Suzan Claesen (CrowdyHouse): Stores should learn to offer the client an experience, not just products

What are your business plans for the near future?

We have a lot of plans, the biggest one we are working on is a shipping solution for designers. Right now designers ship themselves. We are working on a solution where we can hook up all the main delivery services to our system. All the designer has to do is click a button when the product is ready to be delivered and we will send over the cheapest service for that particular product. This way we provide designers a full service where we take over marketing and shipping for them.

Let’s talk a little about you as an entrepreneur. Your company is split in two different countries. Which is the biggest challenge in managing two different teams, many miles away and with (probably) different cultural approaches?

The personnel working in Romania are all programmers. All of our marketing, operations and design personnel are located in Amsterdam. Luckily programmers are quite used to working remotely. To make sure all projects go smoothly we follow Agile methodology and use a Kanban board to manage all projects. In addition to this we are constantly in contact with our programmers in Romania using a chat tool called Slack. This prevents any issues with the team feeling distant from each other.

We recently wrote about how a good tactic for building the right strategy for your company is to give yourself time to think. How do you function? When you reach a dead end or a tangled situation, what is your method of finding the right path again?

We update our P&L sheet every month with the previous month’s financial information and review our forecast every month and what projects will deliver certain results. By returning to this important document we keep a helicopter view of the company. Our P&L sheet contains our employee information, the results of each project, our current budget, our incoming and outgoing.

Most companies, in their early stages, often go through moments of “go big or go home”. Please tell us about a key moment in the development of your business, a crisis and how you handled it.

As a company we move and make decisions very fast because we want to grow as fast as possible. Recently we migrated the website to Amazon Web Services so that we could host the website there. We tested the migration and everything was working fine. The whole team called it a night and the next morning the site was down. We migrated the site but we couldn’t test how it would react with many visitors. The next day we received many visitors and the new host was not prepared to handle the traffic which slowed the whole website down. We lost a day’s sales because of this. We now make sure we test absolutely everything more than once.

What things about running a company do you wish you had known before becoming an entrepreneur?

Hiring is key to your company. You need the best of the best to join you, so that you become the best. I wish I knew more about good interview techniques and about finding and choosing the right people for the role. I am getting better at this now but we made some mistakes in the beginning, by not asking the right questions during an interview.