enjoyed the least have been where I’ve been disconnected from a team I belong to (I can think of three formal teams I belong to, plus more informal project groups) or where I’ve lost sight of what makes teams tick, and ignored the issues that needed addressing.

For me it’s all coming back to people.

When I joined we were 140 people. 12 months later and we are close to double that. That is a lot of change. As I’ve said to people internally, in most cases it feels like the primary unit has shifted from being the office – like Brighton or New York – to the team or even sub-team. Which means that the affiliation and communication between teams and sub-teams, even within the same office, now requires additional effort and probably some new skills too.

It’s very interesting and exciting seeing this arise as a challenge and seeing us find our way through it. (We also have a fantastic new chief of staff Tom who is helping us all out, which I’m delighted about).

Speed of change

One of the other things I am absolutely loving at Brandwatch is the sheer pace of change.

Every week something happens in our market or in our company which makes a material difference to the company’s business or my team’s work.

There is literally no time to get bored and I bloody love that. I love the dynamism. I love how we have to deal with it and seeing the people around me dealing it so admirably.

And yet most of us in the company would like to be moving faster, to be innovating more quickly, to be launching everything, everywhere, tomorrow (!) and that tension between quality and speed, and having to say no many times in order to say yes a few is really fascinating to me.

This 12 months has also helped me clearly see that,  having worked in a startup, then my own entrepreneurial endeavours, and now a scaling startup, I definitely belong in this world. Startups for evarrrrrr (probably).

Business travel

Travelling for business is just a reality within the US. And in my role I need to travel to Europe and beyond too pretty regularly.

What I’ve learnt is that my travel comes in waves. September is a write-off – I’m at home for (most) weekends, but that’s it. April and May were pretty full-on too. But the summer is quiet and there are troughs in between the peaks in which to recover and spend time getting back into healthy patterns.

I met a friendly guy from one of our competitors who travels every week within the US as a VP of sales. Because of the time involved he told me that over the years he has worked to reduce and compress all of that waiting around time as much as possible to the extent that he accepts that he will miss 2-3 flights a year, and if he isn’t missing those flights, he’s not pushing it hard enough and wasting time sitting in airports.

I can feel myself on the same trajectory. I was the last one on the plane on my last US domestic flight, and on the outbound leg I got through security with 30 mins to spare (still plenty of padding). I’ve racked some serious miles this year and am getting more polished at the business of travel. Although travel becomes a ball-ache, I love visiting new places and I love spending time with people face to face. It is part of the adventure I sought out and signed up for, and I’m lucky because I feel in control of it at the moment.

As I side note, I LOVE the BA mobile app. It’s close to Amazon and Uber for me in creating loyalty through sheer simplicity and ease of use. Big fan. Quite impressive, given their not being a digital native company.

Health and happiness

Despite the intensity and change, I’ve managed to stay reasonably healthy and sane. I’m not as fit as I was a year ago – I haven’t clicked with the way they structure the CrossFit programme at my local box, and bouts of travel mean that running has become a more reliable, easier to plan activity.

It sucks a bit because CrossFit is the most amazing way to be all-round fit IMO, and physically I’m not exactly built to be a natural runner – that said, I do enjoy it and I’m looking forward to running in a ‘race’ or too. (Race in inverted commas because I won’t be racing, I’ll be surviving :).

So I do feel grateful that 12 months in I’m genuinely happy and pretty healthy. You never know when you change job, country and all that other stuff.

Family

Lastly but most importantly, the most amazing thing about moving country as a family has been what it’s done for us as a family. We were already in a good place but there’s something ‘us against the world’ about hoiking yourselves to an entirely foreign country where you know next to no one. I never saw that coming.

It’s been beautiful to see how we’ve pulled together and been able to share in the joys of difference together.

So that’s it.

A great 12 months. Learnt loads, done loads, and excited for the next 12 🙂