What would we do for our launch of Colony?

We toyed with all the conventional ideas for a launch. Lion dance, a press conference, cut ribbon… all those kind of things. At the end of it the Colony team sat down and we thought about what the purpose was for the launch.

The purpose was just to show case Colony as it was. As how it would look on a normal day. Plus we thought about what made launch events fun. What made them fun wasn’t the launch gambits and all these things. Nobody liked speeches or launch gambits. What made it fun was just the company.

So for our launch we just prepared the food and invited all the people we knew.

We initially prepared ourselves for 100 people but over 150 came including almost 20 journalists from different publications.

It was an amazing event. I gave a short speech and the rest of the time was just for everyone to sit, chill, drink and chat. We had everyone from our friends to our investors.

One particular investor of mine came for the first time and jokingly (or maybe not jokingly) said “Tim… you know when I invested in you right I mentally wrote off the investment liao. Now I see how it looks I think can write half back”.

I’ve learned that sometimes the most simple things are the best. I’ve got lots of people to thank. From the team, to Heineken and Strongbow who sponsored the beer, to Carol Yong who took these great photos to the guests, our investors, our landlord and Bold Grains and Espresso Lab, our food operators of Colony who also catered that night.

The launch is just the beginning of course. Now the pressure is on for us to make this a sustainable business. I know we have a tough road ahead of us, but we’ve got lots to do.

I know I’ve been sparse on my updates on social media lately, even on Dayre. That’s because I’ve been so busy that I’ve even stopped playing War Robots.

At an interview with Focus Malaysia magazine today the journalist asked me what I do with my time now. If I really think about it, all I do is spend time with family, work, run and read my books. That’s about it but the most important thing is… I’m happy.

Thank you for all the people who’ve been such a wonderful part of my life.

Yesterday was a big day for us at Colony. It was the launch of our new co-working space and we were all really busy preparing for everything.

The one special thing about Colony is that we’re in a building where its tenants (residents and commercial tenants like us) can pay to use the beautiful gym and swimming pool on the roof top that is operated by an independent operator. So that allows our members access to these great facilities which go well with our work life balance ethos.

One thing I’m really conscious about though is making the residents feel comfortable with us sharing the space. Even though we all pay management fees to be entitled to it, I wanna make sure we do whatever we can to make sure they’re comfortable with us being there.

Anyway on the morning of our launch I got a phone call from a “resident of the building”….. which then spoiler alert turned out to be a Gotcha call by the Hitz.FM morning crew.

Here’s how it went. Turns out my wife set me up.

Jump to minute 1.22. That’s where the call starts.

I haven’t had this feeling in a long time. I can’t believe it. Every day now I’m looking forward to go to work. I dread weekends for being too long instead of took short and look forward to my weekdays.

Plus last night when I couldn’t sleep because I was too excited to go to work, it’s not because there was anything special happening today at work. Nothing. Just another normal day but I’m just super excited.

I think it’s a combination of enjoying seeing my colleagues, to enjoying the work I do… to the nice office environment that I was looking forward to go back to.  The environment. Ah yes it dawned on me then that all the articles I’ve been reading about how a great working environment makes you happy at work… that’s what I’m feeling right now.

A big part of course the satisfaction we’ve been getting from Colony. After months of hard work and solving crisis after crisis we have put together what I think is the most beautiful co-working space in KL. (Humble brag).

So I look forward every time I have to bring someone on a tour for the first time because the reaction I get each time is a “WOW” followed by a “I WANNA WORK HERE”.

That’s just amazing! Just amazing!

What really got me today was that my friend Arnold came to visit and he was like “WOW”. He then took this picture and posted it on Instagram.

This is hands down one of the coolest co working spaces I have ever been to! You must check it out if you’re in KL #coworking #colony Well done @timtiah & @fourfeetnine so excited

A post shared by Arnold Aranez (@mr_gadget) on Jul 17, 2017 at 9:30pm PDT

This alone.. made my day.

I’m enjoying loving work so far!

Today at Colony we had a little issue. We’re just a couple of weeks away from the renovation completing and we’ve had to prepare a lot of things like our kits for our members and more importantly the key cards and lanyards.

We took some time to design a really nice lanyard and sent it to the printers to print. We got them today and were really disappointed with what came out. I’m not going to share a picture of it because I’m too embarrassed to even have any digital footprint of it. Worst part is that we had printed a lot of them in bulk.

We managed to solve the situation in an hour or so. After speaking to the printers they agreed to reprint everything for us again without cost.

In any case I thought we learned some things from the little issue today so I sent the following e-mail to the team. After I wrote it out I thought it would be good maybe to share it on my blog here. So here it is.

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Dear Colony Team,

When the Colony lanyards arrived today we were all caught by surprise of how they looked so different from the design we had given the supplier. That issue has been solved now.

However I think there are important insights that I wanted to point out on this issue.

We practice the principle of “Extreme Ownership” in our team. That means whenever someone has a task at hand, he or she takes full ownership of the result of it. The result is the most important outcome. In business things often don’t go as planned and we don’t achieve the result we expected. When these things happen, I as the team leader have a responsibility to go around and ask a lot of questions on what and why did it happen to understand the situation.

Here’s what to keep in mind when answering those questions.

1) Never fear telling the truth

There is no politics in this company and I don’t want us to have a culture of pushing blame when mistakes are made. Never find the need to blame someone else or to “cover yourself”. Everyone makes mistakes and each and every one of us is bound to make a mistake eventually.

More importantly though, understand that while we all practice extreme ownership of our own tasks, I take extreme ownership of all of you. So every mistake any of you make whether it was approved by me or not… is MY mistake. So I am in no position to blame any of you because I share that blame.

2) Never compromise on the good result you expect to get

If a result of your work isn’t good enough whether it’s because of something in or outside your control, NEVER defend it. If the lanyards are shit, they are shit and if we don’t think it’s not good enough then it’s not. Never settle for anything less than excellence. Focus on what went wrong and how to solve the situation. Take your emotions or ego out of the equation because….

3) It is NOT about you.

It isn’t. It’s never about me or you or anyone else. It’s about the purpose we set out to do on every single task. We are measured not by what anyone thinks about us or the task, we are measured only by the result and results don’t lie. So focus all our efforts on the results.

As a team we strive for our purpose of changing the work experience. We want Colony to be the best co-working space in KL or the best one in SouthEast Asia and heck maybe someday the world. In order to get there it’s not about how nice our space looks. It’s about how well we work together as a team and how hard we fight the urge to settle for anything less than the very best.