The journey of Glasnost: from telling time to building the clock

When I started Glasnost, I was mostly busy with clients. Delivering great work, hitting deadlines, solving problems. Classic founder time: you are involved in everything, because without you it falls apart.

Until I read Built to Last by Jim Collins and came across the concept I now use in every growth program: Clock Building, Not Time Telling. The idea is simple. You can be someone who can tell the time (handy, but dependent on you). Or you can build a clock that tells the time without you (infinitely more valuable).

Translated to companies: you can plug holes every day, or you can build a system that keeps running when you are not there. Most founders do the first for years, until they hit the wall.

At Glasnost that realisation hit around ten colleagues. We delivered great work, clients were happy, but the company would immediately collapse without me. That insight was the starting point of a transformation that took years. It came down to four things.

Vision

First step was formulating a clear vision. We imagined a future in which Glasnost not only excelled in PR but became market leader in creative and strategic communications. We made that vision tangible by hanging our BHAG as a poster on the wall.

Sounds cliché. It was not. Because every time an applicant walked in or a new client sat in the office, they saw where we were heading. It became a topic of conversation. It became a selection criterion. And internally it became the yardstick to decide whether an initiative fit or not.

Culture

Then we focused on culture. Not the poster version, but the real one: how do we make decisions, how do we treat each other, what do we not tolerate.

An important step was sharing profit with our colleagues. Not a bonus scheme with complicated formulas, but a clear message: if the company does well, everyone does well. That changed the conversation about money. It changed the conversation about responsibility. And it strengthened the sense of ownership, because colleagues literally became co-owners of the result.

People

At one point we ran into a labour market shortage we could not solve by recruiting better. We decided to train talent ourselves through a traineeship for fresh graduates.

That cost time. That cost money. And it was a real investment at first, because those trainees produced less than they cost in the early days. But it built a pipeline of mediors who grew with us for years. Far longer than the average in the PR sector. And those mediors eventually became the backbone of the company, precisely because they had grown up in our culture.

Systems and processes

Finally we looked at our processes. With a lean coach, we mapped the most important workflows, literally with post-its on the wall. Which steps were in our quote flow? In our reporting flow? In our feedback loops with clients?

It was confronting. We were shocked by the number of handovers, the number of people unnecessarily involved, and the number of steps we did "because we always did it that way." By streamlining, we made the work more transparent for everyone and built a foundation we could keep growing on without me having to make every decision.

Read more on the background in the explanation of lean manufacturing.

The impact

Clock building has fundamentally changed how I look at growth. Not because the clients noticed (although they did) but because I started to position myself differently in it.

I no longer worked in the business, I worked on the business. Decisions were made by others, often better than I would have made them. I could be away for weeks without work grinding to a halt. And most importantly: there was something larger than me, something that could keep existing for years longer than I would be involved myself.

That is what clock building delivers. Not just a scalable business, but also the freedom as a founder to choose your next step.