We often hear this question when we say: We work at CARRY, a startup in Berlin. The short answer: No, we don't. (But there is a need for it :D ) When we hear this often-used term, many people think of young, hip people who work in cool lofts above the city. During breaks they play a game of table tennis and a 60-hour week is standard. That's why we want to clear up the startup clichés here, or maybe even confirm some of them?!?
The term startup is defined in different ways. According to the business dictionary, a startup is a new, not yet established company in the first phase of its life cycle. This usually means the first 3 to 5 years. It is founded to realize an innovative business idea with little start-up capital. It is also intended to break up existing structures and replace them with innovations.
The founding phase
We can first dispel the prejudice of a large office with a lounge and its own massage table. In contrast, starting a new company that is self-financed like us requires a small budget. That means a small office, lots of test runs and a lot of improvisation. But we now have space in a shared office in Berlin's Nollendorfkiez and are pretty happy here. Self-financing means we don't have any big investors in the background who support us financially. That means a smaller budget, but our profits stay in the company and are not distributed externally or to owners. The advantage of this is that we can make independent decisions.
One of our rooms at Nollendorfplatz in Berlin.
Eye rolling is the order of the day here
We do have to confirm some clichés :) Feeling good is very important to us. Our CARRY family is a team of different characters who have a common goal in mind. That brings us together, and helping each other out is the order of the day.
If the warehouse becomes tight for larger orders, we will help out together.
Since we are still a small team, everyone has quite a lot of responsibility on their plate. Since we support each other, flexible working hours and the spontaneous decision whether we want to work from home or in the office are no problem at all.
Every day at 3:30 p.m., we have an appointment to remind us of our eye yoga. We spend 8 hours looking at screens and can already see the poor eyesight and glasses coming our way. So we strengthen our eye muscles with three exercises. First, we close our left eye and look in all directions with our right eye. This also includes alternating focusing at a distance and close up. After that, the same tasks are on the agenda for the right eye. Then we hold our thumbs in front of our face with our arms outstretched. We move one thumb to the side and follow it with our eyes, while keeping our head straight. We repeat this in all directions, as far as we feel comfortable. Feel free to try it out :)
Feel-Good Management
We try to avoid overtime as much as possible. Of course, that's not always possible, but then we start the weekend earlier on Friday. We make sure that we don't exceed our number of hours and we also have a time account app in accordance with legal regulations. We also try to make everyday work pleasant and allow ourselves creative time out. A sufficiently long lunch break with a shared lunch is standard for us. We are lucky to have a kitchen in the office and use it almost every day. We often cook together, always vegetarian or vegan and usually healthy too :D At least when our dear Leonie is here and brings us great recipe ideas. You can also find many of these ideas on our blog under the "Recipes" tab .
Shared lunches are standard.
Work in progress
For about a year now, we have reserved Tuesday mornings for our workshops. Here we work on various topics, each with four sessions. In the first few months, we worked on our feedback culture and redistributed our roles within the team. In the last few weeks, we have been working on the topics of purpose and company values. We have talked about what we actually want to achieve with CARRY and how we will achieve it. You can already discover some of our results in the About Us section and you will also be able to read about our workshops in future blog posts.
