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When a business grows up, the danger is that ‘je ne sais quoi’ can fall between the cracks in the floorboards as the corporateness seeps in and takes over. Holding on to that wonderful hedonistic mix of innovation, loose rules and flat structure takes storytelling, adaptability and a preparedness for failure to be applauded.
Back when I was cutting my journalistic teeth at the height of the dot com boom, I turned up at a newly born publishing house, ready to take on the world. You could almost taste the ‘cool’ vibes – meetings were conducted with feet up on desks and off the cuff, drinks were called in on random Wednesday afternoons while rolling up your sleeves and getting stuck into anything, and everything was part of the delight of it all. Hierarchy didn’t really exist, I loved it, and I also learned an incredible amount about everything because the exposure to all facets of the business was like jumping off a cliff edge in the pursuit of understanding about gravity, quickly. Yet as with any good start-up, over time the processes and procedures crept in and while we blinked, we simultaneously morphed into a mainstream business where there were rules and we were once more ravaged by strategies, meetings at tables and doing things the traditional way.
There’s an old adage that ‘all companies start off different and end up the same’. This saying forms a very healthy paranoia at Fever-Tree and acts as a passionate reminder to cling on to what made us get to where we are
Of course, as with any form of ‘growing up’ it is inevitable that maturity arrives, and those carefree days of youth slip through your fingers. Consider the likes of Dyson, Virgin Group and Asos to name but a few household favourites. They all began with that addictive helping of entrepreneurial flavour – where the rules are fast and loose or more accurately non-existent and innovation is the only currency of value. Yet, overtime they too have ‘grown up’ and with success has come a dolloping of regulations and a disappearance of those heady days where anything goes. I asked two HR leaders about whether it’s possible to hang on to the holy grail of entrepreneurship, the ‘culture’ and be successful to boot.
