The word ‘start-up’ brings to mind the image of a young man. Maybe he’s in his late twenties and he’s standing in a modern office surrounded by other trendy, young, creative people. On the outside he appears to be riding wave after wave of success while building an empire with unprecedented growth. Internally he has a very stressful job having to answer to shareholders and be responsible for a rapidly growing team but no one really focuses on that - we like the success story.
We like the rags to riches stories. The stories when the hero has to overcome extreme adversity and still continues on when everyone else has given up. We want to root for the underdog because it gives us hope that if they can do it, then there’s no reason why we can’t do it either - but only if you wanted to of course.
The truth is far less glamorous than the stories we want to read about I’m afraid. It’s less exciting when we discover that someone has been working on something for 15 years before they became famous for it. This also confirms what we all know deep down that you have to work hard at something for ages if you want to be awesome at it!
We’re a startup. Matt, myself and our latest and first employee. HUCX, the home of TinyOffice. It's taken us about 7 years to get to this point and not one of those years have been ‘successful’ in the traditional meaning of the word. The good weeks are starting to outweigh the bad but it's no glamorous success story, yet.
This week however deserves a chapter all of its own. It actually started last week when our employee had a medical emergency (not at work thank goodness) that will require a week off work then 4 weeks of ‘light duties only’. We’re obviously more concerned about his well being than anything else and are glad he is recovering well but this set in motion the following events.
The week was short, I’m sure you’re aware and on Wednesday we had the business development official from a Singaporean Tiny Home builder coming to visit our factory. This meeting had been in the works for a while and it potentially holds the biggest contract we have ever seen so we were 30% nervous, 30% excited, 40% ‘fake it to you make it’.
We had just got back from the long weekend and Matt is getting really worked up about something - he was ringing around to see if anyone could go pick up some pallet racking for us on Tuesday. We had rushed the order through so the racks would be ready for our factory inspection but now we had no one to pick them up.
I didn't understand why Matt couldn’t do it - I mean I know it’s not the most interesting job, but he could drive the truck to Hopper Crossing and pick them up. Alice had daycare and Frank can hang out with me - what's the problem? What I didn’t know was that Matt was booked in for a day session on making windows that he HAD to go to. It had been postponed so many times that he didn’t want to move it again.
My next question for Matt was do I need a heavy duty licence to drive that truck? His eyes lit up - No you do not! You just need a car licence! Bummer - I had planned a pretty productive day at work on Tuesday - driving a truck to Hoppers Crossing with a 6 year old in a car seat alongside me wasn’t in my plan. I’ve never driven a truck before, despite my Dad having driven trucks for most of my life. I’m not adverse to giving new things a go either but sometimes I feel like I give too many new things a go.
Fast forward to Tuesday afternoon when Frank and I are barreling down the freeway at 110km/h in a 6m long truck. I was 70% excited, 30% hoping I wasn’t going to kill us both. Luckily Matt finished up his ‘windows making’ early so we met in the middle. I took a ute of windows back to Ballarat (equally as scary), while he continued on with the truck (and the child). Did I mention it was raining hard with very poor visibility on Tuesday afternoon? No, well it didn’t help.
We passed the first hurdle of the week. Next was preparation for our guest from Singapore. Since getting our first employee the factory has become this constant hive of activity. It’s wonderful. The factory looks good so we just wanted to do a quick clean up ready for our meeting at 2. I had two new client meetings that morning, because remember I’m a graphic designer most of the time and am running my own business. I managed to get out and help Matt just after lunch.
It really was unfortunate that it was just Matt and myself that day. The school holidays had most of our ring-ins away on family vacations. We needed to convince this lovely man that we had the capacity to make 10’s of tiny homes over the next 12 months. I can only assume that the stress got to Matt when he told me I had to be out in the factory doing work when our guy arrived.
I was extremely pissed at my rapid and unexpected demotion from CDO to factory hand but I didn’t get a chance to argue as our guy arrived an hour early! I could make it out that I was one of those undercover CEOs who works on the front line to get amongst the customers and gather real time feedback but this wasn’t that. I was sweeping up, in my cute TinyOffice t-shirt while Matt was having a walk through zoom meeting with our guest and his boss back in Singapore. I think about it now and it makes me laugh out loud. What was this guy thinking, this strange woman sweeping closer and closer to them trying to eavesdrop on the conversation. Frank, who had been there this whole time, finally came downstairs and asked if the guy was from China! Of all the things!!! Matt and I were both mortified! He then announced that he needed to go to the toilet and ran off!
I don’t think our guy heard Frank's racial generalisation - thank goodness and overall he was very impressed with our setup. We are going to start with one tiny home and go from there - a great outcome for us and could be the beginning of one of those elusive ‘start-up’ success moments we keep reading about.
Being a ‘start-up’ looks quite different from what I imagined it would. It’s not young men in fancy offices or pingpong tables in hangout zones. It’s families like ours doing everything and anything they can to get the job done. It’s telling Frank that we now have an exciting mission to go on that involves Mum driving a truck for the first time ever! When we first took off he started screaming in delight - ‘You're doing it Mum! You’re driving a truck!’. It’s looking at Matt shaking the hand of a man who may very well change the direction of our lives and knowing that we have worked so hard and are so ready for this. It’s the kids hanging out for takeaway nights at the factory because they get to watch TV in our own version of a ‘hangout zone’.
The entrepreneurial path isn’t what I expected at all but it certainly makes for some pretty incredible moments that simply would never have occurred if things had happened any other way. That is probably the most surprising and understated thing of all. Just another example that you are always where you’re meant to be.
