I will take this article to make a big point about where we have come and what we have done so far.
It seems like so many years ago that with Paul over dinner we were wondering what could be a shareable, credible but also challenging Vision on which to build the future years of Instilla. Instead, it was only the summer of 2017.
Instilla was a small reality when I met it a few months before that summer. The ambition was to develop software for a niche in Digital Marketing, specifically software serving local SEO but at that time (it seems like a thousand years ago but in just a few years awareness about these issues has accelerated dramatically) it was not felt as a need at all.
Very little money in the till, very little (more than once we asked for an effort to be able to delay salary payments and I won’t dwell on the alternative we had to food stamps because someone might want to go back to those days, let’s just say we had a lot of “laughs”) a lot of talent outside and above all a lot but a lot of knowledge about how “those digital things” were to be done.
There was talent and knowledge to spare, we just did the simplest thing there was to do, sell it. The first clients then began to ask us for support on mainly performance and SEO activities, and from that moment to today it was a moment with one ambitious goal:
To make digital marketing an affordable tool and become an example of it.
This is also where our why comes from.
In our world, there are too many different points of view, so many skills needed, frenetic is the technological evolution. This has created enormous fragmentation to which few try to offer a clear solution and an informed approach that combines methodologies with knowledge.
Since that day, on every single project in which we were involved we have tried to improve in this regard, investing so much time, the little money available and the growing resources of the team.
Our path of improvement-initially rudimentary and uneven-has gradually been refined, based on four pillars:
- People
- Business processes
- Methods and knowledge
- Tools
People
People first, people as the true value of any company…. blablabla… Super cool to say, definitely challenging to do in a series of activities that need to be constantly improved and redesigned.
But where did we start from?
From the Values, from the design of our RECIPE, which is not just a nice acronym but is meant to be the set of all those characteristics that we have strongly desired, built over time and on which we have decided to improve.
In an organization that grows and changes rapidly, values are the guide for building the team and defining the attitude needed in a constantly changing environment.
But values alone are not enough to allow all people to feel that they are part of a project, we also need shared goals and a lot of discipline that allows everyone to be clear about how achieving, in their own small way, goals can allow their work environment to grow.
In this sense, the OKR (Objective Key Results) methodology, originated at Intel and popularized by Google, has offered us an approach that can connect and link each person to the very growth of Instilla. By defining our goals year by year, we went about unpacking them on the different areas, teams and people.
Fundamental then was the construction of a system for evaluating and assigning goals made available to different Tutors and an HR model that could manage it all in “simplicity.”
Business Processes
We grow, we change, we increase the complexity of projects, and we increase the complexity of managing delivery.
Without the creation of procedures we would not have been able to implement real change. Procedures that must be constantly evolving, must be capable of not “plastering” the company and capable of always being open and evolving over time.
Continuous deconstruction and reconstruction then, which in the transitional moments has created no small amount of confusion in people: it always seems like you can’t see the end of it.
Then one fine day you realize that having processed the most important layers of management activities has helped everyone be aware and know exactly what to do, and when.
In Instilla’s change I think that was the main leap from budding startup to organization.
Creating effective processes that can manage the most critical phases of the day-to-day initially gives the feeling of “taking away autonomy” at all levels: the most resilient experience it as an unnecessary constraint that limits the ability to act. Instead, once the mechanism is defined, it helps to be agile and allows the whole structure to invest more time in producing good execution.
Methods and knowledge
In the initial vision, that of Day 0, there was always the idea of an organization that was able to never stop learning. Perhaps this is one of the main drivers that keeps us together. The passion in what we do and the constant research and experimentation, study and application of “new things.”
Perhaps this is the element that has always struck me about Instilla, which, sometimes even exaggerating and pushing the envelope, has always had the desire to figure out what can be done and how we can do more than we are already doing.
In these few years (which the more I keep writing about, the more it seems like an eternity) we have worked to build our Blueprint, that is, the container where we can put all the material collected over the years, all the masterclasses, webinars and lectures conducted in our journey in order to build a knowledge base that can be rationalized into study paths for new figures entering Instilla and provide an unambiguous vision of what for us is the fundamental knowledge.
In parallel to this we have been working on how-to, that is, how these activities should be carried out, in how many steps and with what methods.
Here I am not even going to tell you about the effort the effort and discussions to be able to bring our methodology to life.
A crazy shit for all those who believe that talent cannot be processed, a huge gym for all those who believe that talent can be cultivated.
Methodology and knowledge bring to life our Blueprint, which we were finally able to publish a few days ago on our own platform made accessible to the whole team.
Tools
This new business setting needed tools that would allow us to manage and monitor the day-to-day but not only that, that would give us the ability to do analysis on what we were doing. Blueprint is definitely one of them.
“Instoffice” is its environment, the cradle of all the different tools that we have made and are going to finalize in the coming months. Through Instoffice we can access Knowledge and useful methods for creating blueprints, manage them and have control over performance. But I won’t dwell on that any further: surprise!
The best is yet to come
Instilla over the years has changed in form but has worked to keep its substance unchanged
Guiding us have always been – and will be – our Values, our Vision and the awareness of what sets us apart: the desire to do and to constantly improve .
That is why we are confident that whatever the future holds, we will always have reference points. To find them we will just have to look at who we are and where we come from, to reach our goals we will always have to start from here, aware that to grow we should not be afraid to make mistakes , if we are clear about the goal.
