Like many other companies, with the onset of the pandemic, Growth Tribe faced the sudden challenge to either innovate or become irrelevant. This is the story about how we not only survived, but were able to develop a new business model and secure €3 million in funding.

I hope that, by sharing our learnings, we can help other companies facing a similar situation to weather the storm and come out stronger.

Around February 2020 we saw our revenue going down. People started to postpone their courses because they weren’t sure if they’d be allowed to fly anymore or be in a classroom together. It was clear pretty early on that social distancing was going to be a big problem for us because 95% of our learning journeys were based on in-person training.

On top of that, we had been in the process of closing a significant funding round. The final checks were being made when rumblings of COVID-19 potentially coming to Europe started coming in.

About 80% of funding rounds were being canceled at the time and we thought to ourselves, “Are we going to be in that 80% or 20%?”

At the same time a key senior employee decided to leave the company.

That was really when I felt we had hit our low point.

Antifragility

Every day we had new curveballs coming at us. “What if we don’t get the investment? Can we keep growing? What kind of government support will there be? Do we even get government support? What’s going to happen to everyone at Growth Tribe?”

In hard times, I firmly believe you need to make sure your team stays together. There are two books by Nassim Nicholas Taleb which I find really describe what we’re living through now:

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable which says that if you can’t predict the future, the crisis will always come from an unexpected event. And the second book is Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder about how only companies that are adaptable to rapid change will survive and thrive in uncertainty.

And that’s what we did.

Crisis management time

During a crisis, one of the first steps companies take is to make cuts, but startups rarely cut their way to success. They need to grow, especially early stage startups.

So we decided to take a more opportunistic-optimistic view of the situation and start experimenting with product iterations to identify and double down on big bets.

We got our directors team of six to seven people together and built a war room to tackle the question: how can we embrace this next crisis as an opportunity rather than a threat? We came up with a list of 25 ideas and ranked them based on:

The likeliness of it working

Ease of execution

How big of an impact it would have

Luckily we had already begun creating a digital hybrid of our classes before the crisis to give us more flexibility. Having all our trainers centralized in Amsterdam meant they were flying abroad to different locations for trainings. But this limited us and wasn’t sustainable from an environmental perspective.

When some of our classes across Asia started being canceled, we decided to accelerate our transition. What was supposed to happen over 12 months happened in 12 days.

I find it interesting that most corporations are killing innovation and training budgets at the moment, because that’s actually what they need most right now. If you look at some of the articles coming from publications like McKinsey and HBR , they’re all saying now is the time to experiment as fast as possible and spend more money on innovation projects.

Getting clients onboard

To make this work, we would have to show our audience something different. We would have to make it really hands on, practical, and interactive.

We quickly began experimenting both online and offline. Here I really saw the power, speed, and brainpower of everyone at Growth Tribe. The team’s reaction was impressive. We ran online smoke tests and high hurdle tests for our bootcamp courses.

For the corporate side, we had discussions with every single one of our corporate clients until we had some sort of letter of intent or quote saying there was buy-in from them to move their learning experiences online. The company became an experiment laboratory.

That took a lot of work. We’re talking: creating marketing collateral, building videos to show what the learning experience would look like, building up the online learning experience, etc. But this gave us the evidence we needed to go forward with this strategy, whether we got the investment or not.

We started creating studios and, in two weeks, we flipped the whole company. So when social distancing measures were announced in Europe, we had all our courses online already.

Since the pandemic started, we’ve trained over 500 students.

Getting investors onboard

When we came back to the investors we were prepared.

We showed them external reports, data, and graphs. But we were also able to reassure them by showing hard proof of what we had achieved in those two weeks. We had already gotten traction by selling online courses and producing letters of intent. We had already made sure that operations, HR, and our marketing materials were all aligned.

We also showed them pictures of our new creative studio. And, most importantly, we showed student feedback proving we’d been able to create the same amazing learning experience.

Ultimately, what we were able to show them was that this was actually a great opportunity and we were prepared to seize it by pivoting and adapting rapidly.

3 tips for surviving and thriving in an uncertain future

It’s really difficult to predict what will come in the future. Will the spike go up again? Will new social distancing measures be put in place? You don’t know what will happen with the economy yet, so making big plans for the future is difficult.

The first thing I’d suggest is to stay close to your customers. Before the government lockdown, a lot of companies already started imposing travel bans, which is what first alerted us. In a crisis, even if you’re not selling to them, just talk to your customers about what’s going to happen and how things are moving.

Second, experiment as fast as possible and trust your teams. We’re constantly experimenting with new products, new delivery channels, and new markets. We’re living in a new reality and when you don’t know what’s coming, the best thing to do is test, try and learn.

So make sure your team has the tools and knowledge they need to run effective experiments. And trust them. The team was 95% of the reason for our rapid pivot.

Third, spend more time re-skilling your people because the market is going to be different and it’s going to change way faster now. The rise and fall of new technology and changing market conditions will also cause a rapid change in the skills that will be needed.

Digital transformation is not about technology, it’s about talent . Prepare your company for what could come by preparing your team with the knowledge they need.

Why entrepreneurs need annoying sideline critics

Boris is the wise ol’ CEO of TNW who writes a weekly column on everything about being an entrepreneur in tech — from managing stress to embracing awkwardness. You can get his musings straight to your inbox by signing up for his newsletter!

It must be wonderful to be a sideline critic. You can easily find the defects in other people’s work or products, point them out in an annoying way, and instantly feel unique and smart. As long as you don’t have to go through the messy process of delivering on your feedback and actually fixing things, you can freely enjoy the moment and bask in your smugness.

Sadly though, sideline critics don’t get a lot of credit for their work as nobody likes to be confronted by a back-seat driver. I don’t need to tell you how deeply frustrating it is when you’ve spent blood, sweat, and tears on a project, only to have someone casually criticizing a tiny detail. And it’s even worse when they’re right.

While it’s normal to want to duct-tape their mouths closed or superglue their tongues to the roofs of their mouths, I’m afraid I’ve got tough news: you need to listen to them.

They might appear parasitic — not doing any of the work but oh so eager to tell you what’s wrong — but understanding their mindset is important and their feedback might be useful (even though you want to burn the keyboard it was written on).

After all, we entrepreneurs can take the criticism… as long as it is constructive and well-meant. We all want the same thing: to succeed. So surely we would like to hear any pesky detail (that we obviously would’ve spotted on our own, if we had the time), no matter how painful it is when it’s rubbed in our weary faces.

Yes, we will sit there politely, giving you the time of day, while we grind our teeth, hear the blood rush through our ears, and slowly breathe out volcano-hot air through our noses — because we do what it takes.

The thing is, when you’re in the thick of it, you’re the driver. You’re forced to be in the moment, viewing, analyzing, and reacting to everything that’s happening in real-time. While you’re juggling all that, you’re also reviewing, re-analyzing, and storing everything that occurred just before. And you’re anticipating, predicting, and preparing for what is about to happen next.

The ugly truth is that the backseat-driver can sometimes see more than you. They have the advantage of being able to just focus on how things appear right now, without any responsibilities.

He or she is unencumbered with any of the actual work, the reflection, prediction, or anticipation. And that, no matter how frustratingly despicable it may feel, is a good thing.

So if a sideline critic respects your hard work and offers constructive feedback, then overcome your frustration and listen. If not — and it is clear that all they want to do is inflate their own fragile ego by nitpicking at every tiny irrelevant detail — then simply tell them to stick their critique where the sun don’t shine.

Can’t get enough of Boris? Check out his older stories here , and sign up for TNW’s newsletters here .

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Why you need to stress out your co-workers… sometimes

Boris is the wise ol’ CEO of TNW who writes a weekly column on everything about being an entrepreneur in tech — from managing stress to embracing awkwardness. You can get his musings straight to your inbox by signing up for his newsletter!

Once upon a time, I bought myself a car. This was a strange time when I was wealthy on paper for a short period (about a year). It was a second-hand Jaguar, a metallic gray piece of art that rode like a dream… when it wasn’t in the shop.

Not long after I bought it, I was driving with my two co-founders. The one sitting in the back was reading something, while the one in front and I were chatting. At one point, the one in the front said, “so how fast does it go?” I simply shrugged and told him I hadn’t really figured that out yet.

The car drove so silky smooth that I felt fine just cruising below the speed limit, with music playing and the seat reclined as far back as it could safely go. But then my co-founder gave me a mischievous look. So I slowly started accelerating on the empty road we were on. We got all the way up to 230 kilometers per hour (142 mph) before the guy in the back looked up from his papers, and said: “Hey, how fast are we going?”

I was surprised how well the car performed at such a high speed; my co-founder in the back didn’t even feel it until we got well past 200 kph. My current car, a second-hand Audi, runs optimally at around 100 kph, but anything above — or even lower — feels less smooth.

I once read a story by a pilot about how airplanes are actually rumbling, leaking, and vibrating aluminum shambles until they reach real speeds. Then everything suddenly tightens, becomes stiff, and the aircraft cuts through the air like a warm knife through butter. Just like cars and other machines, they need to warm up and only find their optimal stride when the right amount of stress is applied.

I’d like to go even further and say this doesn’t just apply to machines — people, teams, and companies act the same way. Although we tend to avoid stress, we also know that a certain amount of stress, pressure, and speed is desirable. It makes us pay attention and work harder and smarter.

Case in point: having competition. Most entrepreneurs I know talk fondly of their competitors. It’s kinda nice to have a mutual enemy as a team. It’s energizing to compete, to lose a battle every now and then, and to regroup and then fight the next battle and maybe win it. Obviously, we want to win the war. Still, there’s no honor in a game where your adversary simply concedes the game before you’ve even started.

As a manager, CEO, or even as a parent, you can actually help by introducing stress into situations. Careful though, apply it like salt to a dinner; tiny bits to bring out the best in the dish, but not too much or it ruins the meal.

A deadline can be an example of artificial stress. You can also define an ‘enemy’ and it doesn’t even have to be a person or an entity. Complacency can be your team’s enemy, or uninformed customers, or low-quality products. Some managers like to create tension and stress by organizing internal competition among teams. To me, that’s a risky strategy, but it can definitely work for particular projects or teams.

Simply put, anxiety, tension, and resistance can be inspiring, motivating, and great for bonding as a team — they’re not things that should be avoided at all costs. The challenge is to find out how much is just enough.

Can’t get enough of Boris? Check out his older stories here , and sign up for his newsletter here .