Our business is now a 5 year old

It’s time for cake & party hats! On August 9th 2023, Life Moments turned 5.

From what I’ve seen, five year olds are loaded with potential.

While Life Moments is still young and learning, we have a huge capacity to grow and achieve great things.

As one of the founding team I’ve been in a position to experience the birth and growth of our business throughout these early years.

As a father of three boys (currently 6, 4, and 1) I can tell you that early years for humans are similar in many ways.

Five year olds are curious

Curiosity is one of the four people principles at Life Moments.

When we hire new people, we’re proactively asking questions to find evidence of them hunting down information, digging deeper, showing an intrinsic urge to learn for themselves.

Without curiosity we wouldn’t be experimenting with new designs, evolving processes, finding new clients, or gathering data to understand what’s truly happening in the world around us.

Curiosity is the first step towards improvement.

Five year olds are creative

Creativity is the second of our four people principles (the last two are Conscientiousness and Consideration, in case you were wondering).

As a visual arts veteran, I’d like to take this moment to explain how I define creativity.

It’s not about drawing things or making slide decks look pretty. It’s about divergent thinking, problem solving, and idea generation.

This is not my own definition. It comes from the Torrance test of Creative Thinking, and I think it’s a good way to conceptualise this trait in humans.

As a startup, we’ve relied upon creative thinking to give us an edge in the market.

Five years in and creativity remains a crucial factor of what makes us tick.

Five year olds are full of energy

When I think of energy at Life Moments I think of a few key things we’ve done to design the organisation and how we live day to day:

The Graduate Programme

Our 2-year Graduate Programme is designed to give talented young people an opportunity to enter a growing business, have real impact on its growth and customers, skill-up in their direction of choice, then spread their wings and fly to another role within industry.

It takes a lot of energy to achieve this in the first 2 years of your career. It’s inspiring for us older folk to see the effort put in and the results gained by our grads.

Unlike other businesses I’ve worked in, it’s not sad to see them go. It’s also inspiring to watch them get excited about the prospect of a new role, new colleagues, new salary, new lifestyle, new learning opportunities.

We’ve seen our grads go on to more senior positions, or even to travel the world as digital nomads. Either way, that gives me a bucketload of energy to fight for the good things in life.

Cam’s Cafe

This is the name of our fortnightly presentation session where one or two people will hold court.

They maybe sharing their knowledge about a topic of interest, or presenting some company-wide work like a rebrand.

The presentation format requires preparation, and some courage to step up in front of colleagues. It takes some energy to put on a show. And those of us watching, we appreciate that.

The CEO

Ben, is a font of eternal energy. His Slack bio is literally “Constantly excited old(er) guy”

Regardless of the subject matter being discussed & worked upon, he brings his full self (and then some) to the business every day.

I think it’s really important to have an energetic character like this in the driving seat.

Five year olds make mistakes

In business (good businesses that is), mistakes are most commonly referred to as learning opportunities..

We respect that sentiment and will give open shout outs to those who are honest enough to stick their hands up and say they made a mistake, and that they’ll fix it.

We can’t ask for more really. We’re only human.

What that does is foster Psychological safety – we’re maintaining an environment to work where we can try things out, to be a little bit risky and reap big rewards.

Taking time to reflect

As your business has grown and aged year-on-year, what changes do you see happening?

When you look back have your colleagues, as a collective, matured into a better team?

I sincerely feel we’ve built something special at Life Moments.

It’s a joy to work with these fine humans, and I’m sure it will be this time next year.

Happy birthday, Life Moments! 😃 🎉