War is a terible and painful. Yet, there is one thing we started to do at ehotel.cz, that was inspired by what soldiers do when times are hard.
The principle of startup work is easy like this: Vaist majority of things you do, will fail. To win the war, you have to loose most of the battles. A startup life, as Ben Horowitz says, consists of long periods of struggle interrupted by short bursts of euphoria.
Startup live is a struggle
Sometimes, the struggle periods can be long and the team might not see the light at the end of the tunnel. Soldiers at war have always received and wrote letters to their loved ones. They keptthe pictures of them to remind them, why the struggle matters. Even the bravest soldier or team member can loose morale when no positive news for some time.
Why do we wake and go to work up in the morning? We remind ourselves often
This is why I encourage my team at ehotel.cz to collect and share stories of happy customers. I ask the customer service team to write down a summary of every call from happy customer. I ask them to jot down stories how we solved our customers problems, how we performed way beyond expectation. I ask the marketing team to record successfull campanins. I ask the sales team to record a stories of grateful clients. We keep those stories in a Trello board.
When times are hard, we can always go always remind ourselves that there are people – our customers – that love us. This remind us why to wake up every morning and go to work, even in long periods of rain.
