People First – Maintaining a Sight of What Is Important

Mind your time to market, innovate, stay ahead of the competition, raise your shares’ value, raise profit, create brand awareness – all at the speed of light because instant gratification is what we’ve been taught to crave for and at the end of the day we create business for the purpose of profit, right? Right…and wrong.

Whereas, there is no denying financial means are necessary in order to support our needs and wellbeing, building your business with the sole purpose of profit in mind, might work for a while; however not sharing the results of your success precisely with the ones that have helped you attain it, is no way a long-term winning strategy. Yes, as a business creator you are indeed entitled to a little more, because of the risks and responsibilities that lie on your shoulders, the long hours and the many sleepless nights spent trying to find the best course of action. But, as a wise business creator, you will also realize that focusing just on that will demotivate your people. As a wise business creator, you will realize that your people will take care of your business if you also take care of them. Some people are loyal by nature, some peoples’ loyalty is built by the force of the example and there will always, also, be people whose loyalty will be contextual. As a wise business creator, you will be able to tell the difference and always keep in mind, at the end of the day, your business is about people.

P4B stands for ‘people for business’ and it’s about us, the people who have been here from the very beginning, feeling and believing we could create something different; it’s also about the people who at a certain point chose a different road; it’s also about the people who came along the way, decided to stay and continue to built with us the dream of something different; it’s also about the people who will join us and who we’re eager to meet, learn from and continue to grow together.

From the very beginning we’ve been aiming at creating a non-hierarchical organization doubled by an open-door policy; a meritocratic structure where leaders would be organically designated by their followers; a context that would encourage people to speak up in an assertive manner, question courses of action and come up with improvement suggestions; an environment that motivates people to learn continuously, improve their existing abilities or completely change their activity filed, should they feel something different better fits their aspirations.

As a 7+ years old organization we have experienced a few things: unexpected situations have at times caught us by surprise, some things had to be course-corrected, some ideas had to be postponed, others completely abandoned.

There are however two aspects that stayed the same – people first and Nora, the Golden Retriever, our Chief Happiness Officer.