Christopher McCann

What I think about culture

The last year has been really enlightening. I have learnt so much - it has to an enormous extent humbled me and really taught me the value of listening, thinking and learning. One thing I have been thinking about a lot recently is culture. 

We started Arkly in partnership with my previous employer. They were gracious enough to give us office space and operational support but I have come to realise that this was a big error. For a long time I had disregarded blogs about starting your company inside your living room but I now know that is a big tactical bonus. The reason - its important to culture.

Without even realising it Arkly picked up the culture of a much bigger organisation (because we were working beside one). A start-up should be scrappy and tenacious, it should be about working all night and doing anything to get your product ready and out there. Now we did a lot of that - we worked endless hours but we were surrounded by people who didn’t. And it had an effect. It instilled a certain “comfort” that it shouldn’t have.

My good friend Michael Hayes and I are now talking about a new venture and this one we won’t make the same mistake - it’ll be working out of our bedrooms and living rooms and spending almost nothing on it (because we don’t have any capital at the moment to actually spend on it). I believe both of those things will actually be an advantage to us. We will be a scrappy insurgency going up against some big players and we will disrupt them - because we can move fast and they cant, we are nimble and they aren’t.

It seems silly but given what I know now I would choose starting a company from a living room with no money to working from an office with money.

The importance of customer service

I had lunch the other day in a bar in Glasgow that will remain nameless. After my experiences I will never ever go again and neither will any of the people I eat with or anyone they ever speak to about it (that could be in the range of 50 or so people that won’t go there now). 

I am sure everyone has experience of that bar or restaurant where they keep you waiting too long, they act like they don’t want you to be there and the food is terrible. That really gets to me - I wasn’t looking for 5-star treatment but I certainly want to be made to feel wanted - even if the food wasn’t that good but the service was great I would have been happier. 

I think that applies to all businesses though. I have had some great customer service experiences - Cameron House near Loch Lomond was a shining example. Everything they did was simple and cost nothing but got them everything! In our team we don’t have much experience in customer-facing roles but we just used common sense. If a customer phones or e-mails we get back to them straight away and we invite anyone to visit our offices or give us their feedback. If they have a problem using our services we prioritise them. All of that costs us nothing but wins us support and champions.

Its a really simple thing to do but I think customers are the most important thing there  are - more important than investors. We try our best to focus on our customers in everything we do - we dont always get it right - but we put try our very best to put them first always. 

Try not to spend money, ever.

Hindsight can either be incredibly irritating or incredibly useful. One of the first things I learned when I started Arkly last year was that I was going to make mistakes - a lot of mistakes. Hindsight (or reflection) lets you see where you went wrong and make sure you don’t do it again. I am a big believer that a mistake is only a mistake if you do it twice.

My first big mistake? Spending money. I was incredibly lucky to be supported by some amazing family members who backed me and let me pull together the wonderful team we have now. However, the big problem with having financial backing and money in the bank is that you tend to spend it. 

When I started Arkly I had very little idea about marketing - I think A LOT of first-time technology start-up founders would say the same. We listened to the wrong people and we put money in things we never should have and before we knew it the financial comfort cushion we had was gone. 

A year on I have a totally different philosophy (though I still do break my rules sometimes!). We now spend money on two things - wages and hosting. That’s it. We also now have a significantly better marketing strategy than we did a year ago and we are able to achieve significantly better results than anything we tried a year ago but we haven’t spent a penny on marketing in about six months. 

I am fully willing to admit that Arkly is not yet a profitable business so anything I say should be taken with a pinch of salt but I am incredibly proud of how we now interact with our customers. We are human, we are open, we are honest and transparent. We have a great relationship with so many of the people who use our services. They provide us with constant feedback and constant promotion. How do we achieve this? Making friends. As many friends as we can. Anyone, anywhere.

When we launched parentalcircle.com we went to enormous lengths to engage with as many parents as we could on Twitter. We spoke to everyone and anyone and created friendships and most importantly trust. We went for lunches with individual parents and had tweet-ups and twitter parties to get everyone involved. The result? We have spent basically £0 on parentalcircle.com outside development time wages and hosting but we have great relationship with so many parenting bloggers who spread the word for us. 

A couple of weeks ago we announced we were holding a conference at our head office for parenting bloggers - within a day over a hundred parents indicated they will be attending (selling out!) simply because the word was spread so well through the relationships we created.

So what is my advice? Try try try try try to just keep your money in the bank. You don’t need to spend it. Beg and borrow but most importantly make friendships! Sit with anyone and everyone. Be humble and be human. One of the most amazing things I learned was that people will go to extra-ordinary lengths to help you if you put enough effort into your relationship. 

Yes, I am going to do it now!

So after reading Mark Suster’s blog on starting a blog I decided I would make the leap of starting up my own blog. I can’t quite make the same contribution as he can but I am going to try my best to write a couple of blogs a week on my experiences trying to get a start-up to profitability, as well as a few bits and pieces about programming, the mobile web and whatever other random meanderings I can come up with. This is something I have been trying to start for a few weeks but kept getting bogged down but I am starting now! Promise ;)

PS I am writing this while the temperamental (he would agree) designer of our team is shouting (and issuing more than a few profanities) while trying to get the printer to work by bashing it as hard as he can. Yes - sometimes we truly hate technology.