Genesis 2022

We began this year by posting a job position for our business development team, and we started the journey in hunting for the right candidates who could join our team. In all fairness it was quite an interesting ride that we got to take. There are a lot of things that we ended up learning during that process of wanting to expand our team. 

Growing The Team

The reason we needed to grow our business development team was because, up until last year, our operations were mainly centered in Mwanza, and things were going well all things considered. 

Revelations

Something that happened last year that made us start to look at things a little differently. Since the beginning of the Pandemic in Tanzania, we had decided that everyone should be able to choose if they wanted to come to the office from work from home. This was a true test for us, especially being a small business, we had never tried something like this, and at the time we had just started getting that rhythm of everyone getting along at the office.

When all of us started working from home, there were some important lessons that we ended up learning almost accidentally. One of the things that we learned from this move was that we can actually survive as a small business with remote teams. Few years ago we were all meeting at the office, and now, here we are, exploring different tools to make remote work easier to manage.

Other things that happened was when we launched our new online campaigns last year, where we then started getting some calls from outside the region where we are based. As previously mentioned, before this we would primarily get clients from Mwanza, but then after we shared our work online, and started reaching out to more people, we noticed that we were attracting some attention from outside our city walls. We started getting calls from places like Dar es Salaam and Arusha. What we found to be even more profound at the time was that clients were willing to trust us with their work despite having to be far away from us. Right now, having worked with a number of remote clients, the idea is not as foreign, but at the time, this was a mind blowing fact to us.

Composite Lessons

These two lessons: that we can efficiently and effectively work remotely and that we can actually get remote clients, where the yin and the yang that just fit together perfectly. It was clear that if we were to go fully remote, we needed both of these pieces to blend together well, we needed to know that our team can work remotely, but also that we were in a position to service remote clients. 

After learning this lesson, we made a deliberate move to then reach out to more of these remote clients. We decided to bring together a remote Business Development team, that would be scattered around strategic regions that we felt could use our services.

Online craftsmanship 

So here we were, getting calls from clients outside the region, but also making deliberate moves to reach out to clients all around the country, and on the other site, trying to make sure that we are a healthy team as we worked away from each other physically. At this point we started seeing the need to have tools that would help us live the remote life.

In looking for ways to cope with this new way of life, we realized that there were two areas that we needed to be actively intentional if we were to secede, these were our social lives at the workplace, and our professional lives.

Catching Up With The Team 

Earlier on as we started the business we worked hard on creating a culture that was healthy such that the team could trust one another and respect one another. We wanted the workplace to feel like a place of growth, and that everyone could learn to become the better version of themselves. To do this we had explored different philosophies in the workplace including The Philosophy Of Family And Friends, which we shared a bit of in an earlier article. 

As we went remote, we looked for ways that would help us maintain the relationships that we had created at the workplace, as well as set precedent for the relationships that we were to build with the new business development team that we were putting together. 

One thing that we had managed to do during our time together at the office was cutting down on the number of unnecessary office meetings. We found that this really helped everyone work more efficiently and get more things done.

When we moved online, we introduced Weekly Catch-up Meetings. These Weekly Catch-Up meetings were 15-30 minutes long, and they would happen once a week. And instead of bringing everyone together, they would basically be one on one meetings, or with a few people who are directly involved in the subject matter in discussion. We found that instead of fighting with scheduling where everyone was all in sync, making use of Calendly in handling the scheduling process was very efficient. We set up a few ways how these meetings could be held including over Google Meet, over the phone and if necessary and possible, a meeting at the office. This was efficient because once a meeting was scheduled on calendly, it would automatically appear on Google Calendar, set up with all the necessary email reminders and all that. 

Getting things Done

The other side of the successful remote working environment was the office tasks management. We needed a way to make sure that the tasks that our clients tasks us with were really getting done. 

We had, in the past, used  a number of task management tools, and through trial and error we were able to settle on a set of tools that were easy to onboard the whole team and work together on.

After circling through a number of project management tools we eventually found one that the whole team was comfortable with, enter, Rock.

Stumbling On The Rock

Rock is a messenger, tasks, and notes organizing tools. Think Slack, ClickUp, and Google Docs on a single platform, that is basically what Rock is. We found that it was very easy to get onboard, and to bring everyone on. There wasn’t much to learn because the platform was very intuitive to use.

On Top of it being easy to use, we had quick access to the Rock team, baked into the app, where we could raise any concerns that we happened to have at the time. 

We actually got to enter into a partnership program, and for those of you who would like to try it out, they have a pretty handy free plan, for you can get a discount if you use our promo code during checkout NYAYOZANGUPM15.

Looking Forward

We are excited about what is to come, we feel like we are getting a hang of this. We went from a team of 4 to a team of 10, thanks for the power of remote work. As a small business, we were very concerned with how going remote would look like, but we honestly couldn’t be happier about going remote.