On the mind.

Traveling Week 1 - Kerala

This week, I am in India.

India is a country of many people. India is incredibly beautiful but it’s also dirty. It’s where my wife and I got engaged many years ago. It’s the country of decadent food. The country of many languages, and a rich, deep culture tinted by an unhealthy relationship with a once ruling England. It’s a culture that has influenced the entire world in so many positive ways. India is indeed a world superpower.

I’m here for work, and wow, IT FEELS SO GOOD TO BE BACK. I missed the energy of this place, the food, but most of all, our team. I also missed the curries and porotta!

As I write this, I am on a 4-week journey away from home. For the next 4 weeks, I plan to post what’s on my mind each week. Below is a recap of the 4 weeks and where I will be:

• Week 1 - India / Kerala: Visiting our main India office.

• Week 2 - India / Rajasthan: Visiting a possible location for our next all-hands company retreat!

• Week 3 - Vietnam / Ho Chi Minh City & Ninh Van Bay: Family vacation.

• Week 4 - Vietnam / Ninh Van Bay: Family vacation.

For this first week, I am visiting our Kerala office, where we have most of our engineering team for White Rabbit Group.

As I walked into the office with nearly 80 team members, I felt the energy of our people again. Everyone stood with smiling faces, giving me a very warm welcome. I had forgotten this feeling, to be honest—seeing and working with our team brings so much energy.

The last time I was here, we had close to an 8-person team and keep in mind that I’ve been working from home, by myself, for many years now. The feeling of seeing everyone and walking into our office was surreal! It was even the first time I stepped foot into the office that I helped design years ago.

We have such an amazing team here in Kerala and Chennai, and seeing them in person, seeing them work, and experiencing their energy makes me very proud. This is our team that we’ve spent many years building. It’s White Rabbit Group, and I am grateful I get to be the CEO of this team.

It was such a good reminder of how great our team is, how important being in person is, and that I must make it out here more often to see them.

Thank you to our entire team for being so welcoming!

We fly to Rajasthan in a couple days but before that, we’ve got more to do here and people to see.

Stay tuned.

Business.

We had an all-hands meeting today (Friday, July 19th) for our India team, where I gave a presentation to everyone. Our Chennai team even made a long 14-hour journey to join us in our Kerala office for this event.

I went over why I’m here in India, what our drivers are, who we support as a company, our mission, and our vision for the team. Then I opened it up to questions.

The mission and vision of where we’re taking White Rabbit Group are incredibly clear to me, but it’s important to reinforce what we’re doing over and over as we continue to build our company. Every day our team comes in, and if they don’t have a strong connection to the why, then our motivation will be low.

A section of the presentation I gave today was our “Why”. I want to share that segment for the team members who were not there and for all my readers.

Our why is comprised of two parts:

1. Culture

2. Our Market: Agencies and Creative Studios

(1) Culture

The first half of our mission is to create and nurture an amazing culture of people. People who are passionate about what they do, hardworking, have fun, produce quality work, and are proud to be working here.

The drive for our culture is to wake up next to other individuals who are genuinely excited to come to work each day. To surround ourselves with a team that is fun to wake up with, to hop on calls with, a team that cares about what they do every day. I also know not every day is going to be perfect but we strive to build a culture of people that genuinely likes to work here. We spend a lot of time hiring to make that happen and we also fire fast when we’re not aligned with a team member. Firing may be harsh but we do it to retain our culture of harboring people that enjoy what they do while creating excellent work.

Our people are everything. Literally. And we’re not just saying it; we mean it.

We value:

• Having fun!

• Giving it your 100%

• Impactful work

• Thinking outside the box

• Problem-solving

• A healthy balance of work, in your control

• Community

• Real relationships

• Compassion and empathy

• Total transparency and being vulnerable

• Mistakes

• Over communication

• Staying calm, cool, and collected in all scenarios

• No egos!

(2) Our Market: Agencies and Creative Studios

The second half of our mission is to make the lives of agencies and creative studios easier. With that, we service and get to work with some of the most talented teams around.

I’m incredibly passionate about our target market and who we work with. There’s a reason why agencies get hired by companies. Some of the main reasons a company may hire an external agency/studio are to delivery fast, their internal team might be lacking a certain expertise, or they may just need more people on a project to get it done. Perhaps the biggest reason to hire an external agency is because of their creativity and that creativity extends to many types of services. It can be creativity in design, marketing strategies, sales processes, or a certain expertise, to name a few.

Agencies and their founders are kind of like the “cool kids” in the business world, but in a good way. They have grit, they get things done, they’re creative. They are smart… and we want to be the best friend of agencies out there producing world class work.

We support them from the technical side so they can focus on what they do best.

One pic.

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Thanks for following along!

The Weekly is a newsletter that goes out each week written by Greg Bellinger, currently building and CEO of White Rabbit Group and The Labs.

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