To grow a healthy company, you need a strong organizational culture

What connects all of us at Brunch is that we all try to do things better, in a very honest way. It’s very easy to get trapped by false values and vanity metrics, but for us, our focus is reaching our end goal while building a strong team.

We’ve never focused on a certain tactic, but on creating something useful that improves our clients’ lives and work. Everyone contributes to Brunch’s objectives and for that, they need grit. Resistance and persistence are key in the early stages of a startup and I am happy to know that all our team members are in for the long run.

Probably the main value that I am looking for in every person I work with is trust. When you trust your colleagues everything becomes easier: people feel safer to take responsibility and try new things and to give you honest feedback.

We are mostly a remote team so for me, everything comes down to trusting each other and knowing we can openly communicate about anything. On the other hand, this means that I have to be as transparent as possible - it’s a leader’s job to make decisions, but it’s important to get everyone on board.

At my previous business, stoica.co, we didn’t have a set of defined values from the beginning. Our culture as a team built up with every new team member and every new project we built. Our previous experience made it easy for us to define our values for Brunch right from the beginning:

• Care for our users - We build solely for our users so we care for them, support them and help as much as we can. If it doesn’t help our users we don’t build it.
• Keep it simple - We use that word or build that extra feature only if it really really helps. We try to eliminate extra elements with no clear purpose.
• Steps forward - Every day we should take it one step further. Be better every day. Even if it’s small, it’s important to add that extra something every day.
• Health first - Personal and organizational health comes first. We build for the long term so we need to stay alive and healthy.

Without these values, I wouldn’t want Brunch to exist. It’s very easy to lose track of what really matters if you don’t have some principles laid down and communicate them to your team.

A clear set of values help with avoiding micromanagement as well. This consumes all your time and shows a lack of trust, which further on translates into frustrations for your team.

As managers, we are working with people and they work WITH US, not for us or for our “business”. A business is a concept, a construct. People work for a vision, a purpose and they perform the best when they are inspired and motivated.

Brunch is the startup I co-founded with Răzvan Stătescu. This business has a real potential to grow also because Răzvan and I complement each other. Choosing your cofounder can make or break a startup if the two of you are not compatible. Luckily, even if we are in different cities, we are motivated by the same mission to help our users.

Building a startup is rewarding, but very difficult at the same time. There are times when you must step on the gas and times when you have to take a step back and make sure everyone is still aligned and following the same objective. It’s not about controlling other people in your team but making sure they are dedicated to taking initiative and putting effort towards the same goal.

For such a team, building a product that has high growth potential, we are looking for partners. We’ve recently launched a crowdfunding campaign on SeedBlink, aiming to raise 285.000 EUR for Brunch.

In July 2021, we announced our first round, from Mihai Ivașcu and Ulpia Ventures and are honored to have partnered with an internationally exposed entrepreneur who can help us grow. Further on, we are looking for other investors or mentors who believe in our vision and can contribute to developing a marketing tech startup that facilitates collaboration online.

There’s still a long way to go for Brunch and with a team like this, I can only be excited about the future. If you’d like to learn more about how you can join us and invest, check out the crowdfunding campaign or contact me at andrei@usebrunch.com.