Until 2020, bootstrapped travel company Flash Pack saw its gross merchandise volume (total value of goods sold) grow to £20m in four years. Then, Covid-19 ravaged the travel industry, causing the company to go into administration.
It relaunched in November 2021 and is now doing better than it was before the pandemic. During those two years, cofounders Radha Vyas and Lee Thompson had a lot of time to reflect on what they had, and hadn’t, done so well in the first iteration of the business, and now do a lot of things differently. “We consider ourselves second-time founders,” says Radha.
In our Startup Life newsletter, we sat down with Radha to get her advice for founders on how to reflect on 2023’s mistakes and implement those learnings in 2024.
Do a blameless post-mortem
When Flash Pack experiences operational issues, or has to respond to external crises, it does what it calls a “blameless post-mortem” — essentially an exercise to dissect what went wrong and collect learnings from the experience.
The leader of the project, team or entire organisation (if necessary), gathers everyone in a room and starts by admitting everything that they personally felt they could have done better in that situation and suggests improvements on those things in the future. This creates a psychologically safe place for everyone else to bring to the table what mistakes they made and what they could do better next time.
Do these post-mortems at regular intervals throughout the year to save yourself from trying to remember all the details of every situation at the end of a 12-month period.
Have an annual leadership team meeting
This can be at the beginning or the end of the year to reflect and refocus you for the future. Plan something for the team to do together to reward them for their hard work (before Christmas last year, we gathered for a six-course tasting menu!). This is a good opportunity for team leaders to review the year together and ask each other some hard questions.
A question one person asked during our meal was: if we had to restart the company today and you could only take five members from the current team, who would you take? This forced us to focus on the members of our teams who are real superstars and reflect on:
- Am I investing in them enough?
- Do they feel appreciated?
- Could I do more to develop them?
Getting everyone to play devil’s advocate and ask questions can be fun, and can allow team members to think of the areas of the business into which they could put more time next year.
Clarify your goals
Once you’ve taken stock of learnings, it’s important to clarify what goals are really important for your business and reflect that in your strategy. We prefer to have one company goal for the year, a North Star metric, that we aim towards. Our goal for 2024 is a revenue goal — and we do quarterly reviews to assess how far we’ve got in achieving that goal. We have a cut-off point in November, and spend December reflecting on what we achieved and planning for the following year.
To keep everyone aligned, it’s important to continuously remind everyone of the goal throughout the year. As a remote and fully distributed team, we discuss our progress toward our goal in every all-hands meeting. We also have Slack channels where everyone pledges on a weekly basis to make a small contribution toward our goal, and weekly accountability meetings with our teams to see what people achieved. It gives team members a chance to say, “I committed to this, I did it or I did not do it, because...” and helps them hit the ground running the following week.
Take one day at a time
For founders who are heading into the year a bit uncertain about how things will go in 2024, remember to pace yourself. When we were going through crisis times during Covid-19, I felt like I was neglecting my wellbeing: eating and drinking too much and not sleeping enough. But what got me through was waking up every day and thinking:
- What is the one thing I need to achieve today?
- What decisions do I need to make and who do I need to speak to, to help me achieve that thing?
In those times, strip everything back to the problems of the moment and don’t think too far ahead.
Taking time out away from your desk, going for a walk or catching up with a friend can also help to motivate you on the days when everything feels too much.
Radha’s inspiring reads
Black Box Thinking — Matthew Syed
It offers valuable lessons on the importance of learning from failures, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and employing data-driven strategies.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz
Horowitz talks candidly about managing a startup through the very tough times. It gave me both practical advice and moral support when I needed it most. It's the ultimate bible on how to get through a crisis.
Four Disciplines of Execution — Chris McChesney, Jim Huling, Sean Covey
It’s a goal-setting framework much like OKRs, but the difference is that 4DX (four disciplines of execution) actually gives your team a playbook on how to execute the company strategy.
