General | 4 min. reading time

COMPANY GROWTH FUTURA: WE ARE OVER 20 EMPLOYEES

Written by: Daniel Schröer

2020. What a year.

Well, I won’t bore you with how unexpected and wild this virus situation was for us in this year, but to be honest for us it only had its benefits. First and foremost, everybody is healthy and happy as possibly could be. We do not see a risk of anybody being contaminated with the virus at work, because we practice remote work very extensively, even since last year. Our teams are strong and we have a great partners and freelancers that help us accomplish our growth while making best use of our CapEx.

What struck me the most was counting our staff a few weeks ago and realizing that we have over 20 people plus more than two hands full of freelancers, which I don’t count to the staff. Funnily enough I don’t see this trend stopping, as the growth and demand for our products and solutions is simply unbreakable so far.

I am also quite proud that English is our first language in most presentations, documents and on our website. And tomorrow, first December, our first employee starts working with us who does not have German as his first language, but surprise: French and after that English.

This is not a 2020 wrap up blog, which I will for sure deliver as well, but this one is just to say how excited I am for this current sprint, which has successfully brought us onto a level of over €4 million of sales, whilst being very profitable, and over 20 people on staff.

It’s such a great feeling to feel the dynamic in the teams, to see who is taking over responsibility for their teams, seeing friendships being built and the little things people do for each other.

What makes me really emotional is when one of my team tells me about a difficult situation they had, how they gathered together, stood strong, found solutions, discussed alternatives internally and with a client and finally executed them. Normally, as the business was smaller, Oliver and I used to be in the situation from the beginning to an end. But now, we have people that are way smarter and that have the time and competence to deep dive into IT, marketing, client relationship management and other issues more than we could ever do. This always made me realize how we grew to be a better version of ourselves, as a unity, as a company, as a group of people that has a vision that is higher ranking than anything else.

Particularly I am very proud about my colleague Sarah, who runs a team of seven people plus freelancers and just keeps on over delivering and supporting Oliver and myself with the management of Futura.

I mean it’s not that we have a quota but I am also very proud that a 22-year-old woman is one of the leaders within our team.

It’s a crazy feeling having built teams that work self-sufficient without us interrupting. It was always our goal to build something that has a vision, that empowers people to do everything that stands in their powers to reach that vision jointly.

We cannot run a business that is managed by ourselves 24-7. Why you ask? The vision must be larger than just a few people, it must be independently driven and manifested through people, a community and customers that become fans.

CEOs run businesses, but a team and employees fight for a vision.

I have the feeling that we succeeded in this very important detail. It now became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I cannot stop it, Oliver cannot stop it and neither can anybody of our competitors.

We are still very small compared to the market leaders, but we have created an atmosphere that is unstoppable. Vision that will be reached. With or without us.

OUR FOCUS IS ON SUSTAINABILITY AND DIGITIZATION

For all of it myself it always was really important to change our industry in terms of digitization and making it more sustainable. This we want to reach with highest quality digital products and the best utmost support possible. Further down the road we eventually created over a few hundred analogue products that now help professional pest managers around the world to better prevent pests within the IPM scheme.

So, no matter if I crash my car or get terribly sick, you will still be annoyed by us because we have patience, we have a strong team, we have a strong foundation and will power. This is stronger than money, stronger than a huge infrastructure and Apple has proven this to Nokia in 2006.

We might still be small to some, but we have succeeded in making the next most important step now. We have broken through the glass ceiling and there is no bottleneck inside, just growth, opportunities and disruption of an industry that lays ahead of us in the next decade.

By the same time in one month we will be having two further employees and I am pretty sure that in 2021 we will be adding another 10 to our team. This is fast for pest control. And note, we are not venture back to come out we don’t have angel investors, we bootstrapped and made all of this happen through our strong will power and patience. Imagine what we will achieve in the next 5 to 10 years, when quite possibly legislation and technology will leapfrog like never before.

We want to prove to you that in 2021, 2022 and 2023 we can achieve the same growth as in 2020, despite a virus and many other international challenges.

If we can keep our promise this is already amazing news, but even more so with the expected change of legislation in terms of the application of poison in our industry, we can expect that we are the only player in our industry that has successfully managed to reach a critical mass, which is needed to supply the top 200 companies of our industry with our products.
Why is this important? Because the top 200 are going to be very eager to run after the top-five, was not being capable of investing five or 10 million into the development of high-quality scalable digital IOT solutions. With a broad portfolio, long expertise, a strong team, diverse channels and a community of fans that relies upon our technology since 2006, we are the only relevant and serious player to go to, if you do not want to give away the responsibility of your future to a startup, of which of course there are also 30 to 40 smaller players existent in our industry.
What do I define as a startup? A company that has just one or two products, maybe five and less than 10 staff and less than €500,000 sales.

WE WANT TO LOOK TO THE FUTURE TOGETHER WITH YOU

If you are a serious business and you are going to take the decision of going down the route of digitization in the next 5 to 10 years, you will be looking at hundreds of thousands of euros if not millions of euros spent into IOT devices that should be very reliable, smart and long-lasting, so it is to be questioned, if you will trust a young start up with questionable capabilities to be the partner for your next 10 years of business, that would probably be the most challenging and competitive years of business you have ever experienced.
We are doing all of what we do only for you and your business. It may sound nice and yes we are also thrilled about the success that we have. But in the end we exist only to serve you and empower you and your business to successfully master the challenge that lays in front of us within the next 10 years.

FURTHER CONTRIBUTIONS

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