3-day meet-up and a €300 taxi bill

A few weeks back, we had our third meet-up at Herodesk.

While we're still a small company, we've grown from tiny to small. That's something! The first two meet-ups last year were just Sara and me, and the second was Ferhat, Sara, and me.

This time, all eight of us spent three days together in Aarhus, Denmark. While I've met everyone (except for one person) one or more times, it was the first time the whole team went together, and the first time most people actually met each other in person.

As one colleague told me on one of the evenings: "It's weird, I've never met these people before, but it doesn't feel like that. It feels like I really know them!"

We're a fully remote company. Everyone is working from their own place. 6 here in Denmark, spread across 6 cities, and two in Turkey (also living a few 100 miles apart). To have a colleague tell me that makes me so proud, because it shows that we've built a really strong culture and collaboration across our three teams (sales, customer success, and product).

The meet-up took place at a really nice hotel and conference centre in the northern part of Aarhus (trust me, it's much nicer than it sounds!). A perfect location in the middle of great nature with only 10 mins from the city centre, great amenities with breakfast, lunch and (optional) dinner, and a choko-espresso that's to die for!

Anyway, bringing 8 people together for three days, all expenses and everything paid for, isn't exactly cheap, so of course, there's a deeper meaning to it.

First and foremost (and forgive my enterprise-lingo): Team building, in the literal sense of it. I really feel I've found the right core team that'll take Herodesk from ~28k MRR to 100k MRR, and more. We all love and enjoy the perks of being fully remote, but it's still important to meet up once in a while to recharge our social batteries so we can go another stint in high-execution mode.

Under the headline "team building" (I really need to find a better term for this), the agenda was:

Day 1: Kick-off (me speaking for an hour), AI workshop, team dinnerDay 2: Full day workshop with Talent X (shoutout!) focusing on our individual and team top talents, a fun activity and steak dinnerDay 3: AI workshop, break-out sessions and wrap-up

Our two team members from Turkey flew in the day before. Because one of the guys had been in Denmark last year for our last meet-up, the Embassy said he didn't need a new VISA (you need that for work-related trips). Although all papers were in place, the airline didn't believe him and rejected him. They contacted the Danish border police (on a Sunday, good luck with that) to get confirmation. Which they got, confirming that he is welcome and can go! An hour after take-off... So yeah, he was re-booked to another flight the next day and missed most of day 1. And this is where we learned the price of a taxi from Billund Airport to Aarhus (yup, €300)... But hey, whatever, shit happens, he quickly caught up and was here in time for dinner!

In my speech to the team on Monday morning, I took the opportunity to step back and reflect on how far we've come. I want to share a few of the slides...

MRR growth since we started. Up and to the right 📈 We're currently adding about €3.000 new MRR every month, and by the time you read this, it'll be close to (if not passed) €28.000.

I also tried to look ahead a bit and focus on what we'll be facing the rest of the year.

We're at an equally exciting and difficult phase right now. We need to nearly double our MRR to become cash flow positive. The competition is getting more and more intense and fierce by the week. And coupled with almost 1.000 active users now (growing quickly) who put strain on the systems and have lots of feedback, feature requests, and questions, there are a lot of balls to juggle at the same time (I love it - this is what my entrepreneur-heart beats for!).So, yeah, anyway, when I emptied my brain on what I think will happen the rest of the year, it looked something like this:

We gotta focus on the core: Make customer support easy!That's the reason Herodesk was created, and it's what we work to deliver every day.

We must make it easy for our customers to give great customer service to their customers, ultimately making it easy for them to do business.

We must be profitable (or at least have a path to profitability), be professional, and have fun!

In product, it means we must carefully consider what we are building and why, to be sure it is the right features for our customers. And we must ensure that our product is always reliable, super fast, and super user-friendly.

In support, it means we must have best-in-class customer onboarding and service. If we, as a customer support system, are not frontrunners and setting an example for how to deliver the best possible service, then who should be?

In sales, it means we must be disciplined, diligent and ensure that we only and always sell our product to the right customers. Nobody wins if we try to sell to everyone, even the ones we know are not a match for our product. Yes, it'll generate some (very) short-term revenue, but shortly after, it'll lead to churn and angry (now-former) customers who bad-mouth us. No thanks!

If we manage to do this, I'm not only sure that we'll have doubled our business in 6 months and be profitable, but we'll have laid the foundation to take this further than any of us originally dreamed of.

Which brings me to day 2: Full-day workshop.

It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of TalentX and their personal talent profiles. I find that it helps me put words to and a science behind the gut feelings I have about people. It explains how they think and why they act as they do. So everyone joining Herodesk takes such a test as part of the hiring process, to ensure there's a match.

That's also one of the things I enjoy most about having started my own company. I get to hand-pick everyone I work with.

It is (apparently) very rare that you find a start-up team as aligned as we are, in terms of our top and bottom talents. What comes most natural to us, and what drains us. Check this out:

I'm sure that the people who know me can recognise my top talents. But check out how aligned it is with the rest of the team...

Targeted: We know where we're going, and we're driven to get there.Responsible: A promise is a promise.Positive: It'll all be fine!Problem solver: Jumping on problems and fixing them as quickly as possible.Confident: We got this!Just: We gotta treat everyone fair and play by the rules.Innovative: Thinking out of the box to create new ideas and alternative solutions.Strategic: Seeing multiple scenarios, anticipating obstacles, and finding the best path forward.Focused: Filtering out distractions to deep-dive into a task and get it done.

Now, compare this with what we're doing and how we're doing it. Building a startup in a highly competitive and innovative market, working fully remote 99% of the time.

It's a fucking winning team that's fully aligned on what, how and why!And I can promise you: the next hires we make will be just as aligned with our mission and the way we work.

An aligned, high-performing team.A great product.Great customer service.

It's the winning formula! It is no more complicated than that.

But it can't all be serious when we get together like this. We've gotta have some fun, too (remember?).

First, I had arranged a surprise for the team at a local place in Aarhus called "Vin and Petanque" (which translates directly to "Wine and Petanque"), which is exactly what it is.

I'm not saying I won... But I definitely didn't lose 😎 (Targeted and Competitive as top talents in my profile, he he)

Followed by (what their ads claim to be) the best steak in Aarhus.

And yes, those ribeyes were pretty amazing!

And yes, I got out-of-control excited to see our name on the door like that! What an amazing gesture. And a great lesson... It often takes so little effort to do something special for a customer that they'll not only remember it, but also talk about it for a long, long time to come!

I headed home after this. I knew I had to get up at 5.30 am to take care of our baby girl, so it was probably the right decision for everyone that I called it a night.

Rumours say that the team continued to a local bar and only went home when it closed... And that they continued at the hotel until.. Well, late. And you know what? I love it! I absolutely love that they had a great night together, hung out, had fun, got to know each other (in real life!), and just had a blast.

And with that, only the last of our three days together was left.

After a slow start and breakfast (which was probably for the better, LOL), we regrouped and spent the day finalising our AI projects that we started on day one.

The idea is that everyone should try to build their own AI agent to help them with something every day. I wanted everyone to "dip their toes in the AI-waters" and get some inspiration and an idea about what it can do. Here are some of the projects that were completed:

An AI Agent that joins customer calls, takes notes, writes up a summary with action points and creates a draft follow-up email to the customer.

An AI Agent that creates a full report every morning of everything you have to do, preparing notes, summaries and short briefs on all tasks, customers and leads set for follow-up today.

A vibe-coded WordPress plugin for our website that analyses a lot of SEO-related things, such as meta tags, alt tags, headers, etc., and automatically generates new ones where they were missing or not good enough (more than 300 tasks were completed in less than 10 minutes with this plugin).

I know how much value our AI agents bring to our customers. They are amazing and handle so much automatically for them, freeing up time (and money) AND gives the customers a great experience (instant reply and resolution - who doesn't love that?), and because I still aim to run Herodesk with as small a team as possible, we must also use all the tech available and various AI agents to work smarter and automate all the tedious stuff that we can.

The goal of this workshop was to introduce everyone to AI agents and get them started working with them daily, and I can already see the benefits.

And that wraps it up. Three great days together at our bi-annual meet-up. The most important thing was team-building (I still hate that word), and I really feel we did it. The social batteries have been recharged, we've gotten to know each other personally (all the activities) and professionally (talent tests) and also did some productive work with AI agents and just getting some time to sit together and do our job.

How lucky are we that we get to work and live like this 😄