As someone who spends too much time working from coffices around the world, I have come to know what makes a great coffice. Here are some thoughts.  A great coffice has the following characteristics…

• Free internet connection
• Great coffee and tea
• Television … so you can watch the sport or news
• Good food for nibbling on
• Power points so that you can plug in
• Not too loud music
• Big tables
• Friendly staff who don’t mind you staying all day
• Beer for afternoon work sessions

Here is a picture of Classified Ad Ventures’ UK team hard at work at one of their coffice’s in St Margaret’s – a cafe called Zorans.

Let us know of any great coffice’s in your part of the world.

When you set up new business, you have clear choices in how you want that business to work and how you plan to run that business. As these businesses always start off relatively small, the founder sets the tone and tenor for that business. As we create Classified Ad Ventures, we are facing these issues everyday. Here are some of the lessons we are learning.

Selection of Team Members

The beauty of starting a business from scratch is that you can select the people that you want to work with rather than being inheriting a team that may not be aligned to your style.  Therefore in selecting people to work for Classified Ad Ventures and its subsidiaries, i have decided to select people that are not only smart but that i also get on with personally.  I want to be able to turn up to work each day and have fun.  Sure we need to get the job done, but we want to do it in a way that sees us smile and laugh.  Therefore being smart and having a good track record gets you the interview, it is the interaction with the team that will get you the job!

Approach to Working

One thing that is important to do in building this new business is to change the way we have to work.  Yes we have an office – a funky warehouse in the city, however i am keen to set it up so that people can work from home or from anywhere in the world – we dont have to be dependent on a location.  To make this work, we need to have the right tools in place as well as the right work ethic and processes.   In CAV, we have team members spread around the world. 

Another change in the approach to working is the strong use of part time and contract people.   I am particularly keen to leverage people who dont want to work full time – for example stay at home mum’s – and it is important that the infrastructure supports remote working.

Creation of a New Culture

Probably the most fun i am having is creating a new business culture – well new for us.  I am keen to create an environment that is built on trust, openness, having fun, working hard, respect for the individual, community service, and so on.  What i am keen to do is to ensure that there are no politics, that the best ideas float to the surface and that people want to be in the business.

To do this i have to lead from the front.  I also have to select the right people to join the business … if we get this right then we will work well as a team and anything will be possible.

Having Fun

Finally, and most importantly, it is so important that we have fun when we create this new business.  Now fun can happen in so many ways and depends on the environment that you are working, however some of the things that we are doing is having an open office space, we have a creative team so i am encouraging them to express themselves and to display their artwork on the walls, and we are making sure that we celebrate every little milestone that we reach as we build the business.

The bottom line is that if you are going to spend time building a new business, you might as well have a heap of fun doing it and do it with people that you like and respect.  Life is too short to do anything else!

Clarity of Mission is Critical

When you have a small busness it is very important to make sure that you have extreme clarity in what you are doing – your mission in life.  In addition you need to make sure that what you are doing is related to a real business model with real revenue and profit potential.  The ultimate test of this is the elevator test – can you clearly articulate what your business does in 30 sec to a minute.  If not … think clearly about what you are doing.

Focus on What Matters

Having worked out what the business is going to do, you need to make sure that everyone is totally focused on making that mission come true. What is as important is working out what you are not going to do – that is, the ability to say no to things. In our business the team often comes up with great ideas (well interesting at least) and i spend time on asking the simple question “how is this going to help deliver our mission and bring in revenue?” More often than not these ideas dont actually add value and are more of a distraction.

Make Sure You Have Funding

Great ideas without money to make them happen are just great ideas. Therefore it is important that you have enough funding to get the idea off the ground or at least have enough man-power to make it happen. Often the man-power can be secured on a sweat equity basis where labour is provided in exchange for equity in the business. This is not my preferred option as equity should be treated as gold and cash used to pay for people as often as possible.

Build a Strong Team

No business can truly happen unless there is a team in place and preferably a strong team. Building a strong team is the most important objective for any founder of a business. At CAV we are really focusing on building a strong team and in doing so, i prefer to work with people i have worked with before as i know their skills and workstyles and they know mine.

Keep a Close Eye on Costs

You may have raised some money however this is not revenue so it is important that you keep a very close eye on all costs. At CAV (and its subsidiaries) i personally sign off on all costs before the are incurred and make sure that there are strong cost control procedures in place. We want to create as much runway as possible to get the business off the ground.