A Day In the Life Of… 4Visions
Hello everyone. I’ve been away most of November – work was surprisingly keeping me out of my own office for 25 days out of 30, sort of. But I thought I’d delight you with a Xmassy entry: here for you the 4Visions team! (Thanks Ricard for your help!)
4Visions is a software company founded 3 years ago by 4 Spanish translators –Irene, Martine, Pilar and Ricard – that were looking for a project management and billing solution for their own translation business. Since we couldn’t find a perfect solution for our needs, we decided we would build one such application on our own. After all, how hard could that be?A few months down the road, we brought Asier on board to help with development and the five of us have been working together to bring this project to life. Do you want to know how is a day in the life of 4Visions?
The 4Visions team: Asier, Irene, Martine, Pilar and Ricard
8:00 am – Pilar is usually the first one to arrive to the office. We have an office now but it has not always been the case and we work from home or any other place if we need it to. We’ve always made encouraged working from anywhere and we use a lot of tools to make it possible. Pilar is in charge of user support and handles questions from our users and prepares all sorts of tutorials, as well as all the newsletters you receive from us. She prepares herself a cup of black tea and goes through all the emails.
Our office building in Granollers (Barcelona)
09:00 am – This is the time Ricard pops into the office. Ricard is in charge of marketing and is also the unofficial copywriter of the company. He is also the one with the shortest commute. A lucky guy.
09:30 am – Irene and Martine drop their kids to school and head to the office. This is the time they all have a coffee break and have a relaxed conversation before getting in front of their computers until lunch.
Coffee break in the kitchen.
10:30 am – Martine is in charge of the financial / economic side of the company. She makes sure that we stay on budget and doesn’t like surprises when it comes to things diverting from the allocated budget. She is also in charge of invoicing and paying our providers, as well as liaising with banks and accountants.
11:30 am – Irene is in charge of supervising all the different areas of the company and she makes sure we’re all coordinated and that we all reach our goals. She’s also now in charge of our social media. We’ve all have had a crack at it and we change he social media manager from time to time. It’s a hard job and you get burned after a while.
12:00 am – By this time we have a Google Hangout twice a week with our development team, led by Asier, who works from his office in Bilbao. We talk about the current state of the application, the things we need to improve and the new functionalities we’d like to add. We tried Skype for some time, but quality of the video call wasn’t good enough and we changed to Google a year ago.
Our office and some desks still available for other startups
1:00 pm – Irene will upload a short summary of the meeting to Yammer. This is our private network, the one we use to communicate with everybody in the company. We’ve created different groups and keep conversations there to make sure that everyone knows what’s going on within the company.
2:00 pm – Lunch break. Usually Irene, Martine and Pilar will stay and have lunch at our shared kitchen space. Ricard will go to the gym and do some exercise. We all try to find time to do exercise during the day. Irene will wake up at 6 am to go a run a few km everyday, Martine prefers to walk down the beach in the morning and Pilar prefers to run or go to the gym in the evening. Asier is in love with rowing and although he doesn’t row as much as he used to, he tries to practice it twice a week. We’ve even taken part in some races together. They say it’s good for team building.
4:00 pm – It’s time to leave the office. We try to finish in time to pick our kids at school but we’re quite flexible as far as working hours is concerned. We work towards goals and objectives and we are free to choose the working schedule that fits our needs and adapts to our family life.
In any case, leaving the office doesn’t mean we stop working. Some of us will continue later in the evening from home and we are all connected through the Yammer app on our phone, by email and we even have a Whatsapp group for the company.
And then there are the special days. Those days when you have an interview for a newspaper, you give a presentation in some conference, you have to travel somewhere and meet wonderful people.
Irene, Ricard and the lovely Valeria
Thanks guys for this insight! happy holidays everyone! 🙂
– Val.
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