Yulia Koroleva is a Chief Business Development officer and a co-founder at Code Inspiration – software development and consulting company from Belarus. She works with clients as well as elaborates the overall business strategy of the company together with other top managers.
What were the top 3 mistakes you made as an entrepreneur, and if you could start over what would you do differently?
Talents
So, when we started building a company, we hired middle developers mostly, good enough to deal with ongoing tasks, but unable to propose elegant solutions or add performance to ongoing operations. Then we came to a conclusion that when a specialist is purposeful, innovative-minded, he can add value to the team’s work outputs by his expertise, life attitude, problem-solving approach, such a developer is more reliable and benefits to the overall company’s reputation. Thus, we decided to increase the talent density in the company. As a result, we started to achieve more goals following the company’s strategy, and the team’s performance improved. Today we do our best to find and hire developers with advanced skills and vast experience, good personal qualities, and loyal to the company. The truth is that we can overcome crisis only together and only with reliable specialists.
Controls
At the beginning, we also tried to document and formalize as many processes as possible like many other companies do all over the world. We defined schedules for developers’ vacations, working hours, permissions, and so on. However, practice shows that when the team consists of reliable, experienced specialists, excessive control doesn’t contribute to the development of a productive atmosphere and efficient workflow. We decided to remove some monitoring and controlling aspects, such as, for instance, necessity to work at the office only, requirement to start and finish working day at definite hours, some restriction policies. As a result, we got more productive teamwork, began to achieve more goals than had expected, and simply managed to do more tasks at the same time.
Feedback
The main point is that when the company and number of employees is growing, there is less and less space for simple feedback activities. Probably, we could have avoided some mistakes in business strategy if we talked with our employees more and listened to their feedback. I’m 100% sure that any business owner or manager should not underestimate the feedback of his team players. And the problem is that the higher the executive is – the less feedback he receives. Actually collecting feedback is important so that not only to avoid business mistakes but also in order to improve yourself as a professional.
If I could start over I would change the procedure of taking software development projects. At the beginning, we were taking almost all the projects that met our budget expectations and did not pay much attention to their idea and business strategy selected by owners. After some time we understood that such projects, which are usually short-term, do not bring much satisfaction to the team, there were few enjoyable challenges. We decided to distance from such an “assembly line of software development projects” strategy. Today we focus more on long-term projects with ambitious and innovative ideas behind, preferring those in which we believe and which are exciting to develop. Understanding that you are creating something useful, something that makes people’s lives better is important for us.
Yulia Koroleva co-founder of Code Inspiration
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