REBORRN turns 6: How it started, how it’s going.

Starting a company has the chance of success of threading a needle while riding a rollercoaster. The fact alone that we exist 6 years after the day we started REBORRN is worth celebrating. This is a long read of the learnings, successes and failures along the way.

How it started.

6 years ago, we started a company in my home office in stealth mode. We didn’t know what it would be exactly, we just knew that we wanted to build a different kind of consultancy.

We started REBORRN with a thesis that the business model of how management consultancies work needs to be challenged. Don’t take my word for it:

You can read our thesis on our new website (that we finally found the time to redesign after a busy 5 year period), but the gist is that we started by challenging 3 areas against our MBB & Βig4 friends:

Our core Thesis as the starting point:
Pricing, People, Ways of working.

1. Pricing: We believe that making money based on “hours spent” is counterproductive and naturally incentivises the supplier to work longer and sometimes invent work to make a decent profit. On the contrary, we believe that in a fast-changing world, we should be getting paid more if we deliver a certain outcome faster.

   
   To this day, we have not negotiated a single engagement based on effort. We are only charging our work based on value and sometimes performance. We have never submitted a man-hour rate list to any procurement department. Ok, maybe we did once or twice.

2. People: When we founded REBORRN, we had the vision of building a management consultancy with no consultants, recruiting builders, entrepreneurs, engineers, creatives, and people from the industry, but no consultants.

   
   To this day, this holds true. More than 95% of our 45-strong team has no consulting background. This is game-changing for the kind of work we deliver and the relationships we build, mainly because it’s easier to put ourselves in our clients’ shoes, having been where they are.
   

3. Ways of working: From the very beginning of our existence, we passionately believed that there were faster, better (and more fun) ways to get things done. We started experimenting with new approaches, in the beginning using our gut feeling and some things that were based on our prior experience in the Ad industry and then incorporating frameworks and theories of others. So we started with “the 58” as our flagship approach to problem-solving, which we evolved and expanded its scope to incorporate elements from Design Thinking and Design Sprint Methodology, Agile Methodology, the concept of Hackathons, and many more approaches that we found in our endless exploration.

   
   To this day, getting people in a room without distractions and a clear challenge to solve is our go-to method to solve problems. And boy, it works.

Our Values as Our Compass

In our early days, a small team of people co-created the values and behaviours we wanted to model while working at REBORRN. We even agreed on the things that we are willing to sacrifice in order to be true to our values and then applied this mindset in every aspect of the way we do things. From the kind of people we hire to how we choose to engage with our clients in project work, our Values are our absolute compass in everything we do. Through the years, we have developed an operating system that lives and breathes these values.

Our Purpose as our Northstar:
To Constantly find better ways for the world to work.

When we asked ourselves in the very beginning why start REBORRN, the answer was very simple: Because we want to be in the business of finding better ways for things to work, and it seems that we have the audacity to believe that we can.

So, the endless curiosity and the passion to change things for the better is what has driven us since then and still does to this day.

How it’s going

Offering: What we do today

We deliberately started with a pretty vague offering because we tried to identify the little blue oceans in the market, things - or the combination of things - that no one else (or very few) out there did. Through a 6-year exploration, we have identified most, not all, of our little blue oceans, and we still have a way to go in some areas.

• We have built a world-class Organisation Design Practice that specialises in building faster, more flexible organisations that are resilient to change. We do that with a unique, design-led approach that goes beyond delivering ppts, to getting to the end of things. We empower organisations and teams, reshaping their operating systems and crafting exceptional employee experiences. Our goal is to unlock the highest levels of potential, ensuring every organisation thrives.

• We are proud of our CX & Process Innovation Practice. A small (compared to the scale of these kinds of projects) but mighty team that helps with an End-to-end approach to building better Customer Experiences from audit to strategy to solution design to implementation with two incredible CRM and engineering teams that we are building at REBORRN.

• We have built a very niche practice that helps multi-market marketing organisations transform and change how marketing is done for the better.

The little blue oceans that we discovered on our way here were only possible because of the hybrid we built, bringing together Consultants and makers. As an example, we are one of the few places in the world where you might find in an organisation design project team:

• a Data Scientist,

• working with a Process Expert,

• A communications expert,

• A visual designer & a writer,

• all led by an Organisation Designer.

This 2023 reel summarises well what we do at REBORRN:

Growing like a start-up but with profit.

We started REBORRN in London with the ambition to build an international business that will address a Huge market in one or smaller niche areas that we could play with little to no competition.

Looking at REBORRN’s performance in these past 6y:

• We enjoy healthy profitability that is above the industry average.

• We are growing with a CAGR (Cumulative Annual Growth) of 48.5%.

• 82% of our business comes from international multi-market partnerships.

REBORRN’s flywheel

Last year, we looked back and collectively tried to identify the core parts of the engine behind REBORRN’s remarkable growth. And we came up with this flywheel.

1. Building a thriving reputation,

is important for growth and getting great people on board.

REBORRN’s growth is not fueled by outbound sales, advertising, or any other push-centric approach to attract new business. 100% of our business is inbound and directly linked to everything we do to build our reputation.

• Participating in international and national fora

• Sharing our work transparently with the world through our Substack publication

• Building communities of practice like #CXGreece

• Producing podcasts like the one we did for Rewired

These are some of the examples of how we built our reputation.

2. Great People,

not growth is the most important part of our business.

Tech Companies are in the business of selling software, and we are in the business of selling intellectual capital. Building a collective obsession around attracting and retaining great people through a state-of-the-art employee experience is the second core part of our flywheel.

While the flywheel inevitably starts with Growth, in services, it’s always revenue before cost, people are more important than growth. For instance, in 2023, we didn’t actually reach our stretched annual targets, not because there wasn’t enough business to win; we just didn’t manage to attract the quality (and quantity) of talent we were looking for.

There are roles that remain open for months or even years until we onboard the right person for a certain job, especially for senior roles.

As such, we wouldn’t be able to run this business if we were not lucky enough to onboard such talented people on our way here. People who chose us over a big corporate job in the industry, equity on a start-up or beginning their own thing. People that chipped in our vision for a new kind of management consultancy.

We thank each one of them separately and wholeheartedly. You know who you are. ❤️

3. Do more with less,

is not as easy as it sounds.

As we grow in headcount, teams, and customers, chaos naturally emerges. Our operating model is an indispensable part of our flywheel and helps to remove the friction of our everyday work. While the tendency is to build more processes to solve chaos, we must resist this. I have written about this in the past.

Instead, we should use technology to automate what can be automated, think smart about documentation and reusability to achieve the same outcomes with less effort and maintain high talent density in our teams. This will ensure that, as we grow, we have the right people who can navigate uncertainty, ambiguity, and a bit of chaos.

REBORRN will always lean toward an operating model based on trust, self-management, and self-learning. We must make sure that everyone is on board with this.

4. Innovation.

The world is an endless playground of exploration.

Our mission is to find better ways for the world to work constantly. Working at REBORRN should be like Alice in Wonderland: no limits to our curiosity, no boundaries to the things we do and how we do them. Since we started, we never stopped exploring. We are constantly exploring new services to integrate into our existing offering, and through the years, we have built at least 3 entirely new ventures that I can remember. The moment we stop exploring is the moment REBORRN will no longer exist. 🙂

Fuck ups & Learnings

Not everything is rosy.

• We are not everyone’s cup of tea.

Whenever we tried to fit into other people’s way of working and culture, our teams suffered from toxic projects & relationships. Since we fucked up once or twice we are politely saying no to partnerships, and more than once, we have gone as far as firing a client.

• If you want to make something fail, make it someone’s part-time job.

Being in this playground of exploration, we sometimes end up with too many eggs in our basket. We’ve started building products that were never released, we built ventures that didn’t meet their potential because we did not put the necessary commitment in resources and, more importantly, in people.

• We need to be more intentional in taking care of our Operating System.

Prioritising billable engagements for our internal rituals or putting effort into evolving our own operating system is a recipe for disaster.

• First, who, then what.

It took some time to learn that whenever we stumble upon an amazing talent that fits our culture, we should hire them, no questions asked, even if it’s not obvious what their role will be or how we are making returns from their work.

There are people who have changed the course of our company because they joined, and others whom we deeply regret that we didn’t hire when we could.

The future.

We have written an article about Strategy and the importance of planning ahead. When interviewing candidates, both Costas & I like to surprise them when they ask us the cliche question about our plans for the next X years. Our answer is always that we have no idea what we’ll do 3 years from now, apart from staying true to our Values, Purpose, and Flywheel.

Finally, we wanted to celebrate this year’s bday by producing a short documentary on the history and people of REBORRN. It’s a 10’ watch that we hope you like:

Merry Xmas, everyone! 🎅🏻🎄