# Supporting Our Team in Ukraine While Building 4 Startups and 5 Client Projects with Andrew Amann Channel: Rob Walling Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z96mmRMzKg Duration: 13 min Language: English Words: 2466 Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/-z96mmRMzKg --- [0:00] he replied get some sleep we're gonna need it tomorrow there is no way we're going to get any sleep we spent the next six hours sending direct messages to everyone on our team in Ukraine asking three simple questions are you okay where are you and where are you going the story I'm about to tell you it's about a startup Studio that has 50 brilliant Engineers marketing managers project Engineers project managers sales and HR reps our team is fully remote all around the world but this is a story about the 25 teammates we have from Ukraine and how on February 24th all of our lives changed dramatically [0:36] 923 Venture studio is a software agency that builds mobile and web apps for startups and established Brands we've been around for 10 years and we build about 50 products for the clients and 14 startups over the past month I've learned firsthand how startups can have an impact on a crisis such as the Ukrainian War I've also learned that being entrepreneur means that it's up to us to solve our team's problems not a government not another company but us and us alone the night of February 23 third in America was the morning of February 24th in Ukraine I sent a message to my co-founder that simply said I feel so [1:11] helpless keeps getting hit what do we do he replied get some sleep we're going to need it tomorrow there is no way we're going to get any sleep we spent the next six hours sending direct messages to everyone on our team in Ukraine asking three simple questions are you okay where are you and where are you going by 6 a.m there were three of us in the United States monitoring the whereabouts of our 25 teammates in Ukraine worried scared and misinformed the team started moving about their country our entrepreneurial Spirit kicked in and we created a spreadsheet that started tracking the movements of the team in [1:46] real time by mid-morning we realized we were not just tracking the team but we were also tracking their families you see a lot of our team members were in the cities and they were trying to get out to see their families or their families were trying to get to them one of the next things we did was set up a Communication channel in Telegram the team used its channel to talk about what was really going on in their country it's incredible to witness the Stark differences between the news and reality the information that was being passed back and forth between the team was far was days ahead of the news and far more [2:16] accurate it was also far more frightening and real watching a war from a cell phone is not easy knowing that people are holding those cell phones is even harder on day two we communicated to the team that we needed that they needed to focus on their safety and that we were going to make a commitment to pay their salaries regardless of work contribution within hours of making this promise Bank of America sent an email saying they were going to shut down all transfers block all transfers to Ukraine but I jumped to my car and I traveled to the bank I remember thinking how lucky we are to [2:50] live in America we live in a country where we feel safe and secure all the time when that's removed from anyone that you communicate with it's got wrenching at the bank we secured an additional hundred thousand dollars of working capital and then we asked them continually if there's anything we can do to transfer money to Ukraine the answer was no but all of us are entrepreneurs in this room and we always find another way we started working with a company called deal there's a customer service rep there Jordan who will forever be the greatest customer service rep I have ever worked with between the two of us we were able to [3:24] adjust deals policies procedures and limitations to get 25 virtual credit cards to everybody in Ukraine this followed out by allowing them to access their money in an American currency so that they when they needed it it was the American dollar by Monday morning we transferred the salaries to everybody in Ukraine at this point things get pretty chaotic we knew our clients would eventually start asking about the support of their projects and we had to figure out how to supplement 50 percent of our team and fast as you can see in the start the build hours represent you know we do about 190 hours of build work per day it dropped [4:02] to 60 hours on the day of the war there is no way we were going to be able to support our clients in this environment if we wanted to continue to pay the ukrainians during the war we needed to figure something out we started EOS this year from a book called traction and we called our instructor and said what can we do he recommended we do a crisis Consulting IDs and for those of you who do not know IDs is the issue solving track that focuses your time on solving problems instead of dealing with issues it's used in times of Crisis and conflict and it focuses you on the top [4:36] tasks each day and then it tells you how to complete those tasks no matter what so let's see what this looks like our first issue in IDs was to keep the team safe we thought this meant trying to get our team out of Ukraine within hours of working on this task the Ukrainian government blocked men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving their country even though our company was about 40 female nobody wanted to leave their loved ones behind so we did the best we could by trying to understand which cities were safer than others and then we tried to look for apartments in those cities for our [5:12] teammates to move to it was also amazing that the teammates that we had would open their doors to co-workers that they've only met once or twice before our second issue was that we needed to complete the client work without putting the demand on the team in Ukraine we have customers that count on us to deliver our products on time but we also have those startups that really don't have any critical releases about 60 percent of our engineering team was under attack so the first obvious answer was to take anyone that was working on the startups and move them immediately to the client projects but there still wasn't enough to support [5:45] the clients so we decided what we decided to do next was hire one developer outside of Ukraine for every two developers inside of Ukraine this would ensure that we could get all the necessary hours to support the client we needed to hire established Engineers that had known how to work in an agency before and we could we needed to do this without even interviewing them we also needed to learn how to hire in a country we've never hired before the way that I decided to do this was to go to the 10 largest development companies in Poland get the email of the CEO and then contact them and basically [6:21] cold email them so what I would do is I would craft the email and I would use HubSpot so I'd send it in a HubSpot email with the tracker on I then immediately connect with them on LinkedIn if the HubSpot email was opened I tend to follow up email right that second if the LinkedIn light turned on that they were green that they were using LinkedIn I'd send them a DM I was able to speak with eight of the 10 CEOs in the first 24 hours each CEO of Poland would show immediate Sympathy for the team they asked if our team needed visas and they told us that [6:52] we could use their offices Humanity lives and we were all starting to band together to protect the innocent at 4 a.m Saturday morning we had a call with a Polish company that does team augmentation and agency work they were able to supply us with enough developers on Monday morning to start to support our company we signed the contract on Sunday and we started moving forward to graphically show our progress through each day of the war it helps to look at a thing called utilization rate a utilization rate is the percentage of your company that's being charged billable time like development versus marketing time I mean first non-billable [7:28] time like marketing on February 24th our utilization dropped from 65 to 24 percent now 65 is about industry average for an agency so dropping to 24 was unsustainable after we moved the 25 non-ukrainians to the client project we achieved a 40 utilization score now this made sense because about 50 of our team was from Ukraine and we had some overhead so 40 was was a good Improvement we continued this process of training cross-training and hiring throughout the week and then the most unbelievable things started to happen by Tuesday the green lights of the Ukrainian started turning on hours started getting tracked we had not asked and we had not imagined [8:17] but from basement parking garages in apartments with nine people in them the strength of the team started supporting the company by Thursday afternoon we recovered the utilization of the company to the exact rate we had Thursday before the war even with the Limited hours coming from Ukraine we were able to support the clients as we increase the team size by hiring by the new developers billing 100 of their time to client projects we were able to cover the developers that were unable to get to a computer or if they felt unsafe at the moment but our costs were outrageous the pink bars here show are costs month [8:57] to month the purple area is our Revenue our current revenue and our future revenue and as you can see by April we're going to start to lose money this leads us to our third issue we needed to find new sources of revenue I have the privilege of working for a company that comes up with ideas all the time and we get to build them just for fun we've created 14 startups two have been acquired and another one is now at a hundred thousand dollars ARR it's really fun but it is very distracting what I needed to do now was to stay laser focused on the mission of Revenue [9:33] we made a decision to support the team financially and we don't have a sales team it's really hard to sell agency agency client work and it's always up to me to find this revenue and we needed to find it in four weeks the goal was to find enough new client work in those four weeks to basically double our Revenue It seems impossible and it sounds impossible but I knew that it was 100 possible Apple calls us the Misfits The Crazy Ones the rebels and the dreamers because what we all do in this room sounds absolutely crazy to people but we know in our heads when we say it [10:10] and we we go to accomplish these goals that not only are we up for the challenge but we know in our headset we're going to complete those those goals we set for ourselves so I picked up the phone and I saved the company I called everyone that mentioned they needed an app from us in the last year the result of this Focus was that in the span of five weeks 923 doubled its Revenue we created enough margin to support the Ukrainian team for at least five months before the universe calls and calls on us again to take action what Pablo and I did with our company [10:42] didn't feel special at the time we're entrepreneurs we understand how to systematically accept risk and then we know how to take action one step at a time without worrying about the distractions and we knew I mean we 100 knew we were going to succeed what is special however is the 923 developer that wakes up every morning at 5am to get supplies sandbags boots and medicine to the soldiers and then he returns home to code for six hours in a basement because he feels responsible for the progress of the customer project what is special is that when one of our Engineers had a missile shatter all of [11:19] the windows in his apartment while he was inside he then spent 10 days unable to code because his hands were shaking without us asking and without us knowing he started coding for an app so that we can all get our packages delivered in two days what is special is that our CEO traveled thousands of miles with their entire family in two cars she got to the border and realized she could not continue without them with the men in her life she was forced to split up and continue on to Croatia while her family stayed in Ukraine she now works 12-hour work days to support all of the new customers [11:54] and we just don't have enough PMS to support the new clients it is the responsibility of entrepreneurs to create products but when we create those products we cannot forget that there are humans behind the code behind the screens and behind the communication those humans can be anywhere in the world now we're a globalized society but more importantly we all know what is right and wrong what is happening in Ukraine is wrong privately and unknowingly to the news companies like 923 are supporting the economy we're providing money to the team so that they can buy groceries and supplies these these this money to the team then keeps the money inside of Ukraine so [12:36] that they can fight by supporting the team the team started supporting us in the years of understanding risk as an entrepreneur has allowed us to be prepared for this impossible challenge we are all here in this room dreaming of the day that our product will change the world but I stand before you to remind you that you can still change the world for the people you call teammates and maybe that's enough thank you [Applause] [13:22] [Music] --- About this transcript Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com). 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