Welcome Everybody,

It got late, but worthwhile.

Enjoy!

✍🏻 Week 34, 2025 - Growing Without Growing

Last week I briefly mentioned that we’d have an opportunity to pitch Askara at Vandebron. I didn’t want to make too big a deal out of it since we weren’t sure how it would actually unfold. But after our meeting with the CTO on Friday, I’m starting to get convinced that this might seriously become a reality.

The Rush

Who would’ve thought that after six months of starting this company, we’d be sitting with one of the freshest energy companies in the Netherlands? To me, these kinds of moments are a big part of why I love being an entrepreneur so much.

Just bluffing your way into a meeting room with some big shots, figuring out the right ways to impress and dazzle, and then actually getting a shot at working your way in. That whole game is exhilarating from beginning to end. Getting all the right people involved to brainstorm the best tactics, letting the creative juices flow to make things look smart, reading the room during the conversation to see what’s the right way to bring it home, and enjoying the afterglow of the adrenaline rush for the few days after it’s over.

I honestly love every moment of it.

Now we’re here with a good chance that this energy company of about 300 people will want to work with us. They still needed to discuss things internally and couldn’t give us any definite answers, but it was clear that we left the right impression and that these people would be excited to work with us. That gives quite the thrill, and I’ve been enjoying it all weekend.

Additionally, all our current clients have been showing increased interest in wanting to work more with us, asking for solutions that don’t directly fall within the scope of the core product we’re aiming to focus on. But it would be a shame to miss out on people wanting to pay us, right?

The Challenge

So the next big question is: how are we going to cater to such a big fish whilst simultaneously dealing with increased demand from current clients? All while we said that we aren’t going to take on any new team members anytime soon. We first need the social concrete of the current team to harden before it can take on any new strain that new people with new needs would require. And we need to have a plan ready to go once the definite yes from Vandebron comes in.

This really strikes at the core of what Source Work is all about. The Source has a specific vision for its creative field and needs to defend the boundaries of that creation with all its power, preventing sneaky new ideas from infiltrating and diluting the essence of what this is really about from the very start. Slowly eating into more and more resources, making people work on far too many things at the same time, and gradually halting progress and momentum in the organisation.

So it’s important that you, as the source, stay true to your gut about what’s being built here and try to discern good advice from bad. In this instance, the nuance is that our core business is developing a management system through which cybersecurity, environmental, and quality standards can be managed. Specifically with quality management, the line of what it involves can often get quite blurry. Many requests currently made by our clients do improve their processes and thus the quality of the end result for the customer, but they’re not necessarily an aspect of the management system itself.

The risk is that we start dedicating precious resources to all these specific process improvements rather than actually building the automations for the generic management system. The management system is something we can productise and scale the sale of, but all these bespoke solutions are just one-offs.

The Strategy

We’ve crystallised two strategies this week to handle this capacity and vision alignment challenge without bringing in new people to the core team.

Teach Them How to Fish

We decided that instead of catching the fish and selling it to them, we’ll get paid for teaching them how to fish for themselves. Still creating a win-win situation for all parties involved. So we’ll develop some high-quality educational content based on the latest insights and skills we’re developing with our own processes.

Roll Out the Network Effect

The next challenge is how to handle the big fish (Vandebron) we’re currently in the process of reeling in. They’ll require lots of attention, especially in the whole onboarding and implementation phase of this solution we’re also still mostly developing ourselves.

We specifically require real cybersecurity expertise that can work to analyse their current data and import it into our Information Security Management System (ISMS). Currently I’m the only one within our team who actually has this expertise, and I’m already very thinly spread. So we need a different solution.

This is why I came up with the idea to involve a cybersecurity consultancy firm that we can tempt by presenting this big new client to them. But for them to get in, they need to agree to being subcontracted through Askara and working with our technology. This will most likely spark their interest since it will make their lives easier as well.

By presenting them with this big client and work innovation, hopefully we can tempt them to eventually also promote our solution more within their own portfolio. Making it possible to train more of their consultants to work with our system and sell licences to their clients. This would be another strategy that scales through what’s called “The Network Effect.”

We can repeat this approach over and over with more cybersecurity consultancy firms without requiring too much of our human resources. We might even create some educational resources for these firms to work with our tools. None of this is meant to steal anybody’s work—just to make it easier, more fun, and more convenient to cater to more clients. Win-win-win.

Integration

These strategies reflect a core principle we’re building into Askara: growth through multiplication rather than addition. Instead of simply hiring more people to handle increased demand, we’re creating systems and partnerships that amplify our impact whilst maintaining our vision integrity.

The “teach them to fish” approach keeps us focused on our core product whilst providing immediate value to clients. The network effect strategy allows us to serve bigger clients without compromising our team’s cohesion. Both approaches honour the Source Work principle of defending creative boundaries whilst still being responsive to opportunities.

It’s a delicate balance, but one that feels sustainable and aligned with who we are as an organisation. Sometimes the best way to handle a big fish isn’t to get bigger yourself, but to get smarter about how you work with others.

With care,
Ben

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