Let’s Ask Jose - Q & A with Navgar Founder Jose Brotons
By way of introduction, Navgar as an organization has no shortage of interesting backstories and perspectives on workplace coordination, collaboration, and communication. From time to time, other team members will be providing these. Today we bring you Navgar Founder Jose Brotons with some insights into the founding of the company
MT: What inspired you to start this company, and how did you get the idea?
JB: I have worked in big companies (ITT Industries - 46,000 employees), I have co-founded and successfully sold my own startup - Product Madness, Inc and I have invested in many different startups throughout the years - some winners and some losers.
An early and obvious lesson learned at ITT was that a massive corporation could not be controlled without processes - or as we define them in Navgar, “Business Flows”. These originated as control functions, ensuring the company headed in the right direction and did things correctly. Ultimately and more importantly they became a fierce competitive advantage. For example, whenever a complex technical quote needed to be prepared at ITT we knew exactly the steps to follow, who was in charge of what was to happen and when it was to occur. In contrast, our smaller competitors had to scramble, sort of “make things up - again” along the way. Even though they had a much smaller headcount, they wasted a lot of time re-learning and re-establishing work flows that had already been used in the past. I was the youngest Product Manager at ITT. I was in charge of a product that had previously failed twice in Spain. After realizing the competitive advantqge provided by business flows, I started implementing these flow concepts and ultimately ended up with the second success story of this product in the world.
When I co-founded Product Madness we were only two people working in the company. That was pretty easy to coordinate. However that ease disappeared a lot faster than I ever expected. As we grew, not only was there a dramatic change in the amount of things we had to do, many of which initially were not on our radar - Accounting, Invoices, HR, Taxes, … but also keeping tabs of who was doing what, in what state those things were and whether we were missing anything became a nightmare. It quickly became unmanageable.
I ended up leading the User Acquisition, Marketing, Customer Support and VIP management sections of the company. My Marketing team was young and for the most part, quite inexperienced, and to add to this recipe for disaster: I was not a marketer myself. Our initial deployment of campaigns took on average 30 days. Taking a note from what I had seen and experienced at ITT we systematically started improving and standardizing. I have always believed that as a manager you do not own the process, your team does, but you do own the outcome of the process - whether the work is on time and done to spec. True to this, I put the team in charge of its own organization and I acted as a coach. It was an amazing experience to see the team work towards setting itself up for success. However going from PowerPoint / PDF explanations of what the team was going to do and how it was going to coordinate itself to actual operations proved to be a real challenge. Yes, we all know what we want to do, but actually making it happen in the day to day is extraordinarily complex - in spite or maybe particularly because of all the different tools and the speed at which we communicate nowadays. Most of these organizational attempts die at the PowerPoint / PDF level and few ever get really executed - costing the company a lot of time and money.
Realizing this, I spent a couple of months synthesizing what the team had developed into an application that would help them achieve the methods that they had put forth. Our Marketing capabilities became astonishing and I even had a couple of competitor friends ask me if they could come into the office and learn how we did it - you can imagine the answer 🙂.
As an investor in Startups, I have often seen what I term as the “Operational Ceiling”. It is that point where a successful company stops growing, not because the market is not there, but because it simply cannot get its act together and starts failing in delivering the promise it was set up to accomplish. The age old adage “We were fine at 5 employees, but at 15 we cannot get our act together”. At 5 people the post-it, SMS, email, … note system still works, at 15 it is impossible. On our website www.navgar.app you can see why this is. It has always surprised me to see how hard it was for founders, who I considered intelligent and highly capable, to get their companies in shape and continue to deliver once they had grown a little.
What stuck with me from these three experiences (ITT, Product Madness and Investing):
How effective Flows were in helping companies get organized and outperform their competitors
How hard it is to operationalize something - to go from the pdf to actual execution - without it being a pain for the employees or have it feel like extraordinary levels of bureaucracy.
How hard it is to get people to actually follow the rules even if you have devoted time and been successful in 1 and 2.
I set out to help companies who did not have a technical founder / manager. To help them take their operations to a whole new level and to help them grow. How could I help companies not only become extraordinary operators, but turn their operations into a competitive advantage like multinationals do?
Answering this is why I started the company.
