Friends and family. Most of us can't imagine life without them. Well, the personal one. In work life, on the other hand, it's mostly a forbidden commodity.
Not so for Martin Tryzna, CEO of UX Fans s.r.o. and former junior biathlon representative.
Martin likes controversy. Plus, he's got his oak stick. I mean, his head. And that's a paradigm-busting combination. So if you go to Martin and tell him that his friends and family are not employed, guess what happens... Right, Martin has more than a few friends and family in the company.
I know Martin from Scaleupboard. I've had a chance to hear his views on this subject a few times. That's why he's on the show today, where we're discussing ...
🔸 What led Martin to employ friends and family?
🔸 How do they separate their work and personal lives?
🔸 What is the athlete's contribution to the business?
🔸 How do they deal with reproach, salaries and rewards with friends?
🔸 What makes a startup successful?
HOW TO (NOT) EMPLOY FRIENDS AND FAMILY (INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT)
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. Today we are going to discuss a topic that doesn't sound much in the ether and when it does, it is often in a negative sense. We're going to look at whether and how to employ friends and family. For this topic I have invited a staunch supporter of this approach, Martin Tryzna. Hello.
Martin Tryzna
Hi, hello.
What was the biggest win for Martin in biathlon?
Martin Hurych
Martin is the founder and CEO of UX Fans. Before we get into the topic, you are a former junior biathlon athlete. As a great athlete, what is the biggest win biathlon has brought into your life?
Martin Tryzna
It definitely brought those habits from the sport into my career, which starts with fair play and also that if you want to achieve something, you have to work hard. It never comes for free, you have to practice every day and try to get better.
Martin Hurych
It's been the case here since the 1990s that business is not very fair play. What do you think?
Martin Tryzna
In the 1990s, it wasn't fair play, but now I think we are able to choose those clients who play fair play and follow that principle of transparency and fair play. So if somebody doesn't play fair, I don't want to work with them.
What does UX Fans and Martin do?
Martin Hurych
I told you you started a company called UX Fans. Come and tell us what made you do it and what UX Fans actually does, how big you are, so then we can understand from what perspective we're going to comment on what we're going to talk about.
Martin Tryzna
I started in IT as a project manager, first in Prague in a company and then in Liberec. At one point, I ended up working on the Miton Rest project in Liberec and several developers ended up working with me at the same time. Basically, nobody wanted to look for a job in Prague or somewhere in Liberec after smaller companies, so we thought it was the perfect time to start our own company. Our core business is that we build startups or digital products and what is our competitive advantage is that we do it from A to Z. What that means in a nutshell is that all you have to do is come to us with an idea, some money, and we're able to build that digital product from customer testing, UX, UI development, to launch and long-term maintenance in production and long-term development of that product. There are currently 35 of us in the company.
What led Martin to employ friends and family?
Martin Hurych
When I was preparing for you, I found out two things. You say a lot that it's great when people in your company are athletes. At the same time, you make no secret of the fact that you spend a third of your time at work, so you need to make it nice, and you're not afraid to employ either family or friends. What made you do that? In fact, the standard assumption in the market is that employing a family is more trouble than it is good. What made you think otherwise?
Martin Tryzna
I quite like controversy, and when something is taboo, I don't want to stupidly accept it and tell myself that it somehow makes sense. I want to try to manage it and you said it right, we spend a third of our lives at that job and I want to spend that time there with people I like to spend it with. I want to look forward to going to that job every morning, so I'm going to recruit there and look for people that are close to me. At the same time, when we get down to the friends and family, most of the time especially with those friends, it's the same kind of people, we'll get along. For me, there's a good saying, the crow sits by the crow. That's the main reason, I want to work in a team that is close to me and I like to go for a beer with them in the evening, where I don't want to talk much about work stuff. There's the personal life, you have to be able to divide it mentally in your head and set it up with these people. When we enter into that professional cooperation, neither of us wants to spoil our personal life. So we have to strictly divide it up and that's how we're going to function, we can't interfere with each other.
How do they separate work and personal life?
Martin Hurych
That's honestly awfully easy to say, but hard to do in my opinion. When you live for work, you want to deal with it after work. So how do you really do it in practice, that you are able to pack up at 4, 5, 6, go for a beer and not talk about work anymore? Is there a culture that's required, or is it unwritten just between you? How do you do it?
Martin Tryzna
A lot of it has to be me. If I don't bring up the work topic, we won't talk about it. How many times have I said I'm not going to address work here, we'll wait until tomorrow, everybody can see my calendar so we can have a meeting, but I'm also interested in what these people are doing at home.
Martin Hurych
One thing about it that caught my eye. A lot of people deliberately change bubbles. Now, I don't want this to sound bad, but you go from family to work and you go from work to family. So how does that work for you in the long run, how many of those 35 people could be said to be very close friends and family?
Martin Tryzna
The really close ones are something like 5. I don't see all of them every day, of course, but my wife and those close friends know each other and those relatives, and the topics in the off-time of that job are absolutely different and they don't mix at all.
Martin Hurych
How many people in your family do you employ?
Martin Tryzna
Directly from one person's family now, which is my only experience so far.
What drives him to employ athletes?
Martin Hurych
Logically, as a lifelong athlete, you gravitate towards sports, you employ athletes. Is that by design or what?
Martin Tryzna
Not intentionally, but again, I think it's true, crow fits crow. We've got former cross-country skiing nationals, world champions in orienteering cycling, winter orienteering nationals, and that community is there for us up north. I have to say that very often these people are ambitious and driven. Because of that often elite sport, maybe they didn't quite have the time to go to college, which would be directly to that job, but because of that single-mindedness, they're able to move very quickly in that practice. They then get to some higher ability and higher level faster.
Martin Hurych
I'd like to dig a little deeper into that. It occurred to me now that I think about it, if there are any non- athletes in Jablonec and Liberec.
Martin Tryzna
When I go around the dam in Jablonec, there are a lot of people running around in the summer, but I'm sure there are some. But I think that this area is alive with sport thanks to the Jizera Mountains, which are packed with skiers in winter.
What is the athlete's contribution to the business?
Martin Hurych
Not to be completely general, you've already bitten the bullet here, when you compare athletes and non-athletes, what do you think is the athlete's contribution to the business? Is that something that I should somehow test when I'm recruiting people into a company, for example?
Martin Tryzna
I think it's a definite plus if the person is actively involved in a sport thanks to some psychohygiene. You get a rest in that sport, you don't have to be a top athlete, I'm not saying that, but those people are definitely healthier, more efficient and the mental hygiene during that sport is definitely a benefit. We also go for a run together during the day, clear our heads a bit, have a shower in the offices, then come back and you have a second morning, you could say.
Martin Hurych
When do you get to work?
Martin Tryzna
We're there a little longer, or in the evening, but when it's nice out, it gets you out of that chair.
How's Martin's partner?
Martin Hurych
When you have that culture at work, what kind of boss are you? How would you describe yourself as a boss and how has that evolved over the years that you've had the company?
Martin Tryzna
In principle, I don't like the word boss at all, I don't have subordinates, I have colleagues. I have in my job description that I have to make sure that the company grows, has some direction, has some rudder and I keep some boundaries of how we do it. Then there are colleagues who in turn have development in that job description. If we were to go to the boss, if something needs to be decided and the team is not able to decide it, I'm the last instance of the one who's going to chop it up. What kind of boss am I? I guess you could say not hard enough, but I tend to look for those solutions in general together by some consensus rather than being some hard hand that has his head and his right.
What is the culture of the company?
Martin Hurych
Jak bys tedy popsal kulturu u vás ve firmě? Je to založené opravdu celé na té sportovní důvěře a na nějakém kamarádství?
Martin Tryzna
The culture could certainly be called camaraderie. I think that's one of the reasons why so few people leave. We rarely have people leave because they don't like the company. Basically, most of the time, whoever we hire and they last 3 months to six months, they last a very long time after that. So the culture is open, I would say definitely in that company everyone's opinion is heard, without exception everyone's opinion and it's kind of friendly. But there's also some pull at the gate, so it's not like we go there to talk. We all know that we're going for a goal and we want to get better every day, both personally and to deliver better products to the market.
How does he manage to keep communication in check?
Martin Hurych
One other thing occurred to me. As we talk in Scaleupboard, I know that you put a lot of emphasis on communication, and it was mentioned a few times in the preparation, both from you to the team and from the team to you. In those traditional companies where you employ people freely from the market, the line of communication is at least in theory somehow clearly defined. How do you manage to keep some things secret for a while until it's time to announce them, or conversely, how do you ensure that the information gets to the last person the way it's supposed to get from you?
Martin Tryzna
I would just say that sometimes I get such a fuck up in that I'm such a keen head and want to get these things done quickly, so I don't pick up on the sequential flow of information sometimes. Not that I have any extremely polished communication flows, I don't, but I have found some ways that if I need to tell the company something at once, I know I have to wait for some monthly breakfast. Until then, I keep it to myself because that's the only time I'm able to talk to the whole company. If someone's not at that breakfast, it's not my problem anymore.
How does he deal with his friends' criticisms of his shortcomings?
Martin Hurych
I experienced one thing in my second corporation when I worked for the Dutch. The way they have it laid out, they're brutally honest at work and they can have that beer with you in 10 minutes. How do you handle it when you're giving someone a hard time at work? Do you really go for that beer in half an hour afterwards, can you brush it off so perfectly?
Martin Tryzna
There, I have to say it's man to man. I think it's also because the relationship is such a camaraderie that you can say to someone, I don't like this, you really messed this up. He's going to contradict you for a while, then you're going to sort of agree that everybody has a part in it and 10 minutes later the coast is clear. But sometimes it can sit in somebody for a day or two, but again, that can be sensed relatively quickly, so you go and talk about it again calmly and clear the air. For me, that communication is the alpha and omega, and when I feel that something is not ideal somewhere, whether it comes to me or I can sense it in that collaboration, I need to go and clear that air right away. Again, it needs to be said with distance, with a calm head, without emotion, and to clarify where we are going and why it happened.
How do they deal with salaries and bonuses?
Martin Hurych
That's when we discussed one-offs and things that aren't exactly about valuation at first. But when you're dealing with, for example, valuations, salaries between friends, how do you work it out there then? Again, there's not that much of a relationship between us in traditional companies, so those things are much easier to negotiate. But if we're going to see each other in the morning at the appraisal interview, at noon on a joint run around the dam and in the evening over a beer, something tells me it's going to be more sensitive. How do you handle these things?
Martin Tryzna
I would say that what we've been pushing since day 0 of that company is that those individual colleague's rewards are ranked from the top down. We really try to maintain that fairness and we do some reviews of that ranking very frequently. I'm not alone on this, there are 5 of us co-owners who are working on this, so I'm not able to bend it myself, and at the same time everyone in that company has some areas to focus on at some point in time. There then you can tell if it's been met or not and I don't have a manipulative manoeuvre there.
Martin Hurych
I understand you're making a scorecard?
Martin Tryzna
You could say that. In principle, you could say, the money, whether we want it or not, is some measure of the abilities of these people and we should be able to rank them somehow.
Martin Hurych
How do you communicate that?
Martin Tryzna
I would say that it's more of a longer horizon of a year or so, but in principle that's how we communicate how we operate, how it's appropriate. Again, we can go back to some fair play. The most stuffy thing in that workplace might be that somebody here has more because they know the boss. Those are the rules of how to work with those friends. You mustn't get on their nerves in any way, you just can't.
Martin Hurych
Is anyone relegated to the second league or the division?
Martin Tryzna
Rather, they're all going higher and higher. Like I said, we're always trying to improve, we're always working on ourselves, and when someone goes down, I don't think they should be in that company.
Summary - What to look out for when employing friends?
Martin Hurych
You mentioned the rules about how to work with friends and family. Now, if you were to summarize that in the middle of the podcast into some 3, 5, 7 points, what should we be looking out for? At the same time, for listeners and viewers, I remind you that what Martin says here now, we're going to put in the final bonus, which is already somewhere around the episode download at this point.
Martin Tryzna
I would start chronologically. The alpha and omega is at the very earliest point, when we are discussing this topic with the person I am thinking of working with, we need to define the boundaries. What gives me an advantage now is that I already have some experience with this and am relatively well able to explain it in some real situations. We need to clarify the territories, where it ends, where it begins and what can happen. I can fire this person after three months because I want to be successful with this company and if it doesn't work, it won't work and it's perfectly fair to tell him up front. At the same time, I can be unhappy with the job and I'll say I'm not happy with it. That's kind of the beginning of the relationship. Then there is some part of the financial reward. We talked about that a moment ago, it's basically a given there. Then there's the work life, and there I would say that at work we talk about work and very little about personal things. For those people where I could theoretically slip up, I really try to minimize that. But then again, I don't want to talk about work stuff in the evening over a beer. It's the same with teambuilding and these events. The working hours are at work, and I try not to bring it up at teambuilding events. Then it's even little things like that. It may sound strange, but we have some company chat and we deal with work stuff there, but if we go out with the kids in the afternoon, I deal with it on WhatsApp. It's two different worlds and the message might be 5 minutes apart, but even that helps to sort of define those boundaries and separate those two worlds.
Martin Hurych
Do you strictly maintain the separation of these communication channels as well?
Martin Tryzna
I try, sometimes I fail, but I try on principle. Then, for practical reasons, I want to have work stuff on one job and private stuff on the other, because when I'm tracking something down, I know roughly in which sphere, and if I have it all together, it's a mess.
What are the plans for the future?
Martin Hurych
What are the plans for the future?
Martin Tryzna
We definitely still want to grow, but we've kind of said from the beginning that we don't want to have a huge company. We know that somehow our mental limit is around 40 people. That's kind of our direction of where we want to get to and then work more on some efficiency and training those people and stabilizing that company long-term.
Martin Hurych
Do you think it could work with 80, 100 people?
Martin Tryzna
I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't work that way, but we started the company with the idea that I want to have some overview of all the projects and what's going on. Because of the size of the company, I would no longer be able to see some of the projects for logical reasons and have absolutely no idea what was going on. That's not quite the way I want to do it.
Will your culture survive you?
Martin Hurych
Once you leave or want to leave as a founder, co-founder and CEO and want to be free to maybe do the long runs you're doing now instead of biathlon, do you think this culture will survive without you?
Martin Tryzna
I think it certainly does. Instead of me, there would be some other CEO at that moment, and the moment that CEO would be out of the company, there is no reason to, because it's the way it is and there is no incentive to change it. But if a CEO came in from outside, of course he could break it.
How to select customers to match the company culture?
Martin Hurych
The other day we were talking about relationships within the company. You mentioned right at the beginning of the podcast that those values of athletes, such as the ability to go for the result, fair play and so on, you have a chance to look for in your customers nowadays. You've got a glut of input, so you've got a choice. If I want to work with those that I enjoy working with and I haven't learned that yet, what should I look for in my potential customers to give me a chance to find those qualities and work with someone who makes sense? How do you do that?
Martin Tryzna
One of the pillars on which this rests is some transparency and expectation management with that client. So I'm absolutely transparent with that client, of course I show some monthly hours, the IT hour is not exactly the cheapest thing. Because I'm transparent like that, then I don't want to be chased on some little things that logically had to be done there. If I repeat myself, it's some fair play negotiation. If I'm being fair play with the client, then I know that he's never going to screw me over and there's a mutual trust. They trust our expertise, which I think we've had for a few years now.
What do they look for in clients?
Martin Hurych
I could tell you about clients who believed the client wouldn't screw them over and it ended up a little differently. Anyway, so in the very first stages of courtship, what are you really testing or how do you want the counterparty to perform and treat you? Where are the first signs that this could potentially be a mess and when would you rather run away?
Martin Tryzna
A lot of times it may not be exactly about the client as such. The clients in the Czech market still don't know exactly how IT works, how our business works and that when there is a mistake, the mistake just happens during the development. Basically, there is no product in the world currently without a bug, it's a feature of IT. There's always a need for a project manager, somebody has to manage it, these are such typically controversial items and it's to educate about it. How do we know the client? I'll repeat myself again, if it's an athlete, which often the decision makers in those companies or the owners are, then it's crow to crow again and the principles are similar. If I had to say it, when we say it's not for us, it's already at some initial pricing. It's some unnecessary nitpicking, there's already a sense of distrust and if there's even some of our own intuition at the beginning, then it doesn't make sense to us in the long run.
What makes a startup successful?
Martin Hurych
For you, the long-term success I assume, because you build startups, is to prove that your startups, whether invested by you or created by you on a turnkey basis, are successful. When you look across startups or your projects like that, what makes a startup really successful?
Martin Tryzna
Foreclosures. The statistic is that 70% of startups fail. But a lot of times I come across that the idea is good and could somehow live, it will employ 3, 4, 5 people, plus it will support the families behind the people who work there. I think there's a lot of ideas like that, but very often it's on that execution. I think the 70% failure rate is not that 70% of the ideas are bad, but very often the foreclosure is bad. A typical example is, I'll set aside some money, 1 million crowns, for 700k I'll get it written and then I'll have 300k left for marketing, for business and so on, but that comes out to exactly one month and then I have no money. Sometimes it's better to make some stupid prototype for 300k that kind of looks like it, the product is functional, and I keep the rest of the money to test it on the market. That's where the business is, not in the technology. The technology is an important building block, but I need to support a salesman for a year, which is exactly another million crowns.
What does the average successful startup look like?
Martin Hurych
When people talk about startups, the vast majority of people think of Productboard, Rohlik, billion- dollar companies, hundred-million-dollar companies. You're talking about 4 founders and their families, it's awfully sympathetic. So what does a classic startup or an average startup in the Czech Republic look like in the optics of Jablonec and Liberec? On the one hand, we only see the glitter of the successful ones, on the other hand, I sometimes hear that startup is already a buzzword and that everyone claims to be a startup nowadays. How do you see it?
Martin Tryzna
Like you said, there are a bunch of definitions of a startup. I have one of my own, that a startup is some new kind of service on the market that hasn't been here before and theoretically has a chance to succeed in that market. We have startups right around that 4 people, but now after some 3 years we have 80 people and that's still a successful startup for me, it's caught on in that market. Even our company is 35 people and I would say it's also functional, stable and even a startup in size under 100 people is a success for me. Of course it's not going to be a unicorn, but it's a success, it's a functional company.
Martin Hurych
Congratulations to 35 people, that's a totally great company, not many people have it here. I always say these people are the heroes and the elite of the company because not everyone here has it. Thank you for the interview, fingers crossed that you're successful, that you're employing athletes around the Jizera Mountains and that you're successful and thank you for sharing and for the bonus that's already hanging on my site at the moment. Good luck.
Martin Tryzna
Thank you so much for the invitation, have a great day.
Martin Hurych
You've taken a peek under the hood of a company that handles its human resources a little differently. I hope you've been intrigued, maybe a little motivated, maybe you have a bunch of interesting people around you that you've been turning your back on because you're worried about what would happen if your friendships last. Give it a try. If you liked this episode, I'm going to ask you to like, share, comment on whatever platform you're listening to us on right now or wherever you're watching us, because as you already know, otherwise the world won't know about us. By doing so, you'll help me reach more ears and eyes and invite more interesting guests.
Be sure to check out my site, www.martinhurych.com, where the bonus is now mentioned for the third time in the Ignition section. I can't help but keep my fingers crossed and wish you success, thanks.