Facctum inaugurated its Bangalore office on 27th July. We also used the opportunity to bring everyone in Facctum to this brand-new office for an entire week. We spent the week experiencing the very thoughtfully designed facilities of the new office. The sense of belonging was palpable almost as soon as we walked in. Until this inauguration, the Facctum team – now almost touching 30, hadn’t ever gathered in one physical place let alone spend a full week together. What an amazing week it was!! We had icebreakers, two separate hackathons, a session each on culture/values, ways of working, Product Roadmap, Path to Revenue, Customer Experience, and team-building activities including a hugely exciting race around Bangalore on the same theme as the Amazing Race, solving riddles in Escape Rooms, and dinner/drinks every night to talk shop and have fun at the same time.

Everyone was not here just physically but fully present mentally and emotionally. The time we spent together will forever be cherished. It brought all of us closer and finally, the pieces started to all fit in and we all felt very energized. Post the week-long fun-and-tech-fest, the velocity has gone up, and collaboration has increased significantly. A simple proof-point of this was our All Hands call last week during which, everyone switched on their cameras most proudly wearing Facctum T-shirts. The smiles, confidence, clarity, and camaraderie were on display like never before. The entire team felt 200% more engaged and connected.

The office itself was built over the previous 3 months at a frantic pace – architecture, design, and construction elements that all needed to come together – a lot of moving parts all at the same time –very different from a large corporate throwing money and resources at such challenges. For us, we needed to keep costs as low as practical which meant getting personally involved in designing every small detail, to build a modern and efficient place to collaborate. The entire project was done in a true start-up style. We set a milestone – half of it was based on plans and estimates and the other half just on a whim. We went all out to achieve the milestone as you do in a start-up and, while we could not achieve our milestone fully on time, we came very close to it as we overran by only 2-3 weeks – expected in any start-up.

We created wonderful moments throughout the week. In 3-5 years, we shall all look back at this week and know it was a defining moment.

Facctum is currently spread across three locations – Pune, Bangalore, and London. These are all long-term strategic locations for us – hence, we intend to build our own offices in Pune and London in time to come as we grow our employee and client base. Until then, we will continue to operate from co-working offices in Pune and London. Here is hope that I am writing another blog in about a year’s time on our new office opening in Pune.