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Paul Kalbrenner lädt ein zur "Berlin Calling"-DVD-Releaseparty

Berlin, München, Hamburg, Köln, Frankfurt, Wien, Linz, Zürich ab dem 17.10.09

Termine, Musik und mehr Infos auf www.myspace.com/paulkalkbrenner

                         

Stieg Larssons Roman „Verblendung“ war 2008 das bestverkaufte Buch der EU, der Autor selbst avancierte nach Khaled Hosseini (Drachenläufer) zum weltweit zweitmeistgelesenen Autor.

Doch Larsson, Journalist und Forscher im Bereich Rechtsradikalismus erlebte diesen Erfolg nicht mehr. Larsson starb am 9. November 2004 im Alter von nur 50 Jahren an den Folgen eines Herzinfarkts. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt waren drei von zehn geplanten Büchern über den aufrechten Wirtschaftsjournalisten Mikael Blomkvist vollständig fertiggestellt, zu drei weiteren gab es Exposés und Manuskripte.

Enthüllungsjournalisten Mikael Blomkvist und die Hackerin Lisbeth Salander, die gemeinsam in albtraumhaften Kriminalfällen recherchieren. Mit dem Film VERBLENDUNG startet die Trilogie nun auch im Kino. Und auch dort entfaltet der düstere Thriller, der in tiefste menschliche Abgründe führt, eine beklemmende Spannung, der man sich nicht entziehen kann.

Fortsetzung garantiert – VERDAMMNIS und VERGEBUNG, Teil 2 und 3 der Trilogie, kommen 2010 in unsere Kinos.

Some years ago we were trying to hire some people in India and this is parts of that story.

I came in contact with a young man through LinkedIn. We chatted for well over three months and decided to meet. He flew to our Cape Town office and we had meetings and compared what to do for a couple of days.

I was eager to build our business in India so against my gut I agreed to take him on. But taking him on required three full days of salary and perks negotiations. I was exhausted. After we shook hands the young man continued to negotiate, via email once he was back in India. Duh! He was given some simple assignments to fulfil before we arrived. It was stuff he could do in his free time.

I arrived in India a month later together with a small entourage. It was the young mans time to shine. First night he took us to a local Indian restaurant and I got sick immediately, even before leaving the place. The next day the young man continued to negotiate about his salary package. I couldn’t believe it. I had been warned about the greed of some Indian people but this was too much, and I kept running to the bathroom.

I wanted to look at offices but he had only arranged one place to visit and that was in an area a stones throw from his family house. When we arrived at the site the builders were already busy building the mans dream. They all greeted him with first name. I think they were related. “This is going to be technology, here’s the call centre and here’s my room etc”.  I had to run to the bathroom all the time and lost 6 kilos those five days. When looking at the proposed team on an org chart we noticed that the last names looked similar. When we addressed this we found that most of the people were close relatives.

We had a meeting with a possible financial manager, not close related, perhaps distant. When I asked him what he knew about Travelstart he gave me a five-minute story of our company, correct with dates, numbers, people. He even told me how many kids I have and my wife’s name. I was looking around to see if someone was standing with Q cards. A different experience to say the least.

One afternoon we were invited to his family home. My colleagues bailed out and rather wanted to sit in the air-conditioned hotel talking strategy, so I went alone. It was a typical upper middle class Indian family area. His family was lovely, all living together. I was so sick I thought I was dying. The whole family watched me as I was trying not to faint while trying to eat the food and drinking tap water… no kidding! On the way back I asked the driver to stop at a hotel. I think they had to renovate the toilets after my visit.

My colleague was doing a great job scouting for programmers but found it a bit harder than expected. We told our young Indian man that the launch was probably going to have to be postponed for at least two months because it was more complex with recruits than expected.  And our young man complained.  After two days of wining we understood what his problems was… If we delayed launch chance were he wouldn’t get his bonus. That was it for me. I fired him. He’s career with the company lasted for six days.

Hiring is extremely hard on your home turf, but it’s nothing compared to hire in a new country. The important thing is however to get the first one right. The rest of the team almost falls in place automatically.

Our young Indian man gave us one of our core pillars when it comes to recruitment: never hire anyone who cares too much about his salary. We have turned people away several times when they worry too much about their salary.

 

PS

The young man is now a manager for Expedias business in India. We obviously value things different.

Looking back over the ten years we have been in business existed I can see that there were two distinct shifts in strategy.

Our first strategy was very simple - transparency. To bring to the web what the whole world of travel agents already knew. Make airline offers bookable 24/7-365 days a year online. That’s been a very simple strategy even though it was very hard to actually achieve. Technology was non-existent. Starting an online travel company that made fares and timetables accessible for everyone was a good sell and worked up until 2001-2002. Internet grew and people were slowly starting to move online to purchase their tickets.

Consumer behaviour shifted in favour for online travel companies. Main drivers were the Sept 11 terror attacks and the emergence of low cost airlines with rotten cheap tickets to a degree that no one could resist bringing up their credit cards.

Our first shift or change of strategy was really pure evolution. Finding tickets online was now commonplace and nothing special. Many competitors decided to go for the portal play and be broader. We decided to go deeper and focus on cheap tickets. Everything in the company now had to be focused on great deals and keep our overheads low. Companies with a low cost focus normally also has the best growth and discipline, we figured.

There’s a delusion about low cost. People might think that you have to be cheap to sell cheap tickets. Au contraire. A company selling low cost products has to be efficient and focused on quality because the mark ups are minimal, so there’s little room for error. The quality is in the details. So in all aspects; technology, processes, customer service etc we need to be persistent in getting better to be able to keep the promise of a low price.

The third shift in our strategy, and the most remarkable is the one we are going through now  - The shift towards great service. The Internet has changed consumer’s service level expectancy. Service is now luck or chance. We decided to do it different. Service must at all things be our core. We believe that people are willing to pay extra for great service and if they aren’t we will still get the tickets at lowest possible price but with a little less service. This is by far the most stimulating phase Travelstart ever experienced, it has energized everyone.

And will this strategy pay off? Yes, you bet – big time. People love service always did and always will.

We always had this idea that people and organisations should serve a higher purpose. I personally always thought that we have a duty to find and serve some higher purpose in life. It’s more than building careers, create families, create wealth and go spending our old age on golf courses.

Finding your purpose as an organisation or company is equally as important. A company must create profits to create jobs, careers and a future for its stakeholders. A company must also look after its environment but also the society at large. You cannot just leave it to the local government, even though it’s good if they do their part. Today the debate is much more about climate change than simply taking care of our neighbour. You can’t argue about a dying person so as humans we rather do what we always do… talk about the weather.

One of Travelstart’s core values is sharing. We like to share within the company and keep a transparent leadership. We also believe in sharing our success and wealth with the community.

Even before moving to Africa I had this ambition of helping out where help was needed. In Sweden it was a bit hard because you don’t see poverty all over the streets like here.

When we came to Africa we had high ambitions to be a help and change. But we soon found that there are fifteen non-profit organisations on a dozen in Africa. And even if they all sounded good, were do you place your money?

I believe in going all in into projects. When giving become a considerable part of your company’s profits you have to start addressing things differently than if you just give crumbs from the table. You have to start forming a strategy. You have to find people managing all the money and projects. And that’s where we are today. Simply giving some hundred thousand away doesn’t do much difference. A focused effort can make huge change.

After scouting for some years we found a couple of organisations that we decided to support.

One such organisation is Star for life that helps school children finding their goal in life and stay AIDS free. What we love about this organisation is that their approach is completely different to anything else out there. They teach sexual abstinence, which is highly unusual, and so contrary to how some organisations address, the problem of HIV. Handing out condoms at schools, I think does the exact opposite. It promotes sex, which is not what I, think, kids need. Most marriages would probably need it however. Star for Life kids learn how to find their higher purpose in life, weather its to become a teacher, soccer player or mum. And if you want to reach the stars you have to be healthy. Star for Life is a Swedish project initiated by some very good people I know from Malmö. It reaches tens of thousands kids through their schools today.

Read more about them or rather give some money: http://www.starforlife.org/

We are also one of the major donors in a beautiful project called Thembalitscha. Yes it’s beautiful. It’s love. Themba´s health care unit takes care of the people lowest on Maslovs pyramid. These are the poor people living in shacks with no water. These are people who have to find a new place every day to take a crap in the bushes. These are the forgotten people, sometimes sick and dying.

Themba successfully lobbied for anti retroviral for years and was one of the earliest organisations that managed to get support from the Mbeki administration with medicines. Anti retroviral can help people with HIV live a normal life. Themba does not throw out medicines in the townships and hope it works. Themba gets its hands dirty making sure people take their medicine every day. A discipline that’s hard with the stigma associated with AIDS and the gruelling township lifestyles.

Anti retrovirals really works. Hand on works in the townships really works and it’s crucial. Themba has close to one thousand patients in their books and the crew running it are doing angels works for the people that are suppose to be the future of Africa.

Support Thembalitscha with money: http://www.thembalitsha.org.za/

If you would like to assist in other ways with labour or if you have special skills and you want to make a difference please contact me at Stephan@travelstart.com

Back in 2005 I was sitting in South African waiting for my Swedish development team to deliver something I could release in South Africa. We were already half a year late and if I had known that it would take as longs as it did I would have decided on doing something different. But anyway here I was.

I met a guy who ran this new media shop developing designs and websites for established companies and start-ups. I had recently bought a luxury chocolate shop for my sister and it needed some brand and design work, so I asked this person to come up with some ideas.

I loved the pitch and bought the design works from the team. Being a sucker for good design I fell in love with the people that did the work. As days, week and months went by I figured that perhaps we should do something completely different when launching in South Africa. After all our web pages was the same since 2000 and I was tired of the same gloomy colours and pictures. It bored me to death.

So I asked the designers if they would be interested in joining me as employee #1 and #2 in our newly founded venture Travelstart South Africa. It didn’t take much to convince them.

The design work started and after a week or so they pitched me their new idea. It was terrible. The website looked like Schiphol airport. Damian the UX man told me the underlying rationale behind the idea and I understood that I probably gave them the wrong idea on what this company is about.

I told them it’s about people and I need something WOW!

A week or so later I got a completely different pitch, which was about exactly - people and WOW.  I asked them to continue work with the sketches. Meanwhile we moved into a small office space of perhaps 10 sqm or even less. We had a monumental view over Cape Town and Table Mountain. Here we planned the next website and the move to our next office, Avalon.

The design work took some six months and covered everything from booking flow for air, and blogs, my account pages and several other sections that we never launched. Other sections of the website like hotels, cars and matrix presentations were all added later.

Our strategy was to first launch the new website in South Africa and then roll out in the other countries. The website was launched in July/August of 2006 in South Africa. The positive thing about the delay was that the South African market had matured somewhat in the meantime. I had had time to understand the market and launch a much bigger scope than was originally planned.

It is hard to manage artistic people, but having worked with musicians for ten years I had some experience. There were often were clashes between commercial, design and development. My experience is that commercial must always go first but it’s easy to quench the artistic drive if you’re not careful, which is exactly what we did as the company and complexity grew. Sad.

We still to this day use the same designers who now have set up their own successful business.

Our design and user experience is appreciated all over the world and not a week goes by without people contacting me for using our technology. They all fall in love with the clean lines and the colours and it really has nothing to do with the underlying technology.

Design and user experience will always be at the core for Travelstart because of Anne Sophie and Damian.

The luxury chocolate store was closed down only a couple of months after the pitch. My sister got bored and the designs were unfortunately never used.

One of my former colleagues once told me that he heard that you should be careful about moving offices because the company culture can easily be distorted. As I recall he was referring to the pre dot com bubble Swedish Internet juggernaut Spray. The start up darling who had everything going for them until they moved offices and then later collapsed. I don’t know whether this is true or not but being a bit fanatic when it comes to finding underlying truths and subtleties, I find these things fascinating.

Travelstart has its bit of DNA from the walls of our offices.

Our company started in a Kärn Kaffes old coffee roastery in Helsingborg, Sweden. The city used to be famous for it’s coffee roasteries. Coffee was the dot com of its days. This small town of less than 100.000 people had several prominent roasteries; Kärnkaffe, Tellus Kaffe, Brinks and most famous of all Zoegas. Mr Zoegas was a Christian, Italian chap who combined his two interests mission work and business. His passion took him around Africa where he discovered coffee beans, which was exactly what poured out of our walls when we started renovating our offices. We occupied the previous management floor, with 2 huge beautiful safe vaults and one walk in vault with a 45 cm thick door, were we stored our servers.

How we loved those offices. It was industrious, concrete walls, high ceilings large abundant spaces. Lots of room to socialize in bright open spaces. It was to this day my absolute favourite office. I think all our staff loved the space. I had my own room with space enough for tons of books and a meeting area. This was a dynamic room. The offices also had its own showers which I used a couple of times after running during lunch breaks. Customers and airlines that visited us, could not believe that they came to a travel company, they all thought we were into advertising or something artistic. I liked that! Space must be creative. Travel posters were banned.

After five or so years the lease was about to expire and the landlord got very greedy so we decided to move. The move sent the company “spiritually” to the dark ages. As much as we loved the vibe in the old office I hated it in the new one. And I think most of my colleagues can agree. We called the new space “the pit”. With the move the atmosphere evaporated and much of the drive and energy was gradually lost. In Sweden we recently moved into our third office in ten years. Lets hope it works.

In South Africa we have had a different journey. We rented a beautiful building in Gardens called Avalon.

It was excellent space for creativity but useless for processes. There was a dischord in ensemble and somehow we never got it right.

We were forced to move offices because we were growing and our old space was useless for customer service. We moved into offices in Woodstock. These offices were just right size wise. We had high hopes that this would be the right home for our South African business. But even though our South African, MD Mrs Leeanne Melton was project leading the move and the decoration of the place she said she was shocked once we moved in. And I agree. The company was simply not in its right element and didn’t like the place. There was this dischord all the time.

We didn’t have to suffer very long. Our landlord decided after one weeks occupancy to sectional title the buildings and gave us notice to get the hell out of there. We had just spent 70.000€ renovating and the outlook of us getting the money back were slim to none. We used lawyers and advisors but decided not to stay. So we started to look for new offices.

Another friend of mine offered us space in his building. We looked at it and loved it. Located on the 7^th floor with bright open spaces in the middle of CBD. We said yes and after 2 months and another 50.000€ in renovation we moved in. 

From that day we went into profit in South Africa. From that day all the things that we battled with before was gone. Staff was suddenly more motivated, management suddenly had control, customers started to love us. It was like a new company all of a sudden. Gone was the start up chaos. The baby matured in a week. The dischord was gone and out came just beautiful harmony.

These are different experiences from office moves and it has made me a firm believer that a company is a being and it has it´s favourite spaces where karma can thrive.