In continuation of the series of blog articles about our staff that we launched last week, this week has us interview Gogoprint’s second Managing Director and co-founder, Alexander Suess. Last week we wrote about David, who is also Managing Director and co-founder at Gogoprint. If you missed the article about David, have a read here. For those who don’t know, we thought of and started this blog series because our staff is the key ingredient influencing the achievement of our strategy, and of our vision and mission for South-East Asia’s printing market. To get to know the company better, we realized that you need to get to know its people better. This series of articles gives you exclusive insights into the daily operations, responsibilities, and challenges of Gogoprint’s staff.

As we said, Alex is the second of two Managing Directors and co-founders of Gogoprint, the second of the two patres familias. Alex had some free time to be interviewed this week, which is great for all of you who want to know how it is to manage half of Gogoprint’s operations. So, let’s meet him.

Hey Alex. How are you doing?

Hi. To be fair I’ve been a bit sick this week. Too much work must have made my immune system a bit more vulnerable haha :) Anyways, it’s nothing bad so let’s go, interview time!

OK, good. So Alex, lead me through a typical day of yours as a Managing Director

You can imagine that with the fast growth of Gogoprint and the fast development of its website, two weeks are never really the same. We’re constantly developing new website features, hiring new people, etc. so my week’s work reflects that.

But if I had to outline the big sections of my days (which I do right now :p ), I’d say this is my typical day:

05:35am: Wake up

06:01am: Prepare coffee :)

06:10am: Meditation & morning swim, for a healthy mind and body

07:30am: Getting to the office and planning the day ahead&lt

08:00am: Focus on getting the 3 most important tasks of the day done. Have to start the day strong, that puts me in a productive mood

10:25am: Get more coffee for a pre-lunch boost

11:30am: Read/reply emails and complete administrative tasks before lunch

11:30am -12:00pm: Finally, lunch

01:00pm: Team Meetings, which can range from briefings on updates & improvements, to discussions of strategies & ideas & challenges, celebrations of victories, and the planning of our weekly roadmap. Basically this is when we question if we’re on the right track, and evaluate what we need to improve most and how.

04:00pm: We put a strong emphasis on hiring the right people, and we’re constantly hiring for at least one position, so I’ve got interviews veeeeery often. Around 4pm is when I try to fit them in.

05:00pm: Time to start finishing the day by getting more todos done

Any time between 7 and 8pm: Leave the office, and eat a bit

08:00pm: Evening workout to get rid of stress and stay fit

09:00pm: Time for a good read to rest the mind

Impressive! Can you fit in your morning swim / meditation and your evening workout every day?

Yup, I make it work most of the time. I try to make it part of my routine because I believe it’s important (at least for me) if I want to be as productive as possible day in, day out.

We should all learn from you! You talked about your to-dos in your daily “schedule”. Can you explain a bit more about that? How would you describe your role and main responsibilities to somebody who doesn’t know anything about Gogoprint?

Well as a managing director, my main role is to steer the company into the right direction together with David, which means growth and the achievement of our mission. Whereas David coordinates the Production, Development, and Marketing aspects of the business, I am responsible of Sales, Customer Service, HR and Accounting. But once again, a start-up has to be lean and able to make the right decisions fast, which is why as a manager David and I participate in all big decisions and projects.

If I had to sum up my responsibilities, I’d sum them up like this:

○ Setting the company strategy and vision

○ Driving Gogoprint's growth & revenue

○ Setting team goals, realigning them when they are off course and providing support if things get stuck

○ Firefighting and making many - often not so easy - decisions :)

○ Making Gogoprint a place where everybody can learn and grow on a personal level (almost) every single day

○ Building a great team of exceptional people

○ Building company culture and following a philosophy of customer service excellence throughout every department

That makes sense. I can imagine it’s a lot of work though. What would you say is the most important part of your job?

To keep improving Gogoprint's systems, processes and customer experience every single day. Improvements accumulate and an improvement of only 0.1% per day has a massive impact after one year of consistent execution. Especially in today’s e-commerce world, if you stand still too long, you get eaten up. At least as important is to make Gogoprint a great place to work, where people can grow and learn.

Yes, incremental improvements are crucial. In the light of these responsibilities and your role in general, what are the main challenges that you face? Do you have a cool story to share?

We always want to go the extra mile for our customers. Unfortunately, printing is a very complex process with many steps involved. Even a small problem in this process could easily create a delay for a customer especially with the short production times (e.g. 24 hours) offered by Gogoprint.

That’s why we invest a lot of time and thought into process automation to reduce the risk of human-errors and substantially invests into machinery redundancies. Still there are cases, even though very rare, in which things go wrong at Gogoprint. In such a case, our whole team works together and tries to make everything happen that is humanly possible to still deliver to our customers on time. One time that meant we had to send a motorbike all the way to Pattaya (on cost of Gogoprint of course) to ensure that our customer could visit her exhibition planned for the next day.

That probably made for a quite uncomfortable and time-consuming delivery for the driver. Luckily the products still came in time. Based on all this, how do you like your job at Gogoprint?

Over the past 18 months we have been building an outstanding team. Everybody in our team has his / her unique strengths and is an expert in his / her field. This has allowed us to build up Gogoprint at a very high pace and allowed us to fundamentally change how the printing industry works in Thailand. Customers can now very conveniently place orders online, benefit from high cost-savings and can get offset prints delivered Thailand-wide in less than 48 hours. This all comes with excellent customer service.

On top of that, we launched in Malaysia about a month ago. It’s very exciting because the market is different, both on the supplier and customer sides. So even though we are extremely busy these days, it’s great to see the hard work paying off.

That’s great to hear. To conclude this interview, please share your thought of the day with the readers. The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” - Henry Ford . We all make mistakes, that is something that we have to accept. Where we can make a difference though, is by learning as much as we can from those mistakes, and making sure that we make use of those lessons in the best way possible in the future.

Thanks Alex for these insightful answers! That concludes it for today readers, and we sure hope you enjoyed reading into Alex’s day. Maybe you even learned something useful… If you’d like to address a question to Alex, please do so in the comments and he’ll answer (don’t be afraid).