Growing a Family, Growing a Business, and Staying Together | Deri & Jo Hughes, Honeycomb

I was going to ask, you know, when was the moment that actually this felt like a really good idea? And then there's probably the opposite, right? Where it was an equally the opposite of that day.

Yeah, that's a really interesting question.

I mean, I guess just a bit of the kind of arc of the business over that eight year period.

So the business as it started out was a outsourced operations services business targeting boutique consulting firms, which came from the idea that, well, my personal experience really as chief finance and operations officer of a 60 person boutique, realizing that there were so many operational jobs that needed to be done, that hiring a team to do them was very difficult.

So that was the kind of the core thesis.

And that seemed to resonate with a bunch of the prospects and clients I was talking to.

What I realized a couple of years into running that business was that I didn't really enjoy running a business like that.

It didn't suit my psychology.

It was challenging.

We were undercapitalized for the business.

Just a lot of naivety around what it took to run a business like that.

I then had a little play for a couple of years with... with a recruitment business on the side, which I launched with a couple of co-founders that I think propositionally was strong, but the three of us were just stretching ourselves way too thin.

And then one of those co-founders left and left the two of us and that just didn't work at all.

So through those first kind of three or four years, that was about four years worth, we realized that those business models didn't suit me, didn't suit our business, didn't suit our lifestyle, et cetera.

And then towards the back end of 2021, we moved into the kind of capability development space off the back of kind of following client demand.

So when I say originally like this This was an idea, not the idea.

It took us from May 2018 to December 2021 to test enough things to work out what was the idea that fitted with my psychology, with what I was good at and with the business that we wanted to build our lives around.

And even then, then we did probably in 2020, we did something like 30 grand's worth of training revenue.

And so to pivot fully into that as our primary revenue stream, then there was a hell of a lot of work still to do.

You've made me think, actually, back to that time, there was a turning point around there where Derry stopped walking in to the kitchen saying, I've had a brilliant idea, which was this sort of every few months.

That was unrelated, like off track of the idea you were doing.

There's always ideas, but now the ideas are all building on the core idea, whereas for quite a while the ideas were real tangents.

And I remember one day just thinking, my goodness, not another idea because it was that sense of sort of starting again and obviously you look back now and it's necessary to test these evolutions and go with the market and you know it's got us to a good place but there was a point in time where I thought actually these ideas are building rather than starting again and that is different.

honestly I mean we've always had that dynamic of me kind of coming up with ideas but me doing that was a sign of my like just discomfort and lack of loving it and then what I realised was the capability development the training the advisory work around that is an area of expertise that I really enjoy and I think that For me as a founder, that like founder market fit is a really important concept because you're going to be in this game for a long time if you want to build something that's going to support your lifestyle.

And if you don't have that founder market fit, then it's such an uphill struggle.