Lopo Champalimaud is the founder of Wahanda, a community and the health market and welfare
over the past five years I have made a radical change for my business' direction. Two times. Making the decision to rotate is never easy, but looking back, both times, it was the right thing to do at the time. As a result, the past 24 months have been among the most challenging and rewarding of my career.
A new era of tech events began
We're back in New York in November for the 4th edition of our technology event focused on growth.
Today, our company is growing at 250 percent year on year. We have over 5,000 rooms signed up to our platform and more than 60,000 orders through the platform each month. But getting here was not easy.
There are three major elements that have played an important role in our history so far, but to understand why it is important to understand the context. Hope to share our experience will help to reassure other entrepreneurs who might be on a roller coaster of their own.
Clear vision and ambition
Knowing what the "big idea" and how you plan to be get is critical. It is the thing that will help you determine the possibility of distraction that you really start to scale your business. It will also be the stake in the ground around which your discussions about whether or not to rotate center will.
When we founded our company five years ago, we decided to create the OpenTable for hair and beauty. The hairdressing industry and beauty in the UK has a value of over £ 10 billion a year, but there was no market that has helped consumers find and book services in this area. We wanted to be a global winner in the category.
The unexpected rise of the "daily deal" in 2010 forced us to quickly adapt our vision and move away from our original intention. When the daily deal business model began to gain ground in the US, we have seen a large focus area was on spas and salons and so we responded quickly.
This gave us the opportunity to launch a daily deal platform focused beauty in the UK and has seen this business grow rapidly, which established Wahanda with consumers and suppliers.
Trust your instinct
While daily deals were extremely popular and grew to represent nearly 70 percent of our turnover, we felt instinctively that there was plenty of untapped potential for trade shows - well beyond what they received through daily agreements. fatigue and consumer distrust providers were treated daily economy less attractive and therefore less viable as a long-term business model.
But breaking with the daily deals market - which accounted for almost three quarters of our turnover - did not seem business sense
.We decided to stay with daily deals, but at the same time remould the company in a booking engine that would help spas and salons fill empty appointments with customers long-term value, which potentially long not only on the market for the lowest price they could find.
Take the hard decisions
We started the transition process in early 2012, and I had hoped that both companies could coexist. However, in the autumn of this year, I came to the difficult realization that in order to move the company forward as we would need to close the daily deal side of the business completely.
The change meant the company would need to focus all its energy and resources on building a new platform. This was to be the second pivot in two years.
Thus, in October 2012, we turned off our milking platform daily and bet the company on our real-time booking system for flight spas and salons.
The transition has not been easy, but ultimately was the best decision we could have made. This meant we had to completely transform the business model, people and the platform that powered the site.
Within six months, we changed our CTO, Sales Manager, Operations Manager, CFO and Director of Marketing. It was a lonely time and they were great decisions, costly to make. I was fortunate to have a group of investors who believed in the vision, supported me and helped me to attract a world-class team to continue to build the business with me.
Could we have arrived at this point without aggressively prosecute trafficking everyday avenue? I'm not so sure. Daily Deals helped us build our base of suppliers and establish with consumers, but it may not be the only goal of the company.
The lesson here is that I knew what we had to do long before we did. More importantly, juggling two models is difficult -. Once you decide to make the change, you need to focus all your energies on the future platform
renounce short-term income for long-term viability could make sense on paper, but when you see it hit the cash flow impact and life, it is not so easy to make the call.
If you wonder constantly take your business in a completely new direction, it should take this a little thread to see where it goes. You experience these thoughts for a reason.
Looking back and looking ahead
Would I have done anything different? It's hard to admit, but probably not. I am confident that the information we had at the time, we took the right decisions. Today we have the best team I've ever worked with, and maybe together we could where we are today faster, but I really appreciate the lessons I, and the team, learned along the way.
So what's in store for the future? We are working quickly to become a first-mobile phone company, focusing on hyper-local improvements for customers and locations to support global growth.
Sometimes you have to trust your instinct and learn to accept change. You can not reach the future if you refuse to let go of the past.
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