The way I described it to the team was like potting. When you use a potting wheel it’s all about the “throw”. You need to get the clay perfectly centred. No matter how much you try to correct a poorly thrown clay the pot will always spoil. The more you try to correct, the more you work the pot, as the centre of gravity changes the more obvious your original poor throw becomes.
We needed time to think, to assess, adjust and correct.
This is how we literally shut up shop and went back to the drawing board.
It’s not starting from scratch. We had months of operational lessons learned. The one rule I have when perplexed by a situation is to seek simplification.
This for us meant an aggregation of our efforts into three basic pillars of the business. Resources, Tools and Vaults.
We rounded up all the good resource ideas that we struggled to deliver into a simple solution. A blog. We needed to refine our tools and shop into a scaleable functional environment. My template; an independent record store. A place where some stuff is sold, promoted and marketed, the rest was searched and found.
Finally we needed to unify our brand identity and at every “touch point” make the experience feel like it was from the same team, the same heart and soul, the same set of goals and principals. Vaults was doing amazingly but we needed to put the character of crow hill into it. the fun, the cheekiness, a representation of who we are and part of our constellation of activities.