My 5-year journey in running a company

5 years… it’s been an amazing journey. This is what I tell most people. The truth is, the “amazing” parts are shadowed by the heart-wrenching parts, and the heart-wrenching parts are the ones I remember most.

Not because I like to dwell on pain, but because the heart-wrenching moments have taught me the largest lessons. I shall attempt to share, as briefly as I can, what these moments were and how they’ve shaped me. 

Most of you know I’ve been running Tabula Rasa for 5 years now; last August, I made the decision to shut the business down and it was a painful one. We had run into some cash flow issues and contracts were cancelled, throwing us into disarray.

I panicked, I had a team of 6 then, how was I to feed everyone? What about the existing projects? What about new projects that were in talks - if we were to close them, can I still fulfill what was promised? 

For 5 years, my key panic attacks are always around the same issues - the team, the clients, the projects. 

1. The Team

Building a solid team has always been my dream. In the early days, I looked at other companies with great teams in envy and have always wanted a team of my own. I started hiring in the second year, and I’ve had my ups and downs. I’m lucky enough to say that I’ve had pretty good teammates in the past few years - teammates who would call me out on things, teammates who’d put the company above their own needs, teammates who stood by me in times of crisis. On the flipside, I’ve also hired wrongly and badly - I’ve had people who took advantage of the company, who did things to harm the company. 

It has been a journey of ups and downs, and in August, when I had to go into the office to let people go, it was one of the toughest days of my life. I told myself that I would not cry that day. I went in, sat each person down individually and explained the situation and what was to come. I thought I’d have to angry and confused colleagues, and that would elevate my guilt. To my surprise, every single one of them was kind and understanding, and told me to take care of myself, that they were grateful for the opportunity to work in Tabula Rasa. My heart was full and I could not have asked for a better way to deal with this problem. 

So, in 5 years, I’ve had a team, many teams in fact as people came and went. And I must say, knowing that people have your back, that’s one of the greatest feelings in the world. I thank every single person who has come through Tabula Rasa’s doors, all of you have played a part in the growth of the company, and you’ll always be a part of my journey. 

2. The clients

In the beginning, getting clients was one of the hardest things to do, especially when I was on my own. If it wasn’t for a previous client who trusted us with her launch event, we wouldn’t have kicked things off. Things have since changed and in 2018, we started to have the luxury of picking our projects and clients. We wanted to work with clients who believed in the same values as we did, who ran on the same integrity space as we did, and we wanted projects of meaning. 

This meant giving up on other types of projects or clients who couldn’t either afford us, or aligned with us. Walking away from some clients was rough because to me, it has always been about servicing the client. But in 2018, when we met a few clients who started to behave in ways we did not approve of (namely, treating my team with disrespect), I realised that it was time we treated ourselves with a bit more dignity. Bending over backwards to service clients is something the events industry does a lot, but we couldn’t do it anymore. 

So we changed our model, and would only work with clients who saw us as a partner, not a vendor. Clients who respected that they were working with a company of calibre and had reasons for charging the way we did. We saw a huge shift in clientele and portfolio -- more clients came to hear of us and the way we worked, and that gave us more room to create and curate.

So, one of the biggest lessons walking away from this is that I’m glad that during the course of the last 5 years, I’ve had the chance to grow the company in a way that satisfies my appetite yet maintain integrity and a value-system. In running a company, if we’re not able to look ourselves in the mirror and say it’s okay, then it’s not okay. 

3. The projects

As we grew, we not only realised that the type of clients we worked with were important, the types of projects we chose to do was important too. We had the opportunity to work with SMU Lien Centre on the Social Innovation Festival in 2017 and that changed everything around. I saw what it was like for the team to be working on such a meaningful project, one that targeted important topics, curated important lessons, and brought together a community.

We started to drive our events towards a more community-building, user-centric experience. This was how Empiricon was born. The name Empiricon comes from ‘empiricism’, another John Locke philosophical theory where sensory experiences drive knowledge absorption. We truly believe in that. And in 2018, the opportunity came for us to be a part of the Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology as a partner event, and we took it. 

It was our first attempt at creating an event of our own, and it wasn’t a simple small get-together, it was a large conference straddling the tech ecosystem and the sustainability community. The great thing was that we already knew how to run events, but curating a whole agenda and programme on topics we could only research on, this was a whole new ballgame. In came our partners and friends, wonderful souls from the community and larger ecosystem who supported us and co-curated content with us. Without these brilliant people, we could not possibly have pulled it off, to be honest.

So, my takeaways -- in wanting to achieve a dream, one cannot do it alone. I not only needed my team to buy into the vision of it and work their asses off, I also needed the support and friendship of many other people to help pull this off. 

With projects like Empiricon, the stress comes from branding it as our own event, but the joys come from knowing that we weren’t alone in the journey. 

--

Thus, even though the company is closing down this year, we’ve had a good 5 year run, and in this 5 years, I’ve met wonderful amazing people, from colleagues and teammates to ecosystem partners (I can’t possibly tag everyone so I won’t but you know who you are) and mentors and friends. 

This may be the end of Tabula Rasa, but it’s the continuation of such beautiful relationships that have been cultivated in the past 5 years. I look forward to contributing to the events industry more, and to collectively work together with everyone to further dreams and push for good things.

Tabula Rasa says goodbye now.