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CEO for tuggl believes good startups begin with ethics
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Matt Buchanan, CEO, tuggl
“A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.” Henry Ford
There are aspects other than hoping to make piles of money from your startup which make the sweat, tears and lack of sleep worthwhile. In this economic climate, it’s a great idea to not only remember what those aspects are, but use them as your foundation in everything you do.
Local entrepreneur, Matt Buchanan, tells the story of his startup, tuggl, and reflects on why good business practise is as important as ever in this climate.
Why did you decide to start tuggl?
My heart has always been in helping small businesses out and new technology gives us that ability. I found that there’s really good businesses and really bad ones, and often the good ones weren’t getting the attention they deserved.
So what is a ‘good business’?
I used to think that being a good business was just about customer service, but while we’ve been working on tuggl it’s become obvious that it’s more than that. At a minimum be good at what you do, but better than that, do good things for everyone. Be a good corporate citizen. In determining what a good business is, the quantifiable measure needs to look at how treat employees the community and the environment. tuggl tries to capture this more holistic approach.
When you were in development, what sort of people or companies did you think would use tuggl?
We were wanting to facilitate any type of local business. The reality has become that the target market is made up of people and businesses who are already demonstrating good business practises. The reality is there’s a lot of them out there, but nobody really knows who these good companies are. We want to show people that if they have good business practise, they’ll get benefits from it. We can see a transformation in how businesses go about achieving success.
Is your startup growing as you expected?
We started development of the site last July and now have five full-time employees. The response has been pretty overwhelming. We have three main types of users – individuals looking for good businesses, nonprofits and local businesses.
What sort of things worked out differently to how you expected so far?
Things have definitely changed. What you think you’re going to do and what you end up with rarely ends up the same. I think we had a pretty good grasp of what impact it could have for businesses and consumers, but we didn’t see what a great impact it would have for non profits. There are a lot of social implications. We’re speaking with 2 or 300 nonprofits, and helping them form strategic partnerships. That’s really great – we’re connecting people with businesses and ultimately helping them work together to achieve real change in society. That’s something that’s tough to realize and we’re still trying to get our heads around the enormity of it.
In running a startup focused on rewarding great business practices, what sort of things do you think are key ethical practises for a startup?
For me, I’ve had two other experiences with startups – one was online advertising and it quickly became clear they were not operating ethically. They did some really shady things. For me being on the wrong side of that was a real eye-opener. These were men who were extremely smart and extremely motivated but they chose to be unethical and the impact of that was losing their relationship with us, the employees. Once they’d violated our trust, there wasn’t anything left.
The second one, as the business began to get successful, we had disagreements and when hard decisions came up that became problematic. Fast forward to tuggl, before we talked about anything at all, we talked about what our values were, what business practice we wanted to have. Basically, if you all have the same page when issues arise and disagreement happens, if there’s common understanding of why you’re doing what you’re doing, then you can work together to overcome those things. People have this misconception that in a startup you have a blank slate, but the reality is it’s easy to sacrifice your values when funding is at stake. At a conference recently I heard someone say that principles aren’t priniciples until they cost you money and I think that’s really true. In the end what you’re trying to do is build something that’s great and create change and unfortunately you can’t really take shortcuts if you want to do that.
Do you have an example of a shortcut you could have taken but didn’t?
We’ve had some opportunities to create sales channels that could help us bring more businesses into the fold. We’ve had the negotiations and conversations with people whose only priority was making money and earning commissions. So in those instances we’ve had to move away from that. We want to work with people who are mission-aligned and luckily here we are not starved for that sort of partner. The metro area we’re in here are ready and willing to play a part in that ecosystem, and that’s been really great for us.
We’re really interested in working with people. We want to help people and we’re looking forward to the potential of doing some amazing things with other people and companies to create some great change. We really want to identify and work with Green businesses, Government agencies, anybody – trying to connect people with good businesses and help them to make this bigger.
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