Opening the doors to all - how we’re building a business based on transparency and openness
Launching a new business can be pretty daunting as you navigate a bunch of unknowns - will people buy my thing, will they like my service, who else is doing the same thing, how will I earn money, and many more unanswered questions! There’s also a lot to overcome in order to face the fear of asking for support from people who have been there before, and learning from their wins and mistakes. Maybe it’s our kiwi “she’ll be right” attitude and fiercely independent nature, or a fear of sharing what we have in case someone else steals it (as we see in lots of media portrayals of tech startups) - either way, it presents some very real challenges for new business owners. Fortunately it’s also something we’ve seen changing recently, as people throw out those stereotypes and challenge their fears. We now see a lot more sharing of information previously considered commercially sensitive (or somehow compromising reputations), in the name of helping others. It’s a delight to see an openness in the business world starting to emerge and we’re a huge fan of this approach.
At BloomHQ, we’ve decided to contribute to this overall shift in business transparency by doing the boldest thing we could think of - we’ve made our BloomHQ Slack workspace open to our wider community of clients, friends, family, supporters, and even others in our industry. This means that at any point, this community of people (who we’ve fondly called ‘Bloomers’) have access under the hood of our business, can check out how we’re planning things, discussions involving work that’s related to them (directly or indirectly), how we’re living our values and how we’re modelling our own behaviour to match how we’re encouraging our clients to work. Our exceptions to this will be private channels for BloomHQ employees to discuss financials involving clients, anything we haven’t been given consent to share, and protected IP of our clients. All internal BloomHQ information will be available for people to view and participate in if they wish. We also have weekly polling on how we’re tracking against our OKRs and values which our Bloomers will be able to fill out too if it helps them - we’ll do another post on this soon.
Why are we doing this? The main reason is because we believe that the information we have and will create will be of benefit to other organisations and individuals working toward our shared vision of creating the freshest, boldest vision for what thriving workplaces could look like in Aotearoa. That vision doesn’t exclusively have to belong to BloomHQ and in fact, it shouldn’t! We must acknowledge that there are plenty of people who have walked this path before us and are currently working toward this shared vision, and we want to recognise that our way of doing things doesn’t exclusively belong to us (as we’ve built our knowledge and skill set over many years, learning from so many others along the way!). If we can share how we’re applying that knowledge, be accountable to others who are breathing this same kaupapa with us and also defy the way we think about business IP and information, we believe we can make a bigger, bolder impact with our work and always learn and grow ourselves, as our community learns and grows around us.
On the other side of this, we firmly believe that we don’t hold all the answers in realising our vision. Opening our workplace for others to view and participate in, invites new perspectives and stories, and the sharing of knowledge that helps the entire Bloomer community. There’s a fine line here of making sure we’re not taking things from our community and profiting off them so we’ll be checking in regularly to make sure that a lot of the transparency and sharing feels reciprocated and uplifting to everyone in their mahi. If this becomes a challenge or any other challenges present themselves, we’ll pause and find a way to overcome it together with our Bloomers.
As this is an evolving experiment for us, we’ll no doubt be sharing more as we learn things from each other as co-founders and from our community, so please keep an eye on more updates from us. We’d also love to hear what you think of this. Would you try this with your organisation? Maybe you have some other ways in which you push the boundaries of openness and transparency in your organisation?
If you’d like to be involved in our BloomHQ community, we’d like to open it up to a new group of people (we’re doing it in waves so we can manage it appropriately) so please let us know in the comments (or email us at hello@bloomhq.co.nz) and we’ll be in touch!
Tamara & Nik
