Based in Vancouver Island, founded by Immigrant Students & Job Seekers, we are Canada's 15th Top Growing Company & Job Providers - How did we do it?

From immigrant students and job seekers in 2013 to establishing one of the fastest-growing companies in Canada and becoming job providers in 2020 - today we attempt to make sense of it. Our entrepreneurship journey on this long and convoluted path started in 2014, and we still learn something new and dramatic every week. The excitement of the early days, the disappointments of early failures, the pivot, the ups and downs of the sales cycle when we were a fledgling team of 15, the resourcing stress when we hit 50, and now some new growing pains & opportunities as we approach the size of ~75.

Every company has a story, I’ll try to share a glimpse of ours (thus far).

Overnight success - Sure!

Starting a business is trivial (no, really). Find a product or service to sell, incorporate the business, open a bank account and boom - you have a business. However, building a long-lasting and profitable business is monumentally difficult. The odds are weighed against you, to begin with. To have a successful business, it requires years of disciplined hard work, a great amount of fortune, supporters, mentors and a community.

We were recently recognized as the 15th Top Growing company in Canada, and I’ve been asked many times about the secret behind our seemingly “overnight” success. I wish to share the real story behind our overnight success which took many years in the making.

As Richard Branson rightly said, there are no quick wins in business - it takes years to become an overnight success. I’d love to see other entrepreneurs succeed as well; business is not a zero-sum game. Unfortunately, though, there is no such secret sauce. All we have to share are our stories and maybe a few key learnings from along the way. So here’s a bit about our experience from the journey so far.

"Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years" - Bill Gates

Phase 0. The Whitelight Moment (2014)

Rohit and I started this journey in 2014 when I was still pursuing my MBA at the University of Victoria pursuing my MBA and Rohit was working at a startup. Instead of looking for a job, I decided to invest my full-time into working on the startup while Rohit kept his job & worked part-time for a year so we can pay the bills. Looking back, it was a smart strategy!

We were app developers and technologists so we had some app ideas but the market was on a different page. I have shared this part of the story on multiple occasions and here is a version at last year’s Connect conference. The consistent motivation of our mentors, our friends and some amazing members of BC Tech Community (VIATEC, Innovation Center etc.) kept the flickering flame of hope alive for us. There was no revenue until 2016, but the learnings were tremendous, which shaped most of our beliefs, values and the Freshness of our future Work.

Phase 1. Opportunity Realization - Pivot (2016)

We rebranded - and pivoted - to agile app development studio (FreshWorks) in the fall of 2016. We had realized that while most of our digital products (apps) were not embraced by the market (Product-Market fit), everyone (who used our products) loved the quality of our apps. According to this study, 80+ failed startup projects found that the most common reasons for failure are the "Lack of Product-Market Fit". We started to bootstrap our new initiative without any external investment and have never raised money for it. We have found our "Product-Market" fit where our product was our agile software development expertise.

What we were learning 

Persistence with an open mind - We were willing to let our original idea die, but that is what let FreshWorks 1.0 begin. If we had clung to our original business plan this story would be much different. The same goes if we had given up entirely. Persistence is important in entrepreneurship, but so is keeping an open mind and pivoting when needed. Easier said than done!

Thus began FreshWorks 1.0. We quickly grew to a staff of ~10 that year, and we focused on modern and agile software development. Our team was young and green, but our hopes were high and serene. The photo is from our humble beginnings - our first office in downtown Victoria where we started to establish ourselves.

Phase 2. Elephants, Deer, and Rabbits (2017-19)

We were fortunate and we worked hard, and now we had a business. We were building digital solutions for startups, SMB’s and a couple of government clients. With extreme pragmatism - we were taking a swing at the opportunities that came our way. While the cheques kept coming, we were exposed to a number of growing pains - the absence of organizational focus, employee burnout, and misaligned decision making, just to name a few. 

What we were learning

We needed focus, prioritization and a strategy to execute on. We just can't keep going after every opportunity and our team needed clear directions. We needed to have company goals, objectives, key results (OKRs) along with our vision, mission and value system. All of this was in our head but it needed to be spelled out and communicated to the team with a clear strategy. We also learnt that delegation with abdication is a recipe for failure. When you delegate to someone, you give them responsibility for something, but you stay in the information loop. Abdicating is when you give somebody responsibility and then you disappear and you're not in the information loop. Then what happens? Ahem!

These days, we follow four rules of delegation:

1. priorities assignment
2. measurement system
3. feedback through meeting rhythm
4. recognize and reward

Those rules came with time though. We’ve always tried to be authoritarian in the principles, but remain flexible in the details. Thanks to the amazing early customers, our mentors, our community and team, we grew to ~40 people by the fall of 2018, but we were in need of a scalable growth strategy that can take us to the next level.

Phase 3. Maturity and Expansion (2019-2020)

Throughout 2019, we more clearly identified our key strengths and opportunities. That tribe of smart people has continued to grow, and the challenges we face - just like our organization - has matured dramatically. We were on a hiring spree and made some fun recruitment videos such as this below to attract talent to our organization. In this interview with Douglas Magazine last year, I offered some succinct advice on some of the secrets to our entrepreneurial success.

Phase 4. FreshWorks 2.0

At the start of 2020, it was time for FreshWorks 2.0. We launched our new website earlier this year and have also moved to our new office in Victoria which can accommodate our growth. It is ironic with COVID-times as everyone is working from home but we are proud of our new space and can't wait for all of you to see it one day. Needless to say, we have the necessary COVID-Safety plan in place for our employees, clients, and visitors.

Recipe for our Growth

• Strength in Diversity: We have made a conscious effort to maintain our diversity and our people are our biggest assets. A key focus of our recruitment process is to remove any bias or prejudice and bring people from diverse backgrounds, genders, and ethnicities. We then give them all the right tools to deliver their very best. Check out this link for the summary of our recent diversity and inclusion report. To learn more about the impact this has had on our growth, check out this article.

• Rightside up Thinking: It is a way of thinking that is focused on clients, prospects, or contacts. We moved our thoughts away from ourselves and on to our clients that we wanted to help. It guides nearly everything we do here at FreshWorks as it is a way to get oneself out of our own head and to focus on whom we can provide value. In the consulting world, capturing a prospect’s attention is the beginning of the process. We are obsessed with our clients’ success and this translates into our key decision making. We focus on making it all about them and less about us - at the end of the day, we are here to solve a problem and not pitch them how great we are.
• Learn Fast, Act Fast: We have a practice of collecting consistent feedback from all levels of the organization. Polly surveys, monthly check-ins, weekly department meetings, exec drop-in hours, and HR dropbox - just to name a few mediums. We measure what matters and act quickly to make improvements in an iterative manner. Some of our best policy improvements (Promotion process, WFH workflow, skills matrix, compensation philosophy) came through employee feedback.
• Leadership principle: Whoever taps into the most brains wins: we surround yourself with a tribe of people who are smarter than us and the business thrived. We let them make the decision - a great leader is authoritarian in the principles and vision, but flexible in the details.
• Rockefeller Habits: “Goals without routines are wishes; routines without goals are aimless.” Routine sets you free, and we strongly believe in the power of discipline. The organizational habits we preach (setting department priorities, OKRs, metrics and meeting rhythms) leads to greater freedom, happier clients and employees.
• Communication, communication, and more communication: A simple yet mostly ignored subject is growing organizations. Effective communication promotes loyalty, motivation and alignment of staff. Some examples of how we promote communication - Monthly demo days, Lunch and learn sessions and Quarterly All Hands on Deck. We have embedded our values and guiding principles in our communication channels which our youngest intern to date has developed for us called Shoutouts. The idea is to give a "Shoutout" to our team-member(s) for their great work and tag a company value and guiding principle to it. With the pandemic, we continued to adapt and change our communication channels and kept our culture alive along with providing training.

• Read, Listen & Stay Humble: We learn everything by doing it and we all make mistakes and improve. There’s no alternative to it but we make far fewer mistakes if we can learn from someone else’s journey, stay humble and books unconsciously show us how to deal with the world and how pieces fit together. They help us face and overcome the internal and external challenges that have the highest likelihood of defeating us on the entrepreneurial path. Based on where you are in the entrepreneurial journey, this is a good list that will help you grow both in life and in business in order to become a successful entrepreneur. These best entrepreneur books will give you the basic knowledge about being an entrepreneur and share advice on what happens while on the journey to entrepreneurial success.
• Above all, Deliver & Have Fun: If we don't deliver on the projects, none of the above learnings would help. At the end of the day, clients hire consultants and engage our team to do a job in time and allotted budget. They shouldn't have to care about your internal issues, challenges, churn or any number of other snafus - all they should care about is timely & quality delivery on the engagement. Throughout the organization, we have several checks and balances to ensure we do exactly that. All this while, don't forget to take it easy, have some fun, add some humour, be authentic and just be a nice human being.

Wrap up thoughts

We are currently ~75 people strong and still seeking more great people to add to the team It seems hard to believe that FreshWorks has been helping startups, innovators, businesses, the public sector and all-around creatives to convert their ideas/processes into digital solutions. For our part, this couldn’t have happened without the passion and dedication of our hard-working teams. 

As we enter into our 5th year, the future here at FreshWorks is full of excitement and improvements across the board. And that is all because of your continued support, which has allowed us to take the time and do things right. We’ve spent the last 4 years building our team and maturing our processes so that we’ll be able to scale and enhance our services & offerings. All of this goes hand in hand with our commitment to offering you industry-leading technology from our knowledgeable teams who put your needs, privacy, and security ahead of everything else (Rightside up Thinking in practice). 

My most sincere gratitude goes out to everyone who has supported us over the past years. I still feel that our journey has just started and we have miles to go before we sleep. Thank you for being an integral part of this extraordinary journey our company has been on, please buy local, and keep innovating in the coming year!