Homeground co-founders, Tom Lateveer and Laurens Bosman | Image credit: Mike Breeuwer
Homeground.io is an Amsterdam-based culture management platform start-up on a mission to help early-stage ventures align their teams for optimal performance while scaling up.
Co-founder Tom Lateveer says, “Homeground is a platform for early stage startups to define their core values”. This innovative SaaS tool provides a system that can be easily deployed in ventures to define their values and help integrate company identity addressing an important issue in line with today’s culture focused people practices. Through the platform, the results from the assessment can then be applied in hiring, onboarding, training, and general business processes as the company scales to stay aligned with their DNA and avoid the pitfalls of a dispersed organisation.
The foundations for Homeground go back to 2011 when recently graduated creative and co-founder, Laurens Bosman, observed during marketing projects how easily culture can get lost in an organisation. While working on a branding project, doing research and visiting his client, he realised the challenge being faced by the company was the disconnect between the brand and the unique culture being distilled by its founder, and its people.
On seeing this inconsistency, Laurens made it his goal to help define the company’s core values, integrate the founder’s special vision and align its people. “If you work on your brand but your people aren’t living it”, says Lateveer as he tells the story, “the work is pointless”.
Having gotten the founder’s buy-in to address the company’s problem, Bosman began devising a method to identify core values, create a core identity and a series of activities to implement these across organisational processes. Ten years later, the company still uses this method and that CEO became Homeground’s first investor.
While Bosman was busy working on his method, in parallel and in another part of Amsterdam, Lateveer, entrepreneur with a background in languages and culture, was coaching and consulting start-ups and at accelerators on these same issues. When faced with a complex project at a rapidly scaling venture, Lateveer turned to Bosman, whom he knew from similar circles, for help. “We were kindred spirits of sorts in the understanding that you need to start from the base, you need to start at the level of values as DNA and that these need to be authentic” says Lateveer. Laurens shared his method with Tom which he got to use successfully and that eventually led to joining forces to start Homeground, an accessible consultancy tool for start-ups to define and implement their core values.
Homeground believes “you cannot start early enough with understanding and living your values. If you start when you’re at 50 people you’re too late.” affirms Lateveer. He also warns that the problem of not addressing values, identity, and culture are threefold. “You’re going to have a leadership team who cannot communicate well with each other because they have different values and different approaches,” he says.
The risks and challenges of hiring for culture fit while scaling, a shared start-up headache, would also be minimised if there is a clear value system in place, explains Lateveer. A start-up needs an aligned team working in one direction to realise their maximum potential and avoid disappointed employees, firing/hiring sprees, and costly, disruptive course correcting consultancies. Lateveer assures that Homeground “offers a way to set out an aligned course and to nudge along the way practically effortlessly so that you can grow, double, triple your team in one year without losing your values, without losing your core.”
He goes on to explain that the initial exercises in their method for identifying a company’s DNA are conceived to be a joint activity between management and either key team members or the team at large, depending on company size. This bottom- up approach removes founder biases and ensures authenticity, explains Lateveer.
The ideal entry point for working with Homeground is between 5 and 25 people; “it’s the best time to start writing down your vision and culture, what kind of behaviour you want to see in your organisation, the dynamics and interactions, something you can track and figure out the course with because either you deal with culture or culture deals with you.” says Lateveer.
To Homeground it’s clear that beyond purpose, there’s a shift in focus towards creating strong value systems to drive and support growth with authentically invested, aligned people. Tom and Laurens’ goals include working with 100,000 start-ups worldwide over the next five years and creating a generation of values driven future leaders. Homeground is actively raising capital and you can join their Beta waitlist visiting their website.
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