As you probably heard, Cristina, our one-woman sales team for the past 2.5 years, is moving on. Her reasons, views on Cobot, and future plans you can read in her own words. With this post I like to say thanks to Cris, praise what she has done for our customers, Cobot, and us but also reflect a bit.
When she broke the news to us that she wants to move on, it came out of the blue. It made me sad to hear and I felt like we failed as an employer. But after some time spent thinking about it, I don’t see it like that anymore. I actually think it was the other way around: we were too successful in a way. Let me elaborate: as you can see in Cris’ posts, we allow our team a lot of freedom. What we want in return is that this freedom is used to for personal growth, and Cris grew quite fast.
I still remember the energetic and slightly chaotic person who applied for the new sales job back in 2012. The fact that she left Spain and her old job behind just like that showed us that she is a person who takes things into her own hands. After she learned the basic ins and outs of coworking and cobot, she quickly provided new input, not only marketing and PR but also improvements that we could make to cobot itself.
She took care of our first steps when localizing/translating cobot into Spanish, collected and relayed feedback from our customers, helped improve the on-boarding process, worked with us on the long term vision of cobot, and made sure that we share our learning within our own coworking space.
During her time with us, she ventured out into other fields, became active within RailsGirlsBerlin and the CoworkingWiki, did business development gigs on the side, all while taking in all the knowledge she could get through books, conferences, and meetups.
She also brought in a lot to learn for us: I took examples from how she successfully built her professional online identity, and her recommendation of “The Personal MBA” started me off on a reading spree about human behavior and biases.
As it is with small teams, there is a good chance that your work relationship can grow a little more familiar, so we also had some good nights out dancing in Berlin clubs and a great sailing trip last summer.
The chaos is gone from the Cristina I know today, whose determination and focus are still paired with immense energy.
Along the way came the point at which she obviously outgrow cobot, simply because she grew faster than cobot itself. This is another lesson for me: sustainable growth sometimes can not match pace with the personal growth of a person.
So here we are now, looking for somebody new who is hungry to learn, improve, and grow further with us, cobot, and our customers.
– Thilo
