Saying Goodbye to Quantico

Last month I made a controversial decision with Quantico. I decided to rebrand.

?

Now, if you talk to the top marketing agencies around London - and I did - they’ll quickly set you straight:

• Changing a company name is almost never a good idea
• You need a minimum of 6 months to do it right
• It’s only really worth it if you can budget at least ￡60k

Having heard that advice I did the sensible thing and…

… Decided to do it anyway!??

Whenever I hear ‘you probably shouldn’t do that’ I just can't help myself.

But of course we're not the kind of company that has 6 months and ￡60k. So we got to work with a budget of ￡6k and a deadline of 6 weeks! We’re currently half way through.?

Very brave or very stupid?? Let’s dive in.?

Wait but why?

I had a lot of rational reasons for wanting to rebrand:

• Google rankings and SEO
• Trademarks
• Not sharing a name with a TV show
• Wanting to feel like a grown up business that wasn't named in a pub
• We thought we could do it better than Elon Musk

But to be honest the marketing agencies were right. None of these reasons really stacked up by themselves.

That's OK though. Brands aren't rational things nor should they be. Behind all the pitch decks and spreadsheets the real reasons for a rebrand are always emotional.

The real reasons

My personal objectives in business have always been to make a difference, have fun and get rich, in that order. And it was a desire to make a difference that set me off with Quantico.?

I felt totally let down by accounting.?

I put in three years of hard, boring work to qualify, but instead of getting a rewarding job at the end of it I felt trapped doing work I didn’t care about. The profession was completely stuck in the past.?

So I set up Quantico to try to make more fulfilling careers for myself and the next generation of finance professionals, and that’s what’s got me out of bed every morning since.?

More than just finance

But the longer I’ve spent working on this goal the more I’ve come to realise something.?

I thought the frustration and shitty careers were caused by the unique problems in accounting. But actually the problem is much wider.?

It’s just not accountants who feel unfulfilled in their jobs. Pretty much everyone in our generation has felt this pain at some point.?

We entered the workforce with so much positivity and optimism. But somewhere along the way those dreams of changing the world got traded in for sending boring emails to people we don’t care about. We accepted Monday morning blues, exploitative bosses, and that nagging feeling that we’re not fulfilling our true potential.?

We tell ourselves that it’s normal, that jobs are meant to be boring. But my theory is it really doesn’t have to be this way.?

We shouldn’t have to settle for work we don’t believe in, that doesn’t make us happy or colleagues we don’t like.

Not working for startups either

And just as I found with finance, the most innovative startups and businesses are being really let down by the old ways of working too. The more time I spent working with founders the more I heard that they’re also desperate for help.

They feel held back by boring accounting firms who don’t get them, lawyers who charge thousands to answer an email and HR reps who are more interested in covering the company’s back than helping people.

Long story short, it’s not just finance that isn’t working for people or startups. It’s work in general.?

What’s going wrong?

Trying to fix our relationship with work is far from simple, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore it.?

Over the last five years of building Quantico I’ve had the opportunity to speak to literally hundreds of finance people about their careers and well over a hundred founders about their startups. I’ve also experienced the pain points myself on both sides of that equation.

My theory is that 90% of the problems people experience today come back to one cause:

The employer-employee relationship we have today is out of date. It’s a legacy of 20th century working practices and it isn’t fit for our generation.

• It assumes that everyone will have one job for life
• Progression is encouraged only within the organisation, not out of it
• Power and control defaults to the employer
• Employees are treated as identical and interchangeable units
• There’s a false dichotomy between employee and self employed and no space in between

The fundamental result is a lack of flexibility, transparency, progression and, ultimately, fulfillment.?

This is the problem we’re crazy enough to think we can take on.?

Listening to what people want

We gave ourselves six weeks to complete the rebrand exercise, but in a way it’s a lie to say it only takes six weeks.?

Because all the conversations and brainstorming about what we stand for started six years ago, when I first left my corporate job to create something better. A rebrand isn’t something that you come up with ‘during a rebrand’ or a big brainstorm. It’s something that grows inside you organically over time.?

In business I’ve always been a big believer in listening to people and giving them what they want. It’s something I’ve learnt the hard way several times with Quantico.?

First we transitioned from Quantico Analytics to Financial based on what we heard, then we pivoted from a fancy accounting firm model to a new type of team. This is the next step in our journey.?

Are we crazy?

So we’re going to be very busy with the last three weeks of our rebrand, working hard to present a solution to the big problems of the world!?

It feels like we must be utterly crazy to think we tackle something so big. But who knows, maybe if we’re crazy enough to think we can change the world, we just might.?

And if we don't, at least we’ll have fun trying :)?

Please join us on 9th August for our launch party to discover what we’ve got in store.?