“Great content, but too many mistakes – failed.” I must have read that sentence underneath my German essays countless times. I felt frustrated, angry, discouraged. This would never work, I thought. The very person who handed me those dreaded marks also encouraged me. “The only thing you give up,” my German teacher said, “is a letter.”
Back then I certainly was not good at putting thoughts on paper without errors. But I fought for better grades over and over again – and guess what, I passed my A levels. Today it is easy to laugh about it, yet in those moments it was anything but funny.
It is fascinating what a somewhat stale, banal sentence can do when you treat it like a mantra. Whenever things get tough in a race – and let us be honest: somewhere between 80 and 170 kilometres it always gets tough – I weigh my options, check in with myself to gauge my tolerance for suffering and usually arrive at a clear answer: quitting is always easier than continuing to grind. But the only thing you give up is a letter.
Sometimes the “don’t quit” kick comes from the outside. At the 2018 UTMB, which I sensationally finished in ninth place, I called my wife before the Champex-Lac aid station at kilometre 125 and told her I was done. I was exhausted, physically and mentally. “Do not be a softie,” she replied. “Of course you will keep running.” So I did.
Even when a situation seems hopeless at first glance – there is almost always more possible than you think.
Not giving up is not limited to school or sports for me – it applies to my professional life as well.
Ever since the early days of Smarter Business Solutions my team and I have been working on a project called Outlook 2 SharePoint, or O2S for short. Outlook is part of every professional’s daily toolkit – you open it in the morning and close it in the evening. We wanted to enable Outlook and SharePoint to talk to each other directly and give users of both systems some real value. Smarter Business Solutions was doing well. We became a development partner for large enterprises such as PORR and REWE, sold corporate licences that were installed on 45,000 machines and improved the product based on user and customer feedback.
We were strong at building the product, but weak at marketing and sales. Competitors with similar offerings used big budgets to reach a level of market penetration we could not match.
That is why we were ready to quit. Almost exactly a year ago, in late autumn 2017, I considered stopping O2S altogether. A decade of passion – especially from my colleague Adnan – had gone into the product, but ultimately we had been investing more than we earned for years. Surely we should spend our time on more sustainable endeavours?
Fate had other plans. Right at that moment a large German enterprise started evaluating our product and a competitor’s solution without us even knowing. Both systems were installed for 20 pilot users, and after the evaluation they opted for O2S and purchased a corporate licence.
That unexpected success gave us a huge boost. Looking purely at the numbers we should probably still discontinue O2S, but is it not an achievement in its own right to support tens of thousands of users in their daily work? IT teams get criticised almost every day. Experts like us are often viewed with suspicion – no surprise, given the constant stream of doom scenarios about digitalisation, transformation and artificial intelligence in the media. Part of our mission is to counter those fears and stand by users with helpful solutions – that feels good!
I am still working on the challenge of making us better known and expanding our presence in the market, but we will master that too. After all we need to earn money with O2S so we can keep paying our employees fairly.
Marketing and sales are not easy disciplines. Whenever I think of giving up, my wise German teacher pops into my head again. The only thing you give up is a letter.
Refusing to quit is simply smarter!
